zach

The "Creative Class" is sort of (urban pundit and the article's co-author) Richard Florida's thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_class

It tries to make events like gentrification a little more clear by focusing on working-age adult occupations. In particular, regular income/wealth statistics tend to hide trend signals because in-place retirees end up echoing the economics of the past for a long time.

Alcatraz is lumped into the same census tract as the Presidio.

And a perfect illustration of why "I'll just leave this here" is so much worse than a simple description of the link target.

The day I met Rob was one of the best days of my career. It was my first day working at Blizzard, and I was totally in the dark about what the game I was going to be working on, other than it was the "Next-Gen MMO" project. So imagine the excitement of going to work at Blizzard, plus the anticipation of finding out what this mystery project is that you didn't even find out about during your interviews.

So on the first day, the other programmer starting that day and I sit down with Rob Pardo and he starts pitching the game to us — laying out the vision, the origins and the goals for what we were building, with considerable enthusiasm and imagination. Surely, this was the same pitch that convinced the heads of the studio to approve the project. It was tremendous. I wanted to get to my desk and start working right away so I could bring this vision closer to reality.

In contrast, at most places I've worked before and since, I showed up and found out about the project I was working on by way of some random demo, reading outdated documents or a process of detective work. Having a reveal and actual presentation as part of a threshold event like the first day on the team was really powerful. I felt like I was carrying the fire now. The inspiration from that first day provided us a full tank of gas and directions for the long journey we were going on.

Everyone talks about how crucial it is to hire well, but then we only grudgingly find time for interviews. In the same way, even though we know inspirational leadership is essential for creative work, it's not easy to plan to meet that need in each team member's experience. Even though it's far less in-depth than, say, the multi-week process at Facebook, that one presentation Rob did on my first day at Blizzard meant a huge amount to me, and I'll never forget it.

High-engagement obsessives are another key to this. In a community where it's nobody's actual job to spread knowledge and values of the community, the highest-volume interactors – the most engaged – become standard-bearers of the community. Since they are often more obsessive and dedicated yet visible, this raises the stakes of the community to greater obsessiveness and dedication.

In online scenarios, the result is that many can say, well, I am dedicated to X, but I'm not as extremely dedicated as Y... where Y may be literally one of the most X-dedicated people in the entire world.

When you have this majority illusion, some high-engagement obsessives, and throw in some producers of writings (news, documents, popular literature and orientation literature such as FAQs), you have an engine for converting dedication into social goods such as a sense of belonging, friendship, and most of all, self-identification.

The ability to create and sustain these communities in many forms, for any topic, worldwide, is the miracle of the internet.

Newark is completely surrounded by Fremont (California) and has over 40,000 residents and is over 13 square miles in area, so if it's not the largest, it's at least near the top.

If we discount natural borders like the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica borders only Los Angeles and has twice as many residents.

Unlike regular loans, there are no qualifications for the United States of America's student aid programs and loan guarantees — they are available to any admitted college student, even if you are going to circus college.

Whereas in Germany, for example, even though universities have no tuition fees, only 28% of high school students (equivalent to 1150+ SAT) pass the exams needed to go to them. In the US, we don't pay for the whole thing, but we have no gate to pass through other than getting a college to admit you.

The problem is the implicit assumption that colleges only admit the students that are quite capable of graduating, and that the degree will be worth it. Well, those things may have been mostly true at one point, I'm sure, but without any incentives, they're not really the case now.

Graduation percentage is the key to seeing how far we fall short. First off, check out this amazing article: http://www.demos.org/blog/5/18/14/college-graduation-gap or just look at the most essential chart: http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/imce/satincomegrad....

Just to make this clearer, the average high school student scores about 1000 on the SAT (the NCAA only requires 800 for eligibility if you can pull a B average). The graduation percentages around 1000 are pretty bad, yet over 50% of high school students have gone to college since 1980, 60% since 1990 and up to 70% since then.

These graduation percentages are very challenging data. Especially looking at the students that can benefit the most from the hoped-for added earning potential. So this is difficult to confront, because it causes cognitive dissonance with our self-image as a country of opportunity.

If you were paying any attention during the mortgage crisis, you can see a pattern here. Everyone is encouraged to stretch to get the most expensive thing they can afford, and the loans are easy to come by.

Well, almost; private lenders are actually kind of strict, which means that marginal and low-ability students (or those who have poor college grades) are shut out. As in this story, they have to go to their relatives to co-sign loans instead, or lose their sunk costs (and dreams) for lack of those last few thousand dollars. Again, this is for students who aren't qualifying for debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy...

If there was some kind of change to the employment market that significantly devalued the $1.3 trillion in student debt, that would be a heck of a write-off. So in our automated future, maybe we won't be deciding how to give everyone free money, but instead dealing with the gigantic amount of bad student loans we have on the books.

