skewart
In any case, architectural style and city planning are orthogonal. You can have nice walkable, cozy streets with “modern” buildings - there are lots of examples of this in Japan, Taiwan, and other parts of East Asia. And you certainly can have sprawling, hostile streets with neo-historical buildings - lots of examples in the US.
The biggest culprit preventing more walkable human-scaled streets in new cities tends to be governments and policy-makers, not architects. Decisions about zoning, land rights, transit investment, and even building codes, have a far bigger impact on the built environment than any architect does.
If the Trump administration’s approach was just to build a lot of neoclassical buildings nobody would have cared.
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 college were either rich or highly motivated then having a degree made you stand out and could open doors. When everyone gets a degree it doesn’t make you stand out any more. Instead, not having a degree makes you look bad. (And unlike high school, which anyone can attend for free, most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind.)
That said, that kind of balancing takes time in practice, so if you did find a way to deliver a lot of housing at a much lower cost you could exploit the delay and build a lot of housing quickly, which would increase supply, which would lower what buyers are willing to pay. Basically you’d have to flood the market with so much cheap housing that buyers willingness to pay goes down.
I think a better approach to fighting high housing prices is to make more different cities and towns appealing places to live. There already is a ton of housing in this country but it’s in places where not many people want to live.
Hotels face lots of regulation not only on how they operate (fire safety, egress, food safety, etc) but also where they can operate. AirBnB lets investors get around all these regulations and tap into tourism demand at a much lower cost.
So strong hotel demand certainly does push up land value overall over time, but it happens much more slowly and to a lesser extent than with AirBnB.
AirBnB gives investors a way around hotel regulations and construction costs. You can buy an existing house and with very little friction or cost start generating revenue from tourism demand.
In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc.
> versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa.
FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.
It’s hard to compete with Instagram because everyone is already on Instagram, not because everyone is also on Facebook. (A lot of IG users don’t use FB much, and vice versa.) A freestanding Instagram could still easily copy and crush competitors.
Heck even if we're in the same office I'd often ping someone on text chat before walking over to their desk - it's just less rude and intrusive than forcing them to stop what they're working on and demanding to talk with them right then. A lot of teams I've worked on have communicated heavily by text chat even if we're all sitting just a few feet away from each other.
Do you find people less willing to send a message on Slack or whatever chat app you're using than they are to physically stop by someone's desk?
More broadly though, they have an incentive to weaken companies like Facebook and Google, which are effectively gatekeepers for a lot of traffic to NYT articles. Clicking on an article shared on Facebook, or clicking through to an article in a Google search result are very common ways for people to land on the NYT website. Not only is this traffic valuable to the NYT for ad revenue it's also very valuable for selling subscriptions - people are more likely to subscribe if they have been seeing and reading free articles. I think it's safe to assume the people running the NYT are aware of this dependency on search and social media platforms and are eager to do anything they can to minimize it. I have no idea how much bias, if any, actually creeps into reporting - hopefully it's none! But the business incentives are enough to make me approach any article from almost any media company about Google or FB with a dose of healthy skepticism.
Making it harder to get a student loan is hardly "outlawing" anyone from going to college. Schools would still give scholarships. Plus, tuition would almost certainly go down. Right now they can charge as much as they want because banks are will to lend whatever colleges charge. If all of a sudden people stopped buying their product when they raised the price too high then tuition would come back down to what it was only a few decades ago.
Even if fewer people ended up going to college it wouldn't limit opportunity. If anything it would likely make it easier to get ahead. Fewer jobs would require a college degree - there wouldn't be enough applicants who have one - and we'd likely see alternatives to college become more popular and widely respected, which would give high school grads more options for how to get started with a career.
Google is already by far the most widely used search engine, so they don't really need to innovate or improve the search product very much in order to attract and retain users. Presumably capturing more advertising spending from the companies paying for ads is a bigger priority.
Microsoft under Satya Nadella has been all about enterprise and cloud, and I doubt Bing is a strategic priority any more, so it's not surprising that they wouldn't put a lot of resources into making it better.
Amazon is a little surprising. You'd think they'd have a lot to gain from making it easier for people to find what they're looking for. But maybe less than perfect search results are deliberate? Maybe it's like how supermarkets put basic items in the back of the store and high-margin impulse buys in the front - so you have to walk past chocolates and chips if you want to buy a carton of milk.
If Amazon is deliberately nerfing search results then maybe Google would stand to benefit from having better shopping-related results - people would get frustrated trying to find a shirt without stripes on Amazon and just use Google instead, letting Google profit from advertising in the process. But maybe people selling shirts aren't willing to pay much for ads, so there isn't much money for Google to make by getting better at finding specific types of shirts.
I dunno if any of these conjectures are anywhere near accurate, but it's interesting to think about.
A popular counter-argument is that governments should plan to spend money on unemployment relief for individuals if it looks like a lot of big companies won’t make it. Let companies fail but cushion the blow for people affected.
As for the hardware products, I think it mostly comes down to making quality a strategic priority. As a result they’re willing to spend more money and make sacrifices in other areas in order to build great high-quality hardware and a cohesive overall experience for users. For example, I suspect they deliberately de-prioritize pre-installed/default apps, like maps and email, and make hardware and integration throughout their ecosystem a higher priority. They let their apps be just good enough to keep too many people from downloading alternatives but they don’t try to make them great. People buy iPhones because they are widely seen as “the best” overall phone. Most people won’t buy a phone because of any one app, so there is no point in making any one better than good enough. So that’s one area where they allocate resources in a way that drives hardware quality.
