iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Personal cars do not offer significantly more freedom than an equivalently subsidized public transit system Indeed the urban form and infrastructure necessary to allow for widespread car use generally impinges on people's freedom to walk, bike, or get around if they are too old or young to drive

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As I said in my other comment, I am not trying to tell a driver who has no other option that they need to live a cloistered life But we do need to recognize that the perception of automotive freedom is an illusion built on massive public subsidy and extensive infrastructure

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Then why did making cars king require the destruction of existing urban areas, especially minority neighborhoods; and why do freeways require such a massive operating subsidy? Meanwhile there are metro systems in the world that run at a profit (though this is admittedly complicated)

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I'm not yelling at anybody and I'm not saying that people who live in places with bad or no transit should be immobile But to say cars, per se, offer freedom is to ignore the absolutely massive infrastructure and public subsidy required to turn them into tools of "freedom" And if you disagree...

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When someone says supply and demand doesn't apply to housing, here's a fun thing to ask them: If additional higher cost housing makes all housing more expensive, then we should be able to lower prices by destroying high cost housing. So why not destroy the most expensive 5% of homes each year?

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We hear over and over again from Berkeley NIMBYs that new apartments are vacant and that we have nothing to show for all the homes we've built They are flat wrong on both counts and Berkeley has extensive, City-collected data to prove it But they keep repeating the lies—like climate change deniers

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Am I missing something? How are cars made?

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Cars are not what provide the mobility. You can't drive a typical car up an undeveloped mountainside or through a forest. Infrastructure provides the mobility. And cars also need places to park. You can just as easily build infrastructure to make movement as easy for non-drivers

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Putting the "complex" in homeless industrial complex

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Am I weird for thinking that this is actually really cool and that the abstract piece shapes make sense based on the traditional forms? Also, I feel like it's pretty difficult to break acrylic and that when it does it's not usually razor sharp like glass But, yes, the bishops are quite pointy

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Oh, and much of what is going wrong is the result of four awful men who are all getting old. Things don't actually have to be like this.

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Green energy accelerating. We're testing vaccines for cancer and the common cold. Gen Z is very empathetic and good at healthily sharing feelings. Mass timber is a lower carbon building method. People are less lead poisoned now. (Some) AVs are safer drivers than humans. Lab grown meat is coming.

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It's important to note that over the past year, data centers only represented about 0.23% of all construction spending in the US For comparison, residential construction is about 39.8% Finally this graph is a *projection* and should be taken with a huge grain of salt

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Heads up! A fire near I-80 is causing bad and worsening air quality across the northern half of Berkeley, and I suspect the bad air will spread further before dissipating Consider closing your windows and running an air purifier (DIY or otherwise) www.berkeleyscanner.com/2026/09/30/c...

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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

AG Bonta and the State should simply dissolve Menlo Park's government authority and render Menlo Park a mere tributary to East Palo Alto

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You're right, it's just Iowa. Whatever. I'm not the Senator doing the questioning

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That's a nice sentiment, but if people could forget Jan 6th, they can absolutely forget this, which the vast majority of voters will never hear about anyway

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*Schmitt I should have double checked before thinking for a second that Benny Johnson would even get the spelling right.

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I know this is a joke, but it really should include the context that GOP Senator Schmidt made a fool of himself by mixing up the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa State Hawkeyes, making his entire line of questioning and subsequent hissy fit completely wrong and embarrassing

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Then pray tell how did these models discover a ton of zero-day vulnerabilities that had never been discovered or written about before?

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I considered this one and it seemed apt, but ultimately I decided to let people find their own meaning 🌈

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Today in San Francisco I saw an ABDL person loudly helping clear a crowd of furries so that someone wearing a strappy leather getup using a wheelchair could get to the sidewalk ramp I was trying to think of a fun follow-up comment, but I think I'll just let this stand as a BlueSky Rorschach test

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Breaking up Ticketmaster and addressing the increasingly consolidated ownership of venues would be a good first step Too bad Trump already undermined the former

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If more people knew engineering, perhaps they would not have bought into Elon Musk's hyperloop and various other claims, would have seen him for the fraud that he is, and we wouldn't be here right now A challenge of modernity is that a keeping a republic requires well-rounded education for all

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If State Senator Wiener doesn't win this seat, he should primary Adam Schiff Or become the Joker

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Okay, I lied, final final note. I just looked it up and this decrease in overall construction spending equates to roughly 0.46% of all US construction spending The data center bump is about 0.23% At $859 billion, residential is about 39.8% So this narrative is false

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Final note, I am also very curious how much of this is due to pullbacks in manufacturing, biotech, etc due to tariffs and Trump's genuinely insane policies of terrorizing foreign workers, researchers, and students

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Oh, and I would also really like to see these expressed as percentages and to know what those percent changes are for housing specifically versus data centers rather than everything else vs data centers

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Part of it is that the total demand for housing is functionally population limited while the highly theoretical demand for AI is (again very theoretically) not I also get the feeling there is much less overlap in the diagram of housing construction lenders and AI capital than people might think

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I feel like this could just as easily appeared in the Onion with the headline: Toxic parents: This guilt-laden attack will be the one that finally changes our kids' minds This WSJ article is complete trash. Why is it incumbent on the kids to go along to get along and not the parents?

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I'm sure that would be working very well right now in Trump's America.

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A good investment has to grow faster than inflation If housing costs are growing faster than inflation, they are by definition becoming less affordable over time Ownership housing should be considered a depreciating asset whose benefits are stability and the freedom to renovate, not an investment

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Counterpoint: The housing crisis is going crazy in places where homes are treated as *anybody's* investment vehicle It doesn't matter if it's a hedge fund or just your grandma, treating housing as an appreciating investment is fundamentally incompatible with long-term housing affordability

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Where can one get the vaccine for dengue? Do you have a time machine perchance?

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