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Jesse Harber

@harber.co.za
441 followers 1.3K following 531 posts

Transport planner in South Africa. Infrastructure, public transport, walking and cycling, better streets for better cities. Focused on the big questions, like “why are you building that?”. Skeets in my personal capacity.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Jesse Harber
dr joshua phillips @woolfianjosh.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
The American/British food debate is played out. The real hot button topic is Sephardi or Ashkenazi food
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Natalie Brender @nataliebrender.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
A philosopher has hitherto only interpreted a diaper in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
Dads make diaper changes, but they do not do it as they please; they do not change diapers under self-selected circumstances, but respond to diaper circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Remnants of past feedings weigh like a nightmare on the diapers of the living.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 16/05/2025
Chat, is it good if my CEO is a Chinese room?
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
What is the Jewish relationship to places that expelled us or made us flee? I don't even know. But it's not nothing, you know?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 14/05/2025
Extraordinary to see the gap between how both pro- and anti-Trump Americans are talking about Afrikaners, and how almost anyone talks in South Africa. Antis, I know you think you’re helping but we generally frown on racial abuse in South Africa, even against your political opponents.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 25/04/2025
IIRC this was a signature Noah Smith opinion. In the same tweet as saying Cuba was better off under Batista than Fidel.
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Nanjala @nanjala.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
This is revisionism. The US government was one of the biggest supporters of the South African apartheid regime. There are important things that USAID has done in SA since 1994 - including on HIV mitigation - that perhaps include funding civil society and dismantling initiatives after 1989.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 03/02/2025
Trump tweet: South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn't want to so much as mention. A massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see. The United States won't stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!I’m in danger dot jpeg
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 31/01/2025
This guy O’Brians
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 27/01/2025
I just finished this and it absolutely slaps. Just fantastic near-future SF.
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matthew du plessis @mattduplessis.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
oh no the nap has become the territory
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 22/01/2025
It’s kind of interesting that, apropos Musk, I keep seeing people here talk about apartheid South Africa like some kind of unknowable hermit kingdom as opposed to a place where I and many others remember* and can talk about in some detail *only a little in my case
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Dr Jenn Lavers ᓲᐊᐧᐦᑫᔨᐤ @seabirdsentinel.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Do any of my contacts know someone who works for the #Fisheries Department in #CapeTown (or #SouthAfrica more broadly)?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 08/01/2025
I would ask the fire ecologist I once met, but that happened when her dog savaged me in the street. So perhaps not.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 08/01/2025
As a resident of a city perched against a dry, windy, fire-prone mountain, I’m wondering why Cape Town’s fires don’t seem to be as destructive as the ones in California. Is it more proactive management? The simply larger scale of CA fire country? Some other innate advantage of geography?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 07/01/2025
Car-brained planning is similarly universal
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 04/01/2025
To be a dad is to finally and frequently get that crucial question answered. I am, indeed, chopped liver.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 01/01/2025
Oh to drive the little fire truck
A little bakkie-based small-town fire truck
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 30/12/2024
Kismet
Two sequential skeets from my feed. The first is a guardian headline: “Some people's ancestors are kings or poets. I'm proud my family invented ... the corridor”. The second is @theophite.bsky.social commenting on a game screenshot or something with “some good corridors”.
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RRRMMM @strongmisgiving.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Toby Young becoming a Lord has reminded me of this incredible exchange
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 20/12/2024
It’s this sort of petty provincial tribalism that makes it hard to see Europe ever modernising
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 20/12/2024
This has no business slapping as hard as it does
youtu.be
Gunsteling - Keith Juluka (Lyrical Video)
YouTube video by Keith Juluka
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 20/12/2024
Our downstairs neighbour has, very politely, said she is woken by a loud bang some mornings around six. We’re up with the baby so it’s plausible it’s us, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. It’s driving me (and I guess the neighbour) nuts.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 19/12/2024
Something I’m not sure I’ve seen discussed is the prospect of a real knock-down fight between fractions of capital. Trump’s patrimonial mercantilism is going to be a lottery, with effects on stability and legitimacy *even among capitalists*. What happens when capitalist unity is eroded?
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Dr Kat Day (she/her) 🌖 @chronicleflask.katday.com · 18/12/2024
Yep. For all that applying the rules is my job 😆, also this:
Venial Trinities
@intransitivelie@beige.pa...
 
I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into
"grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. 

