Tangential, but I'm also a little obsessed with taking municipal data and turning it into something else. Lately I've been building an online open world game built on Philadelphia's terrain. It similarly uses a Philly LIDAR scan, the land use maps, the street data, building lots, and a few other sources to make the game map.

There's a signup but it doesn't validate or anything I just haven't gotten around to making a demo mode. Any fake email will do: https://cityrider.jpsmaps.com/. The general idea is to pick up trash around Philly to power/build other fun things like your jet pack and ramps. Buy properties and customize the facades. Run from Gritty. It's been a blast, and while not conservation, I believe what is effectively a littering PSA to be a worthy output of my time ha.

You can also click on many trees to see what they are, as most are from the Philly Tree Inventory (though more are added to fill out forest areas for style reasons).

companies must do this, 'cause if they don't then their competition will (i.e. the pressure)

of course, we can collectively decide to equally value labor and profit, as a symbiotic relationship that incentivizes long term prosperity. but where's the memes in that

As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.

As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.

It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days

The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.

IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.

In my experience as a human, the more you know about a subject, or even the more you have simply seen content about it, the easier it is to ramble on about it convincingly. It's like a mirroring skill, and it does not actually mean you understand what you're saying.

LLMs seem to do the same thing, I think. At scale this is widely useful, though, I am not discounting it. Just think it's an order of magnitude below what's possible and all this talk of existing stream-of-consciousness-like LLMs creating AGI seems like a miss

To me I think VC's figured out a way to market a very specific way to build companies and convinced a lot of people it's the only way for 20-ish years. Then there was this sort of shift to selling to enterprise, I think because B2C got harder and easy money was the goal. By then a lot of enterprise design makers were probably in the networks of the people selling. There's a meme about YC-of-late being mostly companies that sell shovels to each other.

But when you optimize for enterprise, I think you end up losing a lot of diversity of opinion in where the value comes from, which leads to top-heavy companies.

My main issue is that after the ZIRP era I don't believe the money is gone or unavailable. It just seems to be hoarded for some reason. There is astronomical wealth out there that could be used for trying new economic models that compete with the last generation of VCs. But it isn't happening.

Maybe the next era of VC decision makers, the ones who themselves were funded on big bets, just don't have the same appetite for risk? Or maybe the era of "developing your brand" has made them not want to share their success? I'm not sure but it's weird to me.

To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.