skewart

The Trump style ban didn’t have anything to do with walkability or scale or urban design. It only required federal buildings to have specific kinds of glued-on decorations. Not sure how you got to street planning from there.

In any case, architectural style and city planning are orthogonal. You can have nice walkable, cozy streets with “modern” buildings - there are lots of examples of this in Japan, Taiwan, and other parts of East Asia. And you certainly can have sprawling, hostile streets with neo-historical buildings - lots of examples in the US.

The biggest culprit preventing more walkable human-scaled streets in new cities tends to be governments and policy-makers, not architects. Decisions about zoning, land rights, transit investment, and even building codes, have a far bigger impact on the built environment than any architect does.

The weird part was banning people from building anything that isn’t neoclassical. The order wasn’t promoting neoclassicism as much as it was attacking everything else.

If the Trump administration’s approach was just to build a lot of neoclassical buildings nobody would have cared.

I bet Ferrari owners earn even more than that compared to people without Ferraris.

I don’t think that means we should tell young people to take out loans to buy a Ferrari because it’s a ticket to easy money.

When the only kids going to college were either rich or highly motivated then having a degree made you stand out and could open doors. When everyone gets a degree it doesn’t make you stand out any more. Instead, not having a degree makes you look bad. (And unlike high school, which anyone can attend for free, most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind.)

The big problem is that land value tends to fill any void created by lower construction costs. If buyers are willing to pay $100 for a home in a given location, then land will typically sell at 100 minus the cost of construction (and a small risk/profit premium). So even if you lower construction costs you’ll just increase what people are willing to pay for land.

That said, that kind of balancing takes time in practice, so if you did find a way to deliver a lot of housing at a much lower cost you could exploit the delay and build a lot of housing quickly, which would increase supply, which would lower what buyers are willing to pay. Basically you’d have to flood the market with so much cheap housing that buyers willingness to pay goes down.

I think a better approach to fighting high housing prices is to make more different cities and towns appealing places to live. There already is a ton of housing in this country but it’s in places where not many people want to live.

I agree with you about cabs in the US compared to ride hailing apps. But AirBnB is very different, and worse. The hotel industry is nothing like the cab industry. And residential real estate is nothing like roads.

Hotels face lots of regulation not only on how they operate (fire safety, egress, food safety, etc) but also where they can operate. AirBnB lets investors get around all these regulations and tap into tourism demand at a much lower cost.

Without AirBnB you would need to convert a house into a hotel in order to use residential real estate to tap into hotel demand. And regulations typically make that hard and expensive. Plus you would need to do some construction work, which also adds to the expense.

So strong hotel demand certainly does push up land value overall over time, but it happens much more slowly and to a lesser extent than with AirBnB.

AirBnB gives investors a way around hotel regulations and construction costs. You can buy an existing house and with very little friction or cost start generating revenue from tourism demand.

There are far more news sources available today than in the 20th century. Not only can I read local newspapers and magazines from all over the world, which wasn’t easy to do before the internet, but also there are tons of new digital-only publications and millions of blogs.

In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc.

> versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.

How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa.

FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.

How would breaking up Facebook into three companies fix this though? Suppose Instagram is a separate company and a new competitor starts getting popular. Why wouldn’t Instagram still just copy the competitor’s features?

It’s hard to compete with Instagram because everyone is already on Instagram, not because everyone is also on Facebook. (A lot of IG users don’t use FB much, and vice versa.) A freestanding Instagram could still easily copy and crush competitors.

Don’t forget their initiative to capture an even bigger percentage of app advertising spend. Nerfing the IDFA is designed to make advertising anywhere other than the App Store less effective. Apple is betting that this change will force developers to shift more advertising dollars to Apple, and away from places like Facebook.

Oh, I didn't mean just calling someone out of the blue. I meant that people would be willing to get on a video call if you set up a time to talk. I would typically message or email people first.

Heck even if we're in the same office I'd often ping someone on text chat before walking over to their desk - it's just less rude and intrusive than forcing them to stop what they're working on and demanding to talk with them right then. A lot of teams I've worked on have communicated heavily by text chat even if we're all sitting just a few feet away from each other.

Do you find people less willing to send a message on Slack or whatever chat app you're using than they are to physically stop by someone's desk?

Honestly I wouldn’t worry too much about it. This article vastly overstates the benefits of offices. Sitting in an office every day doesn’t magically make mentorship opportunities appear. You need to proactively seek those out no matter where you’re working - ask questions, ask for advice - and if someone is willing to talk in person they’re almost certainly willing to talk over video chat too.

Histre looks really cool. I just signed up to give it a spin. Capturing knowledge on top of web browsing is a great idea. Have you thought about integrating with email and/or messaging to capture knowledge shared there too?

That’s a bizarre and mean-spirited line of thinking. There’s nothing inherently selfish about not having kids. Every life decision involves trade-offs between time, money, effort, and various kinds of joys and sorrows. People have lots of different circumstances that lead them to evaluate these trade-offs differently. Children are a huge, irreversible decision. It’s natural for people to be cautious. Besides, one could easily argue that having kids is selfish - you’re deliberately consuming more resources and tax dollars so you can create clones of yourself and expand your family line. That’s not a nice or realistic way to look at having children though.

Yeah, it is a bit of a conundrum, but I don't think I'd say they can't be trusted entirely. I mean, I doubt they're printing outright lies - unlike some media outlets. I think the bias would creep in more in the fact that they run this story at all (while potentially interesting, it's hardly world-changing news), and also in descriptive words used here and there. As long as one is aware of their inherent motivations I think it's possible to get worthwhile info from their stories on their competitors. Of course, who knows what stories about media they're choosing not to cover.

For one thing, Facebook competes with the NYT for advertising dollars. If Facebook and Instagram are less appealing places to run adds for a company then maybe that company will spend more of its advertising budget on NYT ads instead.

More broadly though, they have an incentive to weaken companies like Facebook and Google, which are effectively gatekeepers for a lot of traffic to NYT articles. Clicking on an article shared on Facebook, or clicking through to an article in a Google search result are very common ways for people to land on the NYT website. Not only is this traffic valuable to the NYT for ad revenue it's also very valuable for selling subscriptions - people are more likely to subscribe if they have been seeing and reading free articles. I think it's safe to assume the people running the NYT are aware of this dependency on search and social media platforms and are eager to do anything they can to minimize it. I have no idea how much bias, if any, actually creeps into reporting - hopefully it's none! But the business incentives are enough to make me approach any article from almost any media company about Google or FB with a dose of healthy skepticism.