My desktop is from 2012, so 13 years old so far, but is still very capable at any task I throw at it. It was originally a high-end workstation, but by 2020 was worth so little that I got it for free from someone moving out of town. Last year, upgrading the CPU to the top of the line part that fit the motherboard socket cost $17 (versus an original MSRP of $2300), and upgrading it to 128GB of RAM cost $40.
When even top-of-the-line older hardware is nearly free, it makes little sense to optimize for bottom-of-the-line older hardware.
It does very well on any modern internet task, as well as playing modern video games with a few-year-old used graphics card.
I feel Sandy Bridge (2011) and Haswell (2013) were major turning points. Haswell is especially significant because it forms baseline for x86-64-v3, which e.g. RHEL and others are migrating towards: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/01/02/exploring-...
That is also one of the potential problems of pre-Haswell hardware, distros might stop supporting it in near-future
Nearly all large cities today are large cities because they historically were one, leading to economies of scale in infrastructure and agglomeration economies in the production and exchange of goods and services. Ease of sea access is not a major determinant of a city's growth & prosperity today.
Many cities historically grew around ports due to the labor intensity of break-bulk shipping and the difficulty and expense of overland goods transport but modern container ports require relatively few employees and can easily move freight intermodally. The old piers in London and Hamburg and New York and San Francisco and their adjacent factories have all been redeveloped, and the working container ports have all relocated away from the city center to places where rail & highway access is easier, to places like Newark, Oakland, and Felixstowe.
The car market in the US is pretty much designed to rip off people who fear minivan stigma & instead buy extortionately-priced pickup trucks that often don't even have a big enough bed to carry plywood or drywall.
There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking.
The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.
Delivery-oriented ebikes like the Arrow models in NYC use very large battery packs, and some deliveristas carry a second battery on a rear rack. My impression is that, as deliveristas have moved to working for apps rather than specific restaurants over the past few years, the expected delivery radius has expanded, which drove a lot of the range issues that have lead to widespread adoption of gray-market motorcycles with no plates.
Said unlicensed mopeds are current subject to widespread seizure in NYC, so it does seem like ebikes are coming back.
One major delivery-oriented ebike importer, 'Fly Ebike', has gotten a model UL certified.
Martin Kleppmann is an advisor to the Bluesky distributed social network, which has an open protocol and open source code that one can browse, run, and connect to as a supplement to the book if one desires:
https://github.com/bluesky-social
I have a Shimano middrive bike that weighs 50lbs that I purchased on closeout for $1500. It rides like a nice, albeit heavy, bike with the motor turned off.
