skewart

9 ms·

1.
by skewart 5y ago
The Trump style ban didn’t have anything to do with walkability or scale or urban design. It only required federal buildings to have specific kinds of glued-on decorations. Not sure how you got to street planning from there. In any case, ar
2.
by skewart 5y ago
The weird part was banning people from building anything that isn’t neoclassical. The order wasn’t promoting neoclassicism as much as it was attacking everything else. If the Trump administration’s approach was just to build a lot of neocl
3.
by skewart 5y ago
I bet Ferrari owners earn even more than that compared to people without Ferraris. I don’t think that means we should tell young people to take out loans to buy a Ferrari because it’s a ticket to easy money. When the only kids going to coll
4.
by skewart 6y ago
The big problem is that land value tends to fill any void created by lower construction costs. If buyers are willing to pay $100 for a home in a given location, then land will typically sell at 100 minus the cost of construction (and a sma
5.
by skewart 6y ago
I agree with you about cabs in the US compared to ride hailing apps. But AirBnB is very different, and worse. The hotel industry is nothing like the cab industry. And residential real estate is nothing like roads. Hotels face lots of regu
6.
by skewart 6y ago
Without AirBnB you would need to convert a house into a hotel in order to use residential real estate to tap into hotel demand. And regulations typically make that hard and expensive. Plus you would need to do some construction work, which
7.
by skewart 6y ago
There are far more news sources available today than in the 20th century. Not only can I read local newspapers and magazines from all over the world, which wasn’t easy to do before the internet, but also there are tons of new digital-only
8.
by skewart 6y ago
How would breaking up Facebook into three companies fix this though? Suppose Instagram is a separate company and a new competitor starts getting popular. Why wouldn’t Instagram still just copy the competitor’s features? It’s hard to compet
9.
by skewart 6y ago
Don’t forget their initiative to capture an even bigger percentage of app advertising spend. Nerfing the IDFA is designed to make advertising anywhere other than the App Store less effective. Apple is betting that this change will force de
10.
by skewart 6y ago
Oh, I didn't mean just calling someone out of the blue. I meant that people would be willing to get on a video call if you set up a time to talk. I would typically message or email people first. Heck even if we're in the same off
11.
by skewart 6y ago
Honestly I wouldn’t worry too much about it. This article vastly overstates the benefits of offices. Sitting in an office every day doesn’t magically make mentorship opportunities appear. You need to proactively seek those out no matter
12.
by skewart 6y ago
Histre looks really cool. I just signed up to give it a spin. Capturing knowledge on top of web browsing is a great idea. Have you thought about integrating with email and/or messaging to capture knowledge shared there too?
13.
by skewart 6y ago
That’s a bizarre and mean-spirited line of thinking. There’s nothing inherently selfish about not having kids. Every life decision involves trade-offs between time, money, effort, and various kinds of joys and sorrows. People have lots of
14.
by skewart 6y ago
Yeah, it is a bit of a conundrum, but I don't think I'd say they can't be trusted entirely. I mean, I doubt they're printing outright lies - unlike some media outlets. I think the bias would creep in more in the fact t
15.
by skewart 6y ago
For one thing, Facebook competes with the NYT for advertising dollars. If Facebook and Instagram are less appealing places to run adds for a company then maybe that company will spend more of its advertising budget on NYT ads instead. More
16.
by skewart 6y ago
Last quarter advertising made up about 27% of their total revenue (digital advertising was 13% of total), according numbers in this recent article - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/business/media/
17.
by skewart 6y ago
What’s more, the NY Times has a strong business interest in convincing advertisers not to advertise on Facebook. I’m a bit skeptical of anything they publish these days about Facebook, Google, and other companies that could potentially thr
18.
by skewart 6y ago
Do you think colleges wouldn't change if they were going to receive far far fewer applicants at their current sticker prices? I don't mean that to come across as snarky. I'm genuinely curious because your comment seems to
19.
by skewart 6y ago
> Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leav
20.
by skewart 6y ago
If it's technically possible then presumably it's a deliberate product choice to not have better search results for "shirt without stripes". And that seems entirely plausible. Google is already by far the most widely us
21.
by skewart 6y ago
> In some indistries, that means thousands of people without work, and hundreds of other companies in the supply chain going bankrupt, and even more people without work. A popular counter-argument is that governments should plan to spend
22.
by skewart 6y ago
I take it you’re only talking about hardware product development, right? Apple’s software product quality is pretty low. There certainly are lots of companies that far exceed Apple when it comes to software. As for the hardware products,
23.
by skewart 7y ago
> Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web. This the the modern
24.
by skewart 7y ago
Great write up. Can you say more about how the congressional district pork funnel works? I mean, how brazen is it? What are some examples of the kind of projects that serve little technical purpose and exist only to funnel money to a dist
25.
by skewart 7y ago
How would you break up a giant social network? What lines would you cut it along?
26.
by skewart 7y ago
100% agree. Facebook's restricted access was a huge driver of their early success. > People wanted to join before they were able to join. I'd argue the more important factor was that because the early audience was so limited pe
27.
by skewart 7y ago
> For the last 40 years, Google would never have been challenged as a monopoly because its products were free to consumers, hence there could be no harm to them, hence no monopoly. Same for Facebook. Google and Facebook's primary pr
28.
by skewart 7y ago
I work out of a WeWork location sometimes. I don't like the product and only work out of WeWorks because I need to for my job. I would never choose to be a "member" on my own. Here's why I'm not a fan: The interiors
29.
by skewart 7y ago
The optimistic case for WeWork is that they have a shot to become an extremely powerful player in the office real estate market. The idea is that they could get to a place where most big companies looking for office space would prefer to d
30.
by skewart 7y ago
> WeWork's locations are wonderful I strongly disagree. The ones I've been to are shoddily built and badly designed. Door handles break after a few months. There are gaps in walls between offices. And bathrooms have sinks that

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