urbanorabble

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Who are the rentiers?

American cities need more housing. That is obvious to the YIMBY movement. I've heard some attempts to contest that statement, but in the overall range of discourse, it's rare for those who defend opposing viewpoints to respond to that statement directly. Instead, those discussions experience a topic change, either focusing on personal experiences, homeowner "rights", or an attack on landlords. Part of the reason for that topic change is that contending that there is enough housing in cities has to confront the supply and demand topic, and if you're not going to provide more supply, you have to change demand. That line then leads to somewhat hollow arguments about how people don't "belong" in cities and should be elsewhere. It's hard to make that argument without being oblivious to the individuals who are currently making that choice to live in a city despite the very high housing costs, or who would prefer to if they hadn't been forced out by...

Commit to Long Term Testing

Expanding testing is very important now. It's also clearly an area we were unprepared. We should commit to having testing capacity long term, to both provide more certainty to anyone expanding testing capacity today, and to be prepared in the future. I had some thoughts about how this testing would be best structured. It's not possible to test for an contagious disease you're not aware of, but much of the infrastructure for doing so can already be in place, ready to be adapted. That infrastructure would roughly boil down to a) sample collection b) sample handling c) sample preparation d) sample analysis e) materials: reagents, etc. Scaling these up from scratch is quite a bit more work than adapting to a new contagion. A commitment to having that infrastructure would have helped a lot with the current crisis. Right now, the focus is rightfully on health care workers, suspected cases and essential workers. In terms of preparation though, in...

How to create a resilient Oil & Gas industry

Use Less As part of the current crisis, oil usage is down, and storage around the world is filling up, to the point that oil has traded at negative prices. As a reaction, many Republican lawmakers want to bailout the oil industry, by providing free access to storage or no-collateral loans. While it would make sense to ensure oil doesn't get dumped in the ocean, the right way to do that is by producing less oil. These proposals from the Republicans undermine the motivation for the industry to do so. Workers are important, but they have the same access to unemployment as the other 25 million Americans who are out of work. What this crisis should illustrate is something that has been illustrated many times before, the oil industry is a fragile thing. In the past this fragility has been demonstrated by massive spikes in prices and fears of shortage, in this case it's the inverse. Why the fragility? The simplest explanation is, we use too much....

Office Plans

I was inspired to do some research on what types of office plans were most popular among workers. So I dived in and started looking and stumbled across an interesting failure in this area. When a particular office plan was presented, it never included images of monitors. This seems a somewhat shocking error considering that the average office worker will spend a fair amount of their time in front of screen. Consider this as an example: https://officesnapshots.com/articles/the-top-25-most-popular-offices-of-2018/ . In all 25 examples, the initial shot is of a common space. I understand that a bit, it's easier to make these distinctive, the creativity of the designer is more unbounded. But lets be honest, while these areas are useful to collaborative working, without a large screen and space for a keyboard and mouse, the personal ergonomics of them are not adequate for a lot of work. Dig a little deeper and many of the deeper reviews...

The promise (and pitfalls) of index based insurance

Insurance in developing nations is far less broadly available than developed ones. In addition, the risks that citizens of developing nations face, are often much more numerous and severe. Crop-insurance is a common element of agricultural policy in the United States, but less common in Ethiopia. As Ethiopia has a much higher percentage of their population engaged in agriculture, shocks, such as drought, crop disease, or severe weather have big impacts. Insurance's basic principle is simple, spreading risk across a broader pool. When harmed, you get assistance to lessen the impact, when you're not harmed, your payments cover the costs of others who are. But deciding who is harmed is a very time consuming task. Preventing fraud is important to staying competitive, when looking at private enterprise, and important to public trust when dealing with public programs. But preventing fraud places burdens not only on the insurance provider, but the cl...

Finding your way: Public Transit and Uber

Uber has been disruptive in many ways. One way, which has been a great disappointment, is the effect on public transit systems. It was once hoped that ride hailing would provide an assist to public transit, as a gateway to abandoning car ownership. There have also been hopes that suburban commuters would use ride-hailing as their connection to public-transit which is not accessible by walking in these areas. Multiple studies have confirmed these hopes have largely not materialized, and public-transit has been weakened . Cities have reacted, mostly by putting barriers to ride-hailing growth. Sometimes they are collecting extra fees, sometimes placing new requirements. But mostly these efforts don't do much to change the relationship between ride-hailing and public-transit. I work with a local group that spends time thinking about automated car policy, how to get the most good and the least bad. We've discussed a proposal that fits ride...

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