iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

1. Guardians/Rays/Brewers 2. White Sox 3. field (large gap) 4. Dodgers 5. Yankees (chasm so massive it makes the Grand Canyon look like a tiny creek you casually step over) 6. Astros

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

CA state housing law is providing these people with a very badly needed civic education. No, "democracy" isn't measured by the degree to which the state facilitates your ability to harass and frustrate your neighbors when they try to build a perfectly legal-to-build building.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I'm convinced Eyman did this intentionally, so he could get paid for running the same initiative campaign multiple times. (Heywood, probably not, he seems like less of a grifter and more of a true believer, and has plenty of his own money.)

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Reposted by David Watkins

Robert Farley @drfarls.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Every single person who posted “Why doesn’t Beashear DO SOMETHING??!?!?” is either too stupid to be taken seriously, or a lying grifter. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Over the years, the vast majority commentary that drifted near or into 'Al Queda apologia' territory was just dreary, unoriginal, paint-by-numbers bearded-Spock American exceptionalism. Mr. Maher deserves some limited credit for originality and creativity.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I have a certain Carly Simon song (you know the one) stuck in my head now, for some reason

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I was never more than an occasional 8 rider but watching this still fills me with cathartic joy. Wilson deserves lots of credit, but it's also a testament to the car-brained cowardice of the last several mayors who refused to pick this juicy, ripe fruit hanging six inches off the ground.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Based solely on their social media presence: Bainbridge Island NIMBYs seem like the most San Francisco-coded NIMBYs of the Northwest. Not just their comically absurd pretension to be critics-from-the-left of the status quo, but their whole aesthetic, vibe, tone, graphic design choices.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The charge that the Democratic party has moved right in recent decades is very common and mostly wrong, but one issue for which it's at least kind of true is "taxes, ~80th-97th percentile." All too often, though, the populist left is at the front lines, leading the rightward charge.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you (like me) found Silo's first season convoluted and a bit boring, the payoff for sticking with it in the second and third season is enormous. S2 in particular is a uniquely smart rebellion story.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I see this view expressed periodically almost always treated as so commonsense it requires no defense, but no one ever explains why. What's the actual argument for why college students, uniquely among adults, should not vote in the community they presently live in?

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Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

proximity to the puget sound is a literal lifeline - cooler temps, higher winds to keep out or dilute smoke we should focus most of our housing proximal to it.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Very weird trade to attract ownership meddling.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

TIL the man who killed David Halbersham with his lawless, deadly driving thinks bike lane advocates are bad people because they would like some degree protection from killers like him, and because they would make it slightly less convenient for him to store his weapon of choice.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Unlike votes about allocating scarce budgetary resources, there's no case for reasonable disagreement here. These are four people who either a) actually do think building housing is bad, but lie about it, or b) protect the status quo, no matter how harmful/pointless, if some constituency demands it.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Damn. @linforseattle.bsky.social is a badass, thank God we got "common sense no bullshit" Bob Kettle today rather than the NIMBY grandpa version, and Capitol Hill can, and soon will, do so, so, so much better than the fake moderate reactionary NIMBY Joy Hollingsworth.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

SF leftists are, to a genuinely absurd degree, polarized against SF's "moderate" faction, which is actually quite liberal and typically very pro-transit. So they take anti-bus lane positions for a weird mix of ostensibly left-wing (gentrification!) and right-wing (parking!) reasons.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

This Beshear/McConnell nonsense is perhaps the cleanest, clearest demonstration that complaints about the Democratic politicians' fecklessness are free-floating a priori commitments I can recall; while it adapts to facts on the ground, it very clearly is not derived from them.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Left-NIMBYs:Exclusionary Zoning::Dale Gribble: John Redcorn

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Seattle's last several mayors have all been frustrating on housing issues in their own way, but I suspect they'd all look a lot better if Seattle's relevant bureaucracies didn't have a serious "deep NIMBY state" problem. That they're still doing illegal design review is particularly outrageous.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Canadian Olive Garden: look, we have no idea what the fuck is going on down there

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Types of people ontologically incapable of understanding their opposites: Extroverts (introverts) DST year-round fans (those who prefer standard time) direct exposure to the rays of the sun enjoyers (appreciators of a nice layer of cloud protection)

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

I used to think Saka's "I just wandered in off the street but since I'm here I'm going to randomly pontificate" schtick during council session was a kind of populist performance art but nearly three years in I'm beginning to think he may well be as clueless as he appears to be.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Interview is pretty wild. He says (re: tourism in Barcelona) "the demand can't grow if there's no accommodation for them" which can only make sense if you believe "frustrated/unmet demand" is not an actual thing in the course of human affairs, which would seem to imply he's never met a human being?

