RRR2: Nature, Zoning Law Pt.2, and Bradley Beal Takeaways
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I’ve been spending a lot more of my time in nature, recently. I tend to feel better when I improve my ratio of outdoor to indoor time (which can still get much healthier). I’m so thankful to have made this realization a couple of years ago!
I first started noticing how non-human life and the beauty of nature improved my mood when I was taking walks in Philadelphia. I always felt happy walking down the tree-lined streets of Spruce or Pine. I was over the moon if I found myself a couple blocks south of Fairmount street, west of Broad. My absolute favorite place in the city might be The Spring Gardens.
I’ve lived in an urban environment for most of the past decade, so when I first moved back to the New Haven suburbs, I was a bit apprehensive. However, I’m so grateful of the opportunity to now have quick access to larger landscapes in nature:
(This is not all from Connecticut, but you get the point 😊).
Speaking of nature… one day, soon, I will have to talk about my recent month-long trip to Ecuador. The nature there has constitutional rights, for goodness sake. It may sound like hyperbole, but it almost brings me to tears thinking about how beautiful it was 😢😓.
Anyways, it’s easy to feel a bit stuck in life from time to time. A bad mood has a tendency to linger for a while. If you have the ability, get lost in nature for a few hours and see if that helps! Only use your phone to take pictures, if at all. Research from New Haven’s own Yale University says that you’re likely to have positive results:
What are the active ingredients in a dose of nature? Pioneers in this work, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who began studying the subject in the 1970s, devised Attention Restoration Theory, which holds that paying attention in bustling cities, at work, or in other stressful environments requires a good deal of effortful attention. In a natural environment, however, the Kaplans found that people paid attention more broadly and in a less effortful way, which leads to far more relaxed body and mind.
Japanese researchers have studied “forest bathing” — a poetic name for walking in the woods. They suspect aerosols from the forests, inhaled during a walk, are behind elevated levels of Natural Killer or NK cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and infections. A subsequent study, in which essential oils from cedars were emitted in a hotel room where people slept, also caused a significant spike in NK cells.
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This weeks edition will be a bit pared down from last week, since we ran a little long (whoops 😉). We’ll only cover one Junto question this week as a follow-up to what was discussed in RRR1.
In Recent Times…
Why do we lose our sense of wonder? Whether it be with people, places, or things, we have a terrible habit of taking for granted what yesterday we took as magic.
Some friends and I were sitting around a fire a couple weeks back. We decided to discuss inventions that seem the most remarkable to us, because of their technical complexity (or, at least, perceived complexity… I’m not an engineer so 🤷🏻♀️).
Airplanes, cars, even a grill, all came up in the discussion. Are you enamored by any of those inventions? The grill one made me laugh, but it’s true. Pretty awesome that somehow the flame that cooks your food doesn’t light all the gas available, blow up your propane tank, and make you part of the barbecue 🍔.
For me, nothing about talking on the phone makes sense. It leaves me in awe constantly. Think about it:
You pick up your phone and dial a number
Your phone sends a “signal” to another phone instantaneously, based on the number you dialed. The owner of that phone then gets a notification that someone (or some number) is calling
They pick up, and instantly you’re having a conversation with someone potentially thousands of miles away
Insanity. I read up on how it actually works. I might be even more bewildered after taking the time to try and understand it at a deeper level.
I welcome any and all engineers to contribute to this discussion in the comments section 🙂. What inventions have left you most perplexed? Humans are capable of incredible things. Don’t get me started on WiFi…
Readings of the Week
“What Libertarianism Has Become And Will Become” by Tyler Cowen
I’ve always been intrigued by libertarianism. Autonomy, political and religious freedom, and individual liberties are important to me. However, I have never found libertarianism to be very practical. If I could boil that down much further, I would say that libertarianism fails to win me over as a believer for two main reasons:
It fails to address problems that legitimately require collaboration on a massive scale (climate change, etc.)
I believe that potential solutions offered by libertarianism would first require that society undergo near destruction. Think of it as completely tearing things down to build from a new foundation. It might sound appealing in theory to some, but I don’t want to see that.
