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.

Last quarter advertising made up about 27% of their total revenue (digital advertising was 13% of total), according numbers in this recent article - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...

What’s more, the NY Times has a strong business interest in convincing advertisers not to advertise on Facebook. I’m a bit skeptical of anything they publish these days about Facebook, Google, and other companies that could potentially threaten their access to clicks, just given their financial incentives to weaken these companies as much as possible.

Do you think colleges wouldn't change if they were going to receive far far fewer applicants at their current sticker prices? I don't mean that to come across as snarky. I'm genuinely curious because your comment seems to be based on an assumption that colleges would not make changes to their operations or tuition if they suddenly had a hard time filling their freshman class.

Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leave would be better.

Making it harder to get a student loan is hardly "outlawing" anyone from going to college. Schools would still give scholarships. Plus, tuition would almost certainly go down. Right now they can charge as much as they want because banks are will to lend whatever colleges charge. If all of a sudden people stopped buying their product when they raised the price too high then tuition would come back down to what it was only a few decades ago.

Even if fewer people ended up going to college it wouldn't limit opportunity. If anything it would likely make it easier to get ahead. Fewer jobs would require a college degree - there wouldn't be enough applicants who have one - and we'd likely see alternatives to college become more popular and widely respected, which would give high school grads more options for how to get started with a career.

If it's technically possible then presumably it's a deliberate product choice to not have better search results for "shirt without stripes". And that seems entirely plausible.

Google is already by far the most widely used search engine, so they don't really need to innovate or improve the search product very much in order to attract and retain users. Presumably capturing more advertising spending from the companies paying for ads is a bigger priority.

Microsoft under Satya Nadella has been all about enterprise and cloud, and I doubt Bing is a strategic priority any more, so it's not surprising that they wouldn't put a lot of resources into making it better.

Amazon is a little surprising. You'd think they'd have a lot to gain from making it easier for people to find what they're looking for. But maybe less than perfect search results are deliberate? Maybe it's like how supermarkets put basic items in the back of the store and high-margin impulse buys in the front - so you have to walk past chocolates and chips if you want to buy a carton of milk.

If Amazon is deliberately nerfing search results then maybe Google would stand to benefit from having better shopping-related results - people would get frustrated trying to find a shirt without stripes on Amazon and just use Google instead, letting Google profit from advertising in the process. But maybe people selling shirts aren't willing to pay much for ads, so there isn't much money for Google to make by getting better at finding specific types of shirts.

I dunno if any of these conjectures are anywhere near accurate, but it's interesting to think about.

In some indistries, that means thousands of people without work, and hundreds of other companies in the supply chain going bankrupt, and even more people without work.

A popular counter-argument is that governments should plan to spend money on unemployment relief for individuals if it looks like a lot of big companies won’t make it. Let companies fail but cushion the blow for people affected.

I take it you’re only talking about hardware product development, right? Apple’s software product quality is pretty low. There certainly are lots of companies that far exceed Apple when it comes to software.

As for the hardware products, I think it mostly comes down to making quality a strategic priority. As a result they’re willing to spend more money and make sacrifices in other areas in order to build great high-quality hardware and a cohesive overall experience for users. For example, I suspect they deliberately de-prioritize pre-installed/default apps, like maps and email, and make hardware and integration throughout their ecosystem a higher priority. They let their apps be just good enough to keep too many people from downloading alternatives but they don’t try to make them great. People buy iPhones because they are widely seen as “the best” overall phone. Most people won’t buy a phone because of any one app, so there is no point in making any one better than good enough. So that’s one area where they allocate resources in a way that drives hardware quality.

Other smartphone makers have different strategic priorities that make them deprioritize quality. For example, some compete on low prices. Google got into the smartphone business largely for defensive reasons, and they’ve never put much focus on creating great phones. Microsoft was starting to follow Apple’s strategy, and maybe could have given them a run for their money, but they gave up pretty quickly because they could make more money elsewhere.

Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

This the the modern newspaper. Newspapers have some of the most useless, hostile web sites out there. It’s one of the biggest reasons why they’re dying. They’re squandering their brands and public trust and actively driving readers away by providing a horrifically bad product.

The article makes it sound like this is just the way “the web” is these days, like there’s some force of nature compelling newspapers to build awful products. But there isn’t. They are choosing to build their businesses around advertising networks.

It’s not fair to the web to say newspaper sites are typical or the only option. Much of the web isn’t like that though. There are plenty of blogs and web apps that are a joy to use. And there are plenty of journalism businesses that succeed without ad network revenue - e.g. The Economist, the Athletic, Daring Fireball, Stratechery.

Great write up. Can you say more about how the congressional district pork funnel works? I mean, how brazen is it? What are some examples of the kind of projects that serve little technical purpose and exist only to funnel money to a district?

How would you break up a giant social network? What lines would you cut it along?

100% agree. Facebook's restricted access was a huge driver of their early success.

People wanted to join before they were able to join.