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

the data points for my "left-populism is unstable, and struggles to resist the gravitational pull of right-populism" theory continue to pile up. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/07/the-...

lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

If done well, this is a fine idea. But making this your big announcement immediately after you caved to NIMBYs and essentially murdered the multifamily pipeline for the foreseeable future is kind of like making a big deal about the new blender you bought, the day after you burned down your kitchen.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

This is obviously bad, but I must say I found that CEQAworks account epistemically useful. I was worried my media diet was sufficiently biased such that I might be missing compelling defenses of CEQA's enduring value. The CEQAworks account made quite clear my fears on that front were unfounded.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Smartest member of her congressional faction, by a country mile.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Prediction: anti-data center activism will be much more successfully appropriated and abused by right-populist causes than left-populist ones.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Coming to this late, but yikes. It is deeply unfortunate that we've entrusted the practical management and preservation of so much of our intellectual history to organizations this lazy and irresponsible about what that should entail. www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame

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Reposted by David Watkins

Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

if i had cofounded airbnb i would not be promoting the pseudoscientific idea that there’s a fixed bundle of housing that we’re all in competition for!

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

We got a puzzle feeder for the kittens--solve the puzzle, get crunchies. K1 spent months diligently trying to figure it out. Got frustrated but kept plugging away. Finally figured it out, now gets a lot of her food from it. K2 never bothered to try, but steals crunchies from K1 when she uses it.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

The Angels' commitment to drafting and developing pitching is matched only by their incompetence at it. Out of all this, they have 1 pitcher who is a maybe top 40 prospect; they only have him because they lucked into the #2 pick, and then passed on the now #1 pitching prospect.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Talked about this on the LGM podcast last week with @drfarls.bsky.social and @russellarbenfox.bsky.social: can anyone remember any conservative voices of note who opposed the Iraq war from the start?

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Many (most?) people would be better, clearer thinkers if we excised "capitalism" and "socialism" (the words and concepts) from our minds, and formulated our political positions and arguments without reference to them. This guy is like the reductio of what can happen if you let them take over.

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Reposted by David Watkins

Brittney Bush Bollay @brittneybush.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

People think fantasy baseball is deep research and roster combing and divination, but it’s mostly just picking up and dropping Gleyber Torres over and over again for the rest of your life.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Pollack's law review article about sidewalk governance was great; looking forward to this book.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Blaming housing for the environmental damage caused by cars, when successful, inevitably leads to more driving and therefore more environmental harm. These people are either very good at lying to themselves or are incredibly cynical and dishonest.

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Reposted by David Watkins

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 25/05/2026

The fact that small scale real estate investors who flip $500k starter homes into $2 million McMansions are NOT required to provide subsidized housing for poor people but the investors who flip the same homes into ten $650,000 townhomes ARE is such an indictment of California housing policy.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Seattle's "anti-bike protesters" now mimicking white nationalist slogans

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

There's also a bit of tension in the "pro-car"/"care about public safety" pairing in a city where the legal establishment has decided one can massacre an entire family waiting for a bus, as long as you do it sober and with a car, and you can muster up some crocodile tears about it after the fact.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Seems highly intuitive to me, although a lot of people seem to struggle with it. I spent much of my 20's and early 30's teaming up with other single modest earners to outbid families for large homes, which we accomplished by not wasting bedrooms on non-earners.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

I would probably vote for the blah mainstream experienced Dem party hack over the flaky billionaire who has stumbled into some good policy positions in at least 40 states; California is definitely not one of them.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I have a ~20% drafted but still well short of half-baked plan to write a book about internal freedom of movement; should I follow through I now have a burning, insatiable desire to title the zoning chapter "Aren't we kinda being pricks?" www.marbleheadindependent.com/he-asked-if-...

marbleheadindependent.com

He asked if Marblehead was 'kind of being pricks.' Then the internet found him.

David Modica did not plan on speaking at Town Meeting, yet his brief remark exposed confusion over housing compliance and local candor.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

To put a finer point on it: one reason there is such an appetite for poor-quality left-NIMBY scholarly work: it appeals people who are temperamentally conservative, but are desperate to see themselves as progressives or radicals, and such people are extremely overrepresented in academia.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Gotta vote tomorrow. Any fellow Ohio voters (or non-Ohioans who have developed opinions on OH-SOS for some reason) have any thoughts on Hamblin v Russo?

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

I vaguely remember reading that paper a couple years ago and thinking their case selection methodology seemed a bit questionable/risky and woo boy was that apparently an understatement

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

The reaction to bus lanes on Denny is revealing. Everyone who goes near that corridor knows perfectly well giving cars the whole road doesn't work. It's a parking lot half the day. Drivers aren't mad because this will make it slower, they're mad someone else might get to move faster than them.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I used to be annoyed that Mayor Harrell was so disinterested in housing that he was running years behind on the Comp plan. I retract that annoyance; thanks for being lazy, Bruce, as your laziness created the opportunity for a Mayor who takes the housing crisis seriously to do it right.

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David Watkins @djw172.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

The Gods of peer review smiling upon my inbox this afternoon: two pretty promising-at-first-glance R&R's within 30 minutes of each other. Time for a celebratory beverage.

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