Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms).
It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.
American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city.
An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent.
The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws eliminating them. Before the white flight to the suburbs, the attempt was to keep the poor out of cities where the rich lived by eliminating housing of this sort since the poor couldn’t afford single family housing.
This led to a proliferation of laws that required bathrooms and kitchens in every unit, etc.
It's easy to live in shareable spaces when you're young and unattached - it becomes a lot more difficult as you age and want to grow a family. I'm not sure I want the kind of life where I have to share a kitchen or a bathroom, spaces I consider very private, with people I'm not related to. Maybe this is a uniquely midwestern/American sentiment, I'm not sure. But I am confident that there are more people like me than there aren't. The picture of the American dream is familiar, it's a house with a car in the driveway. I feel that may just be who we are now, regardless of any way we used to be.
Edit cause I had more thoughts:
Honestly, probably one of the biggest mistakes we've made as a country have been not putting up enough resistance to RTO. The single family home is, I believe, probably one of the nicest standards of living in the world. Plenty of space for hobbies and activities, privacy, usually some community among neighbors. The only problem is that it's hard to square the circle when it comes to single family living and living close to an economic hub. To afford this standard you have to live close enough to a hub that you can afford one of the well-paying jobs that exist there, but not so far that your commute significantly eats into your life. With RTO, I think we lost a pretty good opportunity to weaken our dependency on the geographic economic hub. We could have had a diaspora of knowledge workers which gave people the opportunity to pursue a better life at a lower cost, and we sorta just threw all of that away.
Isn't it also the fact the almost no one wants to live like that? The expectations has changed and there's probably little demand for such type of housing.
Studio apartments seem like a better option. Also, from a property manager’s perspective, you generally want to minimize shared spaces because they’re a pain and annoying to deal with.
I absolutely disagree. Renting a room in a single family home vastly limits the number of people you have to share those intimate spaces like a kitchen or bathroom with. You also get the option to interview and pick who you’re sharing those spaces with. I lived with housemates for many years, and in dorms during university, and dorms are not even remotely the same from a social safety and privacy perspective.
Yes and there is fierce competition for that in many larger cities, with sky-high prices to rent out a room. But they can't be offered at scale commercially because you'll never get the permits, and the only reason why you can rent these is usually because they're either operating completely under the table or via some carveouts that let property owner rent to 1 or 2 persons.
The pent up demand for this is obvious to anyone who's tried to secure a room only to have a gazillion people competing with them to pay $1000+ to rent an oversized closet to sleep in.
When the choice is between $3000/mo for a proper apartment and $2000 for a flophouse room some people will take the flophouse. Right now the only choice we offer those priced out is a painfully long commute (with has its own time and car expenses that reduce the savings).
I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the same time:
You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.
A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.
Unfortunately what you're describing is precisely the opposite of the meaning of 'democratised'. A more accurate term would be commoditised. In this case the capacity to manipulate events becomes as tied to wealth as it is to access to information.
Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.
If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?
We're sort of already there... there were several reports about massive "wins" in these "markets" on betting on the day the US would strike Iran.
It's not democratized, in the sense that everybody can play. But, the markets are for sure giving people with power/access/money reason to vote (in the markets) and vote (in whatever org they hold power).
Anytime I create a new cloud resource, I always wonder how catastrophic things would actually have to get for toggling GRS to _not_ feel like total overkill. If you're an infrastructure dev doing any work in the mideast, I guess you're gonna learn.
"Interests." I'd love to know what the price per barrel the U.S. has paid in the last few years when you factor in additional costs incurred due to involvement in Iraq and Syria.
> USA is still playing at being world hegemon in competition with china and to a lesser extent russia. Maintaining alliances is a part of that.
The US has been actively disrupting its most critical alliance, NATO, recently. Threatening to invade an allied nation's territory or force them to hand it over to us to prevent an invasion. Now threatening to block trade with NATO nations. The current administration is doing a terrible job of maintaining alliances.
I would imagine U.S. foreign policy, particularly the prolific use of sanctions contributes to this wane as well. There was some discussion about this a while ago - effectively as the U.S. continues to rely on a strategy of imposing sanctions against foreign adversaries, those adversaries increasingly reorient their economy towards non-U.S. economies such as Russia or China. The more the U.S. utilizes sanctions, the less effective they become.
You're still captive to a product. Which means that when CloudCo. increases their monthly GenAI price from $50/mo. to $500/mo., you're losing your service or you're paying. By participating in the build process you're giving yourself a fighting chance.
I will quickly forget the details about any given code base within a few months anyway. Having used AI to build a project at least leaves me with very concise and actionable documentation and, as the prompter, I will have a deep understanding of the high-level vision, requirements and functionality.
There's a subset of sleepaway camps for adults that are quite popular for musicians - they typically consist of sleeping in cabins at night and attending lessons and workshops throughout the day. I went to one a few years ago, and even though I was a full standard deviation off from the mean in terms of age I still had a good time. This seems like a cool idea too.
Probably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way.
Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to production.
B2B AI LLM vibe-SaaS that has a 10% chance to become profitable and a 10% chance to gift away all money invested into the business ever while leaving founders on the receiving end of 100 lawsuits.
> Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small?
I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.
It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.
reply