This piece from Tyler Cowen addresses some of those concerns and paints a picture of how positive libertarian values can be implemented within a realistic framework, in his view. I think what I like about this manifesto of sorts is that it is, if nothing else, an attempt at practicality.
“The Ongoing And Increasingly Weird Reddit Blackout, Explained” by Sara Morrison
This article really helped me understand in a deeper way some of the cosmic shifts that are happening in regard to the framework of the open internet. Social media sites and online communities are increasingly pursuing direct revenue streams as privacy and data security have rendered advertising a less effective way to make money. It is an easy stream of logic to follow: if we can’t serve ads in as personalized of a manner, we will make less money from advertising. Therefore, the people selling us the ad space will also make less money because we’re willing to pay less.
I am pro data privacy to the extent that it actually protects consumers. We may be taking things a hair too far, and it’s now disturbing the delicate quid pro quo that has been the story of the internet… use the internet for free, just let us advertise to you.
The fact is, Reddit is not the only platform doing something like this. Advertising isn’t as valuable as it used to be, and your eyeballs and data increasingly aren’t enough to justify free services anymore. So there’s been a broader shift to a paid business model in the social media industry.
Now, everyone from Meta and Twitter wants literal money from you, and they’re being a lot more aggressive about getting it. Paid offerings — including Reddit’s own Premium service, which gives users an ad-free experience, more customization options, and access to an exclusive subreddit — used to be nice little add-ons to existing services rather than a significant source of revenue. But lately, some social media platforms are seeing them as being a much bigger and more necessary revenue generator.
I for one hope there is a commonsense compromise that can be made between Reddit and it’s mods who have made the platform great for so long.
Junto Club
Let’s take this opportunity to deep dive right back into zoning law. I received some interesting feedback after last weeks’ discussion, and I feel as though there’s a lot more we can cover here 🤷🏻♀️.
As a reminder…
My thesis is that zoning laws were originally developed with positive intent, and are now so distorted that they’re hurting our country much more than helping it.
As for that feedback I mentioned, a big hug and thank you to my sister Sophie for challenging my thesis. I’m sure she won’t mind if I share her words…
“I would argue the thesis of modern zoning laws starting from a good place is factually inaccurate. Zoning laws post WW2 were made specifically to ensure segregation and are often still used for this reason! I think ignoring this fact of zoning makes it an incomplete picture/thesis.”
This was good enough of a reason to continue on rambling about zoning law. While Sophie is right that zoning law in the US has at best, shady origins and an ugly modern history, the US was not the birthplace of zoning…
Key to the development of ideas of urban planning was Reinhard Baumeister, a rail engineer turned city planner after winning an 1872 competition for an urban extension of Mannheim. Mannheim was interesting in that its core was not medieval but a result of 17th Century grid masterplanning, and Baumesiters masterplan was to extend this in a distorted grid to created picturesque vistas and public spaces. His, ‘Town Expansions Considered with Respect to Technology, Building Code and Economy” of 1876 was the first modern planning text and used as the first textbook by the earliest planning schools in Germany.
Hence planning was founded on technical foundations. The primary drivers at this time were health, public safety and technical concerns. There was an obsession with efficient sewerage. Baumeister also wrote the first textbook on sewage engineering. With the prevalence of fires in overcrowded cities regulations were also concerned with fire prevention and fire fighting. For example in Berlin the Holbrecht Plan controlled building heights, limited to ladder lengths and perimeter blocks were dictated by requirements for access by and turning of fire tenders.
Still, Sophie made me realize I really ought to shed more light on the societal implications outside of purely economic terms.
