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Any book club that gets people to read and show up is not "doing it wrong."

I'd be interested in a format suggested by the author, but I think I'm the only one in my book club that would. The fact that I'm regularly reading and talking about books with a group without any particular literary bent is something very valuable to me, even if we don't mine every hidden treasure of the books we read.

>But would the middle class still demand suburbs if they had to stomach the higher taxes to honestly pay for them? That is the open question.

A huge challenge here is that no one ever has to actually face that, because they can just move to the next growing town/city/state. Depending on the area, you can either create another ring surrounding the metro, or leave the state entirely and move to the sunbelt.

In either case, the legacy cities or inner ring towns are left with the bill, and no one left to pay it. To Marohn's point, we've already seen this happen all over (particularly the rustbelt).

But my point is there's nothing to stop that pattern from continuing, as long as there's another town in the rockies or south or wherever with low taxes and plenty of land. There's just not really an impediment short of people's preferences dramatically changing, and the evidence shows that suburbs are growing.

>that suburbanites like suburbs is so obvious to not need stating.

That's not what I said.

I get frustrated reading Marohn sometimes because he describes American development and it's impact extremely well, but generally avoids the number one factor driving this development, which is middle class likes suburbs and continues to demand them.

Sure, suburban development was facilitated and accelerated by the portfolio of government initiatives (highways and home loan programs), but at the core is that people were dying to get out of cities, buy a car, and have their own serene little castle with a lawn and driveway and no shared wall.

And this appetite continues to be the dominant one. While Americans seem to be rediscovering the value of human oriented streets that Marohn champions, they aren't willing to turn away from the suburbs, the way they did cities 80 years ago.

Perhaps Marohn's predictions regarding government financial collapse will come true soon, or perhaps traffic congestion reaches a breaking point that forces a change. But until then, and as long as they can afford them, Americans still want spaced out single family houses that spread out across the fruited plain.

Another element to insurance I haven’t seen covered here is that they have their own micro cycles somewhat independent from the macro environment, called hard/soft markets.

What happens is at some point new entrants or firms that want too grow will offer lower rates and/or loosen underwriting criteria. This forces incumbents to do the same to some extent to stay competitive (soft market).

Over time, risk and eventually losses, accumulate. This stops the loose underwriting practices as firms can no longer sustain additional losses. This allows incumbents to raise their rates (hard market).

These cycles vary by insurance product but can cause huge revenue swings year to year.

I agree for JSON, not JWT.

Reasons for hope are that Jeopardy fans (and the public) have a very specific idea of what Jeopardy should be. I'd optimistically like to think that it's strong enough to hold that line.

One of the things I'm constantly baffled by given the growth of data science and analytics is that data modelling isn't treated as a first class concern. It's absolutely fundamental to doing quantitative work efficiently at an organization with any amount of complexity, yet the majority of people in the field seem to be unaware of the concepts.

This ignorance is especially surprising given that it's essentially a solved problem (Kimball), yet if you talk about data modelling, people usually think regression, not schema.

Third- for an analysis project, I had to look ahead to the next transaction. Tried a bunch of implementations, ranging from offset self joins to iterators to recursion.

Turns out the fastest and simplest solution, by far, was a mix of window functions and CTEs directly in the database.

Comparing bankers to the people who carried out the Holocaust is a bit of a reach.

>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime.

Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...

Military spending is less than a quarter of the budget. Medicare/caid is 55% more than the defense budget, to say nothing of social security or other domestic spending. These may not be the right allocations, but domestic spending is hardly "austere".

Interesting parallel story about Sun's "Sun Blade". https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762

Summary: they solved a technical problem without a clear user story, and were ultimately too early. Sounds a lot like Stadia.

As it relates to the US, this post had interesting ideas regarding urban development, and no grasp at all of suburban development.

While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are.

[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-cit...

There’s an assumption underneath the Gawkersphere snark (that this piece is a part of) that the correctness of one particular far left political worldview is unassailably true. This assumption undermines the entire article, because it leaves no room for dissent.