Again, this article puts student debt at $1.3 trillion. That's almost twice as much as is outstanding on all car loans, except that the cars actually exist. A lot of people never get to drive their college education off the lot. How much student aid should we budget to provide for students who never graduate, or even those who we are pretty sure never will?

Before that point, laundry service is a great candidate for automobile trunk pickup and delivery. Just put your stinkables in a trunk box, have them removed at some point in the day, then your clean, folded clothes are delivered to your trunk the next day. It just happens, like a laundry fairy.

The problem right now is that trunk pickup and delivery is not really an expected use case. Cars aren't really designed to support delivery drivers/automation being able to open your trunk and only your trunk, especially without a key.

But it could be something that can be retrofitted decently, thanks to US-mandated inside trunk releases. And at the high end, limited-entry trunk delivery is already being tested in some places: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/delivery-drivers-can-now-leave-...

Extremely interesting to compare with Jack Gallant's reconstruction of video from the brain MRI of a viewer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

The systematizer who takes up leadership from the visionary is an ancient pattern.

The systematizer may lack inspirational genius but makes up for it with analytical and organizational genius. They can turn a phenomenon into a movement, or a movement into a world power.

You see this a lot with religions and philosophies — if you have n systematizers who take up the leadership from the prophet, you probably end up with n religions (including n = 0).

This is the culmination of some very old news, when Netflix outbid Starz in 2012 for Disney's "pay TV" rights:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/12/04/netflix-outbid...

Why September if the deal started in 2016? It covers movies that premiere in 2016 or later, and September is nine months after the January 29 release of The Finest Hours[1], the first Disney movie expected to be exclusive to Netflix.

[1] — I earlier opined that Zootopia would kick it off, but The Finest Hours was Disney's first 2016 release and since 7-9 months is the typical wait for a pay-TV window, it seems Disney movies will be on Netflix 9 months after release.

I must confess that I am old enough to remember that this was based on an actual brand, "Plain Wrap", which was the store brand of the long-defunct Alpha Beta supermarket chain: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CU25MNEU8AAbnvx.jpg

They actually used to stock all the Plain Wrap items in a single aisle, and the effect was like a consumer sensory deprivation tank.

Furthermore, very-high-income areas (North NJ must have the highest furriers-per-capita in the US) tend to have a far higher median maternal age, which raises the likelihood of c-section.

I totally read it as "oh, no wonder it 'was never fully published' before now, since the lead investigators were the infamous Ancel Keys and a now-deceased collaborator."

People are surprised that Prop. 13 applies to investment and commercial real estate. I was too until I discovered that Howard Jarvis and the backers of the proposition were all apartment owners. If it only applied to owner-occupied residences, it would never have been up for a (off-year election) vote.

Don't worry, families have little opportunity to own a house anymore, much less suffer the tragedy of unrealized capital gains. The most accessible housing market for urban or suburban California families is renting from the Prop. 13 aristocracy.

Twelfth-highest, as it happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United...

For those unfamiliar, you can think of Prop. 13 as an effective cartel to discourage people from selling their property.

Basically, it subsidizes keeping property and never selling it. This is because every year the owner's property taxes essentially go down, presuming any normal level of inflation. And because of follow-on propositions, you can transfer that advantage from parents to children. Yes, this does let existing residents stay somewhere indefinitely. Equivalently, we can say it strongly discourages mobility.

The crazy real estate prices you see are simply a result of the proposition-established cartel. This drives up prices for new arrivals, which California depends on to keep this going, which makes the people holding on to their property think two things: "I'm rich because my home is worth so much" and "I could never get by without Prop. 13 because my home is worth so much." This has made Prop. 13 untouchable — it would basically have to be overturned at the state Supreme Court level at the behest of broad popular opinion.

However, this is just another bubble. California as a state has done relatively quite well in the last thirty years, so it continues to inflate. However, California and local governments have also spent a huge amount of future revenue on state workers, so it has become harder to sustain. But for the huge amount of income tax receipts from the investment class of California, things would already be in rough shape.

Someday, the bubble will burst. If Prop. 13 was ruled unconstitutional tomorrow, it would cause a real estate crisis, followed by an economic crisis, that is hard to imagine. But that might be preferable to having Prop. 13 crumble in the middle of a statewide economic crisis, which is the most likely ending of this story. In the meantime, yes, it does keep grandma in her tidily-appreciating house instead of some filthy tech hipsters chasing the next gold rush.

This is specifically related to the SF Bay Area and there is a link to the source which has a easy-to-use Excel sheet of the data, so feel free to make an awesome geo-mashup:

http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345#Technical_App...

Also, the measure is not whether available housing is getting more expensive, but whether low-income households are being displaced.

