There was an article on the projected growth of the middle class in china. If that was to hold, it would support the point.
If everyone gets some linear growth to their income, those at the bottom get the most %. So the pie shifts down. If its about leveraging existing capital, then more capital means more for you and the pie shifts up.
My guess is its that smart phones are more valuable than the raw materials, or more valuable than a tv, a land line phone, and a hand radio are individually. So not that there are more, that they are more valuable objects.
Still, there were cell phones in the 90s. Are the current smartphones that much more valuable than those early mobiles? Remember we are talking about 2 orders of magnitude here.
There were also PCs, and with Word Perfect and Lotus 123 you could do almost everything you do today with the latest office suite. At least almost everything of what the average user knows how to do.
Sure, you could easily upzone and fit 4 to 5 times as many people into the city.
Not so easy to upgrade the infrastructure (transit and otherwise) to handle 4-5 times as many people living in (and traveling out of and back into) the city, OTOH.
And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
> Not so easy to upgrade the infrastructure (transit and otherwise) to handle 4-5 times as many people living in (and traveling out of and back into) the city, OTOH.
Actually, this is the part where cities shine: infrastructure costs in cities are lower per-person than they are in suburbs. It's much more efficient to have a dense enough city that people can reasonably get around on foot or bike, for instance, than a suburb that requires driving everywhere. It puts way less wear and tear on the roads and requires fewer of them.
The suburban cul-de-sac generates traffic by making everyone take the same big roads. Cities can redirect traffic in any number of ways given a well-connected road network. With a mix of uses the need for heavy infrastructure decreases, as many trips that might in the suburbs require a car merely require a body healthy enough to move. Less driving can actually save lives, given how dangerous driving is. And those who drive in cities are probably less likely to die, given that speeds are much lower.
In large cities, transit becomes more efficient than building highways. For example, the DC Metro just got an expansion for ~$3 billion. Meanwhile, a single highway interchange in Virginia was redone with a cost of $.25 billion. A railroad can move way more people than 12 interchanges.
> And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
You've got lower infrastructure costs per-person than if 1x the people lived in the city and the other 3x-4x people lived in the suburbs, ultimately saving money. A lot of suburbs are long-term financially unstable as growth occurs because their infrastructure costs grow faster than economic growth grows the tax base to pay for said infrastructure.
Loudon County, Virginia, for instance, has drastically lowered its willingness to approve single family housing because it's realized that each new SFH actually gets a large net tax subsidy unless its value is above a certain threshold. More SFHs = budget death.
Apart from infrastructure cost savings due to the economy of scale, the other huge benefit is actually to economic growth: denser cities are more economically productive than less dense cities. In cities with good human capital, the effect is even stronger with higher density.
It's easy to see why this might be. For starters, for people and jobs in a given area means every person has access to more jobs than they would otherwise. In a spread out region, more jobs would be outside of reasonable commuting distance, meaning a good portion of workers would not be willing to take the jobs, due either to time or cost concerns (especially for the poor who will be less likely to afford a car, bus / train fare, etc.).
So yeah, the benefits are large. We founded cities for a reason thousands of years ago.
Have you tried asking people living in those homes about your "easy" plan? The one that would involve them living somewhere else for a couple of years during construction and then moving back to a smaller, less appealing place? As I said, San Francisco residents mostly seem pretty happy where they are.
Now some might _choose_ to move because they could sell their single-family home for a much higher price to someone who would then build a multifamily building on the lot. But that's obviously their business.
But to the main point of your argument, about happiness: it's a general truism that people in low-density-zoned areas are happy there and oppose any sort of upzoning anywhere nearby. Upzoning nearby but not on their actual lot is particularly bad, because it would reduce the value of their real estate; people fight _that_ tooth and nail.
The result is that everyone who is already there is fine; it's people who are trying to enter the market, either via moving to the area or by growing up and trying to move out of their parents' house, who get screwed. But since by and large those people don't vote (the young for demographic reasons; the not-yet-residents because they're not yet residents), it's the incument residents who get to control the zoning rules to their exclusive (perceived, at least) benefit.
Which is all fine, but then prices get out of hand and people panic and start introducing things like rent control and whatnot, which makes prices get even more out of hand anytime someone actually moves. And then we see the current San Francisco real estate market.
People don't fight upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate; in fact, it almost always does the opposite.
People fight upzoning because they like where they live, and upzoning would destroy what they like about it.
As for "people trying to enter the market", upzoning makes it that much harder; condos are generally a worse investment, so most high-density developments are rentals. If you think housing prices are high, try the cost of a buying a rental building.
Lastly, the "incumbent residents" bit is hilarious. I believe that's called "a citizen", or "a community member" -- as in, the people who are paying the taxes and electing representative leadership to serve in the interests of their established community.
> People don't fight upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate
You didn't read what I said carefully enough. People fight _nearby_ upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate. Upzoning of their actual land increases its value, of course.
