Meanwhile in the USSR

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/california-forever-silicon-valley-city-ballot-withdrawn

The move to withdraw the measure comes a week after a report by Solano county stated that the proposed city would likely cost the county billions of dollars, create substantial financial deficits, reduce agricultural production, harm climate resilience and potentially threaten local water supplies.

The proponents of a ballot initiative that would allow a new city of 400,000 residents to be built in east Solano County have decided to withdraw the measure and instead prepare a full environmental report on the impact the project would have on everything from the traffic to water to the county’s budget.

In a statement, Solano County Supervisor Mitch Mashburn said the decision came after conversations with California Forever CEO Jan Sramek.

“We have agreed that they will withdraw their measure and not proceed with the election in November,” Mashburn said in a statement. “I think it signals Jan Sramek’s understanding that while the need for more affordable housing and good paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic.”

. . .

The decision comes two days after a consultant for the county released a scathing assessment of the ballot measure, saying that the plan for the new city was so vague and had so few concrete details that voters lacked the information needed to make an informed decision.

This is a London, Tilbury, and Southend 2100 class locomotive

And it's never expanded on. 1 block over there are just parking lots, strip malls, single family homes. So silly. It'll be packed on nice weekends but it's iLlEgAl To bUiLd anything else like it in town. Maybe the (likely powerful) chamber of commerce sees expansion as a threat to their wallets.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/landlords-using-ai

we keep flexing 24/7

Ah, Japan, the land of the rising sun! Known for its little streets, excellent trains, and great city life!

Home to triangle shaped apartments!

Wonderful railways!

Tiny streets like this one in Shinjuku!

And of course funiculars up mountains to holy sites! (In this case, マウントワシントン)

Yup, that's right, Japan is the place to be!

I want off

https://xkcd.com/2956/

You always liked gray colors? You love panels? Khrushchyovka is your favourite building of all time? Fear not, I present to you the ADVANCED version of Khrushchyovka, still gray and ugly, but now it can be up to 25 stories and up to a kilometer long. When Leonid Brezhnev came to power, he decided to build on the work of his predecessor and continue to erect identical panel houses on the whole territory of the Soviet Union. Nowadays a panel Brezhnevka is the most common type of building you can find in Russia. Let's talk about them and about how they were about to build a whole culture of doomers around themselves.

00:00 - Brezhnevka as a background of our everyday life

04:55 - Khrushchyovka and Brezhnevka - are there any differences?

07:13 - Common problems with Brezhnevkas

10:25 - Different types of Brezhnevkas

"Brezhnevki" (colloquial, by analogy with Stalinkas and Khrushchevkas) is the name of the series of houses built in the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, mostly during the era of Leonid Brezhnev. In the late 1950s, ‘One flat per family’ became, by decree, a priority for the communist party and its first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. Leonid Brezhnev, who came after Khrushchev, disagreed with him on many things. But still decided to continue the practice of building low-cost residential panel buildings on a grand scale. The early "Brezhnevkas" are basically the same Khrushchevkas, made of the same panel blocks, only higher. While Khrushchev buildings had a maximum of 5 stories, under Brezhnev they began to build houses of 9 stories and higher. Buildings were constructed panel by panel out of standard elements manufactured by the factories, The panels would then be transported from the house factories (usually located near the construction sites of the new districts) and assembled in situ. The reason for the launch of the Brezhnevkas was the growth of the population's complaints about the quality of housing in USSR. The delight of getting their own "Khrushchevka" flat gradually dissipated, and eventually a compromise was found - the "Brezhnevka". In fact, "Brezhnevka" is the arithmetic average of two diametrically opposed principles and objectives of urban development: "deteriorated Stalinka" or "improved Khrushchevka". Upgraded variants of the systems developed in the former USSR are still in use, housing millions of urbanites to this day.

Hey there. Somehow you found my video and decided to watch it. So let me introduce myself. I'm Sergei and I'm from Russia. My channel is about my native country. I want to tell English-speaking viewers about the real Russia, about its past and present. Unfortunately, you can find a lot of propaganda about Russia on the Internet, both from the Russian media and from the Western ones. I want to tell you about Russia, as it really is, the country in which I was born, grew up, and lived all my life.

I get why things like hot dogs or bratwurst are readily available as streetfood, it's logistically easy - but so is soup! You need like a pot, maybe two if you're getting crazy with it, maybe some bread rolls and that's it. It's cheap to make, cheap to buy, you could get hot soup on a cold day to warm you up or something like a gazpach or okroshka on a cold day to have a chilling meal. They're stupidly easy to make, all the ingredients basically cost zilch, very easy to adjust for all kinds of different dietary needs if you offer some sort of toppings optionally instead of throwing it all in there.

So why isn't there more soup? It's a style of meal you can find in basically any cuisine yet in all my travels I remember like two instances where I could just get a soup. What drives streetfood and why is soup shafted?

People like trains.