wallacrw

I think you’re onto something here with people thinking they know a lot, but isn’t the real issue anonymous internet posting? Having to take zero responsibility for sharing ideas has ruined intelligent discourse society-wide: Web 2.0, then social media, turned out to be the beginning of the end of experts having credibility. Journalists, scientists, all experts became demonized by persuasive bots or anonymous internet posters. Instead of a world of democratized intelligence as promised, we got a world of “anyone’s opinion is valid, and I don’t even need to know their credentials or who they are.” If we forced everyone to have to stand by everything they said online on every forum, we’d have a lot fewer strong opinions and conspiracies, IMO. People (voters) would be thinking a lot harder about their ideas and seeing a lot fewer validations of the extreme parts of themselves.

Lol classic cyclist comment

So many excellent plots for a great sci fi series here. Who is writing the newest ones? No references pre ChatGPT please; I want the (human) author who is taking these latest concepts, capabilities and fears and turning them into a better Ex Machina. Maybe it's still too new, novels take a while, etc but someone has to be working on it...

This is what I'm talking about, today in the WSJ:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-counties-are-booming-pand...

I hear on you social connections, which is why this must be a coordinated effort. Moving slowly in will not be that appealing, but having everything set up ahead of time and then moving en masse would work.

RE: politics, the governorship isn't elected by land. Take out the governor and you can fix political gerrymandering (or wield it to your benefit).

End of the day, the vision as I see it isn't to build a new city or to make a small town feel like a city. It's to enjoy the benefits of large plots of land and large houses, but to do so with a modern, youthful population and great restaurants and entertainment.

I'm envisioning Bend, OR but all across the country. Or Los Alamos, etc, the examples above. These towns didn't happen by accident. Someone had a plan, and then a tipping point was reached that cemented the place as a modern small town.

That can be reverse engineered and purposefully carried out. Not saying it's easy, but it's 100% doable. And I want to know who's trying, because I want to help.

Serenbe is a very cool example, thank you. Do you know of any others?

I definitely think local political pushback is one of the potential challenges. But I will also admit that part of the plan would be to move in enough people to gain political control.

It's a very viable, legal political strategy to ship 60k families into a new urban enclave in Wyoming or Montana and thereby turn it blue. 120k blue votes would do it.

I honestly thought that was Amazon's plan with HQ2, which is what made me think of it. A company the size of Amazon could create that many great jobs in one of these states in a single election year. If they paired it with tasteful property development, I would be shocked if a good chunk of their Seattle employees didn't swarm the new town.

But let's assume that:

1 - no existing large company will do this. Patagonia or similar could, but most don't wade this deeply into politics.

2 - locals would dislike it but would also get rich selling their land. So this is not hostile to them, and we don't need to obsess over their feelings too much. It's just capitalism.

Seems to me a better mechanism would be to assemble the interest, then collect the money, and then buy the plot of land. You wouldn't want to project too much ahead of time for fear of scaring or intimidating. But once you secured the land, assuming you could still subdivide it and develop it (ie, assuming local politicians didn't stop you first), you could sell it off, get the new residents registered and you're done. You just took over.

This could sound too premeditated, but developers wielding local laws in unexpected ways to their economic advantage is nothing new. See Robert Moses.

I think a DAO should be the next Robert Moses, only not racist and focused on making all of the gorgeous land in this country habitable for young people. This is a massive country. The only reason we all huddle in cities is because the rest of it is so left behind that we don't want to help it anymore.

BTW, I don't think there's much difference between taking over a town and starting a new one. You start a new one and the neighboring towns plus the county will still freak out. It's in your best interest to control local politics, ideally all the way to the governor, either way.

The "small town vibe" is what holds back the value. It's undesirable to modern young people to not have a vibrant creative atmosphere. Obviously this is a generalization but it's clearly true on average. That's bad for the town no matter which way you look at it -- top young talent leaves at first opportunity, so no companies invest because no ambitious talent pool, so no dollars flow through local economy, and it becomes a death spiral. Don't pretend like locals want this.

If the town has great real estate, someone should help it find its maximum value. Sure some locals will claim to dislike the change, sort of like those old SFers that complain about the good ol days of Haight Ashbury. But they did OK if they owned. And this is what capitalism is all about -- if it's empirically good, it gets bid up with higher prices.

To pretend like small towns have precious virtue on their own or want to shun value appreciation is naive.

Small town home owners should love to find out young people moved in and made their home worth millions. They can cash out and go hide somewhere forgotten if they really want. Either way, if they pretend they have some right to not have their land value improved, they misunderstand how capitalism in America works.

LOL nearly everyone. The term has negative connotations but technically it refers to "a person who follows the latest trends and fashions."

Traditionalists, people with bad taste, or generally uncurious folks don't motivate large amounts of people to change behavior. But large groups of young people trying new things and inventing new experiences do.

