Much like the Hyperloop before it, the core assumption of the Boring company is ill-conceived. Tunnel boring isn't a bottleneck.
The costs of surveys, hvac, seismic research and maintenance required to keep a deep-underground tunnel going are much higher than cut-and-cover. So, even if tunnel boring was free, it still wouldn't make sense to prefer it over other options. There are very scenarios where deep-tunneling makes sense (dense cities, across rivers when bridges are infeasible), but they're the minority.
In most transit projects, cut-and-over is blocked not because it's a bad technical option. It's because NIMBYs refuse to permit on-the-ground disruptions or noise of any type. San Jose is the canonical example. It's a political problem, not a technical one.
I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.
It is a little bit wild that 3/5 all came from the same country. Without the partition of ‘47 - India would have by far the largest group of about 600M a full a third of the global Muslims and also at the same time be only a minority in that hypothetical country with 1.1B Hindus
University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.
I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.
The war on phonics is the canonical example.
The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.
The sad thing is that I saw that standardized tests were being blamed based on a certain ideology, when the proponents of the ideology should've realized that their own goals are better served by using standardized tests.
It shouldn't be controversial, and in some sense it isn't (in another sense it is, because people confuse themselves), that everyone should be given the opportunity to develop and perform at their full potential. I could name multiple different ideologies that oppose this in some way, though.
No, Europeans will recognize NYC's policies as normal, Zohran or not. Afterall, It's one of America's only European-ish cities.
NYC has subsidized world-class transit, rent-stabilization, high taxes and free-childcare. Pretty European.
Zohran is classic of case of 'the dose makes the poison'. Instead of subsidized buses, he wants free buses. Instead of rent-stabilization, he wants rent freezes. He wants to increase an already high tax rate in a city that's bleeding billionaires to Florida. NYC spends an eye-watering billion dollars on child-care subsidies, and Zohran's intended expansion will add billions more in costs.
NYC has European public services with American over-regulation. It would be untenable unless it were the world's richest city. Thankfully, it is the world's richest city. But, that doesn't mean that NYC's systems are efficient. It means that the city hopes to get away with policies (some forcefully imposed on it by the state) that no other place would because it assumes the money train will never end.
NYC is better run than American suburbia and California. But, NYC doesn't have California's infinite money glitch or the ruthless demographic segregation of suburbs. So, efficiencies must be found in policy making.
I think Abundance does a good job of summarizing the problems (over-regulation) and suggesting solutions (de-regulation). But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
> But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
Not sure why you make that assumption. In fact, I live in NYC and that's exactly where I see the abundance vs dem-soc tensions. This includes friends who were early canvassers for Zohran. It includes Zohran's loudest public supporters such as Mehdi Hasan and Hasan Piker. I have listened to hours of long-form interviews by Zohran. I am admittedly a sceptic, but I have earned my right to this skepticism.
I know that Mamdani is more than the 4 policies he's championed as part of his social media campaign. But, he has championed those 4 policies a disproportionate amount - free buses, free childcare, freeze rent, raise taxes. A man must be judged by what he says. I judge him by what he says the loudest.
______
For your side rant, I don't agree. New builds in gentrified neighborhoods aren't perfect, but they're significantly better than the brick kilns that came before them. I've crashed at friends houses in Gowanus before the gentrification boom, and it was miserable.
Williamsburg & Bushwick should be seen as a triumph. It went from a dilapidated industrial zone where my friends dad 'got beat up by gang members when he was growing up' and now it is the thriving center of the American hipster movement. Domino Park is triumph. It is noticeably better maintained than parks elsewhere in NYC, and that's thanks to the public-private partnerships.
New build units aren't affordable because those are the only new builds coming up. When supply is low, there is no govt intervention that can give a good outcome to the majority. If those builds hadn't come up, prices would've gone up further in other places or worse, people would have moved out of the city. It's a math problem. People need homes. There aren't enough homes.
That's the whole point of abundance.
There is no such thing as an affordable & scarce resource. It doesn't matter is the scarcity comes from over-regulation or impractical building costs. You can artificially make it affordable by rationing it to the lucky few. But, its limited availability means that a small group gets all the benefits (see classical rent control in NYC) while the majority in the same socio-economic class is left subsidizing their life style.
I can give real examples.
