In a recent article, Kolko divided the largest cities into 32 “red” metros where Romney got more votes than Obama in 2012 (e.g. Houston), 40 “light-blue” markets where Obama won by fewer than 20 points (e.g. Austin), and 28 “dark-blue” metros where Obama won by more than 20 points (e.g. L.A., SF, NYC). Although all three housing groups faced similar declines in the recession and similar bounce-backs in the recovery, affordability remains a bigger problem in the bluest cities.
Super-Liberal Cities, Super-Unaffordable Houses
Trulia
“Even after adjusting for differences of income, liberal markets tend to have higher income inequality and worse affordability,” Kolko said.
Kolko’s theory isn’t an outlier. There is a deep literature tying liberal residents to illiberal housing policies that create affordability crunches for the middle class. In 2010, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn published a study of California cities, which found that liberal metros issued fewer new housing permits. The correlation held over time: As California cities became more liberal, he said, they built fewer homes.
“All homeowners have an incentive to stop new housing,” Kahn told me, “because if developers build too many homes, prices fall, and housing is many families’ main asset. But in cities with many Democrats and Green Party members, environmental concerns might also be a factor. The movement might be too eager to preserve the past.”
via Why Middle-Class Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Liberal Cities – The Atlantic.
Personal Finance For Engineers – Business Insider
Last month, Wealthfront’s Adam Nash gave a speech at Twitter headquarters entitled “Personal Finance for Engineers.”
Personal finance can be a “noisy” field, with a lot of investing aphorisms thrown around as fact.
And because engineers understand and prefer math, as Nash describes them, they tend to think they are being rational with their money … even when they are not.
Given the imminent IPO, and the windfall that will accrue to several employees, this is an important lesson.
Nash’s presentation is a solid intro and useful refresher into the world of personal finance, especially for the more quantitatively-inclined.
via Personal Finance For Engineers – Business Insider.
Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease | The Verge
Google’s ambition to cure death is beginning to take shape in a new product from its Google X division. Andrew Conrad, the head of the company’s life sciences division, today announced the details of an effort that would use nanotechnology to identify signs of disease. The project would employ tiny magnetic nanoparticles, said to be one-thousandth the width of a red blood cell, to bind themselves to various molecules and identify them as trouble spots.
Google’s nanotechnology project, which would also involve a wearable magnetic device that tracks the particles, is said to be at least five years off, according to an accompanying report in the Wall Street Journal. The company is still figuring out how many nanoparticles are necessary to identify markers of disease, and scientists will have to develop coatings for the particles that will let them bind to targeted cells. One idea is to deliver the nanoparticles via a pill that you would swallow.
“FUNDAMENTALLY, OUR FOE IS DEATH.”
More than 100 Googlers are now working on the project. “We’re trying to stave off death by preventing disease,” Conrad said on stage at WSJD Live. “Fundamentally, our foe is death. Our foe is unnecessary death. Because we have the technology to intervene, and we should expend more energy and effort on it.
via Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease | The Verge.
Two schools of thought on the Bangsamoro bill
We can certainly have a successful nation without help from our countrymen from the south but why handcuff ourselves with such a restriction. If you are concerned for ours and our children’s future then this is something that we also need to understand and have an active part on shaping.
MANILA, Philippines – Concerns over the constitutionality of the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) are centered on these questions: Do you choose to read the Constitution broadly or restrictively? Are you open to the concept of “asymmetrical relationship” between the envisioned Bangsamoro and the central government or are you not?
With these comments, lawyer Oscar Franklin Tan, co-chair of the Philippine Bar Association, summed up the main points of the House ad hoc committee hearing on the bill with former justices and legal experts on Tuesday, October 28. (READ: Legal experts take on Bangsamoro bill)
via Two schools of thought on the Bangsamoro bill.
Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease | The Verge
Nice. Hope this becomes reality!
Google’s ambition to cure death is beginning to take shape in a new product from its Google X division. Andrew Conrad, the head of the company’s life sciences division, today announced the details of an effort that would use nanotechnology to identify signs of disease. The project would employ tiny magnetic nanoparticles, said to be one-thousandth the width of a red blood cell, to bind themselves to various molecules and identify them as trouble spots.
Google’s nanotechnology project, which would also involve a wearable magnetic device that tracks the particles, is said to be at least five years off, according to an accompanying report in the Wall Street Journal. The company is still figuring out how many nanoparticles are necessary to identify markers of disease, and scientists will have to develop coatings for the particles that will let them bind to targeted cells. One idea is to deliver the nanoparticles via a pill that you would swallow.
“FUNDAMENTALLY, OUR FOE IS DEATH.”
More than 100 Googlers are now working on the project. “We’re trying to stave off death by preventing disease,” Conrad said on stage at WSJD Live. “Fundamentally, our foe is death. Our foe is unnecessary death. Because we have the technology to intervene, and we should expend more energy and effort on it.
via Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease | The Verge.
Real Love Is a Choice | Seth Adam Smith
I’ve heard it said that real love is an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person.
It’s true.
When all the butterflies have fluttered away and your wedding day becomes a distant memory, you will discover that you’ve married someone who is just as imperfect as you. And they, in turn, will come to learn that you have problems, insecurities, struggles, quirks–and body odor–just as real as theirs!
Then you will realize that real love isn’t just a euphoric, spontaneous feeling–it’s a deliberate choice–a plan to love each other for better and worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health. Of course, you don’t choose who you’re attracted to, but you definitely choose who you fall in love with and (more importantly) who you stay in love with.
