pchristensen

Porque no los dos?

Zoning limits what and how much is permitted. Prop 13 changes the economics and greatly reduces churn and supply, both for redevelopment and migration.

Prop 13 takes the normal supply problems introduced by zoning and turbocharges them.

My kids use Libby very often.

Yes, they showed the Siri app, typing, reviewing conversations etc.

Did you know that IBM got its start building the control center for the Panama Canal locks? Did you know that lobbying has been the same since at least the 19th century? That 10% of all of France's population invested in their canal company, but the company was too afraid to tell the people that Panama wasn't flat like the Suez Canal area? And... and... and...

It's such a good book! Like any dad reading history, I have been annoying my family for years with fun facts I learned in that book. David McCullough's other books like The Great Bridge (about building the Brooklyn Bridge) are also great.

Excavating that much volume would be a heck of an expense.

There's a lot of opportunity cost to waiting 14 months to build something.

You are mixing up a lot of different factors.

3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.

Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].

But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.

[1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...

The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards.

In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).

> It never has.

Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal.

Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.

From what I understand, more air pollution and noise than a normal data center. A data center that's run off of grid power has about the same local environmental impact as a warehouse (but with basically no road traffic). The Colossi are run off of natural gas turbine generators, so like the GP said, it's more like living near an airport than living by a light industrial park.

Won't the most efficient LLMs just learn about and use tools like this, instead of crunching all the tokens to do it themselves?

Impact and externalities.

Capabilities need to be practiced in order to be dependable.

UBI is an "entitlement". Just look at how well a certain slice of the powerful view other "entitlements" like Obamacare or Social Security.

I like the idea of UBI, but the biggest problem with UBI is that it relies on the government to fund it, and the government can be controlled and subverted. UBI might go away, get held up by government shutdowns, not be indexed to inflation, etc - there's a ton of ways things that could go wrong if peoples' entire livelihoods are under the control of one entity.

The Fandango app has an option to check the seats at all the showings at a theater, so I assume AMC has something like that. There are ~600 AMC theaters in the US. Throw in some caching and you can maintain a fast, fairly fresh copy of their seating numbers. Clever!

This is the rare time I wish HN had emoji reactions instead of just upvotes.

When it comes to kids, quantity has a quality all its own. Yes, there are better and worse ways to spend time with kids, but between engagement, enrichment, play, laundry, cooking, feeding, changing diapers, etc, there's just an immense amount of time to fill and work to do. By these metrics, doing the dishes probably isn't counted as "parenting", but since it lets your partner spend time with the kid, or rest and recuperate, it's a good proxy.

If you don't believe me, fold a load of laundry the next time you visit a friend with little kids. Or play with their kid for half an hour so the parent can let their guard down for a bit. It has an incredible impact.

It was created by and for homeowners, but businesses aren't going to pass up a gift like that. It's actually worse for commercial property - building are owned by separate single purpose corporations, and if you want to sell the building, you sell fractions of the ownership in the corporation over time so there's never a big enough change to trigger a tax reassessment.

Low turnover, political and financial opposition to building, and structurally higher costs. It's a tangled mess.

1. People are disincentivized to move - the longer you've lived in a home, the larger the effective subsidy (vs average property tax payer) becomes.

2. New homes are on the other end of that - you pay much more in taxes than the average. So the cost of new homes is higher.

3. The average home pays less than it costs the local government. This is largely true everywhere because of the cost of public schools, but Prop 13 makes it more pronounced in CA. So local governments have a huge disincentive to approve any housing, especially larger apartments or condos where school aged children could live.

4. Govs make up for the lower tax per home by charging very high development fees for new construction, which raises prices and lowers rates.

California has structural obstacles that don’t fit into partisan politics. Proposition 13 limits property tax collection, which warps housing development and many other factors. Also, California has high incomes, which means Californians pay more federal income tax, and the state receives less back in federal benefits, to the tune of almost $100 billion a year. Those are significant headwinds that the state would still have to deal with even if it was governed well.

I'll have to check that out!

If you havent seen it, you owe it to yoiurself to read Mother Earth, Motherboard: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

A Neal Stephenson long read about undersea cables. So good!

The first words I said: "$3.5k is a lot of money..."

There are tens of millions of top 10% income adults in America. So something can be both unaffordable to most people, and also easily accessible to very many people.

$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc.

It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other stuff.

Now go buy a t-shirt!

I'd be interested to see your list! Contact in bio if you don't want to post it here.

Sounds like pg is trying to justify an expensive new hobby :)

  "The Biden Pardon immunizes everyone from future prosecution"

He pardoned specific individuals that had already been targeted and attacked by Trump and conservative media, who were extremely likely to be persecuted by a potential (and now realized) 2nd Trump term. There's a big difference between investigating January 6th and, you know, doing January 6th.

They certainly liked the distraction, but the invasion of MN allowed them to 1) catch some illegal immigrants, 2) intimidate legal immigrants, encouraging them to "self deport", 3) flex their power and demonstrate the ability to cause pain and harm to political enemies, and 4) give agents practice and training for the next city they invade. So far they have had these "surges" in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis. There are plenty more cities in blue states and plenty of money left in their budget, and almost 3 years left in this administration.