Take Chicago for instance. New affordable housing is more expensive than market rate housing due to over-regulation. [1]
Take Austin. It reduced regulation and zoning rules. Rents went down. [2]
Take Amsterdam, Rent control has taken a bulk of apartments off the housing market, making new builds eye-wateringly expensive. [3]
I concede that Mamdani may still endorse a de-regulatory policies. However, the left has historically leaned pro-regulation. I will maintain this prior until proven wrong. I desperately want to be proven wrong, because I want to continue living in NYC. If Mamdani had gone around saying Rezone, Deregulate and Build, then I would have expressed confidence. But he has been quite evasive about these policies when asked by various interviewers over hours of listening to him.
Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].
Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:
> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.
> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.
> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.
> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.
> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.
In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. That's practically their whole life. It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment. You aren't family. But, you can be comrades. Your friendships can be forged through shared struggles, shared spaces and convenience.
It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. Other industries have layoffs, politics and capitalistic competition. That doesn't stop coworkers from becoming friends.
The new generation is more isolated than ever before. The workplace is one of the few remaining mandatory social spaces. We should encourage the organic warmth that builds up between coworkers. It's cliche. But we're social animals.
> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers.
I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.
The problem is the lack of "everyday" socializing, and commute is the cause of that. In ye olde heavy industry days, workers lived relatively near to their workplace, and often gathered for a beer after work - just visit any of the old heavy industry towns here in the Ruhrpott, there's so damn many pubs situated closely to the mines, pits and smelters. That also was the prerequisite for why and how unions got popular - the employer could ban unions from entering the workplace itself, but they could not restrict political activity on third party places such as beer halls.
Today, all of that is gone. Average commute times tend to be measured in hours, so with regular "overtime" you're looking at 12 hours of being away from home for work purposes - eight hours of working , two hours of commute, one hour of lunch break, one hour of overtime. And on top of that, work is condensed ever more by everything being tracked, can't even take a piss any more as a call center worker before the supervisor gets a notification that you haven't picked up a call in 60 seconds.
Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
> But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good?
Yes, it's good. The US seems to have either massively spaced out single family housing, or high density skyscrapers. That's not good.
Most other part of the world, and even older US cities before the urban sprawl started, have reasonable densities where you share a wall or a ceiling/floor with only one other family, or not that many. It's sociable, especially if the housing offers a third space (such as a shared green or a courtyard), and the density is such that amenities are no more than a few minutes walk.
So many neighborhoods could be fixed by adding front/backyard ADUs, converting a handful of houses into commercial amenities tuned for the local community (cafes, small convenience/grocery stores, small libraries/coworking spaces, with minimal parking), and car-inaccessible passthroughs to nearby neighborhoods. There's way too much of a focus on building walkable communities, and not enough on converting existing ones with these small changes that don't disrupt the character in the way huge developments might (and in some cases might lend character to cookie-cutter sprawl that has none).
The problem is, converting an existing setup isn't easy. You just can't go and tear down houses that you got by using eminent domain - you need to either pony up a metric shit ton of money or you need to wait decades, no one will grant eminent domain to build a cafe and convenience store.
And even if you'd manage to acquire the property, you'd need to deal with zoning accomodation to allow non-residential use and that's where the NIMBYs will seriously throw wrenches wherever they can because it will mess with their property values.
Building from scratch doesn't have any of these associated efforts.
NIMBYs make new developments difficult to produce, too, actually, and for similar reasons: zoning and environmental laws. New developments also cost more, because you're putting in all-new infrastructure, whereas many old communities are approaching their replacement dates for water and sewer and whatnot anyway. You might as well get the most bang for your buck by introducing more avenues for generating property taxes (ADUs, subdivided lots, and especially commercial establishments).
Also, you don't need to tear anything down. Small neighborhood-use commercial establishments can be converted from existing housing.
This is a small neighbourhood. There are all types of houses there. To your right is half of a regular semi-detached house having become a small pub, and its garage is a barbershop. The other half is still a normal house.
To your left, the two end houses on a terrace are joined to make a shop.
It adds immediate value to the neighbourhood, as the people who live there need walk no more than a few steps to get their milk and bread, to enjoy some social company in the evening, or to get their hair cut.
You'll also notice the density is nothing like US suburban houses with their masses of space all around each one. And if you travel a little further down the road, you'll see there are more shops not that far away!
