Woe, the Humanity: How AI Fits into Rising Anti-Humanism
The future of humanity is becoming ever less human. The astounding capabilities of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence have triggered fears about the coming age of machines leaving...
View ArticleVMT Rears Its Ugly Head Again
So The Los Angeles Times ran a story today all about possible “congestion pricing” schemes coming soon to certain roads in the LA area soon.While the article lauds the social engineering aspect of the...
View ArticleWhy Globalism Failed
Not so long ago, the West was captivated by visions of the ‘end of history’. Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman, Kenichi Ohmae and others envisaged the permanent triumph of a global neoliberal order....
View ArticleHigh-Speed Rail Proposal Runs into High-Cost Problems
At the June meeting of the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee a consultant presented a review of Ultra High-Speed Rail studies that have been done for the I-5 corridor. As is often the case,...
View ArticleArtificial Intelligence is the Crack Cocaine of the Digital Age
The rise of artificial intelligence may be rescuing the tech oligarchy, but its current trajectory could hasten our steps towards what virtual reality guru Rony Abovitz calls ‘computational autocracy’....
View ArticleDemographically, Cities Will 'Always' Lose to Suburbs
I often check in on NewGeography.com, a website led by southern California-based urban studies professor and famed suburbanist Joel Kotkin. If you’ve checked out the site, you may have noticed I’ve had...
View ArticleCalifornia: No Growth to 2060 per State Projections
The state of California Department of Finance (DOF) has issued interim population projections indicating that in 2060, there will be 39,508,000 residents in the state. This is 12,000 fewer residents...
View ArticleAmtrak Carried 86% of Pre-Pandemic PM in May
Amtrak carried 492 million passenger-miles in May 2023, which was just 86.4 percent of the 569 million passenger-miles it carried in the same month of 2019, according to Amtrak’s latestmonthly...
View ArticleMeet the Woke Activists Behind the Roald Dahl Book Purge
Over the weekend, the publisher Puffin announced that it had scrubbed language deemed “insensitive” and “non-inclusive” from the works of Roald Dahl, the classic children’s book author, in some cases...
View ArticleCobalt Slavery, Child Labor, Ecological Destruction and Death
Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. It exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and...
View ArticleSave Our Cities
With office districts and tower blocks losing their lustre, we need to rethink what cities are for. It’s time to create better neighbourhoods where people will want to spend their time.The notion that...
View ArticleLocalist Living in a Shrinking Age
I try hard to give people insights into trends affecting our world. One of them is the way that declining birth rates will ultimately translate into shrinking cities.In the future, many if not most of...
View ArticleDear Sputla, Stand Up to NGO Industrial Complex
Dear Sputla, please burn more coal.The Minister of Electricity, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, known fondly as Sputla, recently said that if he had his way, he would go and restart the Komati Power Station,...
View ArticleAmerica: Moving to Lower Densities Post-2020 Census Data
Driven, at least in part, by the huge increase in the potential for remote work, US residents moved in large numbers to states with lower urban densities in the two years and three months (27 months)...
View ArticleDebating Gavin Newsom Will Boost Ron DeSantis
A potential face-off on Fox TV between Florida’s Ron DeSantis and California’s Gavin Newsom may not remind anyone of Lincoln versus Douglas, or even Kennedy and Nixon. But it would mark a huge...
View ArticleMassive Riots, Renewable Resentments
The warnings about the landscape-destroying sprawl of wind and solar energy have been coming for nearly two decades. The warnings have come from some of the world’s most prominent scientists,...
View ArticleNew Jersey Challenges New York’s Cordon Fee Plan
With federal approval of New York’s environmental assessment, most of the federal, state, and local obstacles to New York City’s cordon pricing plan— which almost everyone erroneously calls a...
View ArticleReport: How Will California Solve the Housing Crisis?
This new report examines the housing crisis in California and strategies to create more housing at affordable price points. Below is a summary and a link to download the full report.Yes, the housing...
View ArticleThe Question of "Developed" Land -- And Its Impact On Housing
One of the often-used arguments from advocates for increasing housing supply in our nation's most expensive cities is that zoning policy, or the regulation of land use by local government, has kept an...
View ArticleClass, Nation, and the Future
“Politics is really downstream from culture.” Andrew Breitbart’s assertion, echoing the ideas of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, has become a watchword both for the Right and Left. This...
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