Other smartphone makers have different strategic priorities that make them deprioritize quality. For example, some compete on low prices. Google got into the smartphone business largely for defensive reasons, and they’ve never put much focus on creating great phones. Microsoft was starting to follow Apple’s strategy, and maybe could have given them a run for their money, but they gave up pretty quickly because they could make more money elsewhere.
This the the modern newspaper. Newspapers have some of the most useless, hostile web sites out there. It’s one of the biggest reasons why they’re dying. They’re squandering their brands and public trust and actively driving readers away by providing a horrifically bad product.
The article makes it sound like this is just the way “the web” is these days, like there’s some force of nature compelling newspapers to build awful products. But there isn’t. They are choosing to build their businesses around advertising networks.
It’s not fair to the web to say newspaper sites are typical or the only option. Much of the web isn’t like that though. There are plenty of blogs and web apps that are a joy to use. And there are plenty of journalism businesses that succeed without ad network revenue - e.g. The Economist, the Athletic, Daring Fireball, Stratechery.
> 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 people felt comfortable sharing a lot more personal content than they would on the open internet - even just simple things like their real name and photo. That created much more interesting content for other people to look at, driving engagement. In the early days, when there were maybe two or three dozen schools on FB, it felt like a like a pretty small high-trust community. All of your friends from high school were on it, and their college friends, who maybe you met once or twice, but that was it - no parents, no employers, no randos. It was a very different vibe than most other social networks. I also don't think anyone thought it would be around very long. It felt like a new social network popped up as the cool new thing every few months.
I'm sure there was some aspect of pent up demand due to exclusivity, but I think the community and openness created by that exclusivity was a much bigger drover of its success.
Google and Facebook's primary products are advertising. Things like web search, email, maps, and social networking are part of their supply chain for building their ad product. (And people who use these services are suppliers who are trading our exposure to ads in exchange for access to search, email, maps, social networking, etc.)
Google and Facebook don't give away advertising space for free, and they both have very dominant positions in a number of ad markets.
Here's why I'm not a fan: The interiors are cheesey, badly designed, and generally seem poorly built (things are janky and break way too easily). It's often hard to find a good place to work in the common areas - pop music is blasting in the main common areas and the few phone booths and quiet corners are often full (people sometimes just work in phone booths, which is annoying). The fact that you have to pay to use conference rooms (at least with my company's contract) and you have to pay for granola bars and other snacks feels kinda nickel-and-dimey. (There is free coffee, and free beer but during the workday I'm not usually looking to drink a pint.) Also there's a theme of forced happiness everywhere (the mugs all say "do what you love" or "always half full"), which feels at best like vapid corporate fluff and at worst kinda cult-like, but either way it's mildly off-putting. Finally, they often invite salespeople from different companies to set up tables in the common area to sell/advertise random stuff, which isn't that big a deal but monetizing their tenants' attention during their work day kinda seems at odds with "building a community" and "elevating consciousness" and all.
I like the concept of a global coworking space network. I'm just not a fan of WeWork's implementation.
My bet is that in ten years WeWork will end up a bit like Groupon is today - still going, but far from the world-changing force they were once hyped to be. Of course, a lot of weird stuff can happen and maybe they'll end up dominating the worlwide office market, or maybe they'll flame out spectacularly in a couple of years.
The idea is that WeWork can do in real estate what cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers like AWS and Azure are doing in computing. Most companies find it easier to build on AWS instead of running a data center directly. And data center hardware providers find they kind of have to accept the big cloud providers' terms because they don't have a lot of other people to sell to these days.
In order to believe this optimistic case for WeWork you have to believe that they are providing a useful abstraction on top of leasing office space the traditional way, and you have to believe that they won't face any deadly competition. Personally, I'm skeptical of both of those, but I think the best case for WeWork providing a really useful abstraction hinges on two things: 1) a secular shift in the way people work leading to highly flexible office arrangements (e.g. instantly spin up an office in Berlin, run it for two months, then shut it down) becoming much more attractive; 2) WeWork being able to structure lease terms in ways that are better for corporate accounting somehow (i.e. it's not a better product at the end of the day, but it looks better on the books). The best case for them winning out over competition comes down to them getting such a big lead in the amount of space they offer and brand recognition that nobody can challenge them - hence the rationale for burning a ton of money quickly to open as many locations as possible as soon as possible.
I'm skeptical and I'd argue WeWork is more likely to end up like MoviePass than AWS. (MoviePass had pretty much the same idea and playbook - burn money to get to scale and market power quickly then dictate terms to the suppliers who have been eating into your margins - and it didn't exactly turn out well.) But anything is possible.
tl;dr Long-term investors hope that if WeWork can achieve a dominant position in the global office market then they can increase their margins by both lowering their cost to acquire space and increasing the rents they charge. If they pull that off then they can rake in hundreds of billions of dollars and be worth trillions.
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 are borderline unusable because light fixtures are in the way. Sure, everything is new, so it feels kinda fresh and nice at a glance, but I can't imagine the spaces aging well. Or, they'll have to spend money overhauling the interiors every few years.
And that doesn't even touch on their branding and design choices, which, to me at least, don't even begin make up for the cheapo low-quality interiors.