David Bonowitz
banner
dbonowitz.bsky.social
David Bonowitz
@dbonowitz.bsky.social
Buildings. Earthquakes. Public policy.
Functional Recovery <--> Community Resilience.
Giants baseball. Princeton hoops.
contact: djbonowitz (with a 'j') at gmail
Reposted by David Bonowitz
People always say that the East Bay had a great train system before BART that we should restore. So I re-created the Key System and Southern Pacific "Red trains" in SubwayBuilder to test this! The stops and routing are accurate and based on year 1940, when Bay Bridge rail service was at its peak
November 25, 2025 at 6:58 AM
When the feature rolled out, it raised the possibility of breaking through the maga wall: not just #HeLiedToYOU, but #YouAreAllLyingToEachOther.

With the backlash around a good chunk of the location data being wrong, it's just affirming the lack of trust & truth that actually fuel maga. smdh.
November 25, 2025 at 7:07 AM
Say what you will about Frum (yeah, I know), but he's had his finger on the pulse of Trumpism for 10 years now.

Greene: Able to rally T's voters, but still too oblivious to actually work for him. A maga acolyte, but no JD Vance.
November 24, 2025 at 5:13 AM
This is the meta-analysis I've been waiting for, an infuriating coda to Winners Take All.

"The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money" ... with victims variously "evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped."
November 24, 2025 at 4:54 AM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
My reigning favorite discussion of this is here:

Generative AI is a hammer and no one knows what is and isn’t a nail
medium.com/@colin.frase...
November 22, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Strategy 1 posting some Ws.
bsky.app/profile/dbon...
We took the chaos of the Trump-Vance admin and turned it into a pro-democracy movement of more than 600 orgs using the power of the courts to protect people and communities.

Learn more about the legal resistance:
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/meeting-flood-the-zone-with-rule-of-law-shock-and-awe/
November 21, 2025 at 2:36 AM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
A Trump supporter started murdering his way through an assassination list of Democratic law makers FIVE MONTHS AGO. He murdered my colleague Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark — and attempted to assassinate my dear friend John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. I was also on the hit list. WTF
Insanity
November 20, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
I call on the members of the #FEMAReviewCouncil not named #Noem or #Hegseth to release the 160-page report they drafted before Norm and #Lewandowski pulled their #EdwardScissorhands routine and whittled it down to 20 pages of hurtful blather. apnews.com/article/fema...
Trump administration makes major changes to a report it commissioned on FEMA reforms, AP sources say
A draft report on reforms to the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been significantly reduced in size, according to three people familiar with the matter.
apnews.com
November 20, 2025 at 2:08 AM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
The pieces of the FEMA reform puzzle are starting to come together. Not a ton of detail here but it is notable that the draft recommendations from the advisory committee include potentially restoring cabinet level status to FEMA. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/c...
Trump Wanted to Abolish FEMA. His Own Advisers Disagree.
www.nytimes.com
November 19, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
We tried to post before the press did but we were not quick enough on the draw. The senior official performing duties of FEMA Administrator David Richardson has resigned. Remember him, he threatened to run all over us, and didn’t know there was a hurricane season.

wapo.st/4nYPtDa
November 17, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Climate Town's response at least got 1.1 million views www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBC_...
How Oil Propaganda Sneaks Into TV Shows | Climate Town
YouTube video by Climate Town
www.youtube.com
November 17, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
It seems to me that the public interest would be best served by moving a surviving earthquake shack to a park, restoring it, and opening it to the public as a museum rather than forcing people to live in these substandard homes forever.
‘Worst fears’: Historic S.F. earthquake shacks destroyed without permits, neighbors say
Preservationists have long fought a developer’s Noe Valley project, which the city red-tagged only after the buildings were reduced to roofs and frames.
www.sfchronicle.com
November 17, 2025 at 6:49 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Free article.

The graphics used to show the water rising are devastating.

The fear those poor girls felt in their final minutes is excruciating to ponder.

By far the best account of this preventable tragedy.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
New Videos, Data and Reporting Give a Detailed Account of the Camp Mystic Disaster (Gift Article)
Never-before-published videos, data from smart devices, a crash report and the first interview that Camp Mystic's owners have granted since the July 4 disaster offer the most detailed account yet.
www.nytimes.com
November 17, 2025 at 2:27 AM
On the #Bills - Bucs radio broadcast, Compass Media announcers wanted to describe the shaking stadium, so they hinted at a Richter reading maybe recorded at nearby Rochester Inst of Tech.

Disappointed they did not know MCEER national EQ research center is right there in Buffalo ... sigh.
November 16, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Much clearer optical satellite imagery today from @planet.com shows the landslide that resulted in the collapse of the Hongqi bridge in Sichuan.
November 16, 2025 at 3:49 PM
As is often the case, the headline is misleading. Watch the clip, from TMZ, available on lots of bsky feeds.

She's not saying this as a lament. She's saying it as an accusation.

(And while she's mostly right, remember always that Clinton won the popular vote & Harris was right there too.)
cnn.com CNN @cnn.com · 9d
Former first lady Michelle Obama said America is "not ready for a woman" president during a conversation at her New York book event. https://cnn.it/43ApuKZ
November 16, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Trump just cut farm workers' wages $1-3/hr, and there IS something we can do about it.

youtu.be/AnCJfhLxk_c
Farm Workers: Here's How We Can Help
YouTube video by Farm to Taber
youtu.be
November 16, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
We currently have all of the ingredients for these debris flows to occur – steep slopes, recently burned hillsides, and the potential for high intensity rainfall.
November 15, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
When asked if he thought Trump was a bad president…
Pete: I would go well beyond a bad president. 🔥🔥🔥
November 15, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Finally, national coverage on the loss of 9 seismic stations in #AK going dark this month due to #NOAA funding cuts. This leaves #tsunami forecasters without vital data used to determine if an #earthquake will send tsunami waves toward the #US West Coast.
www.nbcnews.com/science/tsun... #EM #greysky
U.S. tsunami warning system, reeling from funding and staffing cuts, is dealt another blow
Seismic monitoring stations in Alaska are closing after a denied federal grant, risking delayed tsunami warnings for people living on the West Coast.
www.nbcnews.com
November 13, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
My immigrant parents didn't know how to do Thanksgiving. My sister and I would bring home tidbits from classmates ("We need to buy 'cranberry sauce!'") and bit by bit, we built Thanksgiving. Not cos-playing, but participating.
It's my favorite holiday.
It’s how you end up with language like “paperwork American” or the idea that Thanksgiving turkey is some sort of natural ethno-national tradition that certain other groups are incapable of ever appreciating
November 13, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by David Bonowitz
Pretty much all affordability discourse could benefit from just posting this chart.

If you're in the better off America, all the luxury goods you want in excess are for the most part much cheaper. If you're in the poorer America, most of the shit you need to live/grow is more expensive.
November 10, 2025 at 2:53 PM
(QPing because #structural_engineering is not the original topic.)
The article notes a series of damaging events. And that photo of the spontaneous facade failure ... yikes. From 2022:
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
November 10, 2025 at 4:33 PM
This is really cool. Translation (edited for length) of the intro post from X:
"In this EQ, the emergency EQ warning was issued before shaking hit land. (Real-time seismic intensity is calculated every 0.2 seconds from the 5-second acceleration waveform observed by the S-net accelerometer.)"
The underwater seismometer network is so great, as evidenced from yesterday's EQ off-Tohoku.
Reposting unofficial visualization by x.com/kotoho76/sta...
November 10, 2025 at 3:54 PM