Agreed on people fighting upzoning of their own land because it would change the surroundings in a way they find undesirable.
By "people trying to enter the market", I mean the housing market, not the real estate purchase market. That is, people trying to find a place to live. It's quite rare for people first moving out of their parents' house to do so by buying a house themselves; they typically rent. The result is that there are tons of places in the US (including San Francisco) where people have to move far away from their relatives when they move out on their own because there is nowhere nearby that is a viable place to live.
As for that last.... that's true if you exclude the interests of the children of the community (which are nearly always excluded; once the kids finish college they're on their own and typically shut out of the community). It's also true if you ignore the fact that some of these communities (and the Bay Area is particularly bad about it) try to create lots of employment opportunities but without the corresponding housing. This leads to hellish commutes for everyone, including the members of the community in question, lots of complaining, and poorer quality of life than you would have otherwise.
There are some unpleasant tradeoffs here, for sure. The problem is that some people refuse to acknowledge that the tradeoffs even exist and to discuss what the right tradeoff is. They insist that nothing must ever change, period, and it never occurs to them that this means that their commute will suck more and more and their kids will not be able to live near them.
Note that I say this as someone who lives in a suburb. I like it here. I would not be terribly happy with upzoning myself. And yet I'm watching a lot of the resulting problems play out (including people who grew up in the town being completely priced out of it). It's not pretty, and upzoning sure would help some of those problems.
Several of the people I know living in the western half of the city are living with 3–4 roommates in one single-family house, because they can’t afford separate apartments. Because they have rent control, they can continue to afford to stay in places where rents have doubled in the last few years, but they can’t afford to move to a new place, and might have to leave the city entirely to e.g. get married and start a family. Some of them don’t drive, so the excessive parking requirements are useless, but are constantly and bitterly complaining about how slow and unreliable the Muni buses are (the ones who drive complain about traffic congestion instead).
Many such people would be pretty happy to have an independent one bedroom apartment in a 5 story building in the same neighborhood at a similar price, assuming some improved transit.
I agree they would be pretty happy to have apartments. But even they wouldn't be happy to be kicked out of their current place now so that in two years some entirely different people could have 1-bedroom apartments on the land where they once lived. And that's not even considering the current owners or all the neighbors. Your friends are likely to be new arrivals, and so have little connection to the people around them. But for many people living out there, those are their childhood homes, and their neighbors are important parts of their lives.
Personally, I also think a lot of land west of Twin Peaks is underutilized. But I think it's important for people not to be glib about the fact that a lot of the people living there think it's just fine, and that even for those who want something different we're talking about incredibly disruptive and expensive change.
One, I don't think asking for some modest thought and compassion in the face of glib, facile plans is the exact problem SF has. But thanks for sharing your feelings so dramatically; I hope it was cathartic for you.
And two, I think things are working out reasonably well for SF. The US has a history of absolutely terrible attempts at grand redevelopment. Read up on our "urban renewal" waves, for example. San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy, and I think it would be monumentally dumb to let another bubble lead to big "solutions" to problems that are transitory.
If you and others would like to indulge that third-world dictator tendency to dramatic urban planning, might I suggest finding someplace else in the Bay Area? San Francisco is less than 1% of the land; there's no particular reason to do it here. Or, better, show us how it's done in, say, Texas, which has plenty of space to develop that nobody is currently occupying.
> San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy
If you think that then I have a bridge to sell you. A nice International Orange one.
SF is a hive of planning idiocy, from dumb height laws, to 1:1 parking requirements, to terrible permit application processes. It's practically a model for planning idiocy at this point.
You do realize that "that sort" restricts the meaning of "urban planning idiocy" to the kind I mentioned in the previous sentence, right?
Assuming you do, then I guess this is just more spleen venting. Anonymous spleen venting of course; I imagine you wouldn't act this way in person: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
I agree, and the maddening thing for me is that my fellow people in the tech industry so rarely say, "Why yes, we are the problem. What can we do about it?"
Thinking the tech industry is the problem is pretty much like saying you get a cold because you go out in cold weather.
It's not true, but it sounds right if you don't look too close.
The tech industry isn't the cause of anything but growth. Growth isn't bad. Growth is totally manageable. It's not like these issues magically showed up in the tech boom of the 90s - it just made them worse.
However what DID cause this: bad urban planning, lack of ability to change, being systemically unable to fix the housing issues over the last 40 years.
Plenty of places cope with growth periods better than SF, but SF doesn't want to cope with them: it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It can't, but it's been trying for a long time and failing horribly.
This is not a new development. It's not a new problem. The solutions have been the same for a long time but no-one wants to change to fix them.
Growth isn't necessarily bad, but neither is it necessarily good. Some growth is manageable; some isn't.