With that being said, I want to elaborate on the distortion of these laws in the US. I originally started writing about zoning laws through the lens of housing prices, but there are many ways these laws cripple society as secondary effects of housing affordability. Let’s look at some examples:
Exclusionary Zoning Hurts The Poor And Propagates Cyclical Poverty
There is a plethora of data showing we have a real problem in the US with concentrated poverty. There’s a multitude of factors as to why that is, but the predominant driver is exclusionary zoning law. These practices started in the 1800s and early 1900s, and is still an issue today. In fact, it may be a bigger issue today because of how long the laws have been in place. They tend to have a compounding negative effect. The only way to end cyclical and concentrated poverty is to allow people access to better resources! Often times, this means at least having the opportunity to move, which currently is entirely cost prohibitive, thanks to exclusionary zoning. According to The Century Foundation:
Traditionally, exclusionary zoning policies have kept poor, central city residents out of suburbs with minimum lot size requirements, single residence per lot requirements, minimum square footage requirements, and costly building codes. Together, these requirements make it difficult to build multi-family rental units that would allow lower-income residents to live in wealthy suburban developments with access to quality schools and employment. In addition, large lot size requirements reduce the supply of available land, drive up housing costs, and further keep out low-income families.
This is ridiculous policy, and we need to take it on aggressively in order to live in a more prosperous society with higher living standards for all.
Young Prospective Homebuyers Are Priced Out
My younger Millennials, and older Gen-Z folks definitely feel me on this one. Because we (builders in the US) can’t develop certain types of housing units in so many places, we have an unmitigated housing shortage. This is making it increasingly difficult for young people to build wealth through home equity. Here’s an excerpt from the Atlantic on the issue of zoning and how it affects supply (link to article):
Boring though it may be, zoning has real-world effects that are dire. Between mandating parking garages and banning apartments, it has made infill development prohibitively difficult in many American cities. And in suburbs across the country, it has made the starter homes we so desperately need—think townhouses and homes on small lots—effectively illegal to build. If Americans want a fairer, more prosperous nation, zoning has got to go.
The housing-affordability crisis is, at its most basic, a problem of supply and demand: A lot of people need homes, but not enough are being built, resulting in rising prices for existing supply. New homes aren’t going unbuilt because of developers’ ignorance or a lack of land—developers are desperate to build in expensive cities, and they can always build up when they can’t build out. Instead, homes are going unbuilt because of zoning.
Here’s median home sales prices in the US from 1979-2022:
Obviously, there are other factors at play here. However, spare me the, inflation adjusted prices this, low interest rate policies that, blah blah blah. Over time, by any reasonable metric, housing as a % of income has ballooned. This goes for rents as well.
Here’s the CPI on rents for nearly the same time period, according to FRED:
It’s another compounding issue for young people looking to purchase their first home. They save a lower proportion of their income because more of it needs to go to rent. More expensive homes require bigger down payments, so people are buying homes later than they would have historically. Less housing supply means less relief as this cycle continues. Crack the code on zoning (it’s not the Da Vinci code by the way, just repeal the most egregious examples of bad law using commonsense), and we can lift the burden off of a huge percentage of our nations inhabitants, while giving young people a fairer existence.
It drives me nuts when we as a nation don’t pick the low-hanging fruits in front of us 🤦🏻♂️.
Helpful Readings on Zoning Law:
I hate the title, but read “Cancel Zoning” by M. Nolan Gray
“Exclusionary Zoning: Its Effect on Racial Discrimination in the Housing Market” from the White House Council of Economic Advisors
“Understanding Exclusionary Zoning and Its Impact on Concentrated Poverty” by the Century Foundation
“Is zoning a useful tool or a regulatory barrier?” by The Brookings Institution
Decline In Global Poverty
Poverty is a pressing issue all over the world. Poverty makes it so that people don’t have access to basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter. This should be amongst the two or three biggest issues we all want to solve, if not the very first issue we’d like to eradicate. I love this quote from The World Bank Organization:
Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been described in many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation people want to escape. So poverty is a call to action -- for the poor and the wealthy alike -- a call to change the world so that many more may have enough to eat, adequate shelter, access to education and health, protection from violence, and a voice in what happens in their communities.
There is still so, so much work to be done on this front. With that context, let’s celebrate some of the progress we’ve made over time in the case of extreme poverty:
We still have a long way to go. Look at the data as it pertains to living on more than $6.85 a day:
That’s nearly half of the world living on less than $7 a day. Now, $7 stretches a lot farther in certain places than in others, but it goes without saying that we need to improve. It’s for this reason we need to pursue foreign policy, as well as economic policy, that is designed to alleviate poverty. We can’t allow global poverty to persist.
