jchewitt

If you read the short book / media project (http://www.strongtowns.org/) referred to in the post, you'd see that the author (not the blogger) covers this issue amply.

It's not a ra-ra-cities-good-burbs-bad book. It explains why the infrastructure in suburbs is not financially sustainable without reference to speculations of higher energy prices (like a Kunstler would) and how political leadership often goes awry in how it pursues development.

The tl;dr which I'll do in three paragraphs is that suburbs tend to overestimate how much tax revenue they're going to get from the development pattern that involves a lot of corporate brand name stores popping up off of main roads. The taxes don't pay for the roads so the towns have to lean on the Federal government for funding.

The suggestion is that towns and businesses need to redevelop downtown areas which have more efficient infrastructure costs because they will no longer be able to externalize those infrastructure costs onto large state governments or the federal government.

Also, across the board, politicians and developers tend to emphasize the benefits of new developments while minimizing the presentations of the costs of maintenance. The book also kills some new-urbanist sacred cows like bike lanes because they are usually both insane from a financial perspective and extremely dangerous for both cyclists and drivers.

So the thrust of it is that if you thought the cities were bad, the suburbs are often worse. It will also make you rethink a lot of the media hoopla over urban development in countries like China which make supersized versions of these kinds of errors. A $100 million infrastructure project sounds awesome until you realize that it will cost $500 million without generating that much in taxes to prevent it from collapsing into a blighted ruin in less than a decade.

It's also possible that employee productivity doesn't matter as much as the speculative price of the company's shares.

If the company's office plan looks like Google's, then surely they're going to generate earnings like Google one day. I don't think the analysis necessarily goes that much deeper than that.

We've gone from managerial pseudoscience of the early 20th century that attempted to measure and optimize productivity into full on mysticism that rests on vague notions of 'increasing opportunities for collaboration.' At least scientific management attempted to use quantitative analysis and empiricism to make employees more productive. In the new age, we just need vague slogans, beanbags, and chi consultants.

You're right to correct me. Most of the works ever written have been lost to history. What I said holds for books that have been popular, historically significant, or valued enough to be widely preserved and archived.

The hilarious thing is that the reason why open office spaces are popular in expensive real estate markets holds no water in the Midwest where there's ample space.

People just do it to cargo cult the woo-magic ideology of open office spaces without realizing that the marketing hoopla around that just exists to avoid saying "we do open office spaces to cram more people into less space and save money on furniture."

The web is full of misleading garbage, but you can get every book ever written inexpensively or free from some combination of Archive.org and Amazon. Many books are trash, but at least we have some means of sorting them.

The web is a big popularity contest, with Google search / Facebook rank being a modified popularity contest. What's popular and entertaining is unlikely to be what's true or useful.

People are very willing to pay for accurate, useful information. Most people do not need accurate or useful information for the majority of their needs in life -- nor do they even want it as we can tell from their revealed preferences.

The web is not even all that popular compared to television. Judging from the websites of many formerly prestigious magazines, many people just use the web as an enhanced edition of TV Guide with some chat features built in.

TV is many orders of magnitude more popular than computer media in the developed world. Many people are happy to pay TV subscriber fees for inaccurate but entertaining shows. The most popular programs are fantasies and sports games rather than documentary programs.

>I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content.

Someone tell Jeff Bezos that all those book sales are illusory. But yes, we should expect the web to more and more be the equivalent of a trash heap of brochures and junk publications pointing people towards higher quality options, with the occasional equivalent of a curated public library (like Archive.org).

>I think people, abstractly, might be fine paying for good content.

They really do when it's important to them. But what people say is important to them when other people are looking is not necessarily what is really important to them.

KDP is far from "oppressive." Authors are totally free to sell directly from their own websites, through DRM-free platforms like Gumroad or Smashwords, and a whole bunch of other options.

What authors get from KDP is a larger cut of revenue, opportunities to list on Kindle Unlimited, and an easier time overall selling ebooks on Amazon. Plenty of authors are 'internalizing their oppression' all the way to the bank. Because DRM ebooks from Amazon tend to be delivered in an incrementally more convenient way, and it's incrementally easier for the average user to sync their library across devices when they buy that way.

This sort of ideological rhetoric around DRM probably alienates more people than it converts.

Steam implemented tags (and, appropriately enough, a personalized 'discover' queue) and it helps.

On Amazon's non-app store, you can also buy search ads. Apple could implement something similar and take a larger cut of the paid install market. There are search ads on Google Play (see: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-...).