ethbro

You'd think people would look at the initial healthcare.gov mess and make some conclusions.

One of which should maybe be "Don't strictly isolate teams, with unowned space between their output and the next team's input, and no method by which post-delivery failure reflects back on them."

> winding roads

Don't get me started on the folly of single-path, non-grid road planning. It's literally encoding the assumption "There will never be more than X people living here" into the city fabric.

And then in 10 years people wonder why traffic is so bad...

Haven't read the paper yet, but could you expand on the tuple use? It seems like the odd person out in that list of primatives.

I'd include the addendum that wisdom is holding mutually-exclusive truths at once, and deciding which governs in any particular circumstance.

But I've found the previous to be right, more often than not.

Hope the inspiration helps you get out of your own way. :)

I considered including all the caveats you mentioned before posting, but decided the base points cover more circumstances. ;)

I think I found that paper. Posted in a reply below.

The opportunity of company towns is the opportunity of dictatorships: with fewer decision makers, longer-sighted decision can be rammed through.

For example, California could presumably make better housing decisions if existing property owners didn't get a say.

That said, the weaknesses of dictatorships obviously apply equally. A benevolent dictator leads to great happiness; a terrible one leads to hell that can only be overthrown by revolution.

Used to live down the road from Avalon. I'd say it's better than a mall, but still too profit-first to be when I'd hope we're pivoting towards.

As context for others, Avalon is a mixed-use development, with restaurants and shops on the first floor (of ~3). Definitely still anchor-tenant focused (movie theater, larger clothing retailers) & restaurant weighted.

IMHO, the type of place you visit to do things, then leave. Not the type of place you live.

But then, my opinion is that Atlantic Station should be nuked from orbit for the sin of isolating itself from the transit grid, so I'm probably on the get-off-my-lawn side of the planner/developer split.

If you don't need a decent school zone, can confirm.

38 minutes from downtown. 3 acre wooded lot. 1900 sq ft house (currently refinishing full basement). $135 when I bought, probably $200 now. In the process of selling a much more expensive intown house, because there's no point.

The biggest things suburbs need to do these days is revolutionize malls. Tear up all the parking and retrofit empty store space into community-centric things people actually want.

Big box -> co-working space, as new anchor tenant.

I can't lay hands on a link, but there was an article about the psychological phenomenon of time passing too quickly. It was a measurable state you could detect a brain as either being in or not in.

One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.

I try and take more walks now.

I think a few things aren't hammered into young people enough today.

1) Any action is greater than no action. It doesn't matter how much you suck at something. Do it. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never started.

2) Finish things. No matter how ugly it is. Even if you have to half-kill yourself to drag it that last inch over the line. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never finished.

3) Your worst effort is probably better than average. Stop obsessing about the 1% best. That's not who you're competing against. You're competing against the pool of real people a company / project could afford to hire, who are available to hire.

4) Everyone starts off terrible at everything. No movie covers the 10,000 hours someone is learning: that's why training montages are a cliché.

5) Forgive yourself. It's okay not to be spectacular every minute of every day. Consistency of effort is more valuable than cyclical manic-depression. The key to becoming better starts with accepting and being happy with where you're starting from.