iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

underrated how much the debt load of the Federal government might also spur this on. I would only imagine it would be successful under a Trump administration though since the court has so far basically allowed him to blow through all precedent. So, T saying: 'let them go' would work somehow

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I would imagine one of the things holding it back now is that most of the initiatives in the past were a reaction to democratic super-control of the state, not the other way around.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

this has always been the case in the west. it is part of the reason people go west. but if this movement keeps demonizing California and the west and/or hold on to power in weird ways, it would be surprising if something didnt start bubbling up. The open initiative process makes it simple to do it.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

kind of funny there is not a groundswell of support for a Cal-Exit ballot initiative (yet).

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The whole point of broad immigration pathways is that every immigrant is a bet that their unique set of skills and experiences might end up being useful amid uncertainty. The hard work to immigrate ( legally and illegally ) is itself a decent signal that every one will be a net positive.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The Elon musk who came to the us illegally was a con artist and money launderer who didn’t like that democracy was taking over in SA. I’m all for the possible upsides of a broad array of immigrants. But that’s not a profile of a guy who is a sure bet to build anything useful.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

the funny thing is we have an example of how this can work - recycling (and in some places green/compost waste). That has largely been driven by local communities.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

this is all within the game we play right now, the market, the system, community assets, and yet, we have barely advocated for it. Instead preferring advocacy for things that are more abstract, piecemeal, and symbolic.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

these are things that are all inherently within their responsibilities as cities - they buy vehicles, they build roads, they permit buildings - and yet, they keep on the same path and so we all do. My big city's purchasing decisions can spur a market, my own is fickle and widely dispersed.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

the building code should be rewritten not just to lessen the impact of cars and include capacities for bikes, but also to privilege buildings that are carbon neutral, are heavily insulated, and generate their own electricity. cities should have banned gas years ago.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

infrastructure investments are enormous - and these entities should be leading the way on net negative concrete products, building demand and replacing their roads and sidewalks and eventually their buildings with concrete that absorbs carbon over time.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

when things are good, they pay for themselves, offsetting peak loads and making their communities more power stable for major investment.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

they hold insane amounts of land that is small and interstitial, ideal for small battery backups. the major communications centers for public safety should all include major battery banks so that these entities (primarily cities) can run themselves without dependence on a fickle grid.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

they permit insane acres of flat roofs each year. becoming a utility that required its panels to be installed on every flat roof for a low-cost would not be that big of an ask, and the technology is light enough to not require much extra engineering.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

these political entities are some of the largest single consumers of internal combustion engines on the planet. committing or a group of them demanding that all their engines have to be electric by X date would go a long way to driving demand (not to mention stabilizing costs for taxpayers)

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

a simple way to understand how unserious we all are about the climate crisis (not just the US, but...) is that political entities that have the capacity to drive consumption decisions and bring down the cost of electrification and other low/negative carbon strategies have not systematically done it.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

as it is set right now, future generations long from now will only remember the United States as the thing that was the greatest cause of the climate catastrophe that will reshape everything. Our failures will be studied and theory will be built to avoid what we are currently doing to our commons.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

how do we learn to build again? we are so used to homogenized culture, and free things, that building institutions of all sorts, many that will have to start small and quirky and weird in ways we often find off-putting, will be a major project of the rest of our lives.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

my thinking is that obviously that most people do not live *in community* even at least partially. To walk a neighborhood, to take transit, to go to the library, not even a meeting, is to realize that things are generally okay, even great, and that even when they are not they are worth fighting for.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

we have scholars doing work on how to govern, how to understand AI, how to understand climate change, and they operate within norms that are easily gamed by bad faith actors outside the academy who have ample resources. it is as if we created a prison to defang ideas.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

it remains amazing we built the most impressive thinking system in history that has brought incredible insights and scientific breakthroughs, decentralized, incredibly diverse, and robust, and the power brokers just get to ignore it. in fact the systems may trap the best minds in bureaucracy.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

but a huge problem for the party of that guy is that the thing he is - the external, brusque, non-politician - is that the rest of them read as internal, weird, inside-bubble types, which people tend to hate. its a reason that as the map expands people who've never had hard campaigns are struggling.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

the rhetoric included a pretty strong acceptance that they might not be the perfect president, but that business-guy mindset would be overall useful to shaking things up and making government work better. so, a lot of the flaws of the guy can still read (at least in 24) as necessary for the trick.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

the one special guy thing makes a lot of sense in the context of 30 years of rhetoric accepted by basically all corners of the political spectrum just saying 'we just need a businessman to fix it' and the guy who was literally branded as that kind of shake it up businessman being that special guy.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

here's a large part of the party that is energizing it and telling people about what good government can do, and the people the press put forward as the voices of the Democratic Party spout off about the most extreme caricatures of that part. but republicans, they're good.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

rahm out here parroting republican talking points about democratic socialists while the mayors of NY and Seattle put forward budgets with increased police spending. can we just ... not?

