Ok, I’m going to do this again. What were Carlson and his brother actually saying on this podcast? What are they *actually* sad about? /1

It always astounds me that people can be against tall buildings in Manhattan of all places

Yeah, looking into it, it looks like the downside of Japan (Sony) coming up with its own standard circa 1997 before a global consortium of Sony, Nokia, and NXP coming up with NFC in 2004, and NFC being ever so slightly different. Inertia is hard…

Sorry you've been having trouble, Jean 😞

Tokyo Metro to accept contactless payment at all stations by 2026 The Tokyo Metro has announced that it will launch a full, post-payment service for riders using contactless credit cards no later than spring 2026. This new service will allow passengers to use a comp...

A fairly recent change on their part, to be fair!: essential-japan.com/news/tokyo-m...

(since I was slagging NYC even though they've had Tokyo beat on credit card tap-to-pay by over half a decade, I should be fair)

(Sorry if that came off as a bit mean. I'm just familiar with a lot of the woes of the OMNY rollout, like the PA here being flummoxed at how they'd be able to still provide multi-ride discount passes with OMNY, or the MTA wanting exorbitant fees to extend OMNY to the PATH subway system)

It's not their fault that Apple was apparently willing to eat the license fee needed for Japanese mobile pay for every device globally, and that Android device makers weren't. You'd think Google would just let people spend the buck or whatever to let people enable it, though…

Using OMNY as a high bar is hilarious, I'm sorry. Only works on half the systems in the metro area (including two railways from the literal same operator!), can't load unlimited ride passes, is useless outside of the NYC metro (unlike Suica which pretty much works in any major metro in Japan)

Sure!

A wide sprawling fee of the NYC city scape, from high in the sky

Hello NYC 😁

Looking forward to NRSC having to spend in… *checks notes* Mississippi then, lol

California seems to be very good at mixing the worst urges of western cowboy libertarianism with micromanaging progressivism.

Like, I should have a god given right to build in wildfire zones, but also it should be illegal to build tall buildings in Santa Monica

At the foamer holy grail in Chongqing, China.

like, this is part of the story of the modern ultrawealthy, too — they have been able to very rapidly and very effectively transform the entire system into one which socializes risk and privatizes gain without, so far, any real penalty

i also think that some of the delayed response — both culturally and politically — stems from it being functionally impossible to wrap your head around how wealthy someone like elon musk is and how wealthy he is going to be in the future, both for the average person and for policy makers alike

超かぐや姫の聖地巡礼してきました２　1/3
花火大会のシーンの場所ですね
映画と違って実際は飲み屋街の奥にホテルがあって土手は見えません
階段は北に500mほど行った場所にありました

#超かぐや姫

#TodayinHistory: #OnThisDay in 1972, the first R44 cars entered service in the #NYCsubway system.

Originally designed for high speeds to allow for swift travel along the Second Avenue Subway, an R44 broke the world speed record for a train car on January 31, 1972 with a speed of 87.75 mph.

A small mixing bowl with a blend of cooked tofu, oyster mushrooms, and very caramelized onions in front of a bottle of olive oil. The EVE Anger Games 7 stream is visible on an iPad in the background

I stole an idea from a meal kit and cooked grated tofu and shredded oyster mushrooms (about equal parts of each) with some thin sliced onion and some shawarma seasoning, and hot damn it is incredible #food 🍜

Line graph showing Number of Tweets vs. Number of characters. Bullet points on top: * Most Tweets in Japanese have 15 characters * Most Tweets in English have 34 characters 9% of Tweets in English hit the 140 character limit, compared to only 0.4% for Japanese.

The graph the Twitter folks made in 2017 when they bumped up the limit to 280 characters is quite illustrative:

おはようございます！(:D)┓
　外濠-市ケ谷駅～飯田橋駅 間、いつもの「中央・総武線(各駅停車)」E231系→千葉方面行。
　左上のこげ茶色とクリーム色の橋は「市ヶ谷水管橋」で、水道管用の橋です。その下は釣り堀の市ヶ谷フィッシュセンター。
　桜が過ぎ去り、続いてツツジやバラ、さらにはアジサイですよ～
#鉄道 #railway #さくら #桜

Friday Fog. This morning in Chicago's South Loop at sunrise.

Housing construction in Minneapolis and St. Paul is tanking For a variety of reasons — including their own policies — the cities just had two of the worst housing years among locales in the Midwest.

Minneapolis-St. Paul had the sharpest decline in housing starts in 2024 versus a 3-year trailing average amongst peer Midwest cities, according to this column. The columnist attributes rent stabilization policies as the "most obvious culprit": www.minnpost.com/cityscape/20...

In first months since passage of St. Paul’s rent-control ordinance, housing construction is way down - MinnPost The decline may have a lot to do with the inherently conservative nature of most construction financing.

St. Paul comes to mind. When they instituted a rent control policy, new multifamily housing starts immediately went down: www.minnpost.com/cityscape/20...

(The city later exempted new housing developments from the ordinance in 2025)

Sunset Park gets a Micro Center electronics retailer Micro Center opens up a store in Sunset Park.

Unrelated, but the Micro Center mentioned has only been there for 12 years: technical.ly/uncategorize...

Industry City is quite nice! It has a little Japanese grocery store over there. I think places being attractive is good.

kupka_speech_bubble.jpg

Would embassy votes be diaspora votes? Because the diaspora vote is apparently heavily Fidesz-favored this election unfortunately

Gowanus is a great project that took waaaaaay too long to get approved, and, honestly, should have gone 10-stories taller.

Wife is away for the weekend to hike and I am going to cook stuff she doesn’t like. I am thinking of kimchi jiggae. But the thing is that kimchi jiggae is better the second day after the flavors intensify. I wonder if I made it in the morning and let it simmer it would be like that by evening.

A cross section view of a tofu mushroom bao bun held in a hand. The bottom is not fluffy at all and the top looks kinda dense too

Five bao on a plate with a small cup of sauce. One is noticeably darker and smaller than the other four

A cross section view of a tofu mushroom bao held in a hand. Both top and bottom are fluffy and light.

#food 🍜 posting: sometimes it’s instructive to ignore recipe directions. The recipe said to let rest 30mins before steaming, I was hungry. There was a big difference in results! (They were all tasty)