Planning permission is handled by the local council, but it is mostly standardised. This would be conversion of usage class C3 (normal house) to A1 (shop) or A4 (pub). Councils have a list of things they're allowed to consider in planning applications (and solicit comments from the public for 21 days), called Material Considerations, and things they're not allowed to consider.
For example, they are allowed to consider traffic and parking, appearance of the area, noise and disturbance, loss of sunlight or daylight, etc. But they are not allowed to consider the effect on business or property values, or the reputation of the applicant.
And the best part is that we don't even need to get this dense. Americans love our greenery, and there's space for that, just not multi-square-mile neighborhoods with NO commerce and housing only a few hundred (or a few dozen!) families. This is where planning IS helpful: identifying places to keep green-space, while also filling in dead-space.
Increasing density within the core allows people to switch to walking, cycling and transit. It reduces road traffic and those who want to commute from the burbs gain a faster commute. New housing isn't zero sum. Increasing housing in the core doesn't reduce housing in the outskirts.
The new Caltrains are a good model for transit as a valid mode for suburban commuting. A table, chair and wifi allows commuting to be a productive period to get work done. Boston's commuter rail & NYC's LIRR routes are also excellent, though they could use technological (wifi, charging, tables) upgrades. It doesn't make the commute shorter, but allows you to leave early and continue work on the train.
Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing?
Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles.
Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric.
I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
> Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested.
It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
> It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there.
This is exactly what's needed. People should stop trying to convince others that they should be forced out of their homes and into high density apartment complexes where no one drives and instead demonstrate an alternative to having private homes and backyards that's actually more attractive. If it's actually better, people will go there naturally and demand more developments like it.
Exactly! And the funny part is, this exact thing is what’s being done on a small scale, and there are a ton of willing buyers for those developments. The main problem is that, due to the massive supply constraints imposed by urban NIMBYs, they are way too expensive for most Americans to afford living in, so the whole thing is just a nonstarter for most. Sure I’d love to live on the cutest walkable street in Brooklyn or whatever. Those houses cost $3 million though.
I never said non-city people all need to move to cities. In fact, small towns predate automobiles by thousands of years, and are not examples of urban sprawl. Furthermore, there are examples of suburbs and small towns that are well-served by transit, don't waste land wildly, and don't force you to own a car. [1]
I'm just saying that American zoning and regional planning should be adjusted to use land better and be more focused on humans than vehicles. I'm not saying that everyone needs to live in a studio apartment, nor that the government should use eminent domain to re-develop vast swaths of land and displace people. But simple things like zoning law changes can impact the direction of the future.
You've done a lot of talking about freedom, facscism, and dictatorship of being forced to live in close quarters. I would submit that the opposite has its own aspects of this "dictatorship." For example, you are forced to buy an automobile from a corporation (and most of them sold today track your every move and sell data to insurance companies [2]). You are forced to risk personal injury to drive that vehicle on the road rather than a safer alternative like walking, biking or transit. You are forced to change your job or lifestyle or home if you ever lose the ability to drive yourself by age or disability.
You say that the non-city people will never move to the city, but that has literally already been happening in the past 20 years or so.
Finally, I will point out that cities are already making themselves more attractive in exactly the way you describe. Crime has been plummeting in the last 30 years, city streets are being reconfigured to favor livability, blight is being redeveloped, and more housing is being built. For example, downtown Cleveland, Ohio has more people living downtown now than at any point in history, since before urban flight and regional population decline ever occurred.
I would also submit the idea that it's something of a misconception that cities don't have any family-friendly housing. Sure, NYC isn't a great example, but many other cities have plenty of suitable dwellings at affordable prices. Just because they aren't square footage maxxing doesn't mean they are inadequate.
I also think that many suburbanites visualize themselves as living in "small towns" when they really live in somewhat large cities in their own right that really could be entirely traversed by walking, cycling or taking financially sustainable transit like a modest bus system if they weren't made up of haphazardly parceled off farmland with winding streets rather than an easily traversed grid that has some level of long-term planning rather than a haphazard piecemeal development plan based on which farmers are selling.
Today, nobody is really being “forced” to live in either of those environments. Anybody who doesn’t want to own a car and wants to walk everywhere and hates sprawl can live in a city - as long as that city contains a home that fits their family and budget.
It’s not the fault of the suburb people that the people who control city governments, the city dwellers themselves, continually thwart the building of housing in cities that is both suitable for families in terms of things like bedroom count, and affordable (dictated almost entirely by the amount of supply, but sadly all of those in charge seem to have failed economics class so they don’t acknowledge that fact).
