rwhitman

This article was an oversimplification of the story in terms of why there is a vertical farm in Newark, at least.

If you google around a bit, the reason for building in Newark is simply that they needed a HQ with attached research facility within commutable proximity of the NYC talent market, and Newark made economic sense. The city of Newark is looking for green tech to move to the city, in the hopes of economic growth and luring other startups to Newark. So they were given a favorable deal to move onto a recently cleared brownfield site. It looks like their proximity to NYC consumers is just an added bonus.

However, the company initially was focused on the manufacture of patented technology and was originally focused on developing these urban farms in order to sell the equipment. The only veggies that the work in this setup so far are leafy greens. So you're likely very right about what this tech is intended to grow...

Some articles I found:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/realestate/commercial/in-n...

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/03/30m_vertical_farm_...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-30/aerofarms-...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/05/429345848/gre...

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/12/10/aerofarms-rai...

Usually when a strip mall is re-zoned for mixed use, they demolish the older structure.

But on the aesthetic side it's possible to turn these buildings into something interesting if they're renovated by someone creative. Worked across the street from this place when an architecture firm bought and renovated it: http://www.rchstudios.com/639-larchmont-boulevard/

I recently got sucked up watching videos of this on YouTube. From what I can tell they just run them at top speed directly onto the beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kDbwE7mFck

First-Time Homebuyer Credit. They stopped it after 2010 I believe

It's all about profit for the builder in relationship to municipalities and their zoning codes. Municipalities that were mostly formed around the time of the suburban building boom instituted very strict zoning and regulations around density, subdividing properties, adding in-law units etc.

Fast forward to today and in all but a few very progressive communities, the fear of changing these zoning laws negatively impacting property value has essentially frozen them in time. So in a lot of suburban areas you couldn't build separate living units on one single family lot, even if you wanted to. Or at least it would be quite costly.

For instance my brother-in-law is a planner in a suburban California city, discussed this once with him... apparently in his city you need to add 2 additional parking spaces for every extra housing unit added to your property. Want to make an in-law unit for grandma? 2 parking spots please. Don't have room for an extra driveway? No permit.

Basically unless new construction was zoned to be a higher-density area, for apartments or townhomes etc, for a developer it doesn't make much sense to build with extra units in mind. Especially if the builder has to put up a fight for permits or spend that much more money to meet code. In that case, it's more profitable to just be building condos.

So much of the most comfortable housing stock in America is single-family "McMansion" type homes. The type of suburban detached house that likely the majority of middle-class American millennials grew up in.

For a young adult in the current economic climate, the only way you're living in one of these cushy homes is if you're living with your parents.

You can't rent one very easily, since they can't be divided up into multiple units or rented at all due to zoning and HOAs. Not to mention it's not typical to be a renter in these neighborhoods to begin with, so even finding a rental is nearly impossible in some areas.

Then of course, after the housing bubble crashed and the subsidies went away, a mortgage for one of these became a big challenge to achieve, and who has the savings sitting around for upkeep and emergency maintenance?

Boomer parents, and a handful of lucky gen-xers are pretty much the only people who could comfortably acquire and hold onto these houses, so it only makes sense that sticking to them like glue is the best strategy if you wanted one.

And there's also the fact that it's just not cool to live in the 'burbs, where you grew up, in the first place. The mental justification has to be "well I'm saving money at least". Saving money, means crashing with the parents. After all, it's "just temporary".

Those are at least my very subjective observations that might be overlooked in that study...

All of Pennsylvania in general is highly undervalued. I spend one or two weekends in PA every month and am always puzzled by how little attention and investment there has been in the state during the last few economic booms.

PA is littered with top notch universities from corner to corner. It's culturally and historically richer than almost anywhere else in the US. You have a lush, green resource-rich landscape as far as the eye can see (and definitely no water scarcity). Absurdly affordable housing with a surplus of incredible historic architecture. Walkable colonial-era villages and small tightly clustered cities with intact historic shopping districts. Endless square footage of unused warehouse spaces. Huge beautiful parks including old growth forests, mountains, rivers. Fairly decent mass transit in the Philly area at least, (and a lot of legacy transit infrastructure ready to spring back to life at some point).

I'm not just talking about Philly and Pittsburgh either - so many smaller "rust belt" type cities in PA with so much to offer that are just completely overlooked. Like the entire Lehigh Valley for instance. Harrisburg is actually a really cool city when you get to know it - very diverse, lots of smart people there, excellent breweries and a lot of economic growth.

Plus we often overlook the fact that Pennsylvanians largely founded the SF Bay Area in many ways - look at the map of the SF Bay and you'll see the markers of PA everywhere. (hint the street grid of San Francisco is named after Philadelphia's)..

I think the main things that have held back PA is 1) it's been overshadowed by NYC 2) property taxes are absurdly high 3) it's still got a rust belt stigma to shake..

But otherwise for tech folks if you've never been it's really worth checking out

I don't really understand how you'd build with this with any level of ease. Seems like there's still a big gap in the developer toolset. Interesting to see where it goes however..