Fortunately, most non partisans recognize the complexity of the world reaches far beyond the limits of what one political viewpoint is able to encapsulate.

WeWork is ultimately a feather in modern finance's cap. Wall street didn't buy the scam, and now the company is re-calibrating. Isn't that the way it should work?

>Anyone can have an MBA from an elite school. You just need the money and be willing to spend it on a degree.

This is not true at all. Regardless of the value of the degree/experience, elite MBA programs are still difficult to get into and have low acceptance rates.

I thought about addressing that, as there is a huge scientific component behind baking, and if you could control every variable perfectly, you would get exactly the result you wanted.

However, reality is there are wayyy more variables than what you can find in a recipe, even a good one. And that's to say nothing of the techniques of master bakers. Compare a what a master does and what they're able to write down or tell someone and it's an enormous gap. That's where the art is.

At first I scoffed, because making good pizza is essentially the same as making good bread, which is more of an art than a science.

After reading through, it became apparent that this isn't geared at good pizza, it's focused on bad pizza where none of that matters, like cafeterias, gas stations, and football stadiums.

I appreciate the historical perspective on US suburbanization here as a welcome and more substantial reprieve from the "stupid lazy Americans and their stupid cars" takes that tend to dominate these types of discussions.

>where investors can look at that company and think it's a good and growing investment to sustain their public pension or hedge fund returns

This hasn't happened, hence all the flailing.

>But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it.

It's generalization based on access. In order to be viable, LRT almost always runs through affluent areas where influential people live, and the areas that aren't affluent near the path are likely to gentrify. It's not that people from lower income neighborhoods won't ever use LRT, it's that they are less likely to based on their communities' geography.

What too many people are missing is basic statistical and probabilistic concepts that allow one to evaluate and contextualize data they are constantly exposed to, and calculus isn't needed for this. Calculating the area under a distribution curve isn't nearly as important.

If you're into fantasy football, footballguys is still very active, and tends to be a mature forum.

Kind of funny to refer to Palo Alto and New Haven as "ancient" adjacent to Rome.

The market forces element is the one that people tend to ignore in these types of conversations. Americans couldn't wait to move out to the suburbs.

The car industry influence played a role but is always overplayed in these kinds of discussions, and ignore equally if not more important factors.

-On macro scale, the US is bigger, more spread out, with tons of land, and there's something in the American psyche that pushes Americans to expand, settle, and use all of it.

-On a micro scale, and as a consequence of the first point, Americans are accustomed to homes that are much bigger, have yards, and are more adverse to sharing a wall with a neighbor. Sure there have been exceptions like tenements in NYC, but even in those cases those residents could wait to get their own Levittown cape cod in a residential subdivision.

-Finally, a ton of this growth happened at right after cars became mainstream and affordable, but before the long terms downsides of car based societies were well understood. Therefore, a huge majority of infrastructure investments were made on what people wanted (cars and space), and not public transit.

-Now, while many of the problems of car based societies are better understood, that doesn't nullify the often ignored benefits of car based societies. Also, for public transit to work at a massive scale, people would have increasingly do two things that Americans intrinsically hate: Move closer together and pay more taxes. There may be a growing population that finds that appealing, but the silent majority in this case is an enormous and entrenched one.

These sound like the assessments of someone who read a critique of the articles, but not the articles themselves.

What stands out to me about Kranz's view of technology and the future is his optimism. While it might be tempting to dismiss this as dated postwar scientific idealism (e.g. Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y."), Kranz walked the walk by successfully guiding the greatest accomplishment of the era.

Kranz's inclusion of "love" adjacent to "skills" and "knowledge" is the lesson our current technological culture could stand to learn the most from.

Having just gotten back from Nashville, their implementation is not really working. The sidewalks are now stressful to walk on as scooters fly above 20 MPH in all directions, with the rider often yelling "Sorry! I don't know how to drive this thing."