Favorites July 6th 2023
Favorites July 6th 2023
Noah Smith points out that this makes California's rent control a type of tax on land! Very cool finding.
The wording doesn't appear to explain CEQA at all, so the fact that people say they favor reducing environmental regulation in order to build more homes seems somewhat promising.
I've definitely heard this quote about Sim City and parking lots before, but I really liked the screenshot of Sim City with realistic parking. Relatedly, Cities: Skylines 2 looks like it's adding parking lots and parking management, so that'll be fun.
Threads, which is Meta's Twitter clone has launched, by one count it's the 8th contender for the 'Twitter successor' title. It surpassed 30 million users in the first 24 hours. For comparison, Twitter hays about 200 million daily active users, and threads isn't yet accessible in the EU. So I think we can say it's going well. Lots of features are still missing, (I'm particularly looking forward to the promised mastodon integration). They're very much aiming to tease Twitter, Zuck posted to Twitter for the first time in a decade just to do so, and the main native share integration in Threads is to share a post to Twitter.
The “PC Guys” quote is from the Palm CEO right before the launch of the iPhone. Although Seigler’s version above is a common paraphrase of the original, often used by one John Gruber.
John Gruber’s post summarizing Threads was excellent, by the way.
Of course, Musk's response to Threads has been to threaten legal action against Meta, which seems like a stretch. But of course everyone's excited to see them fight, possibly physically. This is all clearly pretty hard on Musk, hopefully Spez (CEO of Reddit) will learn from these events that copying Musk and annoying your users can be a ticket to losing your platform.
Longer Threads
• Thread by Alfred Twu about corridor zoning, common in the US and Canada. It's better than not upzoning at all, but it's not really the ideal way to build new homes. It's a political compromise that we can live with, but it's good to know that there are even better options.
• Short thread by Tim Lee arguing that Robo Taxis could be an excellent complement to public transit, in a way that current taxis aren't. My favorite point of his was that they're much more viable as a way to implement a congestion tax, since the rider already has their wallet out anyway.