so33

I’ve said this above but I don’t think this is an incompatible view with what the article says. But the predominant attitude is that everyone just ought to move to the suburbs eventually because it’s just “obviously” so much better, with the bigger living space and the lower density. We’re seeing this attitude pop up with COVID-19 once again.

For me, I so heavily despise the experience of being in a car for even half an hour. So unless I find a neighborhood where everything is nearby or maybe I can bike everywhere (not so easy in the US!) none of these supposed quality-of-life improvements will outweigh the downside for me.

(And yes, I have owned a car and used it for day-to-day stuff. I universally hated every single moment I sat in that car.)

I don’t think that’s the thesis of the article. Rather, I think the article is saying that nice things alone don’t compensate for the opportunity costs and negative second-order effects you incur when obtaining _some_ nice things.

To use the article’s example of living in a city versus a suburb: If you can get a house in a suburb and can commute 15 minutes or so and are within walking distance of the stuff you care about (including your friends/family) and don’t value any of the perks of living in a city environment (or heavily dislike the downsides), then go for it. But a big house in the suburbs _alone_ isn’t automatically going to make your life better, yet in my experience that’s a very dominant mode of thinking.

> Living in downtown Palo Alto probably costs 100% more than living in Pleasanton, which is roughly a one hour commute.

As I understand, there’s heavy resistance to building any sort of density in Palo Alto. That will, of course, skew the cost of living. I believe that people are constantly priced out of the city as well (i.e. they wanted to stay but couldn’t).

> I wonder if this is one of the reasons big tech companies run buses — to make the commute less painful and blend into the background of life.

The American perception toward public transit is that it is unreliable, crowded, dirty and/or filled with poor people. Knowing that there will be a seat on a clean bus to take you home without much worry is a major sell and can convince people to ditch their cars (whether or not the equivalent public transit commute actually matches the above perception).

When I was in a situation where I could take the “tech buses” regularly, they for sure helped make a long commute bearable.

> the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right militarizing).

If I had to choose between “cancel culture” versus militarized violence, cancel me any day.

Bus rapid transportation could be a better fit, given existing freeway infrastructure. But good luck taking away two lanes of highway anywhere in the United States (true right-of-way separation is necessary for any effective _rapid _transit). A lot of other BRT ends up most of the time being express buses with fancy stations/shelters that still cost a bunch of money.

Honestly I think that the way we plan cities in North America is broken to the point where any transportation strategy is doomed to result in sprawl and congestion. To use a train analogy, I’d say that city planning is the true third-rail of American politics.

cities built around transit and biking.

> As evidence, he pointed to data from real estate companies that showed less interest in California, New York and New Jersey as well as slowing searches for homes in larger cities

This isn’t good evidence for the argument. People who live in cities primarily rent.

As an aside, I do think that a move to smaller cities will help strengthen the American economy overall, similar to the distributed small-cities economy that you see in Germany, where no one city has the primacy and pull of NYC.

> It's only when you go out to the suburbs, probably one of society's least efficient constructions, that you see the lowest prices -- a perfect balance of efficiency, I guess. It is weird and I wonder if there's some lesson in here.

I suspect the inefficiencies are just externalized! Rent is low because land is cheap(er) in suburbia, but society pays in increased average travel times* as well as the high costs of road infrastructure needed to support suburban living in general, which is paid for in our taxes and thus doesn't show up on the price tag at the store but rather as a line item on our paychecks.

* I can walk less than five minutes to the grocery store in the urban core. Admittedly I have no data on this but based on my own experience, I'd bet it takes the average suburban household at least 10 minutes to drive to a grocery store - and 20-30 minutes to drive to a Costco-like store, placed where rent is even lower - and then 2-3 minutes on average spent looking for parking and then walking across the parking lot! Time is money, and given society's obsession with optimizing time, I find it strange how little attention we truly pay to travel times.

But USPS is focused on efficiency and profitability. They have streamlined many of their operations and created new profit making initiatives (e.g. Informed Delivery), all while having the mandate that mail cost the same from Alaska to Florida as from New York to DC. They just have the aforementioned budget burden to fund retirement funds no other organization, public or private, would ever bear upon themselves voluntarily. And they can’t set their own rates. And they have to deliver to every address once a day six days a week no matter what.

> TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.

For this tax year I used TurboTax. I have a relatively simple return, but editing stock sales was extremely tedious and I was constantly upsold on random products when I just wanted to go to the e-file page.