That's a really interesting concept. As a visual person this seems really useful.

The name is weird but honestly it sticks out enough that I'd remember it, and it's simple too. Said as one word it rolls off the tongue. I'd stand by it

Philadelphia has both

I should have clarified this better but I'm talking more about "villages" really. Places that are too tiny to be classified as a city center (by my arbitrary east coast standards at least), but afford a little pocket of shopfronts and rental units amongst lower density residential housing.

Of the cities you listed that I know well, Pinole is actually the best Norcal example I can point to. It's just 2 blocks of shopfronts and most of the residents could walk to the post office if they wanted to. A little 19th century main street that got attached to it's sprawling suburbs much later.

Sure there's more places like this in Norcal than Socal, but it's overall pretty rare anywhere in CA to live in a low-density outer suburb and still comfortably walk to a legacy village center rather than a strip mall or gas station. By contrast most 'burbs in the Northeast have these pockets of villages available to incorporate into mixed use zoning plans (but seriously fail at appreciating their potential).

Just an unfortunate roadblock in the way of balancing suburban housing density in Western states that I don't feel a lot of people are even fully aware of

The thing that drives me bonkers about OC and most California suburbs is the lack of town centers.

On the East Coast home buyers have started to discover that all these previously neglected walkable little colonial & 19th century towns and denser suburbs, often adjacent to rail lines, have a lot of value. The smarter municipalities have been taking the hint and zoning in denser development to grow out the town center naturally as it was intended. The east coast can start to regrow a lot of the character that was lost in the 20th century tract housing boom, and begin to resemble the old world in that way.

On the West Coast, most of the small suburban cities never had a town center to begin with. They were designed by real estate developers using standardized high-profit low-density building plans, entirely focused on cars over walking anywhere. (God forbid you live somewhere that you can walk to buy groceries!)

So you end up with these awkward community layouts where there are zero denser centers to grow out of naturally and permanently zoned that way. Nobody wants to take the plunge in having their house re-zoned and experiment with the costly home investment they're sitting on. Mixed use is still a dirty word. So no change occurs.

All that seems to be getting done lately is locking down neighborhood zoning and building fancier and fancier shopping centers. Something in this is going to change eventually, but unless people voluntarily bulldoze their houses to make room for new town plans, I can't imagine what form it will take.

I really want to see what could happen if we could take the principles and lessons of uber and automated vehicles and apply them to mass transit use cases, like on-demand buses to fill in situations where rail lines are deficient, agile new strategies for restoring or expanding rail service in places it's been neglected etc.

Use the knowledge gained from the uber on-demand logistics revolution to fill in the gaps in car-free transportation options to get us on par with europe. And so forth

If silicon valley put it's weight against a new investment boom in mass transportation (of any kind) it would do this country a world of good.

A tool that does automatic withholding of business deposits in a savings account for taxes is something I've been dreaming of for a while, to the point where I even sat down for a bit to see if I could cook up my own tool to do it. Alas banks do not exactly go out of their way to expose a money transfer API...

This sounds exactly like what I wanted.. but I don't know if I want to be the early adopter guinea pig for something that involves setting up new bank accounts and automatically routing my finances around. I was kind of hoping my bank would eventually build conditional features into the automatic transfer / bill pay, as I'd much rather keep all my cash within my banking institution rather than sending it to an unproven 3rd party. Either way, I will be watching this closely..

If only politicians in the US were capable of seeing things this way..

So many smaller cities in the US northeast have been isolated from the regional economy by railroad shutdowns, but there's so little interest in rail here anymore that I doubt local leadership even understand the severity of the problem.

Great example being the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Commuter rail connections to NYC and Philadelphia from Allentown & Bethlehem PA were completely dismantled in the 20th century. There's large highways connecting them but the drive is 2-3 hours, lots of traffic. It's grueling by car. Yet a person could comfortably commute by rail if it was available. So this sizable metro area with tons of charm, walkable town centers and 19th century housing stock almost frozen in time, just sitting economically sluggish as the larger cities prosper around them. Very frustrating.

This has worse problems with credible authority than the Forbes article they're debunking. Forbes is at least a journalistic publication, this is clearly content marketing with an agenda to promote.

How is it that lobbies from oil, guns, banks, telecom have historically been so powerful in passing legislation through Washington, yet the software industry is still so completely limp at protecting it's political interests?

I feel like politicians see tech as an easy target to walk all over to rally the technophobe base, and with good reason - there's really no consequences for doing so.

Why is a company like Apple, at time when it has a historic stockpile of cash, trying to duke out political battles by writing open letters to the press and appealing for public support to uphold basic security practices when other industries manage to bend political will in their favor to do truly greedy things at the public's expense on a regular basis?

The frustrating part is that Pennsylvania has had tons of railway planning, infrastructure built - but it's mostly been abandoned or neglected for the last 70 years. So much of the state was born out of investment in rail connections and then economically smothered by the end of the railroads and never recovered.