Also, re:crime
SF for one still has a lot more crime than the state average by all types of crime except murder, and has more crime than its surrounding suburbs. The murder stat is nice, but I still don’t like how much Rape has gone up since 2011 in these stats. Overall the line that crime is way down across the board is not proven by long-term trends. I’m sure it is for some cities, but not all.
This is a great comment. And don't forget, small towns can be walkable too. Old small towns anyway. So it's not just cities that are dense, rather it's modern suburbs aren't dense.
But how will we ever solve this when people don't seem to care?
Definitely. Are you in the US? Here in the suburbs things are just awful. Massive houses with 1 to 2 people, massive yards, many suburbanites grow no plants at all. It's very different from both rural neighborhoods and urban neighborhoods. But suburbanites tend to like it, and recent urban sprawl decisions in my area have been approved despite voices against them. And again to your question, people aren't happy with commutes now ... to get _anywhere_ in American suburbs you have to drive constantly. It's a draining way of life, that I can't even begin to describe well.
The US has already experimented with the theory that nobody wants to live in a dense city: urban sprawl is ubiquitous and also why all of our cities have the same problems.
It would be nice to have other options more like the dense cities in other parts of the world that Americans vacation to because they are far more pleasant to be in.
One single east asian style metropolis in the US would be nice.
I strongly disagree, because that argument just becomes an attack on people's freedom of movement rather than an attack on the structural issues which led to long commutes being the least-worst option for many people.
This is evident in the way people immediately screech “induced demand!!!!1” the second anyone talks about widening a road, like the point of building _anything_ isn't for people to use it. Nobody ever says induced demand when we build houses and people want to live in them lol
If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street.
Destinations drive demand, not traffic lanes. A road can be so inadequate that the traffic makes it painful enough that might I decide to just stay home when I'd rather go somewhere, but the demand is obviously there either way. Infrastructure should enable us to do the things we want and get to the places we want to be.
I don't understand how people view making or keeping streets so shitty that many people can't or won't use them to get to where they want to go as a good thing.
> If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street.
Widening the road doesn't necessarily create demand (although it may, by making a given route more attractive to folks who would otherwise have worked/shopped/traveled elsewhere), but it does shift demand away from mass transit and towards individual vehicles.
That makes no sense because the original issue is everyone living so far from work that they never make time to gather near work with coworkers because that time is spent commuting. How they get to and from has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Have you tried walking in Houston? Everything is so far apart on a block by block level (crossing the street) and people are flying down the roads while parking gobbles up real estate everywhere.
I agree with the first sentence, but not the rest: even 4 days of work and 3 days of weekend means I am still around work friends more than I am around outside-of-work friends.
I'm also wondering if a 4 day work week would only then make it easier to work two jobs, since there will be people who don't want to be 'idle' for three days, and others who will not use that time to be more social.
There's a difference between professional warmth and "we're a family". The latter usually comes top-down, from management and is fundamentally disingenuous. It's often a self-serving way of trying to get you to treat the company as your family, while company leadership still won't hesitate to lay you off in a mass zoom meeting. It's fine to be friends with co-workers or managers, but don't let companies obscure the fundamental nature of the relationship.
That doesn't seem all that unusual for the Silicon Valley darlings. The days of FAANG employees playing table-tennis all day and heading home at 4:30 ended a while ago
Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not certain it's the company encouraging it, though. IMHO it's far more the economic realities we find ourselves in, where holding onto the same job for an extended period of time is basically, according to all casual career advice, fucking yourself over in terms of compensation.
My generation has been encouraged by this reality since we entered the workforce to change jobs every few years, because companies are so stingy with raises. If you're planning to do that, you naturally keep distance with your coworkers; they're probably leaving before you are, and even if not, you are planning to.
Companies see no value in their existing workforce and it's honestly quite self-defeating and stupid. "Losing" any worker be it to their choice, or layoffs, or whatever it might be is a genuine LOSS to your team. It's however many months or years of experience not just with code, but with your code-base, your business, and your products going out the door. The fact that so many companies lose so many good people because they simply refuse to let an employee have a bit more money is honestly mind-bending; and once they're gone, they'll happily list their job online, often with a salary range even higher than the employee they just fired wanted.
> It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment.
You're straw-manning. The person you're replying to never once mentioned being cold, let alone encouraged it.
