Wow, Milan leaves and this place goes to heck - missed mailbags, reruns, etc. Yale apparently is the only thing holding American civilization together!
Enjoyed yesterday’s Q&A and met a few SB readers. Call me a giant nerd but I’m still missing a proper Bay Area meetup for serious fans of the Substack tough. I like zoning discussions as much as the next reader but reallly looking for some alternate histories, 2000s (2010s?) music references, and discussions of various past posts.
It was a great event! I had to run at the end so didn't get to mingle but could tell from the questions that this was a good group of people to get to know (other than that one of course).
I think you'd need a lot more than 3.5 pickleball players to reach critical mass. To my knowledge pickleball courts don't regularly explode with the force of a few thousand tons of TNT.
Interesting to reflect on the reasons that cities do not grow more. In DC some is just aesthetic sensibilities of current residents, some the perceived hyperlocal externalities faced by local residents (congestion of street parking, local street traffic, crime(?)), but it really is just NIMBY, no one that I know of opposes the growth in population of DC per se. Which makes the actual effectiveness of anti growth pretty curious.
The real lesson is about honor and trustworthiness. The democrats wouldn't bail him out because he was essentially untrustworthy. He made explicit deals and then reneged on them without any good reason or intervening circumstance. For them there was no upside to McCarthy because he left them compromising to achieve something and then ripping up the deal --- pain with no gain.
To a minor extent the house crazy caucus had a similar complaint; they thought he made promises to them and then reneged when he compromised with dems. Of course their real complaint is that he wouldn't just burn the place down with them.
Little Kevin's rank incompetence versus the abject impossibility of corralling that caucus is a real zero-divided-by-zero situation. I'd invoke L'Hopital's rule but I don't know how to take either derivative.
This sort of implies that Kevin McCarthy was ever actually in control of the House, which I think is not strongly borne out by evidence. No puppet, no puppet, you are the puppet!
Maybe. I just don't know enough about the dynamics of this whole process to know what to expect (or fear). I do know that, as execrable and as ineffective as he was, Kevin McCarthy apparently helped the government avoid a shutdown. Perhaps Speaker Gaitz or Speaker Trump will follow a different course of action?
We are in yet another uncharted territory, I'll grant you that much. In a prolonged shutdown, might we see a few dozen vulnerable Republicans join with Democrats to kick out another speaker and install a pass-bills placeholder, maybe some retired Republican governor or something? I hope it remains hypothetical.
Well, Jim Jordan has announced his candidacy. Kasich ain't walking through the door anytime soon. I strongly suspect it will be as a I fear: a destructive, MAGA loon nihilist is who will inherit that gavel. Putin is going to have his soundest sleep in many months.
McCarthy sealed his fate when he went on TV to excoriate the Democrats, on whom his future as Speaker rested. When you go out of your way to stick your finger in your savior's eye, don't expect them to rescue you.
Will McCarthy's successor make the Democrats wistful for Kevin? Maybe. But I don't think his WAR relative to Scalise or McHenry is that high and he had totally blown his credibility anyway. I don't think the Democrats will regret their action. And while things like government shutdowns and denying Ukraine aid are serious risks, having a chaotic, fanatical, radical Republican House to run against next year isn't the worst thing in the world.
There was no way that McCarthy would have been able to rely on Democrats to stay speaker unless he only had ambitions to be in the house until the end of this term. He had to win this with Republican votes and establish his success within the Republican caucus or he was done.
The larger issue is the odds of moving a spending bill through the House in November just dropped dramatically. That's bad for the Republicans in the House, but I don't know if that is good for Biden or Democrats in the Senate either.
Although, tragically, maybe worst of all for the Ukrainians. But here's where I'd like to see the White House get really clever and have the Pentagon suddenly "realize" that they overestimated the value of equipment being sent to Ukraine by, oh, $50 billion and therefore leaving them tons of authority to send more. This is serious stuff and requires some hardball.
You're probably right about Republicans in the House. Just not sure if that translates outside of there.
As for the accounting shenanigans, I hate everything about that idea. If its serious stuff, then treat it seriously. Doing things like that just lead to more and more nonsense in the way we are governed. We're going to have the next Trump arguing that its okay to spend SS funds on building a wall with Mexico because it won't actually cost money for reasons, and using stuff like this as precedent.
I think a major reason we're in the place that we are now is that far to many people in government act like what they do doesn't matter because people will figure out how to work around it. It leads to increasing dysfunction in government and cynicism from the public.
Maybe McCarty is both dumb and untrustworthy. Will he even stay in the House? Even though he'll probably survive the inevitable primary challenge, what's left for him in the House?
