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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.

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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 02/03/2026
Your question intrigued me so now I’m also looking. This is the clearest vid I’ve found. Basically, I think the wool fibres are already a bit long (3-12cm based on coarseness) and the spinning binds them in such a way that their lengths overlap and add up. youtu.be/YwRbyTCqOQY?...
youtu.be
How Wool Is Made: From Farm to Fashion
YouTube video by Woolmark
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 24/02/2026
Ken Follet supposedly sits down and writes precisely 500 words in the morning. If that takes him past the end of a book he starts the next one. Then he has a glass of champagne.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 23/02/2026
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 23/02/2026
SAP has entered the chat with a sales pitch and knuckledusters
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Reposted by Jesse Harber
Virginia Werewoolf @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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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 27/05/2025
Gonna take the bait and say there’s no contest. Sephardi food ranges from North African to Persian, Indian, and others of the world’s great cuisines. Whereas, per Claudia Roden:
Cabbage

Cabbage is the historic Ashkenazi vegetable
Before the potato, it was the only vegetable, - apart from carrots. Every shtetl smelled
intensely of cabbage. It was cooked in various ways, usually boiled or braised, often with onion. A common flavouring was caraway; sometimes a little white wine was added; often vinegar and sugar gave a sweet and sour flavour. It was partnered with apples and sometimes with potatoes, mush-rooms, or chestnuts, and it was used in soups and as a filling for strudel and blintzes.
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Reposted by Jesse Harber
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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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 16/05/2025
Not my area but I know our engineers fret about drainage. The roadway carries runoff along the kerbs and into the stormwater system. Changing the size/shape of the roadway or removing it requires engineering another solution.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 15/05/2025
Got it. So another victim of bizarrely high infrastructure costs.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 15/05/2025
That’s so strange. Does NYC have no geometric designers on staff, or is it a matter of priority?
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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 · 13/05/2025
I can’t begrudge anyone making the choice they feel is best. I’m a multiple migrant, presently back in SA with no plans to move, but if I was unhappy or scared then why wouldn’t I try my luck? Crooks and liars have convinced people that SA is no place for them. They’re the problem imo
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 13/05/2025
Did you see the documentary, the Boers at the End of the World? I thought it was excellent, and very sympathetic to the community that’s there
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 10/05/2025
No disagreement from me there
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 10/05/2025
So did extra-democratic rule! Nonetheless they both took forms after 48 that I think are qualitatively different to what came before. Re the two-way influence: did you read Karayiannides on Musk and the intertwined socio-technical histories of the US and SA? I thought it was fascinating.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 10/05/2025
And spatial means. Apartheid was a novel, racialised regulation of space as much as anything else. Influenced by US ideas of suburbanisation and urban renewal.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 04/05/2025
I regret that this thread was how I had to learn about your book but now I want to read it. I can’t find a hard copy in South Africa. Is there an ebook?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 04/05/2025
Don’t threaten me with a good time
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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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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 25/04/2025
Know Your Enemy did an early ep on it which is a nice rundown.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 22/04/2025
Have you read Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 20/04/2025
Broke: taking selfies at the fish counter in la Boqueria Woke: getting there at opening time and the avocado man already has some good ones set aside for you
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 16/04/2025
tfw your social categories are definitely ontological
Museum plaque of a news clipping:

1985 had at least 1000 "chameleons"
Political staff PARLIAMENT - More than 1000 people officially changed colour
last year. They were reclassified from one race group to another by the
stroke of a Government pen. Details of what is dubbed "the chameleon dance" were given in reply to Opposition questions in
Parliament. The Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Stoffel Botha, disclosed that
during 1985: • 702 coloured people turned
white,
• 19 whites became coloured,
• One Indian became white.
• Three Chinese became white.
• 50 Indians became coloured.
• 43 coloureds became Indians.
• 21 Indians became Malay.
• 30 Malays went Indian.
• 249 blacks became coloured.
• 20 coloureds became black.
• Two blacks became "other
Asians!
• One black was classified Griqua.
• 11 coloureds became Chinese.
• Three coloureds went Malay,
• One Chinese became coloured.
• Eight Malays became coloured,
• Three blacks were classed as
Malay, • No blacks became white and
no whites became black,
The Star, 21 March 1986
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 03/04/2025
Think that’s when Burawoy was there too?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 24/03/2025
I just finished watching the extraordinary Say Nothing, which gave me a renewed appreciation for the miraculousness of SA’s transition and demilitarisation.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 24/03/2025
Could be, but there really were paramilitary training schools for children. Still are, in fact. The documentary Fatherland is well worth tracking down.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 24/03/2025
Hah, can you imagine a Jewish school making kids fight for their food?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 24/03/2025
You’re right, I’m using the word too generally. My understanding is that he went to a violent, militaristic veldskool of the sort that I associate with Afrikaner nationalism—but to be fair I don’t know if they were actually drilled with propaganda.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 24/03/2025
Apparently he was sent to veldskool which, sure, not the Hitler Youth. But a bit of walking and a bit of quacking there.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 22/03/2025
Roland Postma and the Young Urbanists. You’ll probably find them at the Bree Street closure tomorrow morning. Marcela Guerrero Casas at Local South.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 20/03/2025
I expect they are reporting on volume and total value of transactions as a key metric for VCs
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 20/03/2025
Up there with the Station Eleven TV adaptation
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 16/02/2025
Maybe they meant she had a lot of split ends?
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 08/02/2025
I think it’s also a case of the Afriforum dog catching the car. We know they’ve been back-channeling with the US right for a long time. That DM interview sounded a lot like trying not to own the consequences.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 08/02/2025
No, that’s PW Botha, no relation. And much nastier.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 07/02/2025
I would not say that at all. It’s a single multiracial/ethnic constitutional republic, with limited state subsidies for some traditional rulers. King Misuzulu “rules” mostly through control of a land trust, but that is still subject to the laws of the republic.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 06/02/2025
And got a real sweetheart deal in the new South Africa
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 05/02/2025
Little known fact but it’s actually illegal to have any healthy or wholesome habits as a journalist. The upper bound of what is allowed to do regularly is drink cheap whisky.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 05/02/2025
2.a) take them alfresco, not al desko.
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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
I have friends who work in Pepfar-funded clinics treating sex workers and running clinical trials for HIV vaccines. USAID is imperialism _and_ this is a catastrophe.
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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 · 02/02/2025
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 02/02/2025
Yeah, that and the boer thing is quite annoying. Even if Musk was explicable mostly by his SA roots, it would be distinctively upper-middle class anglo racism. Very much its own thing!
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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 · 30/01/2025
I, too, immediately started thinking who I could ask to make me one of these.
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Jesse Harber @harber.co.za · 27/01/2025
To be fair, the Central Line is *very* sweaty in summer
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