English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 17/12/2024
Can’t wait until Grok is given millions of people’s private correspondence and also their password recovery emails.
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Anine Hartmann @aninehartmann.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Have a look at Oslos street design manual, translated to english. I made that illustration with the roundabout, and several others in the guide 😇
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 13/12/2024
It is easy to forget that to a certain generation/disposition of traffic engineer, this concept is bizarre and repulsive. It’s a Kuhnian paradigm and the epicycles would make your head spin.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 13/12/2024
Heating this take up: a bunch of these effects are going to be cognitive and behavioural. That subclass is going to be increasingly marked by odd speech patterns and glitches.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 11/12/2024
The intersection of solidarity and not paying enough attention: I have been maintaining the NYT Games and Cooking boycott for a month like that Japanese soldier still fighting WWII in the 70s.
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Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Paris definitely wasn’t always this way. This is very recent. It wasn’t magic. It just took vision and leadership. Your city could choose leadership too. Great pic via @JBPssx
Long line up of people on bikes waiting for the light to change on a Paris street, in a separated bike-lane.
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𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇 @taras-grescoe.com · 08/12/2024
THIS IS AMAZING! This is the planned bike path network for the #Paris region for 2025. It will involve 450 kms of lanes. Not just #Paris intra-muros (within the Périphérique) but Grand Paris—a true regional network, incorporating long-neglected banlieues (suburbs). Via @emmanuelspv.bsky.social
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 09/12/2024
TIL there is no possibility of luxury as a parent
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Brooke @brooklynmarie.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
This one was also perfect. I thought it came out in 89 until I looked it up just now
pitchfork.com
Portishead: Dummy
Portishead's 1994 debut is a masterwork of downbeat and desperation. They invented their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura.
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
i don't actually need to have any factual opinions on whether trans people are who they say they are in order to believe that their assertions deserve my respect
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 06/12/2024
My Spotify Wrapped is almost exclusively the super chill album we used for the lad’s wind-down routine for a couple months. 83 bedtimes.
Spotify Wrapped showing I listened to an Agnes Obel album 83 times this year.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 06/12/2024
I hate these zombie newsletters. I haven’t taken a dutch train in 12 years. There’s no way to unsubscribe. I don’t speak dutch. And they’ve got my name wrong.
A Dutch railways email newsletter
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 05/12/2024
Totally. The only people allowed to loathe a person for writing a PhD is themselves.
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The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) @themerl.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
üpdate: the hog has grown to be much larger than the sun. bröther, may it have this final öat?
A 19th-century painting of a hog, edited so the hog is now flying in the middle of space, over a backdrop of darkness illuminated by a starlight sea. The Sun floats in the hog's shadow, though the hog has expanded to be many times larger than both it and all the planets in our solar system combined.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 05/12/2024
Just out of a public meeting on our NMT strategy. Strong consensus that the major cause of pedestrian injury and death is people not knowing to avoid it.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 05/12/2024
Coal power was already unaffordable and now it’s unconstitutional. But coal miners and mineworkers are major constituencies of the ANC.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 05/12/2024
Chefs kiss
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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
i'm sorry but i do not understand how or why people use chatgpt for literally any reason. any benefit it could possibly have is overshadowed by the fact that it just straight up fucking lies to you!
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 04/12/2024
South Africa would like a word
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Dr Jo Kershaw @mthrjo.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Reminder that the Guardian staff are on a 48 hour strike against the sale of Observer. If you wouldn’t cross a picket line in real life, don’t do it virtually.
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CL Hellisen @clhellisen.com · 02/12/2024
TV and my country are hilarious. *Wild Carribbean pirate beach* Cape Town *Weird alien habitat* Cape Town *Strange alien horror plant* Protea *Ruined dystopian city* Joburg *Unnamed African country at war* Joburg
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Microplastics Sommelier @leastactionhero.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
nobody does more brutal fashion reviews than the irish
lady of sophistication @janky_jane
Props to anyone who tries to be fashionable in ireland i wore a red beret once in waterford and someone called me super mario
Andrew Beatty V @AndrewBeatty
Replying to @janky_jane
I once ordered a taxi in Belfast for a night out. The driver pulls up to my house and just says "yer not going out like that. Go back in and change, I'll turn off the metre." | swear I was wearing normal jeans and a normal jacket.Matthew @MrWeir
Replying to @janky jane
I once wore a silver jacket to college, turned up late for class, said 'sorry I'm late', lecturer said, 'that's ok' then waited til I was halfway across the front of the full class before following up with 'trouble with the spaceship again was it?'.
Replying to @janky _jane
My sister was in France sporting a new trench coat, thought was so stylish, but went into an Irish bar and got called Inspector Gadget by the first guy that saw her
15:53 • 8/16/21 • Twitter Web Appwas wearing my super-fashionable short trench coat. My friend took one look at me wearing the jacket and said,
"Where are we off to now. Columbo?"

Eoin O Neill
@eoinjoneill
Replying to @janky_jane
Was wearing a vintage nike jacket in a very long que for drinks at a boxing match when a Belfast lad goes "furk me this is taking forever, your man has been here since the 80's"Loic Wright
@dufflest
Replying to @janky jane
I wore a suit with a matching tie and pocket square to my first day of work at an advertising company (I thought I was going to be in Mad Men I guess) and the staff sent around and signed a communion card for me with a fiver in it.

Eóin O Coileáin
@L20_MTN
Replying to @janky_jane
I wore a white, wool turtle-neck jumper to the match once and a fella in the pub said 'Where have you parked the U-boat?'.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 02/12/2024
Tfw you finish the fourth cup of wine at the seder
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