I'm not sure what the answer is for housing, but there are tons of factors that go in to the growth of cost there. For one, the people making the buying decision aren't comparing DR Horton to Lennar. Usually, they're thinking along two lines: monthly mortgage cost and location.
Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.
For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.
Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
Housing is all messed up because land is a limited resource and regulation artificially limits it even further.
I live in a high demand area. A perfectly cromulent house on a particularly good lot will sell for $1.5 million as a teardown. The new house will be 6,000+ sqft and be inhabited by a family of four. Builders won’t build smaller because the land price sets a hard floor. The most profitable and economically productive thing would be to split the lot and build several smaller houses, or build a small apartment building, housing several times more people for the same cost. But this isn’t legal. Construction costs don’t make a difference. If construction costs doubled, the new houses would just get smaller. Some of these teardowns would stop being torn down. The cost of living in the area would stay about the same.
I suspect it’s a byproduct of Google’s internal launch process which may require more work or longer processes for launching something in different jurisdictions. So it’s probably not an active decision that they couldn’t legally do this in the EU, but a result of being extra careful around what they can “launch” in a jurisdiction with potentially high penalties.
(I am a Googler, but not on this team, or familiar with their launch policies)
Fellow Googler here. I'm the exception that proves the rule. After 7 years of Macbook and Linux devices, I needed Windows for a special project, so I got a "gWindows" device and found it very well supported.
Aside from the specific Windows-only software I needed, I would still just ssh into a Linux workstation, but gWindows can do basically everything my Mac can. I was pleasantly surprised.
It's just easier to iterate and improve on a coding specialist AI when that is also the skill required to iterate on said AI.
Products that build on general LLM tech are already being used in other fields. For example, my lawyer friend has started using one by LexisNexis[0] and is duly impressed by how it works. It's only a matter of time before models like that get increasingly specialized for that kind of work, it's just harder for lawyers to drive that kind of change alone. Plus, there's a lot more resistance in 'legacy' professions to any kind of change, much less one that is perceived to threaten the livelihoods of established professionals.
Current LLMs are already not bad at a lot of things, but lawyer bots, accountant bots and more are likely coming.
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
These are cool, it would be nice if there were also waving flag versions to match the styles of the leading emoji sets (eg Apple and Google). Most of them use some form of wavy flag:
I'd love the flag of Aboriginal Australia to be included too! I always think it's really disappointing that it isn't included anywhere, particularly if Star Trek is going to be represented. Any help?
It seems pretty self evident that China would not be in favor of military action to enforce climate goals. GP's point was that still developing nations are going to continue producing CO2 regardless of what electric grids look in OECD nations.
What matters for the climate is absolute emissions, not the some underlying fairness metric. Chinese CO2 emissions dwarf ours. Further: China's CO2 emissions are rising. Ours peaked in 2008, and are today lower than they were in 1990.
What matters is per capita emissions, not some arbitrary measure based on how borders happen to have been drawn hundreds of years ago. A small country like Kuwait, or the US (relative to China) cant just pretend not to be part of the problem, because they can point at some region with more people that consequently have larger emissions.
And historical emissions are relevant, since the carbon budget relates to the total amount of co2 in the air above pre-industrial levels. That co2 budget was largely "spent" by the US.
Another major stumbling block for train signals once you get the basics down is segment length. Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)
I frequently set up tracks with segments as large as my longest train, but then end up having to add an intersection here or there, breaking up segments into smaller sizes. This is the root of most of my train woes (aside from LTN issues, which are a whole other issue!)
> Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)
That's what chain signals are for. If a train waiting at a signal causes issues, replace the previous signal with a chain signal to prevent the train from problematically waiting at the signal.
