Fracking is extremely innovative, probably one of the great industrial innovations of thelast 20 years. Was it good. Well I don’t know. Buts it’s very innovative

Frankly I’ve always been a fan of Chaos With Ed Miliband.

Reading a really interesting paper (www.lse.ac.uk/CFM/assets/p...) treating the end of fixed-rate mortgage deals in the UK as natural experiments to estimate the effect of rate changes on borrowing and consumption

we keep finding this but free fares discourse just will not end

The section in the Wikipedia article about whether this was the last lynching in CA is very strange. What a twist about the newspapers for the possible one in 47
The past was bad in many ways

But then why is the UK depressed at an expected level? Is it really that the US was ZIRPier?

1. The UK has sentiment you would roughly expect given their conditions
2. If its inflation why did Americans respond so much more positively to higher inflation with similar unemployment in the 70s and 80s?

We’re looking for a cause that is limited to the US and also relatively recent

Mr. Dooley - Wikipedia

It always blows my mind that Twain’s greatest rival as a humorist and writer among the 1890s US public was the guy writing Mr. Dooley and how completely unreadable Dooley is now on account of the insane dialect. It’s aged so badly

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Doo...

No

I Fought We Won is also cool b/c it’s one of the key bits of Glorantha Lore that every culture has but believes differently.

My favorite thing of that type is that Yelm’s death and resurrection is interpreted so differently by Dara Happa, the Orlanthi, and the Trolls.

Well obviously the big NYC developer of skyscrapers who doesn’t know how to drive would be into decatbonization

Given that Syria has restarted it's freight railway first I'm pretty sure the *first* person to do this journey in the 21st century will probably be a freight worker, so hats off to them

Turkey to Improve Transport Network as It Eyes Europe-Gulf Route Turkey, Syria and Jordan have agreed to modernize their railway systems with the aim of eventually creating a contiguous corridor between southern Europe and the Persian Gulf, according to Turkey’s tr...

I believe that one of you, my readers, can be the first person to do an Istanbul-Damascus-Amman rail journey report in the 21st century.

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/turkey-to-improve-transport-network-as-it-eyes-europe-gulf-route

I started reading this book, a general history of the Dutch republic, because I really wanted to understand the governmental system of the Dutch Republic and I’m still really confused as we’re entering the 1600s. However quite frankly I think everyone at the time was also confused about that, so!

Also quite frankly as a modern person William the Silent comes across very well For his policy of ”I don’t think we should kill people for their religious beliefs”. Go off [guy who is not really a king but a Prince, and also just a regent sort of, it’s confusing]

People immediately pegged some other Soviet triangles though. Maybe transit nerds don’t go to Athens?

Guy Reading a Book about the Early Dutch Republic: [looking around] not getting a lot of Early Dutch Republic vibes around here. Honestly the situation is very different.

It’s crazy how hard people found this one (including me!). Isn’t it a big tourist city?

Yeah but you needed that rain

The situation in 2012 when the idea was getting started was also pretty different. The affluent big city deregulation and good governance professionals that YIMBY hoped to convert as a non-partisan issue existed then but all became Dems in 2017 for a different reason

(It’s far away)

The most confusing bit about this is that the fastest growing parts of the US are:
- places in the exurban south, someways randomly distributed (hot)
- places in the international west where you get extreme heat and extreme cold.

People love Cour d’Alene?

This is even truer for me [originally born a golden retriever to a semi retired family in coastal Maine who was turned into a human by an unholy act of science]. I’m thinking of getting into reactionary politics to deal with this.

Here is a Yale lecture by Donald Shoup. Same Pic.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8vk...

NZ & AUS seem like outliers in a lot of development stories, they’re rich but don’t have the usual history of industrialism that the standard story seems to teach you to expect.

National accounts household income per capita in the UK was converging with Germany in the 1990s and 2000s, but has stalled at around 10% lower since 2010

I just finished David Gwyn's The Coming of the Railway and you need to take back "worst track ever used." Did you know that the first two B&O lines, from Baltimore to Frederick & Washington, used a mixture of wooden and granite track?

Descriptions of East Coast interurbans are particularly insane, they'd say things like "our line is signalled" and what they meant was they hung lightbulbs on poles connected to switches that conductors would throw with a long stick they poked out the window.

I think eventually they’d figure out using hydropower to run electric arc furnaces although of course that implies a pretty radically different path…

*found cursed books in a tomb

Sorry