I'd argue the more important factor was that because the early audience was so limited people felt comfortable sharing a lot more personal content than they would on the open internet - even just simple things like their real name and photo. That created much more interesting content for other people to look at, driving engagement. In the early days, when there were maybe two or three dozen schools on FB, it felt like a like a pretty small high-trust community. All of your friends from high school were on it, and their college friends, who maybe you met once or twice, but that was it - no parents, no employers, no randos. It was a very different vibe than most other social networks. I also don't think anyone thought it would be around very long. It felt like a new social network popped up as the cool new thing every few months.

I'm sure there was some aspect of pent up demand due to exclusivity, but I think the community and openness created by that exclusivity was a much bigger drover of its success.

For the last 40 years, Google would never have been challenged as a monopoly because its products were free to consumers, hence there could be no harm to them, hence no monopoly. Same for Facebook.

Google and Facebook's primary products are advertising. Things like web search, email, maps, and social networking are part of their supply chain for building their ad product. (And people who use these services are suppliers who are trading our exposure to ads in exchange for access to search, email, maps, social networking, etc.)

Google and Facebook don't give away advertising space for free, and they both have very dominant positions in a number of ad markets.

I work out of a WeWork location sometimes. I don't like the product and only work out of WeWorks because I need to for my job. I would never choose to be a "member" on my own.

Here's why I'm not a fan: The interiors are cheesey, badly designed, and generally seem poorly built (things are janky and break way too easily). It's often hard to find a good place to work in the common areas - pop music is blasting in the main common areas and the few phone booths and quiet corners are often full (people sometimes just work in phone booths, which is annoying). The fact that you have to pay to use conference rooms (at least with my company's contract) and you have to pay for granola bars and other snacks feels kinda nickel-and-dimey. (There is free coffee, and free beer but during the workday I'm not usually looking to drink a pint.) Also there's a theme of forced happiness everywhere (the mugs all say "do what you love" or "always half full"), which feels at best like vapid corporate fluff and at worst kinda cult-like, but either way it's mildly off-putting. Finally, they often invite salespeople from different companies to set up tables in the common area to sell/advertise random stuff, which isn't that big a deal but monetizing their tenants' attention during their work day kinda seems at odds with "building a community" and "elevating consciousness" and all.

I like the concept of a global coworking space network. I'm just not a fan of WeWork's implementation.

My bet is that in ten years WeWork will end up a bit like Groupon is today - still going, but far from the world-changing force they were once hyped to be. Of course, a lot of weird stuff can happen and maybe they'll end up dominating the worlwide office market, or maybe they'll flame out spectacularly in a couple of years.

The optimistic case for WeWork is that they have a shot to become an extremely powerful player in the office real estate market. The idea is that they could get to a place where most big companies looking for office space would prefer to do it from WeWork because it's better than leasing directly from a building owner. And most building owners would prefer to lease their space to WeWork because it's better than trying to lease directly - after all, at this point everyone looking for office space is going to WeWork so it's tough to find companies who want to lease directly. Once they're in this position they'll be able to bully building owners into leasing to them at very favorable rates - who else are the owners going to lease to?

The idea is that WeWork can do in real estate what cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers like AWS and Azure are doing in computing. Most companies find it easier to build on AWS instead of running a data center directly. And data center hardware providers find they kind of have to accept the big cloud providers' terms because they don't have a lot of other people to sell to these days.

In order to believe this optimistic case for WeWork you have to believe that they are providing a useful abstraction on top of leasing office space the traditional way, and you have to believe that they won't face any deadly competition. Personally, I'm skeptical of both of those, but I think the best case for WeWork providing a really useful abstraction hinges on two things: 1) a secular shift in the way people work leading to highly flexible office arrangements (e.g. instantly spin up an office in Berlin, run it for two months, then shut it down) becoming much more attractive; 2) WeWork being able to structure lease terms in ways that are better for corporate accounting somehow (i.e. it's not a better product at the end of the day, but it looks better on the books). The best case for them winning out over competition comes down to them getting such a big lead in the amount of space they offer and brand recognition that nobody can challenge them - hence the rationale for burning a ton of money quickly to open as many locations as possible as soon as possible.

I'm skeptical and I'd argue WeWork is more likely to end up like MoviePass than AWS. (MoviePass had pretty much the same idea and playbook - burn money to get to scale and market power quickly then dictate terms to the suppliers who have been eating into your margins - and it didn't exactly turn out well.) But anything is possible.

tl;dr Long-term investors hope that if WeWork can achieve a dominant position in the global office market then they can increase their margins by both lowering their cost to acquire space and increasing the rents they charge. If they pull that off then they can rake in hundreds of billions of dollars and be worth trillions.

WeWork's locations are wonderful

I strongly disagree. The ones I've been to are shoddily built and badly designed. Door handles break after a few months. There are gaps in walls between offices. And bathrooms have sinks that are borderline unusable because light fixtures are in the way. Sure, everything is new, so it feels kinda fresh and nice at a glance, but I can't imagine the spaces aging well. Or, they'll have to spend money overhauling the interiors every few years.

And that doesn't even touch on their branding and design choices, which, to me at least, don't even begin make up for the cheapo low-quality interiors.