When I got my business license in a suburban city, I was chagrined to see that home-based businesses are allowed only in the single-family residential zone — sorry, apartment-dwellers. I'm sure many cities are the same, because why not? Who's going to complain if you say no, the existing residents or "that guy" who wants to do something unconventional? So just keep everyone happy by saying no.

And really, that "no by default" is what zoning laws are all about. City administration is only faulted for not preventing some land use that people will get up in arms about, so zoning laws are their set of hidebound insurance policies.

I think "It's a Wonderful Life" deserves a good deal of blame for this, because of how Capra illustrated the moral derangement of Bedford Falls becoming Potterville. Its main street was full of dime-a-dance saloons, floozy-filled nightclubs, billiard halls and pawn brokers. The implication was that any city with wise and moral leaders would have prevented it, which has struck fear into the heart of American cities ever since.

And here I thought this only happened in Gargoyles. Cultural appropriation has never since been this visceral.

I was fascinated by the description of 10,000+ pieces of a monastery in a warehouse. It seems like such a perfect problem for modern technology. If anyone has any such stories of ruins being reconstructed in computers, please share.

This is highly relevant for the recently-bankrupt American Apparel, which has a fundamental proposition (even in its name) of producing clothing in the USA:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-american-apparel-manuf...

Wages in their current location will be rising from $9/hour to $15/hour over the next five years. It doesn't seem tenable in that situation to produce goods at the same level of technology that overseas workers use. So this may be the perfect opportunity to get serious about automation for clothing manufacturing. Send in the sewbots.

They have "My First Errand", we have Dateline NBC and America's Most Wanted. What else should we expect?

I think Americans have an almost pathological reflex to gaze at sentimental stories that are sensational because they are exceptional, then use them as guidelines for how the world is now.

The sentimentality aspect, which drives interest, outrage and action, is what makes it so pernicious. Sentimental appeal is what drives our politics, media and fundraising. If there's no emotional aspect, our media is quick to invent one by creating angles like arguments between talking heads.

I know many on HN understand that there are fewer than 200 stranger abductions of children per year in the US. Maybe you even know that runaways have decreased by over 70% in the last ten years.

How would the US public ever know this?

In the emotional marketplace, that simple fact can't compete with these facts which, when conflated in the media, produce utter paranoia:

http://www.missingkids.com/KeyFacts

I have nothing against the work this organization does; they are as captive to the existing narrative as police or parents or anyone else.

I think the progress in this area is that through electronic media, we can actually measure pretty easily how informed the public is by the media they consume. Hopefully we can get closer to news that demonstrably informs people.

Oculus: "Hey Netflix, how about we work together on getting your service on our platform?"

Netflix: "Gee, we're pretty busy, maybe next year..."

Oculus: "We would have John Carmack work on it..."

Netflix: "YES! Yes, yes, yes. Okay, now is good. Can we have him write a guest post on our tech blog when it launches?"

Fine advice for experts, surely. Those who recognize they are blind should copy. Copying Tufte seems like a reasonable way to open their eyes and save everyone else's.

Sigh, yes. "Bait and switch" is the "begging the question" of product forums. It has an actual meaning that nobody cares about and by now just means "I feel disappointed". This is one of the least unfair outcomes for what is a barely a purchase and it is still a "Classic bait-n-switch".

512 apps should be enough for anyone.

A lesson to take away here is that a startup which faces legal/regulatory threats to their existence has to be small enough to be ignored or huge enough to change the rules.

Uber is probably the first company you think of, with their absurdly large investment rounds, or maybe PayPal, but don't forget YouTube. They went from a little video portal with everyone else's stuff on it to a protectorate of one of the world's largest businesses so quickly the copyright holders had no chance to deprive it of existence.

The danger zone is in the middle. Homejoy didn't expect to be in this kind of trouble, but once they were, it made finding a huge round of funding both necessary and impossible. So this is the rational decision.

It's fascinating to see the many reservoirs we were supposed to have built by now. The engineers of the 1950s and 1960s had a lot of big plans that were all supposed to be in place decades ago (look at the gray squares on the map):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project

A lot of people will say "the environmentalists" stopped them, but really it was that lawmakers gave environmental concerns only one effective tool -- enforcing standards via litigation.

The task of resolving environmental concerns was pushed out of the political and economic arena into an adversarial process that takes a huge amount of paperwork, lawyer time and calendar time to resolve.

Exactly like the Republicans with Proposition 13 (a California initiative which required supermajority voter approval for taxes), once you take fundamental powers away from the legislative and executive branches, you really limit the potential effectiveness of the government. And now California's infrastructure is a mess.

From the article: "A handful of incidents involving SCOPs in Virginia and nationally have focused attention on the training and oversight of private police."

Well, many incidents nationally have focused attention on the training and oversight of municipal police too, to put it mildly.