iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 57m

I'd require any vehicle that gets a few speeding tickets to install a mandatory speed limit compliance device. Which stays in it even when the vehicle is sold, driving down the resale value & making it very expensive for drivers to evade the penalty by buying a new car.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 1h

There's a long history that wealthy nimby suburbs don't respond to incentives. Many, like my neighbors in Chevy Chase, already have the giant incentive of double or triple home values with rezoning. Incentive-based locally enacted IZ won't move the wealthy ones, so won't yield economic integration.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 1h

I don't know the California law, but in Maryland and I think most states camera tickets don't give you points against your license. The idea is that the camera knows who owns the car & is responsible for its use, but not who's driving.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 2h

Wealthy nimby suburbs that want to avoid affordable housing (all of them) can already avoid affordable housing by simply not passing IZ. The only IZ ordinance they would ever pass is one that's designed to block all new housing. No point to an IZ ordinance there until the state forces zoning change.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 2h

It's like tree conservation ordinances adopted in places where you'll get fined if you let your front lawn go to seed and grow trees.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 2h

I disagree. Limits on shadow are a way of keeping apartment residents far away from the detached-house-owning elite. Used in places where the more honest approach of calling apartment dwellers parasites & saying you want an "exclusive neighborhood" no longer flies politically.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 3h

How does their likely voter screen work? If you identify likely voters by past voting behavior only, you will get an R lean that completely leaves out the current greater D enthusiasm.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 4h

Lately I have seen signs in DC that say "push button for audible signal." But most places I'm familiar with still use the same "Push button to cross **** Street" signs for all buttons, whether they change the signal cycle or not.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 4h

In Montgomery County's urban centers & many other places, pedestrian signals go through exactly the same cycle whether the button is pushed or not. The button only turns on a beeper. But the signs say "Push button to cross **** Street" & are identical to signs at buttons that affect the signal.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 5h

“I believe in inclusionary zoning as a mechanism to economically integrate neighborhoods, not as a tax on all new housing.”

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 7h

I for one would be more tolerant of beg buttons if DOTs didn't put up signs telling you to press the button to cross when pressing the button has no effect on the signal but sets off loud unpleasant noises.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 9h

Nonprofit HMOs like Kaiser were once much easier to deal with. Arrival in 1970s of for-profit HMOs which abandoned community rating set off a race to the bottom in which the nonprofits were forced to copy the bad practices of the for-profits for financial survival.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 12h

This is the ultimate sign of a wave election. Even Tom Edsall thinks the Democrats are in good shape. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Trump’s Luck Is Finally Running Out (Gift Article)

Voters are showing a growing determination to repudiate his presidency.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 22h

A tankie who supports Hamas on Oct 7, Xi's repression of the Uighurs, the Burmese junta's treatment of the Rohingya & Putin in Ukraine, all justified as "anti-imperialist," isn't an antisemite. The evil hate is not specifically against Jews, it's against a much wider category that includes Jews.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Michel Rocard & Pierre Mauroy were both Socialist PMs of France in the 1980s. In ~1979 Rocard said he was in complete political agreement with Mauroy about everything except the 1948 Young Socialist faction fight, in which Rocard led the quasi-Trotskyite splitters & Mauroy the Social Democrats.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And, to be clear, lots of the people who left the CP in 1956 stayed romantic about it & unwilling to face up to how bad the USSR really was for the rest of their political lives. In the entire range of varying degrees. Judge them individually & give some leeway. Just don't muffle your own opinion.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm just saying, give him some time to reflect. Which is harder, in this day of social media.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm willing to see what he says next month and next year. I can also point to American CPers like Joseph Clark who was writing party-line stuff in the Daily Worker up to the day he read Khrushchev's secret speech & a year or 2 later was an anti-Communist social democrat working with Irving Howe.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That is uncharitable and unnecessary. It often takes a lot for someone to see the error of their ways, and once their eyes are opened they start to see more. George Orwell didn't really criticize Stalinists until he saw them at work on his comrades in Spain. Give this guy some time.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This structure presumes that the rental income is sufficient to yield a large surplus over operating and maintenance costs, even as the project ages and maintenance costs go up. The underlying concept is that social housing is for mixed incomes, not just for low-income people.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

FDR was the governor of NY when the bills came due for the cost overruns on the Long Island parkway & Jones Beach projects, described in detail by Caro, that were started under Al Smith. He knew the backstory.

