I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?

But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.

It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)

However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.

Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.

Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:

“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”

And for some people, they're unsightly:

In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”

You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.

But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.

I recently joked that, because of AI, everyone now sends you a 50-page PDF for review. Of course, what we all do next is just ask AI to summarize it and help prepare a response. So, the net effect is AI talking to AI.

We're all becoming a kind of intermediary because the volume of information is simply too great for any human to reasonably process. In many ways, this can feel overwhelming. It also makes me feel like it's becoming harder to maintain a long attention span.

But this appears to be where the world is heading. Eventually, we are going to have what is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and that is going to have a profound impact on our lives.

Venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been spending a lot of time thinking about what an AGI-level economy might look like, and he recently published a post where he modeled some of the possible scenarios.

I will give you the spoiler here: His intuition is that we're going to need to create an economy that combines competition and redistribution (also referred to as a Negative Income Tax, which provides people with a basic income).

Because without competition, productivity gains will be captured as rent, rather than resulting in lower prices. And without redistribution, we are likely to see an untenable increase in inequality.

If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his post.

Cover photo by Alex Knight on

I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?

But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.

It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)

However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.

Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.

Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:

“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”

And for some people, they're unsightly:

In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”

You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.

But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.

I recently joked that, because of AI, everyone now sends you a 50-page PDF for review. Of course, what we all do next is just ask AI to summarize it and help prepare a response. So, the net effect is AI talking to AI.

We're all becoming a kind of intermediary because the volume of information is simply too great for any human to reasonably process. In many ways, this can feel overwhelming. It also makes me feel like it's becoming harder to maintain a long attention span.

But this appears to be where the world is heading. Eventually, we are going to have what is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and that is going to have a profound impact on our lives.

Venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been spending a lot of time thinking about what an AGI-level economy might look like, and he recently published a post where he modeled some of the possible scenarios.

I will give you the spoiler here: His intuition is that we're going to need to create an economy that combines competition and redistribution (also referred to as a Negative Income Tax, which provides people with a basic income).

Because without competition, productivity gains will be captured as rent, rather than resulting in lower prices. And without redistribution, we are likely to see an untenable increase in inequality.

If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his post.

Cover photo by Alex Knight on