They simply expressed a preference for companies that don't try to pretend that their mission and purpose is something other than what it is.
I've worked in tech exclusively my entire 25+ year career. And I've worked for way more companies that try to put on a front of "we're a family" than the opposite.
As someone who has worked as an employee and owned businesses (often simultaneously), I'm on board with the parent. I don't want coldness in the workplace. But I also don't want employees or co-workers who don't respect that we're here to build something that we're offering for sale on the marketplace either, least of all in a highly competitive landscape where we're under constant threat of going out of business if we don't get productivity and efficiency right.
I want my businesses to be enjoyable places to work. But at the end of the day, if I'm paying money for someone who isn't pulling their weight then I am extremely resentful of anyone who tries to get in the way of me correcting the fact that they are effectively ripping me off and, by doing so, hurting every single one of their co-workers by hurting their employer.
Succeeding in business is hard. And while there are a lot of shady businesses out there, and a lot of big corps do things we take issue with, 99.9% of businesses are making the world a better place for you to live by producing everything from the concrete that paves your sidewalks, to the shippers that get food from farm to your table. The anti-business, anti-capitalism attitudes that are so prevalent in the west are truly disturbing.
By all means be pro-worker. But there really ought not be a conflict between business and employee since, at the end of the day, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Business can't succeed without its employees, employees don't earn a cent if the business doesn't earn a profit. And lets not forget that what a business can afford is irrelevant. The business doesn't exist to employee people. It exists to produce the goods or services that it set out to in order to turn a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that. An employee that hates the profit motive is one I don't want working for me. You're hopefully profiting by being employed. Otherwise I don't know what you're doing with your life. So stop the hypocrisy and double standards. We're not a family, and we don't need to be cold to each other, but we're in this shit show together so let's act like reasonable, rational actors and do our fucking jobs so we can all take home money and feed our families and savings.
> as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders
Video game employees (programmers) are famously overworked, layoff prone and have little say in executive matters. I can't imagine how PE could make things worse.
The video game industry has been in an odd place for a while. The 2020s haven't produced many reliable AAA hits.
If ruff & uv have proved anything, it's that a tool that's effortless, a net-positive and fast will get adopted.
New typecheckers don't need to be perfect. They need to be good enough, easy to integrate and have low false positives. Sure, they will improve with time, but if feels like a pain then no one will pick it up. Python users are famously averse to tools that slow down their dev cycles, even if it means better long term stability
BasedPyright is popular because it comes built-in with Cursor and disappears into the background. I have a positive bias towards Astral figuring it out given their track record. But, none of these tools have reached the point of effortlessness just yet.
> New typecheckers don't need to be perfect. They need to be good enough, easy to integrate and have low false positives. Sure, they will improve with time, but if feels like a pain then no one will pick it up. Python users are famously averse to tools that slow down their dev cycles, even if it means better long term stability
I really don't agree. Sure, they don't need to be perfect but also keep in mind many codebases have already standardized on something like (based)pyright or mypy. So there's a migration cost. If your analysis has a lot of false positives or misses a lot of what those type checkers miss then there's little incentive to migrate. Sure, ty and pyrefly are much faster, but at the end of the day speed is only one consideration for a type checker.
Think of it this way. There are 2 groups. Group 1 has has avoided typecheckers because they're a PITA and group 2 has configured mypy/pyright despite the devx pain. Group 1 is a lot bigger than group 2. Group 2 is more lucrative per unit than group 1.
With enough time, ty and pyrefly will approach perfectness. If they're easy enough to use today, group 1 should be able to adopt them without any extra pain. (some typechecker is better than no typechecker). This gives them momentum. In couple of years, ty/pyrefly may finally be better than mypy/pyright. Then, Group 2 can start their ports.
This way, no one misses out. Group 2 still gets their perfect typechecker, just not immediately. But in that time, Group 1 is getting familiar with using typecheckers and their sheer size helps build institutional momentum towards typecheckers as an essential piece of any python dev flow.
If A. 'certain class of python problems are permanently solved by typecheckers' and B. 'every python user has some typechecker' become true, then that opens a lot of doors. Today, B is a harder problem than A. I'm guessing that compiled/JIT python will be the next frontier once python typing is solved. Wide typechecker adoption is a blocking requirement for that door to be opened.