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Reposted by Brad

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sort of insane fact about how broken US urban planning is—America now spends more building *just the lights for roads and highways* than on all subways & ground mass transit combined Spending on roadway *pavement* is 18x transit spending

a graph of roadway and mass transit lights

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

He’s one of the architects of just asking questions opposition to all development / progressive initiatives that has over time done more to entrench corporate power than almost anything else.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

a whole political elite of Grus.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This all seems a product of the early 00s blog and forum culture. Do spaces like that exist now? Where does someone go to play with ideas now?

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

not to dwell too much on how micro-actions are used by algorithms to give you stuff you may not even know you like or want to acknowledge you like.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

like - one problem with social media is that a feed seems like a personal space, but can have things that just algorithmically show up that you don't expect. Whole Foods (or any minority) is fine if it is over there, but then it is in MY FEED which somehow is taken very personally.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

(if real, but also a legit point) has anyone done research about how the *existence* of something ends up feeling like an imposition (forced down their throat)

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The problem is burning down the house is much much faster than rebuilding the house. Especially if they don’t build houses like that anymore. There’s intermediate measures for shelter but they don’t feel like the house either.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The number of legislators who are afraid voters are watching every vote closely so spurn their party on symbolic votes is insane. The public has no clue and you just burned your key electoral support and your chance at leadership. Nice.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

a lot of this feels like people who do not like the core work of the academy, engaged pedagogy and writing, telling on themselves that they do not *like* that work, but a key part of their motivation was imposing the thing they find uncomfortable on other people instead of learning and discovery.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The explanations of the hugging face attack are a pretty good start of what is freaking them out. Agents ostensibly doing a near impossible thing not only finding sideways ways into that thing but also repurposing stuff to communicate with each other ( file names for example ).

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

It’s more likely the old accidentally asking for something relatively benign of an intelligence and it burning everything down trying to solve that task. That’s kinda what the explanations of the hugging face attack show.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

If everything is connected to the internet and agent swarms are figuring out weird ways to infiltrate systems sideways relatively quickly when things aren’t clearly open, then accidents could happen or bad actors could focus that strategy. It’s not ai doing it autonomously but the new possibilities.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

and - having read it again and to clarify. It seems like, everyone liked it mostly closed and they just went ahead and said, no, actually, we're gonna open it again except from 11-4? (my comment was meant more as SDOT has knee jerk scared-ness even when over 90% of people AND BIZ says keep it closed

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

it is sort of like its nearly impossible to walk 2-3 blocks without running into a stand of trees or park, and most blocks are still quite leafy even if they have apartment buildings, but the most pressing concern is always the canopy.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

definitely feels like seattle is held hostage by a bunch of people who have rarely left their (quite palatial) single family homes in decades but want everywhere they *hypothetically could go* to be completely unimpeded from their vehicle transit. and everyone is scared of their wrath.

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Reposted by Brad

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This is a good example of something that is entirely political (the government dislikes higher ed and foreign people) and has large economic impacts but will get less attention than "woke one" from our pundit class.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

this is fantastic. Thank you. Will note, it has also hidden a lot of the social investment that cities have made because they hide that social investment *in police departments* because it is well established those tactics work, too.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

If the Mayor is *this* responsible for all public safety things, does the council think she is also responsible for the precipitous overall decline in violent crime and homicides in the city? Guessing not.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

usefully, there was a shooting in Idaho shortly thereafter where the head of public safety for the situation (both police chief and sheriff) demonstrated that in normal circumstances that those departments lead on this type of stuff.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

a belief concreted long ago that dems have repeatedly shown no alternative better path will convince them out of (getting them out of harms way, increasing support stateside, getting rid of culturally bad practices, massive support for the VA, nominating a bunch of cool veterans)

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The absence of any stated or proposed or enacted policy positions related to statements like this should allow even neutral commentators to call this racist. Or maybe ask if they intend to impose the most socially conservative practices of their followers and supporters on people.

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Brad @bradamj.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Worth reading the comment section on the Seattle times article about the development next to the mount baker station in Seattle. It’s like a window into car owners’ id.

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