Building Nolan: https://xitter.cf/t.co/v7UPnGkPFX
Oakland, CA
Joined November 2009
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Trump lost this election, but Democrats didn't pick up many voters. Important going into 2028.
Of every 100 Trump voters, ~63 voted GOP, 4 voted Dem and 33 didn't vote or went third party. Of every 100 Harris voters, ~85 voted Dem, ~2 voted GOP and 13.5 didn't vote or went third party.
Of those that turned out 6% of Trump voters backed Dems (exit polls put that at 7%)
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BART is an efficiently run system. The core problem is that the system was designed for a pre-pandemic commuter-centric world which no longer exists. It is no longer fit for purpose. BART's board needs to lead with a Vision for how BART adapts
You can compare to other transit agencies. BARTs expenses are the lowest per mile of service in the industry.
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It's amazing how the BART board hasn't presented a real vision for how to transform BART. Instead, the argument is really just "more of the same for more taxes". There is a lot of great ideas to borrow from Vancouver Skytrain & the land use around stations.
Very excited for Bay Area voters to seppuku the state next year by causing BART to cut 70% of service by July and for Jane Kim to crash the state insurance market if she wins insurance commissioner vs. Ben Allen and then insurers cancel everyone and then no new construction can get financed and nobody can transact anything.
The core conflict around time zones is because we align the vertically across states, instead of on a diagonal. Further south = generally pro-daylight savings time, further north = generally pro-standard time.
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Fraser Harris retweeted
"I was speaking to a grandmother in rural Tennessee, and she was taking care of her eleven-year-old granddaughter. So she wakes up, she walks into her room, the bed's empty."
" Detective arrives, no sign of force. There's nothing, except one thing that he remembers. There's a Flock camera just down the street. So he pulls out his phone and runs a search for the night and finds one car. He runs that tag, and it's his worst nightmare. It's a registered sex offender. So he logs into Flock, and he's looking for this car, and he sees the car is traveling down I-75."
"The person's on the highway. The detective doesn't know what to do, so he does what every hero does, is he moves into action. He jumps in his car and races down I-75. As he approaches the interstate line, he sees the vehicle."
"A violent struggles ensues, and at the end, he hears crying. And the girl's in the back. She's bound, but she's alive. They went on to go search the suspect's house, and the nightmare got scarier. Everything one would need to not only assault, but dispose of the body was there."
"Now that girl's alive today because the detective had two things: He had a license plate, and he had direction of travel. This, for me, is one of thousands of stories I sadly hear about every day in America. I started Flock nine years ago because of this exact type of problem."
@glangley at @TEDTalks
I long thought the impact of ideological capture of universities was overblown because those students would need to get jobs and then realize through osmosis how the economy actually works. I didn't appreciate how large the proportion of employment of government, NGOs, & non-profits in politically left cities had become, creating an alternate economic reality that reinforced their ideological beliefs instead of discrediting them. Unfortunately history shows that nothing will change until the dysfunction gets extreme
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This work deriving general relativity from entropy (quantum information) flowing over the horizon of a very small observable space seems likely to be a future Nobel prize. Much work remains to flesh it out into a full theory, but the core insight is there. arxiv.org/abs/2510.24491http…
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Fraser Harris retweeted
Better advice in this one clip than ten-thousand self-help books. xitter.cf/TheRoyalSerf/status/20…
I know Mamdani is just setting up a straw man here, but I don't think his worldview grasps what makes America truly exceptional: freedom. You don't need permission from a King to build. You don't get wealthy by a King giving you a title & income. It is that freedom that attracts people looking to better themselves. Not because they believe they are owed it, but because they want to earn it. That widely held entrepreneurial spirit is what makes America truly exceptional.
NYC Mayor Mamdani on American exceptionalism: "We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else... The truth, my friends is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place."
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Fraser Harris retweeted
I know its very on vogue for smart people to mock the positive / negative rights distinction as facile, in a sense it is, but what that construct gets at is any strongly posed positive rights framework makes normal people murderers and monsters for the countless things they should do but dont. And similarly they make the existence of other people who suffer an act of moral violence against you, every suffering person born who needs you imposes an obligation on you and damns you for failing to meet it.
This is a very unappealing moral framework! The idea that we dont, by default, owe strangers ordinary course affirmative sacrifices is load bearing to our ability to live life and interact with each other as people not walking moral harms. If i accepted affirmative rights broadly i would be extremely anti natalist to protect the living from the moral parasitism of other people being alive.
Fraser Harris retweeted
Almost everything in the field of urban planning devised after ~1916 is benighted pseudoscience
Almost everything good in the field of urban planning was implemented before 1916
Modern urban planning as a discipline is obsessed with value-destroying ideas about setbacks, scale, massing, etc that are totally at odds with what popular — crowded places where space is at a premium — urban neighborhoods are actually like.
slowboring.com/p/against-urb…
Not surprising at all -- hanging out with my kids is awesome!
Modern dads are helping out at home more than ever, @lymanstoneky finds.
Married dads of young children in 1965 did, on average, less than 10 hours a week of child care or help around the house. Dads in 2024 contributed nearly 30 hours a week, an increase of approximately 300%.
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Fraser Harris retweeted
If you've adopted AI at your company but haven't seen any tangible results, read this 1990 article: "The Dynamo and the Computer" by Paul David.
When electricity first arrived, factories that "adopted" it barely got faster. They just swapped the steam engine for an electric one and ran everything else exactly as before: same machine layout, same workflow, same management. Electricity in, no real gains out.
The most common mistake with any new technology is to drop it into the old organization and then declare the transformation done.
The real leap came decades later, when each machine got its own small motor. Suddenly machines no longer had to be lined up around one central drive shaft. They could be rearranged around the actual flow of work.
The productivity gains didn't come from electricity. They came from REDESIGNING THE ENTIRE FACTORY around it.
AI is the same. Bolting it onto your existing process gets you a faster steam engine. The payoff comes when you redesign the work itself.
(link to paper in comments)
Don't tease me
The Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would end the practice of “springing forward” and “falling back” by permanently advancing clocks by one hour.
The legislation now heads to the House floor. wapo.st/4wzZ5tA
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Fraser Harris retweeted
Here's @MattMahanSJ, on the lessons — both politics and policy — of trying to cut unsheltered homelessness in San Jose to zero