Building out a housing heatmap of England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland publish housing data differently, working on getting them integrated!
Every now and again someone will open a "American Diner" here in London, then have normal opening times and serve basically the same food every pub serves, only with more milkshakes.
Like, no. I want my American-style hash browns, over-easy eggs, and country-fried steak, not the same burger every pub on the street is doing.
And (refillable) filter coffee please, not just espresso drinks.
I recently visited my brother in Spokane (we're British, he moved out there a few years ago) and we went to Frank's Diner, still in it's original 1906 railcar. Not my first diner experience, but by far my favourite. Diners are probably my favourite part of American culinary culture.
Also, on my first visit to San Francisco, my mum and I stayed opposite the Pinecrest Diner on the edge of the Tenderloin. Being jetlagged, I woke up at 5am the first morning and went there just as it opened, and having my coffee and huge breakfast as various diner regulars stopped by was just fantastic.
Two choropleth map projects I've wanted to make for a while:
https://housepricedashboard.co.uk - shows a visualisation of house prices in England and Wales since the 90s, with filters for house types, real vs nominal, and change views over time
https://councilatlas.co.uk - similar structure to the above, but focusing on local council datasets. The idea is to make it easier to compare your local council's performance against the rest of the country.
As much as I appreciate the difference between literal infinity and consumers' demand for software, there's just so much bad software out there waiting to be improved that I can't see us hitting saturation soon.
I think the downside is the developers who love the action of coding managed to accomplish several things at once - they got to code, and create things, and get paid lots for doing it.
AI coding makes creating things far more efficient (as long as you use AI), and will likely mean you don't get paid much (unless you use AI).
You can still code for the fun of it, but you don't get the ancillary benefits.
They're pretty extraordinary, but funny thing is the expensive bits of London (central, west, and bits of north) have fallen the most in real terms over the last decade!
Then you should also look at Wayve (self-driving cars, $1 billion Series C), Lighthouse (travel and rental data, $370 million Series C), Highview Power (novel energy storage, £300 million). Lots more too. I won't deny that the UK specialises in fintech, but there's a lot more going on than that.
> Replacing blue collar workers for robots hasn't been super duper great.
That's just not true. Tractors, combine harvesters, dishwashers washing machines, excavators, we've repeatedly revolutionised blue-collar work, made it vastly, extraordinary more efficient.
Why would a bad dependency ratio mean we stop using industrial fertilisers? If anything it's the opposite, using more fertiliser and technologies to cope with labour shortages.
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