Viewing profile — pchristensen

The ability of citizens to restrict or prohibit building in their jurisdiction is extremely strong, basically everywhere in the developed world[1]. There's not much they can do to …

He’s from NYC

Definitely Siracusa.

If you have YouTube Premium, you can use their Gemini AI to summarize videos. I've "consumed" tons more videos since I discovered it, since I can get a good idea from the summary i…

Operations is about 1/4 of the budget ($1.75T), and half of that is DoD. 60% is payments for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The remaining 15% is…

I love this. So many more people associate it with Shrek these days, so all the Johnny 5 comments warm my heart!

I came here to post this, glad you beat me to it. I pulled a muscle laughing the first time I saw this.

I'm excited for them too!

Ford invested heavily in reliability in the late 2000s - see e.g. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-apr-15-la-fi-bo...

"prop 13 isn't really changing homeownership periods by very much" I have heard the exact opposite. If you have a source for that, I'd love to read it. I would specifically be look…

I didn't make those numbers up - here's a widely cited source from MIT: https://nutsandbolts.mit.edu/BBJ/EmployeeCost.php Overhead is not fixed per employee - things like taxes and…

A company's fully loaded cost (payroll taxes, insurance, fixed company costs, infra, real estate, etc) is usually about double the employee's salary. Half of $40k is 20k/mo, which …

Porque no los dos? Zoning limits what and how much is permitted. Prop 13 changes the economics and greatly reduces churn and supply, both for redevelopment and migration. Prop 13 t…

My kids use Libby very often.

Yes, they showed the Siri app, typing, reviewing conversations etc.

Did you know that IBM got its start building the control center for the Panama Canal locks? Did you know that lobbying has been the same since at least the 19th century? That 10% o…

It's such a good book! Like any dad reading history, I have been annoying my family for years with fun facts I learned in that book. David McCullough's other books like The Great B…

Excavating that much volume would be a heck of an expense.

There's a lot of opportunity cost to waiting 14 months to build something.

You are mixing up a lot of different factors. 3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10…

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 e…

> It never has. 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 we…