This piece from the Financial Times really resonated with me.
It hits on something I've experienced: the difficulty of finding a community in an American city that is affordable enough to live in, safe enough to let children play in, and has access to good education. It's so hard to find. In most parts of the US, if you want to have these things, you're pushed to the suburbs.
It seems to me that urban areas have an amazing lack of urgency around this problem.
While reading, I couldn't help thinking of this picture I took during my first week living in Zürich:
In what US city could you imagine this scene?
A group of grade school girls on their way to school all by themselves, without a parent in sight. One of my favorite things about living in Switzerland was that it was not just possible to live in an urban area, but easy.
One of my proudest accomplishments from the past year is coding this website with the help of GPT.
When I first built the site, I wasn't sure I was going to finish it and GPT didn't have sharing features, so then I was done and I couldn't share with others what it was like, but it was really impactful for me. This skill that had always been outside of my grasp was now something I could do... and what did that mean for other skills?
Since finishing the site's MVP, I've periodically made changes, but haven't put all the effort into sharing them. I'm going to try and do more of that though, in part because ChatGPT's sharing features make it so easy to do.
So with that prologue, here's my first change log post: images are now responsive on the site. This was annoying me for a while and I'm glad I took the 15 minutes to fix it.
Just to give you a sense, the mortality rate for something like cardiac arrest or a heart attack goes up by about 15 to 20% on the day of a marathon. Now, most people are not having cardiac arrest or a heart attack, so the aggregate impact on a city might be limited. But I think if I were to talk to people about the Boston Marathon bombings, most people would say that was a horrific event. But more people die because of marathon-associated road closures every year in a given city with a large marathon than died in the Boston Marathon bombings. But the bombings, what they did are so salient to us. Deaths in these other channels, we don’t even think about that.
That is from David Epstein's newsletter Range Widely. The cause is that the closure of roads along the marathon route makes it difficult to get to hospitals quickly.
An idle thought: I wonder if the same holds true for cardiac arrests during rush hour traffic?
One of my favorite stories of the year. From Vice:
Comparatively, according to a representative from the Royal Thai Embassy in DC, there are just 300,000 Thai-Americans—less than 1 percent the size of the the Mexican-American population. Yet there are an estimated 5,342 Thai restaurants in the United States, compared to around 54,000 Mexican restaurants; that’s ten times the population-to-restaurant ratio. So, why are there so many Thai restaurants in the US?
The Thai government has created a company, the Global Thai Restaurant Company, to make it easier to start and run Thai restaurants. If I understand correctly, they aren't quite franchised (as in sharing a brand name), but effectively provide a pre-planned out restaurant. More from the article:
The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion, most likely run by bureaucrats rather than restaurateurs, drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.”
Why go to the trouble? To increase exports and travel to Thailand through gastrodiplomacy.
