My theory for North America is that this is the consequence of the fact that every urban profession shifted to work in the wrong field: road engineers design public spaces (it should be planners), planners meddle with architecture via design reqs/codes. Architects became façadists.

There is even an amateur racing series dominated by Fits. Anything so tough and nimble makes for a decent race car!

Taught junior high in Japan in 07-08 and in the library they had a cutesy manga about the period around WW2. Their account of the war itself mostly amounted to "we were minding our own business and suddenly nuclear bomb? Why???"

You've written a remarkably concise Naomi Klein book here!

This neighbourhood in Japan was the most "livable" place I had yet lived in, yet it subverted nearly everything urbanists tend to believe about character, landscaping, "eyes on the street" etc. From the aerial view, though, you can see some of the land use mix & how compact the urban fabric is.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999)
Grand Prix Legends (1998)

if personnel is policy, then the most fundamental questions about an institution is not "what are the policy directives" but rather "what will get you promoted" vs. "what will get you fired"

No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.

Ronin, the 1998 John Frankenheimer movie, is set around Christmastime & has some kick-ass car chases

That the team's brilliant new strategy for a chunk of the movie amounts to repeatedly doing Crashgate...

But yeah, this DOES resemble the modern usage of the angular plane, they've just rotated the concept 90 degrees to make it ostensibly about setbacks. Quite different from the district-level height restrictions from Holt/Greber/various NCC things.

Holy shit. Yikes.

Presumably the angular plane referred to here is the 1950 Gréber one centred on Parliament for the purpose of preserving views to it? Not the "built form transition on a site to site basis" thing we generally think of today when an angular plane is invoked.

It's possible that there are still elements of that very first ZBL embedded in the document that is about to be repealed/replaced in 2026. There is quite a lot of legacy code in there, amalgamated/amended/patched and jury-rigged half to death.

There was a Toyota Sienna on there yesterday.

I mean, it's a good van but........... a Sienna? Really???