Michael Bradley 🍕

Sentiment indicator: Jehovah’s Witnesses now have a booklet called “Coping with Rising Prices.”

What's going to happen when the family shares an account and half of it is scanky star wars fetish short clips and the other half is mickey mouse funhouse.

The "it would be good to have more families in the city" is in direct contradiction with "the area of the city with tons of developable city lots sounds like you're standing in the tarmac at o'hare."

Wisconsin is going to spend ~10B expanding all the highways & interchanges around milwaukee. For 10% of that amount, they could cap everything that went through neighborhoods & subsidize development (or endow maintenance of attractive greenery) on the highway adjacent remnant lots w/ negative value

In a sane world, we'd take these old downtown highway trenches, drop rail lines in them and cap & cover them with champ elysee/park avenue-type grand boulevards. But alas.

Eh, I am in the pro-freeway cap camp.

There's a good chance this is the single most expensive per-spot surface parking lot ever built by human civilization

You can find lots of things like fbi reports where they embed with gangs & cartels, spend 2 years figuring out everyone in the distribution networks, then do a huge 1 day crack down where they arrest everyone at once. And will be like 160 people.

While wikipedia will say they have 60,000 members.

We're supposed to think there's gangs with as many employees as Verizon? Yet when you bust a drug dealer in the most crime riddled rust belt city, there's somehow no affiliation to these networks.

Or that you can scour every left wing area of the internet and find no meet ups or leaders for antifa.

The thing about the antifa, "the bloods & the crips," ms-13, cartel de los soles, etc is that it's all fake in any sort of actual organizational hierarchy.

"Go to war" most famously referring to the nazi campaign to conquer europe and exterminate jews, roma, and others. In a war that ended with like 75M deaths globally.

The problem if you went to full truth in pricing is that you would get a whole lot of bills that are like
Colonoscopy: 1,100
Insurance Pays: 0
You owe: 1,100

Until you hit the high deductibles, and people would wonder what hell they & their employers are paying $20K a year for.

It's like when you go to a department store and the sticker price on a sweater is $100, but it's always on sale 70% off. Except it's a colonoscopy for 3,500, but after discounts is 1,100.

And it’s also not a service we consume; the great Krugman line still applies… “they’re having a sale on stents at St. Mary’s!” is not a thing

It does scare the hell out of people, though, because they'll see $250K at the top of their cardiac arrest bills and go, "shit, I'd be completely bankrupt without insurance." While the real cash price is the (still high) idk $85K further down the bill.

The top number and the "Insurance discounts" are completely made up from an economic perspective. It just represents some nonsensical price negotiation that the medical provider & Insurance company does that's irrelevant to the actual approximate cash price.

The thing to know about medical bills is that the top line number is super fake.

It will be like:

Broken Arm: 10,000
Insurance Discount: -8,000
Account Balance: 2,000
Insurance Pays: 1,600
You Owe: 400

The 'real' price is the ~2,000.

Yep. And the way it works outside of top metros is that the super markets and super stores, rebuild down the street and their old locations become giant home goods stores or hobby lobbys or planet fitnesses or whatever. It's perpetual expansion.

Milwaukee is high end of retail sq feet per capita & we have things like successful restaurants that are open for just dinner service, 3 days a week. Or collectors shops open just Saturdays. Which is neat in some ways, but also contributes to the place feeling empty relative to its built form.

I think in general, it seems we way over produce retail compared to the rest of the world. I suspect that contributes to a lot of vibe differences. If our retail sq ft went down by half, things would be busier, open later hours, seating & displays would spill out of buildings onto sidewalks.

Does it even need to be paved? Couldn't it just be irrigated and landscaped into a lush garden of eden. Build some nice parks in the fire break.

The elephant in the room is that >90% of very low income households are renters. And single family "character" also basically means a neighborhood with no very poor people, at least for the first several decades after construction.

NE view from the intersection of Cass St and Front St in Traverse City with Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan beyond. // Image captured at: 2025-12-09 12:36:06 UTC (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Current Temp in Traverse City: 21.56 F | -5.80 C // Precip: mist // Wind: S at 15.010 mph | 24.15 kph // Humidity: 77%

Current* conditions near Traverse City, MI:

the tower crane at 400 n lakeshore drive lowering three portapotties from the ~45th floor, the sunset sky pink and light blue over lake Michigan and navy pier in the background

a bundle of porta-potties has never looked so pretty

River Hills: Spectacular Mid-Century & Pop Art! starts on 12/4/2025 View information about this sale in Milwaukee, WI. The sale starts Thursday, December 4 and runs through Sunday, December 7. It is being run by Landmark Estate Sales.

Really wild estate sale in Milwaukee this weekend. Dubuffet, Eames, Bertoia, Saarinen, Warhol... you'd expect this stuff to get offloaded via auction or something, not an estate sale.

AHHHHH EMERGENCY MILWAUKEE SUBWAY BUILDER STREAM COMING TONIGHT www.twitch.tv/kimischilling

Uh

A prolific amount of 1-2 acre single family homes. Tons of scraps of conservation easements. Every city has a basically a sprawl greenbelt around it.

In raw density terms, the Boston region is the sprawliest big metro in the country: realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/u...

The relatively competent guy in India using AI for email & report writing assist seems fairly formidable? How do you think that fits in your basic model, or am I thinking about it wrong?