I’ve loved this.
publish.obsidian.md/history-note...
07.03.2026 21:42
👍 0
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
I hesitate to ask but...how many #obsidian nerds are out here?
I don’t really care if the Democrats take Maine. He had a Nazi tattoo, that is a principle more important to uphold than a flimsy parliamentary majority.
In an ordered society, he would be banned from practicing politics.
#Croatiantragedies
kaprićoza duo
If you pay Proton Mail for a service, they may hand over the payment data in response to a court order: www.404media.co/proton-mail-...
The approach to regulating short-term rentals in LA city reflects a constantly repeating cycle of bad governance:
> Following stakeholder pressure, new law is passed
> Law is often window-dressing + designed to fail
> Enforcement of law is non-existent for LOTS of reasons
> Civic ill endures
Nice! It was more of a message for my colleagues in the US who may be reading this, hope it didn’t come across snarky!
How is your union handling the whole AI/deskilling thing? I’m afraid there is so little knowledge among my colleagues. We have our work cut out for us.
Join your academic union or start organizing one. This is our only option.
The online banner shows a Call for Papers: "New Approaches to the Study of the ICTY Archives". Conference dates: October 15-16, 2026 at the University of Graz. Application deadline: March 31, 2026.
📣 #CfP: "New Approaches to the Study of the ICTY Archives"
Workshop @uni-graz.at, Oct 15–16, 2026. We welcome proposals on tribunal truths, digital infrastructure & memory politics. Exploring digital coloniality & computational methods.
📅 Deadline: March 31, 2026
➡️ leibniz-ios.de/en/knowledge...
Short explanation: there is no settled way to Romanize Cyrillic (except for BCSM). People might spell Кустов as Koustov or Kustov in different settings and situations. It’s just an interpretation of the (nonambiguous) original.
Zidovi pamte by Eric Ušić
Hearing from a fella whose new book has dropped. He's got a film too.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Los Angeles needs money. Airbnb says the way to get it is to loosen the rules on short-term rentals (STRs). But what if instead the City enforced those rules? This analysis examines the potential role of STRs in generating revenue for the City of Los Angeles. Under the 2018 Los Angeles Home Sharing Ordinance (HSO), it is a violation for a host to list a noncompliant STR and it is a violation for a platform to book a noncompliant STR. Policy enforcement began in late 2019; the citation amounts today are $625 daily per noncompliant listing and $1,250 per noncompliant booking. Noncompliance under the HSO is widespread. During the program thus far, the City has issued $2.1 million in fines, and through the first five years, collected just $472,000-an annualized revenue for those years of $95,000. We find that since 2019 the City could have issued $5.2 billion in citations. If collected, this would have yielded $850 million on average each year.
HSO Noncompliance Creates a Largely Untapped Revenue Stream Amid the threats noncompliant STRs pose to communities and to the housing market, it is important to acknowledge one of the few opportunities they provide: revenue generation. Consider the parking meter: it is simple to comply with well-understood parking rules, but some percentage of people, some of the time, will flout the rules. We do not need to condone these parking violations to appreciate the $133.5 million in fines they contribute to the city's coffers annually.22 Thus far, the widespread HSO noncompliance has been a woefully untapped resource. The 1,374 citations issued by the City represent 0.17 percent of the total 777,145 noncompliant listings and transactions identified in this BNLA analysis. In December 2025 alone, Granicus reported 5,160 noncompliant STR listings with known addresses; yet that same month, DCP reported the issuance of a total of 15 citations-less than one-third of one percent. As a share of the total potential fines of $5.2 billion, the actual fines of $2.1 million represent a mere 0.04 percent.
The total (actual) fine revenue from the first five years of the program came to $472,434-about $95,000 annually.23 For fines issued in 2025, $195,000 has been collected thus far. BNLA finds that potential fine revenue has been $850 million annually.24 Within that yawning gap lies an opportunity for easy, if unfortunate revenue. For the initial years of the HSO, STRs generated an average TOT income of $34 million per year. Fining program noncompliance might have generated income of $70 million-per month. If the City were to start collecting the potential fines from noncompliant listings and transactions today, in two months the City would generate over $95 million, without any voter referendum or change in policy. If the City were to collect a mere five percent of the potential fines for noncompliance, the annual revenue stream ($42 million) would regularly exceed the annual TOT revenue currently generated by STRs citywide ($34 million).
A new Better Neighbors report says if LA started actually enforcing its short-term rentals, the city would rake in $40 to $50 million each month — "more than any measure the city is currently proposing for the ballot to raise revenue."
Report here: static1.squarespace.com/static/5fc98...
In the 1930s, Harry Chandler's LA Times ran regular columns on eugenics. The Human Betterment Foundation (backed by Chandler) included PSAs like this one. By showing a clipped vine from infecting a tree, it endorsed forced vasectomies to stop impure bloodlines from undesirables.
Not sure if we are a social science, but for history this is absolute nonsense. I’ve done my best to try out different agents (including at paid tiers) and they cannot write a single useful thing or analyze archival data in any meaningful way.
Lots of people are suddenly convinced that Claude is going to fundamentally disrupt academic work, but I will believe that when Claude can spend four months going back and forth with the business department about whether expenses from a conference were properly labelled in Concur.
This is the kind of person that’s fighting against transit in Los Angeles.
A map of the US and Canada with a criss-crossing network of many train lines, extending from northern Quebec to the Gulf Coast, and from the eastern Seaboard all the way to eastern Washington state. The speeds vary between 200 and 200 km/h.
China’s high-speed rail buildout since 2008, superimposed over the US and Canada.
This is what the ruling class is stealing from you.
I’d like to comment on current events but don’t feel safe to do so.
“Chinese state subsidies account for just 5% of BYD’s $4,700 per-vehicle cost gap with Tesla … The gap stems from deeper vertical integration, greater scale, and lower overheads that Western rivals would struggle to match without clashing with their own governments’ industrial policies.”
New #shoupista UCLA report on parking construction costs. Did you know:
👉 avg cost to build underground parking = $73,000 per space ( excluding land cost)
👉 avg cost to build aboveground parking = $52,000 per space
👉 For apartments, required parking adds roughly $50,000-$100,000 per unit
Metro D Line subway extension will open Friday May 8! Four new miles, three new stations - first Metro rail connection to Beverly Hills. la.streetsblog.org/2026/02/26/m...
Students feel like they can’t enroll in majors like Af-Am Studies and WGSS because they’re getting messages from all sides that they’re not remunerative. And yet they desperately want the knowledge, so classes are full. That seems to be the situation everywhere.
This is why we need to run recognition campaigns at private universities, and demand that tenure stream faculty have the right to collective bargaining. Yeshiva is dead but we can’t win this in the courts we need to win it on our campuses
Big if true
“The administration should not expect faculty to continually take on additional labor in order to mitigate strike impacts. Further, we are opposed to UC’s pattern of passing on the costs of negotiated wage increases to faculty grants and research funds.”
Make it a detailed thing we can put on the ballot! Happy to collaborate
“He who saves his country violates no law” is literally the Führerprinzip.
“faculty aren’t fiduciaries. Their role is purely advisory, as the president regularly reminds them, although they do win the grants that pay the university’s bills … donors contribute a pittance … yet it’s the donors who sit on the board and make the big decisions.”
In 1989 there was buzz behind creating a "Bicycle Freeway" in Westwood that even Mayor Bradley endorsed. It proposed 17-foot-high elevated "veloways" crossing Wilshire & the 405 into Brentwood & Sawtelle. Cost: $7 million. LADOT said it would infringe on street/fwy improvements.