No, I'm pretty sure they need to be perfect. If the tool's telling me bad information about types, first I'm going to lose a stupid amount of time debugging to that wrong info, and then swear off the tool forever after I realize it was the tool that was wrong.
Type checking in Python involves guessing. Take a program like
x = [3]
Should the type checker guess that the type of x is list[Any], or list[int], or list[Literal[3]], or something else? Libraries you depend on will pose more difficult versions of this question.
So it's not possible to expect the tool to be "perfect", whatever that means - usually people think of it as meaning it allows all code that they think is idiomatic and reasonable, and disallows all code that could raise a TypeError at runtime. You can only expect the tool to be reasonably good and perhaps to have an opinionated design that matches the way you would like to write Python.
Arguably it's the job of a linter and not a type checker, but if your code just assigns random things to random variables that never get used again, I hope something would point that out to you before it passes code review and merged to main,
ideally before it even gets sent for review.
Ignoring the question of why there's some random assignment to x in the first place, where are its type hints? Those were added starting with Python 3.5 via PEP 484 just over 10 years ago and have been added to since then. If our goal is maintainable code at scale, the first thing I'd expect of a type checker is for it to communicate with the user, stating that a) the variable in file foo.py on line 43 is missing a type hint and couldn't be guessed with confidence, and that it's just gonna guess it's a list[int]. For bonus points, the tool could run in interactive mode and ask the user directly. But even without a hint, assuming the variable actually is used later, how does it get used?
It seems like you'd just start with the most strict interpretation, list[Literal[3]], and relax it as it gets used. If it gets fed into a function that doesn't have hints and can't be introspected for whatever reason, relax it to list[int] and then further relax it to list[Any] as necessary. Then depending on the mode the user configured the tool to run in, print nothing, or a warning,
or error out or ask the user what to do if running interactively. Some of the config options could be strict, tolerant, and loose. Or maybe enforcing, permissive, and loose. Whatever color we want this bike shed to be.
More advanced tools let the user configure individual issues and their corresponding levels, but that may be considered too many options to give the user, overwhelming the user who then doesn't use the tool.
As far as perfect typing goes, I mean, yeah, ideally, after satisfying the type checker in strict mode, which means no types need to be guessed at, as all variables and other locations without type annotations that need them were reported, or even annotated interactively, or if we're real fancy, automatically with a comment. IMO programs should feel free to edit code directly (as a non-default option) That would mean the program could not throw an an uncaught TypeError, unexpectedly. That's a lot to ask of a dynamically strongly typed language, but I'd settle for it never being utterly wrong.
What that means is if the type checker says the function is returning a string, but of the 200 calls to that function, the type checker throws an error and says ten of those callsites expect it to return a dict, all I'm saying is this hypothetical type checker had better be right about that. Nothing worse than losing hours rooting around in the code looking for something that isn't actually there (or an errant semicolon, but this isn't C)
> Ignoring the question of why there's some random assignment to x in the first place, where are its type hints? Those were added starting with Python 3.5 via PEP 484 just over 10 years ago and have been added to since then.
The code is in a third party library which doesn't have comprehensive type hints, and perhaps has type expectations so complicated that they can't be expressed in the Python type system.
Even if you enforce type hints on every line in your internal code, you're going to be relying at some point on libraries which are reliable but poorly type hinted. If you're not using that vast ecosystem of libraries, Python probably wasn't the best choice.
Also, in the past, many tools were dumped by users for too many false positives. Tools like Astree and RV-Match got adoption by having no or low false positives.
I don't think that's an accurate metaphor. Seatbelts are expressly a runtime solution to car crashes, whereas Python's type checking is a) only done during development (not even during build), and b) completely reliant on third-party tools.
If you're looking for a car analogy, I would suggest comparing Python type checking to installing speed cameras on the factory floor.
This sounds like the typical "its good enough" argument. Say we test the breaks manually nine times of of ten. This means we get really hard to diagnose bugs because "this did work when i tested locally". And users get more runtime errors because of half-assed development.
Type systems should be treated like maths, its either correct, or not. In the end, a typesystem is basically just that, its math behind the scenes, more specifically a genre of maths called category theory.
It's not just gambling. Influencer and VC culture incentivize this same 'hit it big or die trying' ethos. I have seen '5 million is too little to retire on' type of messaging on HN too. The only way to save more than that is to take on an irrational amount of risk (ie. Gamble).