Boehner simply quit after he resigned as Speaker. Ryan threw in the towel before the 2018 election because the caucus and trump were so dysfunctional.
McCarty's choices were ask dems for help or effectively end his career in the Hose any way. I don't think there's any long game where he comes back as anything.
If he accepted Dem support he was doomed it was just a matter of time. At some point, he would lose too many votes between Dems and Reps and would be gone probably in another month or two at the latest.
The only potential for him to continue as speaker was to win the vote yesterday or whenever it came. That was clear back in January - both that it would come at some point, and that he was only going to survive if he could convince the hardliners to stick with him. I'm guessing he knew he was doomed as soon as he introduced the clean CR.
Does anyone know if the c-span cameras will again be unfettered by rules because of a lack of Speaker. That actually made things interesting last time.
I was wondering that too. My guess is no. I think the reason they were allowed last time is because rules hadn't been adopted yet, but rules have now been adopted and, as far as I know, are still an effect.
Skeptical of the largest-cities chart. London was not the world’s largest city for the entire period 1900-2000. Not even close towards the end of that period. Mexico City and cities in China were larger, I believe. And the London figure seems inaccurate. Most comparative population measures now use the population of the continuous urban agglomeration rather than official political boundaries of cities, which are fairly arbitrary and not generally representative of any kind of economic or transportation border
>one thing is for certain though, at the moment, the top 3 for both is New York, LA, Chicago<
I don't think that's certain, depending on definitions. I'm not sure we have accurate real time snapshots, but I'd be tempted to think the DC CSA is now larger than Chicagoland.
Wikipedia gives the Baltimore-DC CSA as 9.9M versus 9.8M for Chicagoland, but I'm inclined to look askance at the former definition. Nobody from Baltimore identifies as from DC, and vice versa.
There is a case to merge them. But it’s weaker than the case to merge the San Francisco and San Jose areas, or the Los Angeles and Riverside/San Bernardino areas.
If you want to try for the bank shot, Milwaukee as part of Greater Chicagoland is a colorable argument, by the standard of "would I think about driving to ORD for a cheaper flight".
The Washington Football Team need to become the President's Own - a sign of Federal competence and dominance just like Real Madrid is/was the royalist/fascist team in Spain.
The 4 highest adjusted income places on the chart (Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle) are big tech hubs, with lots of college graduates. Makeup of the available jobs probably explains a lot of the variation on that plot, including Minneapolis being high and LA being low.
When you control for education, though, it does make the point about New York even stronger. You would expect to see New York on the high end for adjusted income, given the number of high-paying white collar jobs. But no, people do seem to be tolerating some penalty on adjusted income to live there.
Not shockingly, San Diego also seems popular, and Detroit seems unpopular.
I wonder if London would be so hardline anti-development today if in the post-war period they had to make those hard decisions about knocking down old buildings. Rather than having lots of room to develop over the ruins caused by the bombings
I wonder if London would be so hardline anti-development today if in the post-war period they had to make those hard decisions about knocking down old buildings. Rather than having lots of room to develop over the ruins caused by the bombings
Wow, Milan leaves and this place goes to heck - missed mailbags, reruns, etc. Yale apparently is the only thing holding American civilization together!
It's the magic touch of that gentlemanly club life!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX-k66VrmQo
For subscribers, if you want to see the original comments from when this was posted the first time, they are at: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-the-city
Enjoyed yesterday’s Q&A and met a few SB readers. Call me a giant nerd but I’m still missing a proper Bay Area meetup for serious fans of the Substack tough. I like zoning discussions as much as the next reader but reallly looking for some alternate histories, 2000s (2010s?) music references, and discussions of various past posts.
As a Bay Area native I also think this would be super fun!
It was a great event! I had to run at the end so didn't get to mingle but could tell from the questions that this was a good group of people to get to know (other than that one of course).
I require a community big enough to support an active courthouse and a critical mass of 3.5 pickleball players.
I think you'd need a lot more than 3.5 pickleball players to reach critical mass. To my knowledge pickleball courts don't regularly explode with the force of a few thousand tons of TNT.
3.5 is a skill level
I *was* wondering what one does with half a pickleball player!
I kind of figured you weren't running one through the sawmill and splitting him between two courts, yes.
Interesting to reflect on the reasons that cities do not grow more. In DC some is just aesthetic sensibilities of current residents, some the perceived hyperlocal externalities faced by local residents (congestion of street parking, local street traffic, crime(?)), but it really is just NIMBY, no one that I know of opposes the growth in population of DC per se. Which makes the actual effectiveness of anti growth pretty curious.