It appears we both agree that rapid growth is a proximate cause of the problem, and the tech industry is the main cause of that rapid growth. Where we differ is that you think a bunch of other people should immediately change to accommodate you, while you simultaneously refuse to acknowledge their perspective, which is that their previous system was working well enough for them until tech people came along in overwhelming numbers. And that maybe they were perfectly happy with how things are, and feel no particular need to change to suit you.
The rest looks like dickish handwaving to me. If you'd like to just keep yelling at people, stop bugging me. If you'd like to have an actual discussion, then start behaving respectfully.
> Were you even in SF 15 years ago, when the .com bubble popped and housing prices returned to a degree of sanity?
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
Shadowsocks for iOS
Notice: This version is deprecated. Please wait for iOS 9's new VPN API
Features
Shadowsocks is a cross-platform tunnel proxy which can help you get through firewalls.
This iOS version is for non-jailbroken devices. It has two features.
A web browser with all the traffic going through a Shadowsocks proxy
A background global proxy, with some restrictions
Install
Available on the App Store
Please visit the App Store.
As a web browser
Shadowsocks works as a multi-tab web browser. It's really easy to use.
Tap the + button to open menu.
Tap Settings to configure Shadowsocks proxy settings.
Tap New Tab to open a new Tab. Tap URL field on the top to input URL.
Swipe a tab to scroll the tabs. Hold and press a tab to swap tabs.
If you've changed Proxy Mode, a restart is needed to take effect. (Kill the app, then open the app again).
As a global proxy
Shadowsocks works as a background global PAC proxy, with some restrictions.
Only works with Wi-Fi network. But we are working on the cellular network.
Only works for a few minutes. Due to iOS restrictions, Shadowsocks can't keep running in the background. It's killed after you leave it for a while. To keep it running for an extended period of time, you have to come back to the Shadowsocks app every few minutes.
So it's a little tricky to use global proxy.
Set up proxy settings in shadowsocks.
Copy this link http://127.0.0.1:8090/proxy.pac
Open iOS Settings -> Wi-Fi -> i icon on the right of your connected Wi-Fi -> HTTP Proxy. Choose Auto, paste the link in the URL field. Tap back.
Other apps now go through the proxy. If they don't, kill and restart them.
Come back every few minutes to keep Shadowsocks running in the background.
Exactly that. The argument you get against this is that you could say sell your vote and verify to a 3rd party you voted as asked. But frankly I think that is not nearly as bad as hidden vote tampering. Not even close.
Worse than selling votes is coercing votes. Being fired because you didn't vote the way the boss likes? Terrible. Verifying votes this way turns a secret ballot into an open ballot, with all the attendant problems.
Hidden vote tampering of the pencil-under-the-fingernail variety is a solved problem here in Australia. Each vote count is done by an employee of the electoral commission. They're watched by volunteer scrutineers (plural), provided by the major parties, with each scrutineer looking to maximise their own party's response and distrusting all other parties. You effectively have two opposing meatspace inspectors willing to challenge anything that looks shady.
Paper voting isn't perfect, but it's far, far better than any electronic voting system that the general public can use.
EDIT: to clarify, with any electronic medium, the only way to confirm that your vote was counted as cast is to cryptographically sign it in some way with a key that's under your control. Even us techies have problems doing that, and the general public could never be expected to do it, especially the socially disadvantaged members. Not even security conference attendees keep up to speed with their cryptographic signing, so how can we expect mere mortals to do it?
With paper votes, you confirm that your vote goes into the box as you've marked it. You can then opt to be a scrutineer and watch that box travel to the counting area, and confirm the votes are counted correctly. And has the benefit of having the record independently verified if required.
Any form of voting which has a "just trust us on this" stage is not good enough.
I don't think there is anyway the technology doesn't get used. The only option is going to be transparency and openness in the data collected so it becomes harder to hide abuse. Privacy will be what dies.
Im going to go with the in 50 years if you cant code on some level you will be seen as mildly illiterate. Coding will be core to nearly all jobs. There will still be people writing software as software engineers, but around the edges it will be specialists in a discipline writing code to extend the core software to do what they need.
Really, its just taking how many people use excel and growing that up. With technical improvements like simpler to code languages, more predictable API expectations (that is they all tend to work the same as a convention), and general maturity of software as a idea (its not old by any standard). Along with social expectations of what you need to be able to do. Today its use excel, a generation or 2 it will be basic coding.
If you're saying some jobs that today require "Excel" will require "Excel with VBA", sure. But I'm skeptical that programming will become some sort of new literacy. It seems to me that programming has narrower applicability than, say, high school math. Still, most non-programmers seem to forget their high school math, and they get by just fine in careers where numeracy would be useful from time to time, but is just not essential. No one considers them illiterate.
If everyone gets some linear growth to their income, those at the bottom get the most %. So the pie shifts down. If its about leveraging existing capital, then more capital means more for you and the pie shifts up.