Can this guy get any more cringe?

NYC Subway Ridership Jumps 7.7% Due to Congestion Pricing Toll New York City’s controversial congestion pricing toll is helping to boost subway ridership, according to a committee that represents transit riders.

No more talk of "transit death spirals" in New York City.

Since Central Business District Tolling Program (congestion pricing) was introduced in 2025, ridership on #NYC subway is up to 1.28 billion/yr—a 7.7% increase.

72,600 fewer cars enter Lower Manhattan/day.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry” As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themsel...

There has always existed a sort of Jevon’s paradox for productivity tools. Part of the pitch is that the tools save time, but the workers who adopt them only end up working harder for longer hours.

I experienced this in architecture when AutoCAD replaced hand drafting…

Sounds Like they should switch to bikes then

Common Swiss L

Closing Central Madrid To Cars Resulted In 9.5% Boost To Retail Spending, Finds Bank Analysis City of Madrid significantly boosted the takings of its shops and restaurants last Christmas by banning cars from the CBD, finds an analysis by Spain's second largest bank.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY.

There was also a 71% drop in air pollution.

Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

Epidemic abuse:

"One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police"

"White nationalists pervade law enforcement

10,000 family dogs killed by police every year (DOJ: "epidemic")

"Police solve just 2% of all major crimes"

"NYPD Costs $10 Billion a Year

"50% of municipal budgets

Wow

That's not what they think of themselves because they don't see it as their problem.

Making citizens of one EU member, care about the problems of another has been an impossible task.

Katie Miller tweet with text that reads “SOON” and a map of Greenland with an American flag overlayed

These freaks want territorial expansion and they know Trump will do everything he can to deliver.

This isn’t just a tweet from some random asshole either. This is Stephen Miller’s wife. Miller was in the room with Trump during the kidnapping of Maduro.

Decline, what decline? The myth of dying Europe There is a widespread view that, by comparison with the USA, Europe is in economic and social decline. But, Zucman argues, it's not true

The story of Europe’s economic decline while US is 'soaring' is everywhere.

But it is wrong. It is a myth.

Europe delivers more leisure, longer life expectancy, less inequality than the US.

Gabriel Zucman dismantles the myths.

Everything Elon Musk promised in 2025, but didn't deliver Musk is now infamous for his false promises, but even this is excessive.

Elon Musk promised a lot of things by 2025

- colonists arriving on Mars
- xAI achieving AGI
- Tesla robotaxis serving half the U.S.
- completely driverless robotaxis
- a Tesla Roadster demo
- DOGE cutting trillions

none of them happened
mashable.com/article/elon-mus...

Image Alt Text: We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later. No, the money does not exist for you or me or a person. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy, even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system’s intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it’s socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. The “free market” is a fucking con. When you or I run out of money, our things are taken from us, we receive increasingly-panicked letters, we get phone calls and texts and emails and demands, we are told that all will be lost if we don’t “work it out,” because the financial system is not about an exchange of value but whether or not you can enter into the currently agreed-upon con. By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society created the conditions for what I call The Enshittifinancial Crisis — the place at which my friend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification Theory meets my own Rot Economy Thesis in a fourth stage of Enshittification.

:In November 2025, Reuters revealed that Meta projected in late 2024 that 10% of its annual revenue ($16 billion) would come from advertisements for scams or banned goods, mere weeks after Meta announced a ridiculous $27 billion data center debt package, one that used deep accountancy magic to keep it off of its balance sheet despite Meta guaranteeing the entirety of the loan. One would think this would horrify investors for two reasons: Meta’s business is both supporting and profiting from organized crime, and at 10% of its revenue, it’s also kind of dependent on it. Meta is using deliberate and insidious accounting tricks to act like a data center that it is paying to build and will be the sole tenant of is somehow an “off balance sheet” operation. One would be wrong. Morgan Stanley said a few weeks ago that it is “one of the handful of companies that can leverage its leading data, distribution and investments in AI,” and raised its target to $750, with a $1000-a-share bull case. Wedbush raised Meta’s price to $920, and Bank of America staunchly held firm at…$810. I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.

Enshittification's first three stages - from a platform people love to a platform businesses profit off of to a platform that hurts consumers and businesses alike - are well-known. But I argue we're in a fourth stage where stocks have become enshittified too.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshitti...

Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech.

When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.” What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Thing is: this should have been obvious BEFORE regulators greenlit Waymo.

Having business be the tail that wags the dog of government--as neoliberal ideology would have it--simply privatizes gains and sticks ordinary people with the costs of being corporate guinea pigs.

US tech leaders say we need climate-disrupting and water-depleting data centers because we need the US to be the leaders in GenAI innovation. Apparently their idea of innovation is overwhelming our information ecosystems with deception & manipulation.

How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?

How Elon Musk's DOGE became a fiasco of deception and accounting gimmicks -- failing in its mission to slash government waste

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan…

* Vehicle traffic: -11%
* Foot traffic: +3.4%
* Storefront vacancy: -0.9%
* Pollution: -22%
* Revenue for mass transit: $548M

So YES this has been a huge success.

Worlds richest families have never been richer - Walton's lead with net worth of $513bn

This is obscene. Why can't other politicians say that?

The 25 richest families are collectively $358.7 billion richer than a year ago, with a combined fortune totaling $2.9 trillion.

The world....

No surprise: new analysis shows that heat pumps can deliver excellent performance even in older buildings with no meaningful correlation between building age & heat pump efficiency.

This is in line with my own experience of having a heat pump in a 1880 Victorian home with only modest insulation.

The great exodus: How Poles are ditching UK for their booming homeland New statistics reveal that while 7,000 Poles arrived in the year ending last June, 25,000 returned home: a net outflow of 18,000. The UK's total Polish population has shrunk to 750,000.

Amazing, the @dailymail.co.uk manages to publish an entire lengthy feature bewailing (!!!!) the exodus of Poles from Britain without once mentioning Brexit. Apparently this outcome (which is surely exactly what they campaigned for in 2016) is all the fault of Keir Starmer.

mol.im/a/15379789

Energy transitions can happen faster than we think:

In 2000 almost 90% of Denmark's electricity was from fossil fuels.

In 2024 less than 10% of Danish electricity was from fossil fuels.

Zagreb against fascism ❤️

Gedankenspiel: Donald Trump ist ein Scheinriese. Die Umfragewerte sind rekordniedrig. Er hat den Handelskrieg gegen China verloren. Russland gegenüber knickt er immer wieder ein. Die Europäer haben seinen “Friedensplan” verhindert. Bald kommen die Epstein-files.
Someone call the bluff!

Lesson for Europeans sucking up to Trump - look how much you're getting screwed while Brazil, India & China defy him and end up winning.

"When Macron's like, 'Oh Donald you're a genius'" says Ben Rhodes, "they keep getting the rug pulled from under them"
podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/p...

2nd day of #POLIS25 Impressive list of Sustainable Mobility Indicators by Budapest #SUMP

Full house at the #POLIS25 plenary session on mobility and health.

Day one of the Annual #POLIS conference. Talking about innovative digital cycling solutions.

BTW, a 2021 Carnie Mellon study found that ridehail's arrival in a new city *increases* car ownership.

The reason: Few residents ditch their car, while some become ridehail drivers and buy vehicles.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...