SF, NYC, LA, even Miami real estate booms are all because of hipsters. Young creative people make the place interesting, then richer but more boring people crash the party and bid up prices. It gets too expensive for young creatives eventually so they leave, and then the cycle repeats.

Geography on its own isn't enough. NYC was a disaster in the 70s; only when the young people started moving back did it become desirable, hence valuable.

So you need hipsters. Without them, the place you live is just a boring bedroom community. Could be anywhere, likely not valuable.

Wealthy? Sure. Fashionable? LOL.

I've always wondered -- if I used this on the board room window to listen into public company earnings meetings, is that inside information? Technically, the information is "public" in that anyone could do what I'm doing...

Still a shithole -- https://memes.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/57b0057d-268a-48dd-b4e5-c...

From 2002: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2354135.stm

Referenced here: https://slate.com/technology/2012/09/avacore-technologies-ma...

What scooter did you buy? Where? (I've tried briefly to find the model Bird uses but couldn't)

And yet, the moment you want to move any of those resources from one place to another, you must deal with the US Navy, which, without meaningful resistance, can control all global shipping lanes at will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers#Numb...

When it comes to limiting moves, no country has the ability that the US does.

Crunchy tacos. All day long. I don't care where it's from, it's genius.

Anecdotally, my sense as a Santa Monica local is that the helmet requirement is no longer being enforced in Santa Monica. I've ridden by cops several times in the last few days, no issues.

So I think it has somehow been negotiated with the authorities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7t5rV4J8Q

Just sayin.

The search engine would have to be the NLP and information retrieval that's turning the requests into actions or answers.

Which is why I'll now plug the company I work for, MindMeld, since (i) we do that better than Wit and (ii) we are not feeding our data to an advertising team.

Correct.

Accuracy and information retrieval.

The best systems--Siri, Google Now--have 95%+ ASR accuracy AND can find the right answer among millions of possibilities once they've broken down the utterance.

Combining human-like ASR & NLP with super accurate search capabilities is hard.

There's also MindMeld--https://expectlabs.com/docs

With Alexa, you have to bet on Amazon winning the IoT game. Amazon is great at ecommerce (mostly because they don't care about making money), but it's not clear they're great at platforms.

But if all you want is the functionality of an Echo that you can customize, then go with a well-funded startup staffed by some of the best AI engineers in the world offering similar and often better capabilities, and build your own so you can integrate it wherever you want.

That's MindMeld.

False. Your influence as a voter is much greater at the state and local level than the federal level. On an individual basis, you have much more freedom to make your own choices and have them honored if the vote is left to your state or local government.

This is pretty simple to do on your own. And although I appreciate the idea of charging folks who don't want the hassle of building something themselves, some might want more control: http://tonylea.com/go/examples/jquery-exit-popup/#

Built by Prolific Interactive (prolificinteractive.com) for Udacity. :)

Exactly

This perspective asks too much of everyone. If I want to make an intro to you, it's because I think it's helpful. It's the opposite of disrespect.

To then place the additional burden on me of checking in with you first is, in my mind, just cocky. Not my job to know your schedule, and how about respecting the fact that I'm trying to help?

People who insist on pre-introductions are vastly overestimating how much others should be thinking about them or "respecting their time," which is actually no one else's business. Responsible adults can handle the additional burden of someone trying to help.

I disagree with this in 9/10 cases. If you're so busy you can't take 15 minutes to chat with someone who comes from outside your network, you're doing something wrong. Get over yourself, take the intro and try to be classy about it.

The 1/10 case would be intros to people who are either in a position where they likely receive dozens of emails from folks they don't know every day (e.g., VCs) or folks with enough name recognition to be in that same spot (e.g., famous people you might know).

You might jeopardize your relationship with the person in that case, but for most of your friends and pretty much anyone reading this comment, you're better off being open instead of self-important.

That's funny, I guess this really is an issue for people. I just don't see why folks have such a hard time managing their time and/or focus.

I've been most impressed when people, no matter how busy/famous/rich/etc they are, still manage to stay calm and take responsibility for their workload. At the end of the day, the burden to handle their focus rests with them, not others.

Saying to people who might want to help you, "hey, check in with me before you help me" basically asks those people to be your secretary. It's not really my business to know how busy other people are or whether they have the time to take a meeting.

My thinking in sending an intro wasn't "how burdensome will this be for him?" but rather "this is going to be really helpful for him." Maybe you'd argue I should have been thinking the former, but I trust that grown adults can handle themselves, and their schedules, well enough to not need my patronizing concern about whether they can manage meeting someone new. Particularly if their title is "Head of BD."

Definitely a fair point...I considered making light of that in the post, but I couldn't do it concisely.

One of the most fascinating articles I've read in a long time.