#1 Shoup Fan
oneshoup.bsky.social
#1 Shoup Fan
@oneshoup.bsky.social
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
December 18, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
In the 90s a naturalist friend showed me a guidebook to windshield splatter that identified different birds by the poo marks they left on car windscreens. It was dedicated to the memory of an expert who, not wanting to destroy a rare poo sample, continued to drive without cleaning it & was killed
December 18, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
One of the really weird features of this administration is it took crude tankie/undergraduate left beliefs (every war is about oil, every coup/movement is created by the CIA etc), assumed they were true but also normatively how one /should/ do foreign policy
Here's a quick hit on why Trump's obsession with Venezuela's oil is a bit heavy and crude in a world where the US is a net exporter and the concerns are a lot more about peak demand than peak supply. responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-venezu...
Trump's Venezuela oil obsession doesn't make sense
The president accused Caracas of 'stealing' the commodity and vows to take it back. First, we don't need it, second, invading for it would be a blunder.
responsiblestatecraft.org
December 17, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
The Russian and Chinese railways have very intensive freight traffic and also carry very high pax-km/capita. But the US network suffers from really low investment compared to those systems. There proabbly isn't any American railway that can measure up to Transsib or BAM in infrastructural standards.
HSRstans when you remind them that freight rail exists and is much more important in the US than in Europe.
December 17, 2025 at 5:27 PM
Finally some good cross tab demographics. What UK party has the most support by role in childhood nativity play?

(from Luke Tryl, UK Director of More in Common x.com/LukeTryl/sta...)
December 17, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
Most of the elite persuasion was persuading the elite that they misunderstood mass opinion.
Elected officials thought that local elites (nimby civic association leaders) were representative of broader opinion. Yimby proved that they weren't. Crucial to this was election victories (eg Scott Wiener).
December 16, 2025 at 1:36 AM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
what's that?
December 15, 2025 at 1:45 PM
The thing that all future historians are going to miss about the 20th century is how everyone on earth cared about newspaper comics SO MUCH.

FARSIDE, SNOOPY, GARFIELD, NEMO, MAFALDA, ANDY CAP, etc. clogged the minds of 20th century people. And the medium is basically dead now.
It would be very difficult to convince anyone who wasn’t alive in the 1980s of just how popular Far Side cartoons were for a while.
December 12, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
Tomorrow Malaysia will have electric intercity trains running all along the west side of Malaya, stretching over 800 km from Thailand (Padang Besar) to Singapore (via Johor Bahru Sentral).
December 11, 2025 at 6:15 PM
The most important thing for the future of US metro construction is getting Honolulu Skyline to finish, and getting as many random pols to go on vacation there. We could finally teach Americans about automated metro systems...
(Maybe REM in Montreal will show them too?)
December 11, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
Governor of Akita Prefecture is asking for Japan's SDF to go to war....against bears. (Obviously this means @tobiasharris.bsky.social will be able to use a certain Simpsons clip).
Its also a story about dying rural Japan and Climate change disrupting bear life-cycle.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mit...
PRESS CONFERENCE: Japan's Bear Problem: Time to Call in the Self-Defence Forces?
YouTube video by 日本外国特派員協会 オフィシャルサイトFCCJchannel
www.youtube.com
December 11, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
The safest thing to do would be to clear and pave a buffer of a few hundred feet between the mountains and the residential area and then rebuild the residential area into concrete mid- and high-rises whose structures are not fuel, but we’re not ready for that conversation.
"We will not allow outside groups — even longstanding allies — to attack the Palisades," @gavinnewsom.bsky.social spokesperson on a now-filed YIMBY Law lawsuit against his July executive order banning duplexes in L.A. wildfire rebuilding www.politico.com/news/2025/12...
Newsom wouldn’t budge on his duplex ban for the Los Angeles wildfire rebuild. So, a YIMBY group is suing him.
Gov. Gavin Newsom shrugged off a lawsuit by a YIMBY group over his executive order to ban duplexes in Pacific Palisades.
www.politico.com
December 10, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Imagine how satisfied Uccello would've been with late 80s/early 90s vector graphics. He would've been overjoyed to see this thing spinning on an Amiga
2/2 Chalice in perspective, by Paolo Uccello. When his wife said Come to bed he muttered Oh but my sweet perspective keeps me awake. Not an easy man to be married to. Great painter, though.
December 10, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Just as Steve Jackson predicted....
It's time to make AI tanks the size of whales
December 9, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
December 8, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Best books I read this year
MIDDLEMARCH
THE MINISTRY OF TIME
TRIUMPH OF THE MOON
COURT ON TRIAL
December 8, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Most exciting transit line the US IMO
December 6, 2025 at 8:13 PM
The wiki picture for Khara Photo, the Lost City of the Xia dynasty, destroyed by the mongols, and explored in 1907 by Potanin and Obruchev looks exactly like you think it should.

Why yes, this is certainly where 2000 Tangut manuscripts were found.
December 5, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
I wrote a thing.

Build trams, but build them well.
Understanding what tramways are, what they do best and how to employ them.

open.substack.com/pub/marcochi...
Build trams. But build them well.
Understanding what tramways are, what they do best and how to employ them.
open.substack.com
December 5, 2025 at 2:07 AM
Is there a report going over the predicted effects of the St. Lawrence Seaway vs actual effects? IIRC the expected traffic didn't really appear? I know they rebuilt Lake Calumet with slips for SLS traffic that never appeared...
December 5, 2025 at 12:33 AM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
What a lede on this story: Man who complained about narrowing a road in order to protect pedestrians, so much that the city eventually reversed the change, then kills a woman on that very road with his car www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...
America’s plan to protect pedestrians failed. A young woman’s death reveals why.
U.S. officials adopted Europe's Vision Zero initiative, but many cities have seen an increase in pedestrian fatalities despite efforts to improve road safety.
www.washingtonpost.com
December 4, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
A lot of film series shifted into some high concept SF/F series obsessed with continuity but it's hard to draw parallels with politics
Was the response to 08 and Obama parallel to F&F going to space and thinking about legacy? Not really IMO
December 3, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Good article looking at the "great downzoning" of the 20th cent. as a global effect. IMO it's right that this was mostly landowners cartelizing — I would also point out that the reason this happened at the time was the state developing enough to enable it.
www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-the-wo...
Why the West was downzoned
In the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?
www.worksinprogress.news
December 3, 2025 at 6:21 AM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
Now that people are back to the office, I can return to tweeting about the necessity of limiting downtown parking.
December 3, 2025 at 5:13 AM
Reposted by #1 Shoup Fan
I thought maybe firewood, but nope. Obviously firewood use per capita is way down, but population growth and the use of wood pellets as a coal substitute keep it just creeping up. (For a long time, it looked like 1989 was the peak though)
December 3, 2025 at 5:17 AM