I agree, outside of the AI bubble, there's a lot of wait-and-see happening in the B2B world right now, I'd say we're currently 6-8 months into that 14 months.
3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.
Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].
But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.
The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards.
In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).
It is harder but I also find that a poor excuse for not improving streets and infrastructure because it can be done and the taxes scale faster than costs. But people and politicians are short sighted and rather kick that can down the road either to make them look good from good financials or to leave enough money on the table for a bit of corruption.
Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal.
Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.
And zoning didn't exist then. Zoning was created purely to keep black people out of neighborhoods. The first zoning attempts were entirely race based - SCOTUS overturned them in 1918. The same group came back and recreated zoning to keep apartment buildings out of white neighborhoods. The funny part? "Single family" zoning explicitly targeted black families, who didn't have the wealth for a house, and would buy larger houses as a two or three family collective.
Industrial zoning came much later, as a post hoc justification, long after that was an issue.
Just to stress that the world is larger than the US. Zoning exists pretty much everywhere and the reasons for its introduction were diverse and mostly about quality yof life, citizen health, or city esthetics (keeping polluting businesses out).I have no view on whether what you're saying is true for the US, it is however definitely false for most other places.
Not really. Similarly to humans, it's easier to write code than read it; LLMs aren't particularly less efficient at doing off the cuff tasks vs reading in all of the tokens of documentation for a specific tool (assuming you did the legwork of manually feeding that tool to the LLM, which makes it less efficient for you) and then coming up with a solution. And that argument would only apply if there were custom tools for each of the infinite possible tasks, which there aren't.
From what I understand, more air pollution and noise than a normal data center. A data center that's run off of grid power has about the same local environmental impact as a warehouse (but with basically no road traffic). The Colossi are run off of natural gas turbine generators, so like the GP said, it's more like living near an airport than living by a light industrial park.
UBI is an "entitlement". Just look at how well a certain slice of the powerful view other "entitlements" like Obamacare or Social Security.
I like the idea of UBI, but the biggest problem with UBI is that it relies on the government to fund it, and the government can be controlled and subverted. UBI might go away, get held up by government shutdowns, not be indexed to inflation, etc - there's a ton of ways things that could go wrong if peoples' entire livelihoods are under the control of one entity.
The Fandango app has an option to check the seats at all the showings at a theater, so I assume AMC has something like that. There are ~600 AMC theaters in the US. Throw in some caching and you can maintain a fast, fairly fresh copy of their seating numbers. Clever!
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