wallacrw

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-counties-are-booming-pand...

RE: politics, the governorship isn't elected by land. Take out the governor and you can fix political gerrymandering (or wield it to your benefit).

End of the day, the vision as I see it isn't to build a new city or to make a small town feel like a city. It's to enjoy the benefits of large plots of land and large houses, but to do so with a modern, youthful population and great restaurants and entertainment.

I'm envisioning Bend, OR but all across the country. Or Los Alamos, etc, the examples above. These towns didn't happen by accident. Someone had a plan, and then a tipping point was reached that cemented the place as a modern small town.

That can be reverse engineered and purposefully carried out. Not saying it's easy, but it's 100% doable. And I want to know who's trying, because I want to help.

I definitely think local political pushback is one of the potential challenges. But I will also admit that part of the plan would be to move in enough people to gain political control.

It's a very viable, legal political strategy to ship 60k families into a new urban enclave in Wyoming or Montana and thereby turn it blue. 120k blue votes would do it.

I honestly thought that was Amazon's plan with HQ2, which is what made me think of it. A company the size of Amazon could create that many great jobs in one of these states in a single election year. If they paired it with tasteful property development, I would be shocked if a good chunk of their Seattle employees didn't swarm the new town.

But let's assume that:

1 - no existing large company will do this. Patagonia or similar could, but most don't wade this deeply into politics.

2 - locals would dislike it but would also get rich selling their land. So this is not hostile to them, and we don't need to obsess over their feelings too much. It's just capitalism.

Seems to me a better mechanism would be to assemble the interest, then collect the money, and then buy the plot of land. You wouldn't want to project too much ahead of time for fear of scaring or intimidating. But once you secured the land, assuming you could still subdivide it and develop it (ie, assuming local politicians didn't stop you first), you could sell it off, get the new residents registered and you're done. You just took over.

This could sound too premeditated, but developers wielding local laws in unexpected ways to their economic advantage is nothing new. See Robert Moses.

I think a DAO should be the next Robert Moses, only not racist and focused on making all of the gorgeous land in this country habitable for young people. This is a massive country. The only reason we all huddle in cities is because the rest of it is so left behind that we don't want to help it anymore.

BTW, I don't think there's much difference between taking over a town and starting a new one. You start a new one and the neighboring towns plus the county will still freak out. It's in your best interest to control local politics, ideally all the way to the governor, either way.

If the town has great real estate, someone should help it find its maximum value. Sure some locals will claim to dislike the change, sort of like those old SFers that complain about the good ol days of Haight Ashbury. But they did OK if they owned. And this is what capitalism is all about -- if it's empirically good, it gets bid up with higher prices.

To pretend like small towns have precious virtue on their own or want to shun value appreciation is naive.

Small town home owners should love to find out young people moved in and made their home worth millions. They can cash out and go hide somewhere forgotten if they really want. Either way, if they pretend they have some right to not have their land value improved, they misunderstand how capitalism in America works.

Traditionalists, people with bad taste, or generally uncurious folks don't motivate large amounts of people to change behavior. But large groups of young people trying new things and inventing new experiences do.

SF, NYC, LA, even Miami real estate booms are all because of hipsters. Young creative people make the place interesting, then richer but more boring people crash the party and bid up prices. It gets too expensive for young creatives eventually so they leave, and then the cycle repeats.

Geography on its own isn't enough. NYC was a disaster in the 70s; only when the young people started moving back did it become desirable, hence valuable.

So you need hipsters. Without them, the place you live is just a boring bedroom community. Could be anywhere, likely not valuable.

Referenced here: https://slate.com/technology/2012/09/avacore-technologies-ma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers#Numb...

When it comes to limiting moves, no country has the ability that the US does.

So I think it has somehow been negotiated with the authorities.

Just sayin.

Which is why I'll now plug the company I work for, MindMeld, since (i) we do that better than Wit and (ii) we are not feeding our data to an advertising team.

The best systems--Siri, Google Now--have 95%+ ASR accuracy AND can find the right answer among millions of possibilities once they've broken down the utterance.

Combining human-like ASR & NLP with super accurate search capabilities is hard.

With Alexa, you have to bet on Amazon winning the IoT game. Amazon is great at ecommerce (mostly because they don't care about making money), but it's not clear they're great at platforms.

But if all you want is the functionality of an Echo that you can customize, then go with a well-funded startup staffed by some of the best AI engineers in the world offering similar and often better capabilities, and build your own so you can integrate it wherever you want.

That's MindMeld.

To then place the additional burden on me of checking in with you first is, in my mind, just cocky. Not my job to know your schedule, and how about respecting the fact that I'm trying to help?

People who insist on pre-introductions are vastly overestimating how much others should be thinking about them or "respecting their time," which is actually no one else's business. Responsible adults can handle the additional burden of someone trying to help.

The 1/10 case would be intros to people who are either in a position where they likely receive dozens of emails from folks they don't know every day (e.g., VCs) or folks with enough name recognition to be in that same spot (e.g., famous people you might know).

You might jeopardize your relationship with the person in that case, but for most of your friends and pretty much anyone reading this comment, you're better off being open instead of self-important.

I've been most impressed when people, no matter how busy/famous/rich/etc they are, still manage to stay calm and take responsibility for their workload. At the end of the day, the burden to handle their focus rests with them, not others.

Saying to people who might want to help you, "hey, check in with me before you help me" basically asks those people to be your secretary. It's not really my business to know how busy other people are or whether they have the time to take a meeting.

My thinking in sending an intro wasn't "how burdensome will this be for him?" but rather "this is going to be really helpful for him." Maybe you'd argue I should have been thinking the former, but I trust that grown adults can handle themselves, and their schedules, well enough to not need my patronizing concern about whether they can manage meeting someone new. Particularly if their title is "Head of BD."