For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can vanish under your feet at any moment. (SWE jobs in particular are feeling this pressure). 2nd, Social media has raised the goalposts on the idea of a good life. Lastly, Nimbys and opaque healthcare policy have put the lowest (and most quantifiable) aspects of Maslow's pyramid out of reach. (Safety needs)
Gambling is a symptom. Nowdays, people don't invest in good bonds because there is no such thing. Similarly, people don't invest in steady jobs because increasingly, there is no such thing.
Housing reform, transparent healthcare and a small degree of worker protections would go a long way towards incentivizing stable decision making.
I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers.
A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under 30 have looked at the trends over their lifetime and determined that their lives are going to have so much volatility they need a massive amount of money to weather the storm.
Yeah, after doing the numbers, 5M makes sense for my generation. But of course it depends on what "financially successful" means. This isn't defined in this piece, so I defined it as "can myself for a career, save for retirement, and pay off any emergencies". My current yearly expenditures are $60k or so, so if I give a 50% buffer for taxes, savings, and emergencies funds, then take that over a career of 40 years... 3.6m dollars.
And to be fair, my expenditures are very small compared to most others. No loans, no major medical issues, single person living alone. Having a family easily triples this number and we get right on that 10m figure.
The incomes are still wonky, though. I don't know how financial success is double, but income demands are tripled.
Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol
I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials.
But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry with ups and downs (including layoffs) for a decade or so now. Paid that debt off. Lived in a high CoL city in a nice apartment. Got a nice house after 5y of saving (but not being super frugal, just savvy I'd say. e.g. drove the same 08 Civic the whole time). And now we have a baby and only one of us works at all (and the other WFHs).
We didn't get giant donations from our parents (although some reasonable college savings helped, which I am repeating for my kid). Didn't go to prestigious fancy schools. Didn't even exceptionally excel in school.
But the key was to not throw our hands up and say the system is fucked. It's waxed and waned since that 08 crisis, and not participating is the main way to have lost. So yeah, thinking insanely wrong stuff like you need 10 mil to succeed is just stupid and self sabotaging haha.
The 10MM figure might be a falsehood, but I think that you're falling for the same thing previous generations have fallen for: Assume that because it worked out for you, it will work out the same for the current generation.
I'm not sure that it's an accurate view of reality this time. And to be clear I'm older than you, so this isn't me being a doomer and throwing my hands in the air about my own future. This is me noticing that if I myself can't afford a house in my city, how is the younger generation supposed to do it? They simply can't, not after only 5yrs of savings at least. Not even if they cut down on avocado toasts.
Leading up to me buying my home, the narrative was about how expensive houses are - especially in my city (Seattle).
But now on the other side, I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
Savvy also comes into play. The most affordable decent Seattle houses then were like $750k for sub-2k sqft well outside the main parts of the city. But Tacoma had 3k sqft houses for under $600k. 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun. When we discovered this we pulled the trigger and it was the best financial decision we ever made along with going to college.
I agree it's a shame that owning in the biggest city (especially the nice parts) is hugely expensive.
> 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun
What is a "reverse commute"? Is that just going into the city at the opposite time of day from normal work?
Also, 45 minutes one day (1.5hr total) is a rather large chunk of the evening to spend in transit for "evening fun."
> I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
It's funny, I remember thinking that people buying in 2020 were nuts because none of us knew what the economy was going to do, and it turns out that those who did buy came out ahead. I cite this among friends as one of the many ways in which I feel like being cautious with money has been the wrong choice (e.g. maintain 6mo-12mo emergency fund, don't make large purchases in periods of uncertainty, etc).
45 minutes both ways to the city is just what being in the suburbs is like. I grew up outside Chicago, and that's how long it'd take to go into the city and see a game or show or museum or whatever. Usually I'm spending 6+ hours in the city (we catch an early dinner at 4 or 5 and then head back after our event at 10 or 11) so it feels worth it to me.
And yeah, that's what reverse commute means. Seattle traffic is awful if you're going where everyone else is, but Tacoma to Seattle in the evening is not busy at all.
Any anecdote will suffer from survivorship bias (and also negative anecdotes). The data on the other hand are very clear that people are not doing as well as their parents. Unless you have a theory as to why Americans simply became more lazy, etc. a starting point should sensibly be a systemic explanation.
