Pittsburgh
Article
Pittsburgh is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 15 times across 15 issues between May 21, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Cities such as Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Tulsa”; “One customer, from Pittsburgh, dined every night”; “PITTSBURGH, PA ( RSVP )“. It most often appears alongside Philadelphia, India, London.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 15
- Issue count: 15
- First seen: May 21, 2021
- Last seen: April 01, 2026
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
- Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
- Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
- Open Thread 242
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- The Question Of Separatism
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
- My 2024 Presidential Debate
- Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Open Thread 398
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
Related Pages
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- Philadelphia (12 shared issues)
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- India (11 shared issues)
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- London (11 shared issues)
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- Europe (10 shared issues)
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- France (10 shared issues)
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- Australia (9 shared issues)
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- Berkeley (9 shared issues)
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- Boston (9 shared issues)
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- Denmark (9 shared issues)
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- DUBLIN (9 shared issues)
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- Houston (9 shared issues)
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- Paris (9 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Cities such as Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Tulsa are effectively ocean ports, thanks to the extensive navigable waterways.
According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hôtel X were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English—no French—and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with disgusting American 'cereals', and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburgh, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not.
PITTSBURGH, PA (RSVP) Contact: Matthew Marks, matthewfmarks[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 12:00 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Outside the Frick Park gate Coordinates: https://w3w.co/pulse.cubes.admiral Notes: Location may be updated, so (1) email to confirm, (2) thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Bourassa (1987) studies a Land Value Tax system in Pittsburgh and finds that "the incentive effect is significant but the liquidity effect is not. The incentive effect is found to encourage increases in the number of new units constructed in Pittsburgh rather than increases in the average cost of new units" Skaburskis (1995) concludes, "Tilting tax rates to favor improvements at the expense of land increase the intensity of land development when all other factors are held constant. The policy can increase land values when it is applied to a small portion of a housing market and can reduce land values when applied across the entire housing market."
Inline links: Bourassa (1987), Skaburskis (1995)
PITTSBURGH, PA Contact: Justin (pghacx@gmail.com) Date: April 16 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2C3PR+QP7 Location: Frick Park, by the Beechwood Gate Entrance IF weather is dry. In the event of rain, the indoor venue will be Crazy Mocha Coffee in Squirrel Hill (2100 Murray Ave) Notes: Please email pghacx@gmail.com to RSVP and be added to the mailing list! If we change venue, an email will go out by noon the day of (>2 hours before the scheduled meetup time).
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G2C3PR+QP7
7: Sorry about the weather today for the Bay Area meetups! We are still planning to hold the Berkeley meetup at the Rose Garden Inn starting at 1, and SF started at 11 and has announced their rain plan here. Next week will be meetups in Amman on the 20th, Philadelphia on the 22nd, Paris on the 23rd, Zurich + Edinburgh + Pittsburgh + Copenhagen on the 24, and London + Perth + Waterloo on the 25th - see details here.
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Justin Contact Info: pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 22nd, 02:00 PM Location: Our meetup was at Galley Bakery Square (location changed from Mellon Park due to rain) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+PH Notes: We also host ~monthly meetups throughout the year, if you'd like to be added to the list to be notified of future meetups, please contact Justin at the email address above.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+PH
This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Justin Contact Info: pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 1:30 PM Location: DEFAULT OUTDOOR LOCATION: CMU Campus, Jared L Cohon University Center, at the picnic tables outside the east entrance (the side of the building that faces the track). Look for the "ACX" banner. CONTINGENCY INDOOR LOCATION (in case of rain): Jared L Cohon University Center, Danforth Lounge (upstairs, 2nd floor) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2C3V5+6C Notes: The Pittsburgh ACX group meets around once a month, with most meetups taking place around Shady or East Liberty. If you'd like to be notified about future meetups, email pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com to be added to the mailing list.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G2C3V5+6C
Biden: My fellow Americans, I am humbled to standing here before you today as your President. No, more than humbled. Flabbergasted. Do you realize how bizarre it is, that, out of eight billion humans, I’m the leader of the most powerful country in the world? It doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to you, because someone has to be President. But it doesn’t make sense to me, because the sheer coincidence that the person I happen to be is also the person who is President - that has one in eight billion odds. I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. Sometimes I think it’s some sort of weird dream I’m having, and I’ll wake up and be a sanitation engineer in Pittsburgh or something. But this seems more vivid and more continuous than a dream. I think the more likely explanation is that some future posthuman is running a historical simulation of the 2024 US election, and that only I and maybe my opponent are fully-conscious humans with real internal experiences. For years I’ve tried to escape this conclusion, but it looms before me, as compelling as it’s ever been.
Contact: Siddhesh Contact Info: ranade[dot]siddhesh[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe at 100 S Independence Mall W #110, Philadelphia, PA 19106 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Justin Contact Info: pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 02:00 PM Location: City Kitchen @ Bakery Square in East Liberty. If the weather is nice, we can meet at the outdoor tables by the South-East entrance. In case of bad weather, look for us in the atrium between City Kitchen and the Alta Via Pizza/Jeni's Ice Cream. Look for a table with a small stand saying "ACX" on it. I will also send out an email ~5 minutes before the scheduled start time with the table number.
Contact: Wes Fenza Contact Info: wfenza[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 24th, 06:30 PM Location: Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. Upstairs in the Weston Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ Group Link: https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB; https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia Notes: Kids welcome. We'll provide an assortment of dim sum. PITTSBURGH Contact: Matan Shtepel Contact Info: matan[period]shtepel[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 06th, 05:00 PM Location: We'll meet on the lawn in front of the tennis courts on CMU's campus. If it rains, we'll go into the the CMU university center (UC) which is open without key-card even on the weekend. We may eventually wander, so email me if you can't find us. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2C3V4+2X Group Link: https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA Notes: There is also a monthly ACX meetup group that meets at Bakery Square near the Google office. If you'd like to sign up for the email list to be notified of when they meet up, you can do that here: https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA
Contact: Ben Contact Info: bwieland[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee, 100 S Independence Mall W (6th at Market, SW corner) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB PITTSBURGH Contact: Rushi Contact Info: pghacx[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 2:30 PM Location: City Kitchen at Bakery Square Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+JP5 Group Link: https://discord.gg/6yu [remove this bit] FhsRRJm and https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA Notes: Excited to meet other ACX readers in the 'burgh! Join our Discord to hear about other meetups as well
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J, https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+JP5
1: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.
Contact: ben Contact Info: bwieland[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee 100 S Independence Mall W #110 (6th at Market, SW corner) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB PITTSBURGH Contact: Jenna Contact Info: pghacx[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM Location: City Kitchen at Bakery Square. If we have good weather, we’ll be at the outdoor tables on the southeast side. If not, we’ll be in the atrium between City Kitchen and Alta Via Pizza/Jeni’s Ice Cream. Look for the ACX sign! Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+JP5 Group Link: https://discord.gg/6gb [remove this bit] Z7gQMtz and https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA Notes: We have a local ACX meetup! Currently it is every second Sunday from 2pm-5pm at the Panera Bread at Bakery Square, instead of City Kitchen. The next one will be May 3rd. Join the Discord or subscribe to the mailing list to get notifications of when the next one will be!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M, https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+JP5
Backlinks
- Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
- Mississippi
- Munich
- My 2024 Presidential Debate
- Open Thread 242
- Open Thread 398
- Ottawa
- Perth
- Philadelphia
- Places: M
- Places: P
- SANTIAGO
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
- Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
- The Question Of Separatism
- Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
- Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower