If you have YouTube Premium, you can use their Gemini AI to summarize videos. I've "consumed" tons more videos since I discovered it, since I can get a good idea from the summary if it's worth actually watching the video.
My overall minutes of YT have gone down, but I probably interacts with 2-3x more videos. Just like skimming on HN!
Operations is about 1/4 of the budget ($1.75T), and half of that is DoD. 60% is payments for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The remaining 15% is debt service.
"prop 13 isn't really changing homeownership periods by very much"
I have heard the exact opposite. If you have a source for that, I'd love to read it. I would specifically be looking for homeownership period vs moving within CA vs moving out of CA.
Overhead is not fixed per employee - things like taxes and benefits scale with salary, not to mention the cost of tooling (hardware, software, AI token budget, etc) tend to be higher for higher-compensated employees.
You definitely shouldn't plan your business based on my comment, but you'd be foolish to ignore it.
A company's fully loaded cost (payroll taxes, insurance, fixed company costs, infra, real estate, etc) is usually about double the employee's salary. Half of $40k is 20k/mo, which is ~$250k/hr. That's a lot but very in-bounds for software engineering salaries.
Zoning limits what and how much is permitted. Prop 13 changes the economics and greatly reduces churn and supply, both for redevelopment and migration.
Prop 13 takes the normal supply problems introduced by zoning and turbocharges them.
Did you know that IBM got its start building the control center for the Panama Canal locks? Did you know that lobbying has been the same since at least the 19th century? That 10% of all of France's population invested in their canal company, but the company was too afraid to tell the people that Panama wasn't flat like the Suez Canal area? And... and... and...
It's such a good book! Like any dad reading history, I have been annoying my family for years with fun facts I learned in that book. David McCullough's other books like The Great Bridge (about building the Brooklyn Bridge) are also great.
3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.
Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].
But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.
The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards.
In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).
email: peter at pchristensen dot com
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