Bradley Beal To The Suns 🌞🌞
This was a wild deal for so many reasons, but first, a look at the full details via CBS:
The second most important thing to consider is that the Wizards did not get a whole lot for a multiple time all-star still in his prime. For starters, 38 year-old Chris Paul, while he is going to be a hall-of-famer, is not a heralded prize for a Wizards team that is trying to lose games next season. Want proof? They already flipped him to the Golden State Warriors for younger talent and picks.
Secondly, pick swaps are not the same as picks. It means the Wizards reserve the right to swap first-round draft picks with the Suns in those particular draft years. I find it increasingly unlikely those swap options would be exercised until ‘28 at the earliest. The 6 second-round picks are just not a big deal either, until maybe ‘27 and beyond. This information brings us to the key takeaway:
Players earning supermax contracts, such as Bradley Beal, are now less of an asset under the NBAs new CBA. Why?
Put simply, it now hurts bad to carry too much salary on your roster. The NBAs luxury tax has a new look that is going to absolutely punish teams who are carrying huge payrolls with big payments, and more restrictions on how they can acquire talent.
I’ll circle back on this topic, because I’d like to flesh all these variables out in more detail. We’re yet again bumping up against the email length limit 🤦🏻♂️. Ramblings, I tell you!
How Often Do You Use AI?
When OpenAI first released Chat-GPT into the wild, I was using it every day. The use-cases were pretty vast early on, and it was fun to play with. I remember prompting the tool with some pretty ambiguous questions, and being blown away with the answers which were crafted in seconds with tremendous amounts of nuance. I thought to myself, “this tool is better to speak with than most humans” 🤣.
However, as I mentioned earlier, our sense of amazement just tends to fizzle. It’s as if we can’t help it. I also started to realize AI wasn’t quite ready for the big time. I got a lot of really bad information from some of my prompts, and it even lied to me a few times.
Since then, Google has released it’s answer to Chat-GPT, and it’s named Bard. I used Bard a bunch when it came out, but had taken a long hiatus. I prompted it again earlier this week, and the rate of progress they’ve made is wild. It can pull images into its responses, and I prefer it to GPT in some regards because it has connection to fresh data on the internet. Here’s the recent prompt I provided:
“Hey! I live in New Haven, CT. The weather here to start the summer has been fantastic! To me, it doesn't seem too hot, and it hasn't rained all that much. I am trying to find data or an article that supports my feelings to see if they are valid or not, but when I use Google Search, I can only find articles about climate change. Can you help me find information that speaks specifically to the weather in my general area so far this summer?”
Here’s what it had to say (images not included):
Sure, I can help you with that. Here are some resources that you can check out:
AccuWeather has a monthly weather forecast for New Haven, CT. You can see the average temperatures and precipitation levels for each month.
Wisemeteo also has a weather forecast for New Haven, CT. They provide a more detailed breakdown of the weather, including the number of days without precipitation.
Weather.com has a current weather forecast for New Haven, CT. You can also see the hourly forecast and the extended forecast for the next week.
According to these resources, the weather in New Haven, CT has been cooler and drier than usual so far this summer. The average temperature in June was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 2 degrees below the historical average. The average precipitation in June was 2.5 inches, which is 1 inch below the historical average.
So, your feelings about the weather are valid! It has been a cooler and drier summer than usual in New Haven, CT.
I hope this helps!
This is freaking good. Isn’t it?
I don’t have any major takeaways other than this: The rate of change and improvement in the AI space, at least for now, is breakneck. We should all make a habit of playing with the latest and greatest tools a few times a week, or risk becoming dinosaurs 🐱🐉🐱🐉.
Sorry for posting so late on a Sunday! I traveled a ton this weekend, and had serious celebrating to do on account of some friends getting married. As my friend Sergio put it, Ramblings, Readings, and Reposados 🥂.