So since we've all seen and commented on this before... thoughts on McCarthy's little clusterfluffle?
The real lesson is about honor and trustworthiness. The democrats wouldn't bail him out because he was essentially untrustworthy. He made explicit deals and then reneged on them without any good reason or intervening circumstance. For them there was no upside to McCarthy because he left them compromising to achieve something and then ripping up the deal --- pain with no gain.
To a minor extent the house crazy caucus had a similar complaint; they thought he made promises to them and then reneged when he compromised with dems. Of course their real complaint is that he wouldn't just burn the place down with them.
I haven’t been following this stuff. What kind of deals with the Dems did he renege on?
The planned funding levels when they negotiated the debt ceiling.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4047677-democratic-leader-accuses-mccarthy-of-reneging-budget-deal-biden/
Little Kevin's rank incompetence versus the abject impossibility of corralling that caucus is a real zero-divided-by-zero situation. I'd invoke L'Hopital's rule but I don't know how to take either derivative.
Come here for the urban planning discussions, stay here for the calculus jokes...
I hope Democrats know what they're doing. My fear is the devil we knew might not be as bad as the one we might get.
This sort of implies that Kevin McCarthy was ever actually in control of the House, which I think is not strongly borne out by evidence. No puppet, no puppet, you are the puppet!
Maybe. I just don't know enough about the dynamics of this whole process to know what to expect (or fear). I do know that, as execrable and as ineffective as he was, Kevin McCarthy apparently helped the government avoid a shutdown. Perhaps Speaker Gaitz or Speaker Trump will follow a different course of action?
These people are civic vandals.
We are in yet another uncharted territory, I'll grant you that much. In a prolonged shutdown, might we see a few dozen vulnerable Republicans join with Democrats to kick out another speaker and install a pass-bills placeholder, maybe some retired Republican governor or something? I hope it remains hypothetical.
John Kasich?
Well, Jim Jordan has announced his candidacy. Kasich ain't walking through the door anytime soon. I strongly suspect it will be as a I fear: a destructive, MAGA loon nihilist is who will inherit that gavel. Putin is going to have his soundest sleep in many months.
Matt Gaetz is the Vivek of the Republican House caucus. He's hated more by his fellow party members than by the other party.
McCarthy sealed his fate when he went on TV to excoriate the Democrats, on whom his future as Speaker rested. When you go out of your way to stick your finger in your savior's eye, don't expect them to rescue you.
Will McCarthy's successor make the Democrats wistful for Kevin? Maybe. But I don't think his WAR relative to Scalise or McHenry is that high and he had totally blown his credibility anyway. I don't think the Democrats will regret their action. And while things like government shutdowns and denying Ukraine aid are serious risks, having a chaotic, fanatical, radical Republican House to run against next year isn't the worst thing in the world.
There was no way that McCarthy would have been able to rely on Democrats to stay speaker unless he only had ambitions to be in the house until the end of this term. He had to win this with Republican votes and establish his success within the Republican caucus or he was done.
The larger issue is the odds of moving a spending bill through the House in November just dropped dramatically. That's bad for the Republicans in the House, but I don't know if that is good for Biden or Democrats in the Senate either.
Maybe, but worse for the Republicans, I'd say.
Although, tragically, maybe worst of all for the Ukrainians. But here's where I'd like to see the White House get really clever and have the Pentagon suddenly "realize" that they overestimated the value of equipment being sent to Ukraine by, oh, $50 billion and therefore leaving them tons of authority to send more. This is serious stuff and requires some hardball.
You're probably right about Republicans in the House. Just not sure if that translates outside of there.
As for the accounting shenanigans, I hate everything about that idea. If its serious stuff, then treat it seriously. Doing things like that just lead to more and more nonsense in the way we are governed. We're going to have the next Trump arguing that its okay to spend SS funds on building a wall with Mexico because it won't actually cost money for reasons, and using stuff like this as precedent.
I think a major reason we're in the place that we are now is that far to many people in government act like what they do doesn't matter because people will figure out how to work around it. It leads to increasing dysfunction in government and cynicism from the public.
I think when you gave a nihilistic party condemning a brave people to death it's not business as usual
Maybe McCarty is both dumb and untrustworthy. Will he even stay in the House? Even though he'll probably survive the inevitable primary challenge, what's left for him in the House?
Boehner simply quit after he resigned as Speaker. Ryan threw in the towel before the 2018 election because the caucus and trump were so dysfunctional.
McCarty's choices were ask dems for help or effectively end his career in the Hose any way. I don't think there's any long game where he comes back as anything.
If he accepted Dem support he was doomed it was just a matter of time. At some point, he would lose too many votes between Dems and Reps and would be gone probably in another month or two at the latest.