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Reposted by Ben Ross

Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Why not make anyone who buulds a parking space pay into a fund instead They are the ones imposing costs on taxpayers. Indeed, it's very odd that "transportation impact" fees for road building are always per apartment or per square foot, not per parking space.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I always give my landline number when making any kind of donation. Also, I use throwaway email addresses for all online purchases and donations, which I replace with a new one at the end of the year. Doesn't stop that stuff completely, but really dials it back.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Have you read The Road to Wigan Pier? I think it might change your opinion of Orwell.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The security she describes at that screening is about the same as entering my shul (and I think many others) on the high holidays. She says it's "hardly unwarranted" due to death threats against Abraham & Szor. And then she pooh-poohs Jewish concerns over antisemitism?

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

But not everywhere. In Baltimore County MD the slogan is still No Apartments No Compromise.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

At the time of the AMIA bombing, Yitzhak Rabin was Prime Minister of Israel and the Oslo peace process was in full swing.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I never give my info to these card deals. I started to once, when the offer was unusually high for these deals (maybe 30 bucks) and stopped when I saw what info they asked for. If its even $50 and certainly $100+, in my experience, they'll send you a check.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

In some of these (generally the more legit ones), you can opt out of the prepaid card and require them to mail you a check. But you need to do it earlier in the process.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

In the same way, as Bengio points out, the information communicated to the LLM program by humans in the form of instructions and evaluations does not and cannot communicate the entirety of human understanding related to the task the LLM will do.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This is closely related to a criticism I have long had of Bayesian statistics applied to human thought. When you reduce a human opinion about whether something will happen to a numerical probability, you leave out a lot that the human knows (such as correlations with other events).

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Unfortunately not weird. We ran into this with the Purple Line. The sincere (there were grifter consultants too) environmentalist Purple Line opponents typically came from the most hard-line wing of the movement.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

They have money to burn now is why now and not before. They may be running it nationwide, figuring that a lot of the out-of-state audience will be people from their state who are traveling. Or maybe the only way they can buy time on the game is by buying it nation-wide.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Putin's support for the AfD is the ultimate refutation of the "realist" theory that states pursue their long-term interest. Does not require a deep knowledge of 20th-century history to see why strengthening irredentist German nationalism is not in Russia's long-term interest.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This is from the Jewish Publication Society Bible translation published in 2000.

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Reposted by Ben Ross

Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The US left retreated into a subculture in the late 1940s & entrenched itself in it in the late 60s. The habits acquired as a subculture have been very hard to shake off. Mike Harrington tried in the 1970s & then gave up. And now that it has become a mass movement, those habits still weigh it down.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

No white flight going on in Chevy Chase Village. Who do you think wants to live in John Roberts' neighborhood?

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Reposted by Ben Ross

Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Truly a classic bit of nimbyism: I moved to near the Red Line to get away from the Purple Line. So you can't build new apartments near the Red Line!

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"'The day will come when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen, and the Lord will not answer you on that day.' But the people would not listen to Samuel's warning." - 1 Samuel 8:18-19 With the previous verses of warning full of relevant detail.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

They can't remove any of them without a lot of Republican votes.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Truly a classic bit of nimbyism: I moved to near the Red Line to get away from the Purple Line. So you can't build new apartments near the Red Line!

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

By early 1999, Doug Duncan's FY2000 budget sought money to study an underground "Outer Purple Line" outside the Beltway. This was a transparent effort to kill the project. But what's relevant here is that it's the first document I see in which it's the whole Purple Line, not a segment.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

You sent me into old files to find the start of the name Purple Line. First document I see using the term is from July 1997. That's just ~7 months after Bethesda-New Carrollton route emerged. Early mentions think of the Purple Line as a full circle around DC, with Bethesda-New Carrollton a segment.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I hear that a whole bunch of Republican candidates in now-contested House districts don't actually live in the district. Basically they bought a seat & got sent to the district.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It wasn't a matter of priority. The Purple Line, or at least the Bethesda-Silver Spring section, would have been built long before the Silver Line were it not for nimby opposition. WMATA doesn't set priorities, the 3 jurisdictions each set their own.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I knew I'd see it. It was a long. tough fight, though.

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

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Ben Ross @benrosstransit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Maybe the bondholders have a claim on the real estate. That's what I don't know.

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