I love SimTower to death, but unfortunately being a Win16-based game, it's kind of hard to get working on modern computers. For some reason, trying to run it in Wine works for a couple of minutes before it causes my window manager to spaz out and crash, and I haven't decided what avenue I'd try to get it working well again.
On the other hand, with all the poking I've done at it over the years, I think I now have the most complete knowledge of the save file format for anyone who doesn't have access to the source code.
The scaling challenge here comes from scaling across the various types of life situations and personality types out there. Some people work too much to be able to live a balance lifestyle. Other people just can’t summon the motivation.
Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.
I don’t agree with this take, we’re overly simplifying the nature of housing here. It depends on the housing mix as well. If the vast majority of the pro-housing prices crowd is heavily invested in single family residential then they should favour widespread upzoning and deregulation of apartments because that would increase the value of their SFHs through two mechanisms: 1) presumably single family homes will be destroyed so any remaining single family homes become more valuable and 2) every single family home is now a potential townhouse or high density building which increases the value a developer would pay for it.
Are there any serious objections to that line of reasoning?
No, what you said is mostly correct; but I'm mostly talking about not having home prices go down, which is different but related.
There are different kinds of homeowners. There are those who are flipping houses and directly betting that the values go up, which is the crowd that you're describing. But at least in my area of the world, the majority of the anti-housing crowd is just old and is more anti-change than anything else. Even if the value of their home skyrockets even more, they won't sell and move. Their complaints are more about noise, traffic, and "quality of life" than home values.
I think the value of their main residence is a bigger driver than opportunities through zoning changes. It's easier to sit in your house year after year as it increases in value than it is to go through a redevelopment process, and have to move or end up with a less impressive residence. I'd guess that many would look for opportunities in denser suburbs elsewhere than agitate to change zoning closer to home.
There are strong factors around character of a neighbourhood: I think people in valuable SFHs tend to resent people in units as one example. Housing prices have typically risen without the assistance of zoning changes.
I don't think they're actually the same thing, I definitely feel like Claude is much better with code than ChatGPT is so there are clearly differences in the capabilities of these models. One analogy that I find helpful here is the idea that these AIs are like animals. Just like there are animals of the same family (meaning they're genetically related to some degree) they still adapt to different niches. I see all these AI companies ultimately creating models analogous to that.
Some AIs will be good at coding (perhaps in a particular language or ecosystem), some at analyzing information and churning out a report for you, and some will be better at operating in physical spaces.
They have sufficient control over their model that they can presumably tailor it to their needs. Perhaps if you acquired analogous control, you’d have more success.
Exact match? Unlikely. But suppose that with each tax return, everybody had the option of listing 5 corporations which they believed were doing more harm than good. It would be simple statistics to determine if the signal was strong enough to warrant action. As for mine, well I'd have to do a bit of research but they'd likely come be in defense, oil, or adtech.
Perhaps we also could list 5 which we think are having a positive impact. The assets of the bad ones could be auctioned off to the good ones, the money made from that auction could go towards severance for anyone whose job was dissolved.
I'm not sure about that, there haven't been too many large European tech companies growing up in the aftermath of GDPR. While it's probably a small factor, I do think this general climate of regulation hurts smaller companies more than is generally acknowledged.
