Brendan

Brendan

@ninthhostage.bsky.social

I think of creative ways to end the world for a living, and how to protect shareholder value to the bitter end | 📍Philadelphia

326 Followers 270 Following 83 Posts Joined Apr 2023
2 weeks ago
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New from me: In 1818 free Black Philadelphians attempted to form their own volunteer fire company, this is the story of what happened next

open.substack.com/pub/pigeondr...

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3 weeks ago
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Read @ninthhostage.bsky.social on last Friday’s Philadelphia Historical Commission meeting, where the Commission decided a designation case for a 1920’s movie theater in Frankford, among other things open.substack.com/pub/buildphi...

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10 months ago
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Regarding the Purpose of the Philadelphia Home Defense Reserve Part I on the History of the P.H.D.R.

Check out a history of the first six months of the Philadelphia Home Defense Reserve - a little known paramilitary organization from the first world war

open.substack.com/pub/pigeondr...

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1 year ago
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A Random Walk Through Philadelphia Week of 2/24/25

open.substack.com/pub/pigeondr...

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1 year ago
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One of the great things about doing thus kind of research is finding all kinds of interesting tidbits - this is a future philadelphia mayor talking about why he got intk politics in 1950

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1 year ago

which begs the question, for councilmanic prerogative, does a district council member really "know their district best" when their district is composed of 150k residents?

Prerogative emerged when that number was closer to 10k

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1 year ago
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Philadelphias city council has varied in size and composition quite a bit - it got at big at 145 members in 1920

The number of residents per council member has increased 17x since 1860

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1 year ago
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Jackals and Bosses A look at the history of the structure & powers of the Philadelphia City Council

Philadelphia friends: I wrote an essay on the history of the structure of city council, and how that relates to councilmanic prerogative - you can see it here: open.substack.com/pub/pigeondr...

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1 year ago

There's a group that meets at bike stop ~monthly - phillyrubberclub on IG, that's probably a good starting place

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2 years ago

bluesky got milkshake ducked?

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2 years ago

a king among men - thee steps ahead of me

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2 years ago

thing to include in the regex is probably filtering out stuff about the tv show always sunny in philadelphia

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2 years ago

Unique politicians names would probably work well ish too

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2 years ago

hoagie and wawa will both have a lot of south jersey/ delco overlap

so I guess the q is if we’re limiting to phila proper or the philadelphia metro region

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2 years ago

wondering how good the hit rate on “center city” would be …

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2 years ago

is jawn too mainstream?

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2 years ago
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smdh all these people hopping on blue sky who haven't read the book first

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2 years ago

One nice benefit of Elon completely fucking up Twitter is the VC’s and Investors can shut up now about operating a tach business with only 20% of your staff

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2 years ago

deep cut

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2 years ago

it also has a remarkably high success & recovery rate for younger people with early intervention and defibrillation!

how could someone say that you'd have been better off without the attempt??

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2 years ago

what does that even mean? at a basic level... you only do CPR on someone who is already, for all intents and purposes, dead - and it seems hard to do more harm then "dead" under almost any sensible ethical system

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2 years ago

that's like so horrific and callus - but also - medically illiterate - real one two punch

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2 years ago
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boop boop

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2 years ago

..... what!?

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2 years ago

when you go to a bar that has no beer taps - that's when you know

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2 years ago

really is feeling like 2009 era facebook out here

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2 years ago

you see this kind of behavior with (I’m sorry) people with medical backgrounds a lot too

hell hath no fury like an male doctor who is informed that his MD does not, actually, impart mastery over anything other than the general practice of medicine (and maybe not even then)

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2 years ago

that behavior is telegraphing insecurity like a lighthouse in the fog and demonstrating that attainment of an economically valuable technical skill does not make you either a model of virtue nor a particular thoughtful or wise person

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2 years ago

the almost compulsive snideness that some CS / eng people display when someone questions their credentials / suggests that an eng background doesn’t make you an intellectual ubermensch is quite unbecoming

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2 years ago

gen ed curriculum still exists and includes math right? or is that just a liberal arts thing?

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