The only potential for him to continue as speaker was to win the vote yesterday or whenever it came. That was clear back in January - both that it would come at some point, and that he was only going to survive if he could convince the hardliners to stick with him. I'm guessing he knew he was doomed as soon as he introduced the clean CR.
Republicans will have no trouble finding someone worse, but it may take a while to sift through the list to find the absolute worst.
My guess is they'll go with Scalise if he's physically up to it. He'll be as much a null as McCarthy so big whoop.
Well, I'll probably be turning on CSPAN next week for the first time since the 15 rounds of votes in January.
Does anyone know if the c-span cameras will again be unfettered by rules because of a lack of Speaker. That actually made things interesting last time.
I was wondering that too. My guess is no. I think the reason they were allowed last time is because rules hadn't been adopted yet, but rules have now been adopted and, as far as I know, are still an effect.
He is a mediocrity who became an American patriot.
I’ll be darned - Matt actually DOES think about the Roman Empire.
Skeptical of the largest-cities chart. London was not the world’s largest city for the entire period 1900-2000. Not even close towards the end of that period. Mexico City and cities in China were larger, I believe. And the London figure seems inaccurate. Most comparative population measures now use the population of the continuous urban agglomeration rather than official political boundaries of cities, which are fairly arbitrary and not generally representative of any kind of economic or transportation border
You should give Houston it's due as the fourth largest city in the US. Dallas is ninth.
Maybe he's talking metro areas. Dallas County appears to be 1/2 the land area of Harris County but DFW has more population than Houston metro.
Probably so.
The chart in the article does refer to MSA so that's what I assumed.
You want to see a couple of Texans start fighting here? Because that’s how you start it.
>one thing is for certain though, at the moment, the top 3 for both is New York, LA, Chicago<
I don't think that's certain, depending on definitions. I'm not sure we have accurate real time snapshots, but I'd be tempted to think the DC CSA is now larger than Chicagoland.
Wikipedia gives the Baltimore-DC CSA as 9.9M versus 9.8M for Chicagoland, but I'm inclined to look askance at the former definition. Nobody from Baltimore identifies as from DC, and vice versa.
There's commuter rail between Baltimore and DC and they share an airport. I think it's pretty clearly the same metro area.
"Share", to the extent that Matt's *third*-closest international airport is probably BWI.
They have different football teams and baseball teams, ergo different metro areas. Those are the rules, I didn't make the rules.
BWI is the second closest airport to people in large sections of DC, being only a 45 minute drive from
NW DC.
Also, the NY metro area has multiple football, baseball, hockey, and soccer teams in an area that is definitely one CSA
There is a case to merge them. But it’s weaker than the case to merge the San Francisco and San Jose areas, or the Los Angeles and Riverside/San Bernardino areas.
If you want to try for the bank shot, Milwaukee as part of Greater Chicagoland is a colorable argument, by the standard of "would I think about driving to ORD for a cheaper flight".
"Maybe our football team getting an actual name will help."
You got something far, far better: a new owner!
And now the only thing left for them to do is to Make The RFK Site Great Again. (Just kidding!)
The Washington Football Team need to become the President's Own - a sign of Federal competence and dominance just like Real Madrid is/was the royalist/fascist team in Spain.
This, I command!
I see what you did there with your last word.
And it's funny that you mention a royalist/fascist team, because the current name so easily just gets shortened to Commies.
This is why I say we should get rid of the Buy American laws and local veto points and outsource transit construction to the Japanese
The 4 highest adjusted income places on the chart (Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle) are big tech hubs, with lots of college graduates. Makeup of the available jobs probably explains a lot of the variation on that plot, including Minneapolis being high and LA being low.
When you control for education, though, it does make the point about New York even stronger. You would expect to see New York on the high end for adjusted income, given the number of high-paying white collar jobs. But no, people do seem to be tolerating some penalty on adjusted income to live there.
Not shockingly, San Diego also seems popular, and Detroit seems unpopular.
I wonder if London would be so hardline anti-development today if in the post-war period they had to make those hard decisions about knocking down old buildings. Rather than having lots of room to develop over the ruins caused by the bombings
I wonder if London would be so hardline anti-development today if in the post-war period they had to make those hard decisions about knocking down old buildings. Rather than having lots of room to develop over the ruins caused by the bombings
I’d like to counter one of the assertions here by mentioning that the culture of Minneapolis is absolutely infuriating to people from the Northeast.
The absence of comments is sad. This was a great post, and repeating oneself after 18 months is fine
Well, posting the McCarthy-specific thread probably took a lot of wind out of the sails of this one.