Ben Ross

The purpose of peer review is to judge whether an article is new, important & lacks obvious errors, thus worth publishing. Improving the article is a side benefit. This is a study of "peer reviews" (human & AI) whose sole purpose is to suggest article improvements & measures how well they do that.

When I first moved to MoCo with my fam, we rented a house in a "single family neighborhood", and the owner lived somewhere else As far as I could tell, the neighborhood didn't start to "function differently" after we arrived

By far not the cruelest, but maybe the stupidest example of Trump's lawless immigration enforcement. Guy under US District Court order to remain in Baltimore is allowed short visit home to India. Now can't come back after CBP tells airline to cancel ticket. www.thebanner.com/baltimore-co...

We've got the housing version of the "avid cyclist" who's against bike lanes. "Renters are essential members of our community. I was a renter at one point," but keep renters out of 1-family areas because "neighborhoods function differently" when they arrive. montgomeryperspective.com/2026/10/23/m...

Horseshoe theory in action.

WaPo/ABC poll finds democratic socialism has a higher approval rating than the Republican Party. abcnews.com/Politics/dem...

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

Some interesting polling data on antisemitism in France, with a focus on antisemitism from the left. www.jean-jaures.org/publication/...

Just saw some kind of work beginning on the River Road bike lane where Sarah Langenkamp was killed. Flexposts have been removed and pavement is being spray-painted with what look like construction markings. I'm hoping for a fixed protective barrier.

The establishment media catch on to the weakness of left-nimbyism. For an NY Times reporter, legalizing dense housing is now an "aspect" of DSA's agenda. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/u...

Not a good look for the "non-partisan ratings" of who's winning House of Representatives seats. Republicans give up on 5 seats. 4 of them are rated highly competitive (lean or tilt Democratic) by all 3 raters. IA-1 & NJ-7 were rated tossup until very recently. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/13/u...

The movie "Joe Gould's Secret" is set in Greenwich Village in the 1940s & meticulously recreates that era's street scenes. A New York subway map hanging in the office of New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell shows the 63rd Street tunnel which opened in 1989.

This whole argument, which preoccupies Bluesky, is stupid. People care about more than one thing. Some are material interests and others can be social status, moral beliefs, etc. They will vote different ways in different elections, without changing their beliefs, based on what issues are salient.

The constituency for road-building is the road builders, who don't care whether the roads are useful, and the toll road promoters, who don't care whether the toll roads are really profitable because they will be gone when the roads go bankrupt. The other supporters are just taken in by the grift.

It's more than a little contradictory to say that you're worried about the safety of kids if a building for 80- and 90-year-olds is built across from a school, and then demand that the building must have parking for the residents.

Can someone explain to me how anyone is supposed to walk to this "BRT station"? Compared to this, the train stations in the middle of the interstate in Chicago & Fairfax County VA are the height of urbanism.

It is no exaggeration that the doctrine of Miller and Trump are unAmerican, at least in how we have understood American values over the last century.

Everyone is banned from talking about bayes unless they can name their prior variables without missing anything, and define the joint density function of their priors and their evidence. Anything else is bullshit

If a traffic light is broken, it's reported & fixed immediately. Not so for beg buttons. DOTs don't care about beg buttons. And the public can't report broken beg buttons, because identical signage for beg buttons that do & don't change the cycle means that you can't tell whether it's broken.

This is the ultimate sign of a wave election. Even Tom Edsall thinks the Democrats are in good shape. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...

Why not make anyone who buulds a parking space pay into a fund instead They are the ones imposing costs on taxpayers. Indeed, it's very odd that "transportation impact" fees for road building are always per apartment or per square foot, not per parking space.

The US left retreated into a subculture in the late 1940s & entrenched itself in it in the late 60s. The habits acquired as a subculture have been very hard to shake off. Mike Harrington tried in the 1970s & then gave up. And now that it has become a mass movement, those habits still weigh it down.

Truly a classic bit of nimbyism: I moved to near the Red Line to get away from the Purple Line. So you can't build new apartments near the Red Line!

Truly a classic bit of nimbyism: I moved to near the Red Line to get away from the Purple Line. So you can't build new apartments near the Red Line!

I knew I'd see it. It was a long. tough fight, though.

In today's mail, I got 11 pages of paperwork informing me that my Medicare drug plan paid minus 13 cents on my behalf in August and paid 23 cents in the 8 months from January to August. No further detail, and these numbers cannot be correct. Somehow I think this system could be made more efficient.

A Democratic wave is on the way, even if Cook, Sabato & IE refuse to see it. All 3 rate the Vermont governor race Safe Republican. The first public poll of that race in 2 months just dropped. It's from an NYT-rated quality pollster. It shows Democrat 6 points ahead. scholars.unh.edu/survey_cente...

This is the project where neighbors' lawn signs read "No Apartments. No Compromise."

New Public Comment on the persistent fantasy of low-conflict housing policy publiccomment.blog/p/sometimes-...

If they want to find violations in high- & low-income areas equally, all they need to do is ticket everyone who is storing lawn equipment in their garage in violation of minimum off-street parking requirements.

Today's bad behavior by @bikeshare.bsky.social users. Two e-bikes parked with rides completed off-dock, locked together with a chain so that the users are the only ones who can use them next. Have been sitting at least 3 hours aside the Capital Crescent Trail at Bethesda Ave.

It's fair to say regulation is yimby's top priority. What's wrong is that "regulatory reform" is a euphemism for deregulation. The yimby program is the opposite of dergulation; it seeks to impose uniform rules on a chaotic system of arbitrary local decisions made by small local interest groups.

This🧵 is correct. For structural reasons (eg life of buildings > financing time horizon) markets won't build enough housing on their own. BUT right now many cities have extreme shortages. Zoning & nimbys are the main constraint. Added public finance will do little without removing those constraints.