There's lot of things where the average product has gotten worse. Dishwashers, for example. Cars aren't one of them.

The main problem with cars now is that optimizing for passenger survival, makes them increasingly dangerous to pedestrians. Something we need a public policy solution on.

Our local park friends group has some history on those men.

www.humboldtparkmilwaukee.org/wwi-memorial...

5. The Bay View WWI memorial in Humboldt Park, Bay View, Milwaukee. This one's distinctive because there aren't many neighborhood WWI memorials in the United States. Australia and New Zealand, yeah, lots of them. (waves at my fave Milwaukee Blueskyer @mikebradleymke.bsky.social for more local info)

And by we, I mean 2020-2022 twitter based urbanist organizers. We barnstormed every public meeting with 100s of people.

It's the milwaukee chamber of commerce. They were the chief lobbyists in favor of road expansion on the 3 miles of i-94 highway between 16th and 70th streets.

There was no comparable organized anti-expansion lobby. We were aligned with a groupd of generally pro-environment groups.

... comments are of course not something that's public knowledge. They did end up winning comments like 55-45 after MMAC & the national chamber of commerce spammed their membership and did a form letter campaign.

For the 94 expansion, I publicly debated the head of the roadbuilder lobby. And he said to me 1. The 6 and 8 lane configurations will come in at the same price (something that was not made public for another 2 months), 2. That they were dominating stakeholder meetings. 3. Had an edge on comments...

The roadbuilders also have connections inside Wisdot that will tell them how the public comments are coming in, so they know exactly how many form letters they need to get submitted to tie or win. And will dig from a state & nationwide rolodex to get them.

That's just how this shit works in Wisconsin. For the 94 expansion, we outnumbered folks in favor by 20 to 1 ratios at every public meeting and absolutely none of it showed up in their EIS. They just pointed to their private meeting minutes, which was facilitated by mmac & the roadbuilders.

Northwestern Mutual and ownership of the US Bank building will anonymously donate to the realtor group and MMAC and they'll produce a bunch of phoney studies and flood the zone over at wisdot with private meetings. And it won't matter how packed the public out reach meetings are.

Anyway, the easiest & lowest cost cafe drink anyone can make is to brew your own overnight cold brew, little bit of milk, then hit it with a seasonal topping of cold foam, and shake of seasoning (cinnamon sugar, nutmeg, etc). Recently learned this hack.

This doesn't sell many business self help books or CEO biographies, but if you want to be Chief Marketing Officer or whatever the key step is just proving yourself to be the most devout member of the church of corporate america.

I think it was honestly hard to predict the extent to which Elon intended to use the site as a giant ideological project.

He & Jack are not that far apart politically & culturally. Jack just tried to maximize shareholder value, while that's obviously not an objective to Musk & the Saudi investors.

There's just not a lot of run way there, if actually know a median elderly person. Maybe 62 to 75. Even 75 feels generous.

I don't know many 80+ year olds in physical & mental position to be buying houses.

Right now, anything dems do will be 10 points left of center. This is when you want to be blasting through referendums and everything else.

I don't necessarily think pivoting to high frequency voters is a bad strategy, but the implication is you lose ground in presidential generals to pick up ground tactically, but then they do nothing tactically. Lol.

Seems clear to me that 10 or so democrats saw the shutdown only as a means to bring health care cuts to the forefront leading into the next election cycle.

Which, sure, Dems are net favorable on health care but I think clearly falls short of the magnitude of the moment.

Explaining it even this much would be excessive for a Bond movie