Joined April 2009
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If you take the 30 largest metros in the US and draw a 100 mile radius around their downtown, which has the largest population? (thread)
1. Philadelphia - 30 million
2. NYC - 29.6 mil
3. Riverside - 20.9 mil
4. LA - 19.4 mil
5. Baltimore - 16.5 mil
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The European mind cannot comprehend Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jun 14
We have cities where millions of people spill out onto streets, fill restaurants until midnight, and occupy squares that were old before America had a flag.
We don’t need a $60 million concrete bowl surrounded by a car park to feel alive on a Wednesday night.
But yes. Remarkable stadiums. For children.
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Brandon wants 1 million more neighbors retweeted
May 23
Ohio Local Income Tax Rates
Youngstown- 2.75%
Columbus- 2.5%
Cleveland- 2.5%
Toledo- 2.5%
Akron- 2.5%
Canton- 2.5%
Dayton- 2.25%
Cincinnati- 1.8%
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Brandon wants 1 million more neighbors retweeted
📍Cincinnati, OH
The city or whoever’s in charge of this area did a hell of a job. When all of this blooms it’s gonna look incredible.
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There is one major reason the US has no trains and then a number of smaller reasons. The big reason is pure economic geography. Trains and high speed trains work best at "mid range journeys" between dense population centers. Think roughly 150-400 miles. Anything shorter or longer and there are better options for travelers. What doesn't the US have much of? Dense networks of large cities 150-400 miles apart. A little on the eastern seaboard but beyond that you just don't have the economic geography.
The second layer to this question is that building new trains are just prohibitively expensive. There are many reasons it is prohibitively expensive but leave that aside for the moment, it is absurdly expensive. For the amount of money California plans to spend just to build the Los Angeles to San Francisco rail link (NOT ongoing operations or upkeep), you could make air travel between the two cities free in perpetuity just from the interest of what you would spend to build rail.
It just doesn't make any sense and I love trains but there is a reason.
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Metro areas with 500k in population are even more concentrated.
Comparing "cities" across states is useless because they have different definitions. The MSA map looks different.
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real Censusheads know that US city populations are basically fake. Is the number of people who live within the boundaries seen below the same as the number of people who live in “Houston”? Obviously not.
Feb 21
How many cities with a population of 100k does each state have?
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Comparing "cities" across states is useless because they have different definitions. The MSA map looks different.
Feb 21
How many cities with a population of 100k does each state have?
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Brandon wants 1 million more neighbors retweeted
Feb 15
Or this one for the city-bashers still out there I'm sure... though they have been quiescent of late.
We can discuss impact of working from home... but no matter how you parse it, city-located industries/establishments have for years been outperforming those across the far larger remainder of the 8-county region.
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Good.
Feb 13
Most Americans still don’t fully understand what happened under Biden…
8% of Nicaragua entered the US in 4 years.
8% of the entire country.
7% of Cuba.
6% of Haiti.
5% of Honduras.
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I fixed SF.
"San Francisco is so beautiful."
90% of San Francisco:
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Utah is a good example of how income measures can be disparate. They have a really high median household income thanks (in part) to a high share of multiple earners per household. Per capita income there is more in line with Ohio or Wisconsin.
Jan 27
Why are Colorado and Utah so rich now? Their household incomes are just kind of bafflingly high lol.
Also, MA's median household income being $120k is just kind of crazy lol.
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When I was a baby planner I helped with the build out of the trail system in a suburban a Philly community. Many of the neighborhoods are disconnected but adding trail connections made it so much more walkable and bikeable
Jan 22
In this photo, a little path connecting those two culdesacs would create SO much freedom and opportunity. This is an easy way to make suburban sprawl less tyrannical for the nonmotorized.
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This is exactly backwards.
1. Most people who own a home or live in an old house get this.
2. Liberals are more likely to live in or own an old house.
I actually think the percentage of people who really get this in their bones is maybe like 20% and the number of people on the left who get it is maybe like one percent
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But beyond that simple fact, a liberal worldview is one that is inherently focused on the entropic nature of things. It emphasizes consistent investment to prevent decay of infrastructure, markets, environment, etc. A worldview that explicitly fears the outcome of benign neglect.
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This is a misrepresentation of the politics of the time. Bush was to the left of his party on this and out of step with most of the GOP. Obama was to the right of the Democratic base at first and eventually moved more toward their position. Things were not "the exact opposite."
Jan 16
For people who weren't alive to remember the politics of the early 2000s, the debate on immigration was the exact opposite of what it is today.
The Democratic Party viewed open borders as, in the words of Bernie Sanders, a "Koch brothers proposal"-- that Republicans wanted to displace American workers with cheap labor at the behest of their corporate donors.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, was an honest-to-God open borders ideologue. He and Karl Rove had this brilliant theory that importing as many Hispanic immigrants as possible would make our country better and lead to them voting Republican forever.
Then at some point, Democrats realized the only way they could continue to win elections is by changing the demographics of the country-- while a businessman from New York came along to save the GOP from its pathetic leaders of the past.
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Bush repeatedly failed at immigration reform because he couldn't get conservative lawmakers in line. He was not the median Republican on this issue or the thought leader. Conservative media attacked him on this stuff.
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I'm not saying this guy is lying but this is an extremely silly claim. This topic has been studied extensively.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2789…
24 Dec 2025
I had an extremely similar argument with my original chair for my PhD dissertation. I wanted to research why infant morality is so much higher in African American women. If you google this the answer you’ll find is “racism”. But that’s not an empirical answer.
My hypothesis was that due to socioeconomics AA women were suffering from obesity at a greater rate than other demographic.
We already know obesity is a factor in infant mortality. I also found some maps that showed a correlation with infant mortality, race, obesity, and geographic locations. So I wanted to see if there was anything behind this.
I got shut down for being a bigot by saying black women are too unhealthy to have kids. Not at all what I was saying. I ended up having to do another topic to get my degree.
So when people accuse me of racism. Note I was willingly called a bigot to try to save black lives and yet the people who are social justice warriors are happy to keep letting the die because it’s too racist to say the cause is anything other than racism.
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