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Colby Brown

Welp. Shorts feed still full of trash so maybe it had nothing to do with my stay in downtown Minneapolis. The YouTube algorithm has been acting very weird lately for sure and/or Cops 2024 might just be its default setting. Is there a Fediverse clone of TikTok?

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Colby Brown

Before someone whatabouts the skyways let me remind you that they close at 8pm and are lined with empty storefronts. Many restaurants are only open from 11am to 2pm. The sushi bar I ate in last night had started closing its doors at 7pm. This is not a substitute for streetfront retail.

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Colby Brown

I can't imagine what it's like to try to live in this neighborhood. We talk about revitalizing downtowns by converting the tall buildings to housing but there has to be some drastic changes to almost everything else around them before enough people will want to reside here for that to be a viable solution. Honestly the best case scenario I can think of might be to convert large portions of downtowns like these to hydroponic vertical farms (for food not weed).

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Colby Brown

I also have to say, after exploring a bit last night, that this is one of the least walkable places I've ever stayed in and I don't know how I never noticed that before when I lived in the Twin Cities 15 years ago. It seems to have been emptied out by the pandemic in a particularly dystopian and sad way. The poor streetscaping was always there, but now it's laid bare because so few downtown workers are moving about.

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Colby Brown

I just need to tell someone that the contrast between my YouTube Shorts feed when staying in Downtown Minneapolis and when back at home is wild. Lots of videos of armed confrontations between people, racially charged conversations, viral videos of police acting stupid etc.. You can't convince me that this doesn't have something to do with Google using my location to adjust its algorithm.

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Bryan Hansel

"Those who have never seen Superior get an inadequate, even inaccurate idea, by hearing it spoken of as a 'lake,' and to those who have sailed over its vast extent the word sounds positively ludicrous. Though its waters are fresh and crystal, Superior is a sea. It breeds storms, and rain and fogs, like the sea. It is cold in mid-summer as the Atlantic. It is wild, masterful, and dreaded as the Black Sea." - Rev. George Grant, Ocean to Ocean, 1872

#photography #LakeSuperior #minnesota

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Colby Brown

if I didn't know better, I'd say the app-based ride service industry was ripe for disruption by taxis

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Colby Brown

I'll also be wandering around the conference on Monday and staying in the Twin Cities for Tuesday afternoon, so to any friends and colleagues in the area, let me know if you're interested in getting together to catch up!

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Colby Brown

I'm honored to be speaking at the National Planning Conference in Minneapolis on Tuesday morning about "Socioeconomic Forecasting in the Post-Pandemic Era". Thanks to my friends Todd Graham and Dennis Farmer at the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities for organizing the session and inviting me to be part of their panel.

npc24.eventscribe.net/agenda.a

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Dare Obasanjo

Larry Summers and others published a paper with an interesting theory on why consumers believe inflation is higher than the government’s CPI numbers. Since 1983, it has ignored interest rates even though they affect car and mortgage payments.

Using a pre-1983 CPI formula would have inflation around 18% versus the official 7.1% in November 2022. It’s a plausible theory that explains why people’s sentiment doesn’t match inflation stats.

forbes.com/sites/theapothecary

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The Overhead Wire

Wednesday's Most Read # 2 - Has remote work changed how people travel in the U.S? bit.ly/43UYeFX MIT News

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Ben Smith

A short memory of how I built 38 useful Twitter bots in 2009: bensmith.blog/posts/i-invented

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The Overhead Wire

Wednesday's Most Read # 1 - A Possible Future for Downtowns Out in the Suburbs bit.ly/4cI274Z Governing

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Colby Brown boosted
𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇

Mondo Transit !

Today's episode: Off-the-Wall Solutions

By which I mean: Out-of-the-Wall Solutions

1/ The Liziba (李子坝) station of the #Chongqing Monorail

🚝🧱🧵

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Eugen Rochko

The fact that you can follow the president of the United States (@potus) from your Mastodon account instead of being forced to have an X or Threads account for it is a huge W in my book. Of course our team is fully available to help if they'd want to set up Mastodon on whitehouse.gov. I believe governments should not rely on 3rd party platforms to connect with their constituents.

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jsj

How does this entire #CNN article cover this without mentioning the toxicity of the brand’s CEO as a possible reason demand is down?

I know many like myself who were considering Teslas before Elon went full Nazi, but now will never own one. There are others who own them and have bumper stickers saying they bought it before they knew who he really is.

Tesla sales plunge far more than expected | CNN Business cnn.com/2024/04/02/business/te

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Wifi-cable

Happy Easter to those who celebrate.

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Blair Lorenzo / Fox & The City

In many ways, the archetypical nighttime institution—the all night diner—was invented to serve this kind of work.

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Scott Santens

New results from another completed guaranteed #basicincome pilot. This one was in Cambridge, MA where 130 people got $500/mo for 18 months. Did they work less? No. They worked MORE.

Recipients went from 36% FT employed to 40%. Those who didn't get it went from 30% to 28%. PT and seasonal employment also grew for those with the basic income.

That isn't unusual. Most of the pilots have shown increased employment.

So what else was observed?

Read the report:
cambridgecf.org/research-on-ca

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Colby Brown

I had a dream last night that I took a job as Christopher Walken's "driver" and then found out that meant just being his assistant, not really driving, until one day we were sitting in his Tesla (or whatever) and as it went into self-driving mode he turned to me and said, "you know, I would really appreciate if you drove the car right now." I told him on the spot that the job was a bad fit for me and he sort of sneered and said "yeah, it is. it obviously is."

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