Also, just speaking about your anecdote, let me add my own. I am also doing fine. Not particularly rich but middle class, good income, and savings for retirement. But I just got hit with compounding dental issues, which despite having the most expensive health insurance from my company that's well known for providing excellent employee benefits, it will end up costing me at least 20k out of pocket, potentially going up to 30-40k due to the need for multiple surgical procedures.
And fortunately we can manage it, but if the same issue had happened to me 5 years ago, I would basically be at the edge of my savings where even a minor unexpected cost would have put me in terrible shape, and 10 years ago I may have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, do without either suffering in pain, or pushing off the problem to be handled by even more expensive work a few years down the line, taking on expensive debt, or setting myself up for periodontal disease which leads to a whole host of issues including significantly increased risk of dementia.
Even if one is earning and saving decently, the precariousness of life in the US of A today is incredible.
I think the data shows Millenials are now doing pretty well. Ofc it's now peak earning years for them.
Funny how that works when the Millenial narrative was very similar to Gen Z's.
Sorry to hear about the dental issues. Is the issue that it isn't covered by medical insurance at all, so out of pocket max isn't at play? Because we had a baby this year and hit our OOPM and it didn't cost nearly that much.
That sort of situation is a problem in America and I wish we'd fix it. But the governing party wants to make it worse and get cheers for that.
As someone in the Gen Z age bracket, I believe that they really do have a worse economy than their parents/grandparents due to no fault of their own, and that they're also much lazier than their parents/grandparents generations.
1. Social Security and housing has turned into a huge transfer of wealth from Gen Z to the Boomer generation. I don't believe I will ever receive Social Security benefits, and yet nearly 15% of my salary goes into Social Security. Also, people who own houses vote to keep their housing prices high (through zoning laws), which is... not how "investments" are supposed to work. It'd be like the US government hoarding all the gold when prices get too high. If a house is a place to live (in which case, zoning laws are perfectly fine), property taxes should be high enough that renting out a house is a much worse investment than say, government bonds. If a house is an investment, the protection racket needs to stop.
2. On the other hand, I've seen so many of my peers just... not study. Kids who easily got a 36 on the ACT, but would do the bare minimum in and outside of school. Now they're working pretty normal, white-collar jobs that pay about a median starting salary, but I know they could have easily made $150k+/year in tech if they'd just studied at any point between middle school and college. They probably won't struggle financially, but they won't ever really "make it" ($10m?) either. And, if this is the top of the class, you can imagine what it's like for those without the same natural ability.
So, on the one hand, I absolutely agree that Gen Z should have an easier time with housing, and shouldn't have to pay for their ancestors' unwise debts, but on the other hand, part of the reason they're struggling so much now is because they didn't spend the first twenty years of their life doing the only thing they were asked to do.
I don't know. If you're definition of success is owning a home and having a family, it gets close.
you need to clear 1-2m for that house by itself in any mid-high COL area right now.You need another 1-2m in 18 years to take care of your kids (they can live on less, but is that "successful"?). In 20 years we're already talking about 3-4m dollars before we even dive into the other bills and emergencies to address.
We have to remember that "financially successful" isn't some precise term. Some may treat "able to eat food and keep a roof over head" as successful, where others may see "can raise a healthy family" as so.
But precisely because "financially successful" isn't a precise term, the concept can be and is manipulated by smooth operators. It's always possible to construct a plausible argument that true success lies just beyond what you could reasonably expect to make through your own efforts (and therefore you might as well throw your money at me for a chance to achieve it). I don't think we can separate Gen Z's incredibly high standards for financial success from the amount that they're marinading in ads for gambling, crypto, and scam investments.
Was that survey over total earnings or savings? Like yeah..a few million tucked away will allow me to not work again. Or I can just work for a few decades like a normal person lol.
Yes, I am not seeing any problem with the $10M figure, assuming one wants to insure against old age health expenses, insure against loss of income between age 50 and 70, and be able to to travel here and there between the age of 60 and 80.
For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that).
The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.
The costs of surveys, hvac, seismic research and maintenance required to keep a deep-underground tunnel going are much higher than cut-and-cover. So, even if tunnel boring was free, it still wouldn't make sense to prefer it over other options. There are very scenarios where deep-tunneling makes sense (dense cities, across rivers when bridges are infeasible), but they're the minority.
In most transit projects, cut-and-over is blocked not because it's a bad technical option. It's because NIMBYs refuse to permit on-the-ground disruptions or noise of any type. San Jose is the canonical example. It's a political problem, not a technical one.
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