LA_Banker

>The reason a lot of people (especially young people) have been flocking to walkable cities has a lot more to do with self-identity and lifestyle choices than with just merely commuting time.

These are drivers to be sure, but the biggest is the network effects of being in a denser metro. The more people there are in a given area, the more human resources: job options, entertainment options, dating options, knowledge-sharing (the form that can only be done via meeting people in person), collaboration, and other forms are human and knowledge-derived capital. It's easier to form a rock band or hire for a startup idea in NYC than it is Duluth, Minnesota where there are fewer musicians and programmers.

This is why rural areas, unless undergoing some sort of unique boom (e.g. the Bakken Formation or Athabascan Oil Sands) or hosting a college/university, sustain much older average populations. Unless one's career allows them to live/work remotely, it's often necessary to move to the city to pursue most career options.

Aside from the self-identity and lifestyle points you mention.

I couldn't agree more. I think if everyone just got to experience this dramatic difference, even briefly, there'd be no obesity epidemic.

Holy hell, that's quite a transformation. Congrats to you.

Yes, that's the biggest thing that's under-stressed about exercise: the benefits are not just physical/health related. Like you, exercise has made me far less averse to interacting with people, and resulted in me being more outgoing, more open meeting new people, and just living a better life as a result.

There's a book called Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain that relates that if exercise came in pill form, it would be plastered across the front page, hailed as the blockbuster drug of the century – purely on cognitive/psychological benefits alone. That really drove it home for me.

Don't just workout for health reasons. Workout for life reasons.

It's not that less is more; rather it's that more work has diminishing productivity returns. And, after a certain point, the returns dip negative due to fatigue-related risks (this is a unique example, but it's always major news when the maximum hours allowed for medical residents gets reformed/reduced on account of patient mortality related to doctor fatigue).

And that's just when we limit the scope of "returns" to productivity. As the article points out, there are many, many non-productivity benefits associated with a shorter work week.

I don't think many Americans will be on their death bed lamenting "oh, if only I'd spent more late nights/weekends at the office working on spreadsheets."

This is really great. I use the Pomodoro Method and only check distracting sites in between, but maybe I need to be even stricter and limit it to 2x/day (considering I'm wasting time right now).

If you pay $750k for a home and someone buys the highest parcel in the neighborhood (which used to be open park land), and puts up a shipping container that gets graffiti'd, your real estate value is going to take a hit. The neighborhood is now uglier, has less aesthetic quality, and is potentially endangered in case of earthquake.

Many cities have ordinances such that someone can't buy a lot in a neighborhood and turn it into a landfill such that everyone's property values suffer.

"Head off cancer" != "cure cancer."

There's (growing) research to suggest it partially mitigates risk: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3608686/.

Most occupations are settled on a 40-hour work week, sure, but that's because employers have done the math and determined paying overtime is worse than extending output. They don't cap it at 40 hours/week for optimal productivity; it's for the bottom line.

However, I can think of very few professions which involve a 40-hour work week, given that most professionals are salaried. In The U.S., 60 hours/week is more the norm (not to mention being subservient to email at all hours) and in certain competitive careers, taking vacations is eschewed.

This mentality is silly.

Anyone who's worked 80+ hours/week can tell you that work is an efficiency function. At hour 75, one's capable of much less (cognitively and physically) and more prone to mistake than at hour 5 (as the article notes). The stakes are high when it's overworked 20-somethings working on an expensive lawsuit or transactional spreadsheets or trying to ship code on a deadline, to say nothing of engineers and others involved with public safety.

The notion of more work = better isn't as straightforward as you make it. The article itself points out Chernobyl and Challenger as the result of pushing people. Even from a purely competitive, capitalistic POV, pushing people to work more has very real risks; risks that make the expected return negative the harder one pushes.

It is entirely possible that capping the number of hours worked – such that workers are rotated and therefore are always fresh/at their most efficient – is more optimal than driving them harder and harder in the name of competition.

We see this with Olympic/professional athletes whose coaches enforce mandatory rest days and optimal sleep. Certainly these athletes, if they just "worked harder" in the name of competition, would be harming themselves after a point despite putting in more hours.

This recovery period, while mostly physical in nature, also extends into the cognitive realm as well. Knowledge workers need recovery too.

The tech companies you've mentioned are not like Berkshire's model at all.

Berkshire is a conglomerate that looks for proven, established, cash-flow-positive businesses. See's Candy, for instance, requires no debt and is a sure bet every holiday season.

On the other hand, self-driving cars and WiFi balloons are extremely speculative and definitely aren't cash generating.

>Microsoft are so well placed to create and distribute what is bound to become a popular from factor.

There already is a popular form factor that companies issue, and folks in developing countries purchase (in addition to us on HN): the smartphone.

If you're not intensely inputting typed data, there's no need for a keyboard. And if you are, then likely your company issues/reimburses-for a device with a keyboard.

But otherwise, this is why smartphones are ubiquitous. Many more people are content consumers than content creators.

You say "is" as though they haven't changed CEO's, undergone a complete organization rehaul, and oriented toward cloud services in the ensuing six years.

The headline of the story itself literally reads "Don’t Blame Divorce on Money."

>and the fact that a lot of men tie their identity to their employment so strongly.

That's a really interesting point, especially in light of the study pointing out that it's moreso job status that's a risk factor than money problems.

One would normally think the two would go hand-in-hand in terms of a divorce autopsy. But as you (and the study) point out, there's very much distinct.

1. "Meditations" – Marcus Aurelius

2. "The Practicing Mind" – Thomas Sterner

3. "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" – Atul Gawande (I'm not a surgeon; the principles herein are universal)

(honorable mention: "How to Win Friends and Influence People" – Dale Carnegie; various biographies by Caro and Chernow)

It's not. Reddit could easily sell targeted ads based on subreddits (e.g. inking a deal with Uniqlo to advertise on /r/malefashionadvice or /r/femalefashionadvice).

It chooses to pursue other monetization means to preserve the Reddit experience.

We'll see if it's able to stumble onto another sustainable business model.

Precisely. I get the appeal of Soylent (quick meal replacement when otherwise obtaining food would be too big a distraction), but I don't get the appeal over meal replacement protein powders – many of which already taste better, have more protein, and are cheaper than Soylent.

What's interesting is that, given enough practice, one could convincingly mimic Satoshi's writing style as some ancillary (unimpeachable tech proof aside) evidence of validity. It seems Wright hasn't even gone that far.

> "all this stuff doesn't seem to result in enabling people to do their jobs better or more easily..."

While I disagree with that notion, I also wonder why the focus on merely jobs. Smartphones and mobile devices have enabled people's lives to be much easier. Not more than 10 minutes ago I just determined the optimal route to a meeting, factoring in real-time traffic (measured by phones) and overlapping mass transit lines. If I'm late or my meeting partner isn't there ("there" being a location determined by ratings on Yelp's app, as the meeting was scheduled via my phone during another meeting), I have instant access to him and vice versa. Just the first example that comes to mind.

There are, literally, dozens of expensive devices that have been replaced by free/inexpensive smartphone apps in the past few years, to say nothing of smartphones enabling us to do things we never even thought of a few years ago. In 2014, it is possible for the middle class to take timelapse aerial video from a drone and edit/upload/share it remotely via phone in a matter of minutes. I cannot imagine what will be possible in a mere two years, when apps have replaced even more expensive things and enabled us to do things heretofore unconsidered.