Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

Cool. So then people who buy condos for investment will have to choose between paying the non-occupancy tax or putting their money in property that isn't encumbered by those regulations. Accordingly the price of condos in buildings with such regulations should fall.

Alternatively, if a city council has the votes to implement a non-occupancy tax, they may have the votes to nullify HOA clauses that forbid renting. Or levy additional taxes on such HOAs. Since it's the HOA that's forbidding renting, the HOA should foot the bill for the non-occupancy tax, not the owner of the unit.

It's fairly common to include HOA dues and fees in the rent when renting out a condo.

I'd like us to be more forward looking, ambitious and experimental with our cities as well, especially in the west.

But... I think there's an institutional aspect here that needs resolution before we can. The internet is worryingly centralised. A small number of extremely profitable companies monopolise huge markets. Google tends to do this with data.

I think the reticence was justified: "Who owns the data? What kind of monopoly are google eventually going to have?" These are fair. A financial success case for google is some sort of data-centric monopoly. They don't really do business another way. It's fair to be dubious of their endgame.

I am a very optimistic individual, and have considered this project as vapourware since day one. All vision and posturing, and no execution over years.

some benefits off the top of my head:

-More natural settings shown to improve mental health

-"neighborliness" scales inversely with density to a point - less neighbors means you're more likely to get to know them, while with more people there are too many so the crowd of people gets depersonalized to a degree, because 50 neighbors are too many to keep track of.

-you don't have to go to some crowded city park full of garbage when friends have yards with their own stuff like sandboxes where they can have some privacy from for example sheltered city people or park cops freaking out over the kids having nerf guns

-other activities become more feasible like bike riding (I wouldn't feel good letting a kod bike around NYC), ATV's, fishing

-more outdoors setting prevents aesthma

-safer setting for the kids overall

Your concerns just don't work oout that way in my experience. I was in single-home-only towns as a kid and there was no problem playing with neighbors or anything. Even when houses are a mile apart it's really not a big deal just being driven to them.

And since when do kids want to attend classes?

> which org does exist purely to make the world a better place?

I think the idea that one organization existing to make the entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are much better equipped to bring positive change than private companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries of government resources. For example, a municipal government’s purpose is to administer public services, and a municipal government answers to its citizens. A private company, on the other hand, has a fiscal duty to its shareholders.

I’m not arguing that any organization is perfect because such an organization does not exist, and that’s true for companies and governments.

> how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?

Let’s use various governments response to the coronavirus outbreak as an example. The US government opted to defer much of it’s responsibility to private companies and state governments, which has resulted in less testing, less access to PPE, and more reported deaths than any other country. Testing hasn’t scaled, and there have been numerous reports of corruption and interference in the medical community, some of which was alleged to have come directly from the White House.

Contrast that response with countries like Taiwan, who moved quickly to provide necessary resources and communicate effectively to mitigate the transmission of the virus.

The US has operated one of the most private-industry focused responses to this outbreak, and we’re likely to see 3k deaths per day by June. That’s a 9/11 death toll every single day.