Our society places a lot of emphasis on feelings. We are taught that we should always follow our feelings and do whatever makes us happy. But feelings are very fickle and fleeting. Real love, on the other hand, is like the north star in the storms of life; it is constant, sure, and true. Whenever we’re lost and confused we can find strength in the love that we have chosen.
via Real Love Is a Choice | Seth Adam Smith.
Filipinos most sought-after architects in Singapore | Inquirer Business
Nice new for our Architects!
Singaporean Theodore Chan can’t help but comment about the “ubiquitousness” of the Filipino overseas worker. “You guys are all over,” he chuckled good-naturedly.
He meant that in a positive way. The president of the Singapore Institute of Architects (SIA), and the director of CIAP Architects Pte. Ltd., hastily added that he had nothing but admiration for the skills and knowhow of Filipinos, especially in the architectural field.
“Singaporean architects have taken interest in the Philippines because a lot of your architects work in our offices. I would say that 90 percent of our workforce in Singapore are dependent on foreign technical expertise, and of which maybe 70 percent are of Filipino origins,” Chan told Inquirer Property during a panel discussion on Sept. 9 at the Master’s Hall of Yuchengco Museum in Makati. The panel also consisted of other leading Singaporean and Filipino architects.
via Filipinos most sought-after architects in Singapore | Inquirer Business.
The Cheapest Generation – Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic
In some respects, Millennials’ residential aspirations appear to be changing just as significantly as their driving habits—indeed, the two may be related. The old cul-de-sacs of Revolutionary Road and Desperate Housewives have fallen out of favor with Generation Y. Rising instead are both city centers and what some developers call “urban light”—denser suburbs that revolve around a walkable town center. “People are very eager to create a life that blends the best features of the American suburb—schools still being the primary, although not the only, draw—and urbanity,” says Adam Ducker, a managing director at the real-estate consultancy RCLCO. These are places like Culver City, California, and Evanston, Illinois, where residents can stroll among shops and restaurants or hop on public transportation. Such small cities and town centers lend themselves to tighter, smaller housing developments, whether apartments in the middle of town, or small houses a five-minute drive away. An RCLCO survey from 2007 found that 43 percent of Gen‑Yers would prefer to live in a close-in suburb, where both the houses and the need for a car are smaller.
via The Cheapest Generation – Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic.
Let the Body Rest, for the Sake of the Brain – The Atlantic
Something I need to take seriousy.
In fact, according to Roenneberg’s groundbreaking study in Current Biology, about one-third of people living in first-world countries are required to wake up two hours before their circadian clocks, or “natural waking times,” tell them to, and 69 percent of people have to wake up one hour before their bodies would like them to.
Of course, different people require different amounts of sleep and although there’s no universal rule for how long we should all be sleeping, it’s becoming increasingly clear that working late and waking early can cause serious problems. It’s not just repeated sleep deprivation that does people in, either. Just one restless night can seriously affect us in the morning.
Getting less than five hours of sleep a night makes people dumber and less able to concentrate, and it can make people more susceptible to false memories, according to a new study published in the September issue of Psychological Science.
via Let the Body Rest, for the Sake of the Brain – The Atlantic.
John Wick: An Idiot Killed His Puppy and Now Everyone Must Die – The Atlantic
Strangely excited to watch this movie.
John Wick, played with quiet, slow-burning grace by Keanu Reeves in what’s being billed as a comeback for the 50-year-old actor, is both. At the beginning of the film he seems like any Wall Street banker or startup whiz who has cashed out early to enjoy life with his wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan, seen only in flashbacks and blurry iPhone clips). That’s until Helen dies of a serious but unspecified illness, leaving Wick all alone in his sleek, monochrome mansion as a living, breathing, sobbing manifestation of Sad Keanu.
In one of the most emotionally manipulative plot devices ever seen on film, the doorbell rings, and he takes delivery of a puppy, a canis ex machina, ordered by Helen before she died to give Wick something to love. The bond is instantaneous: The adorable dog and the handsome man eat cereal together, and snuggle up in bed, and drive around in a killer 1969 Mustang—sometimes breaking into what looks like an airport to do doughnuts and handbrake turns in front of gas tankers—and for a fleeting moment it seems like the movie might have the makings of an existential buddy comedy. Only a thug, Iosef (Alfie Allen), who’s eyed Wick’s car in a gas station, breaks into his house with a handful of friends late at night, beats up Wick, steals the car, and kills the puppy.
This is 2014 in immature, animal-worshiping, Cute Emergency-retweeting America. You come at a puppy, you best not miss its owner, whose mystique as one of the most ruthless killers ever to wear Kevlar is quickly established in the following exchange between the owner of a chop shop (John Leguizamo) and Iosef’s father, Russian crime lord Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist):
Viggo: I heard you struck my son. May I ask why?
Aureilo: Because he stole John Wick’s car and killed his dog.
Viggo: Oh.
Iosef doesn’t just kill John Wick’s dog, as Wick expresses in possibly the fiercest monologue Reeves has ever delivered: He kills his hope, and in doing so, unleashes the full fury of a now footloose and fancy-free angel of death. John Wick kills, by my count, 78 people in the movie’s 93 minutes, and he doesn’t just kill them, he toys with them first like a cat with a mouse, delivering a stray bullet in the shoulder or a kick to the kneecap before offing his targets with two shots to the head, assassination-style. The movie’s tagline is “Don’t Set Him Off,” but it really should be “This Idiot Killed My Puppy and Now Everyone Must Die.”
via John Wick: An Idiot Killed His Puppy and Now Everyone Must Die – The Atlantic.