Pennsylvania became an economic powerhouse because of the railroads, but without them it's just a sad shadow of it's former glory. If someone took the lead on rebooting the railroad industry in PA it would reboot the entire economy of the state.

Pittsburgh is unfortunately kind of isolated transportation-wise, which I think is a bigger disadvantage than it looks on the surface.

It was founded when waterways were the main transportation access point, and boomed as it was the intersection of 3 rivers. But today Pittsburgh has an airport that isn't a major airline hub, with limited flights that need a connection from most cities. Rail by Amtrak is infrequent and impractically slow. The drive from NYC is 6 hours, 5 even just from Philly. And extremely treacherous in winter, too - winding Appalachian mountain passes with icy roads, blizzards, fog, narrow lanes. The nearest neighboring city is Cleveland, which isn't exactly a big boost economically.

Contrast to Philly on the other end of the state and you're 2 hours from NYC, Jersey, DC with high speed rail, a major intl airport etc. Sure there are west coast cities with worse problems, but they still have the optimism of manifest destiny working in their favor. Getting caught in a blizzard driving to Denver just feels more exciting than a blizzard driving to Pittsburgh..

If Pittsburgh doubled down on the airport or got cash from harrisburg to improve rail links to NYC (we can dream), maybe build up as a tourist destination even, it could be competitive. Till then, yinzers are going to have to enjoy the secrets of their charming city on their own.

Satellite / drone camouflage.

I'm certainly not a military expert, but it seems fairly obvious that China's military would benefit from being able to hide from high altitude surveillance. They're not doing a whole lot with these vehicles in combat at the moment, but masking their position and numbers seems like a pretty important objective for someone trying to build up an arsenal without escalating tension.

That is amazing. Not that I endorse criminal activity or anything, but I imagine the amount of power you now have to evade traffic violations, get away with jewel heists etc, must have made the wait well worth it

They mentioned this in the article, but I'd say it has a lot to do with image.

Boston Dynamics seems fixated on posting videos of people abusing their robots to demonstrate their ability to regain balance, but the general public finds them pretty disturbing and are easy fodder for late night comedy jokes about robot uprisings.

Not really the kind of visual you want to put in people's minds when your company is simultaneously developing AI that was broadcast besting a human at the world's hardest board game.

No short term ROI + product milestones in the form of creepy videos = Google's black sheep

You misinterpret.. My comment had a very specific list of middle-tier fast food joints that have gone to crap.

McDonald's wasn't in that list. Neither was Taco Bell. Both very affordable, and still pretty consistent.

But if you're going to call me out on classism, it's a fairly ironic position to take that fast food is some sort of special charity to the poor. A far more charitable approach would be embracing publicly-subsidized grocery stores in food deserts rather than letting private equity slumlords peddle sugary deep fried dog food as if it's the only game in town.

Agreed. He clearly has a self-serving business and political agenda underlying his statements.

If his business is suffering right now, it's because the American appetite has changed - people either want decent food made with quality ingredients in a friendly higher-touch environment, or dollar value menu quick calories.

Much rather see crummy middle-ground fast food chains like Carl's/Hardees, Burger King, Wendy's go under and be replaced with better businesses that respect employee attention to quality and service than have them morph into automats. If fully automated dining becomes a category, I really doubt these lumbering grease factories will be the ones to dominate it anyhow

He's right - when the bulk of common minimum wage jobs have been replaced by machines to offset the human resource cost, it's going to decimate low-wage employment.

There will eventually be a price point at which the cost of buying and maintaining machines is more expensive than human labor. The problem is those competitive wages are extremely low, measured in pennies an hour. (Mechanical Turk is a great example)

Today's minimum wage workers may eventually end up working illegally or flooding "gig economy" 1099 roles - driving their collective value in those markets down to wages less than a dollar an hour.

Without a strategy like Basic Income, our cushy Western living standards are going to be at a real crossroads soon. We're about to turn a good chunk of the Western world into Bangladesh

Fascinating. Never crossed my mind that this was an area I could break into. Thank you

How does one break into VR without a background in 3D gaming / CG?

Thank you so much for that read.

The part about Pioneers of the past being burned at the stake I'll hold on to. That's a truth that hangs on today, albeit with less fire and more firing

The point about generalists no longer having a place in the market is something that's becoming more and more apparent every day.

The web was crafted by generalists. People who could think about both technology and design at the same time were hugely valuable builders, and leveraged to rapidly build up the content and tools of web from nothing.

Looking back, it was the wild west. We generalists were the rough and tumble pioneers that swung an axe and moved boulders, dug for gold, founded towns from dirt.

But now, it's built. There's no more frontier left to explore. The roads are cleared, railroads built, the land claims are well established, the towns have paved streets and public services.

10 years ago we web generalists were calling ourselves designers or developers but now we're engineers, product consultants. There's no longer a mad scramble to get a vision onto the screen with a designer, develop a new product from nothing. It's all about engineering to remove the flaws of the rough work done by pioneers, carefully looking at what's been established and tuning it so that it lasts.

I think some of us chronic generalists need to find a new frontier. This is just no longer our place..