And as far as regional inequality/rural area decline, someone posted a good Washington Monthly article about that awhile back.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...loom-and-bust/

Economic growth has become very concentrated by region. Especially during this recovery.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/stat...16772299689988

Completely insane Buzzfeed article claiming that the British authorities have covered up as many as 14 Russian assassinations in the UK:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/...n-british-soil

Tokyo has all sorts of zoning and land use regulations, including the strictest seismic codes in the world. The whole zoning argument is just another variation of people complaining about regulations in toto while ignoring their individual complexity, variety, and necessity. What people really mean when this topic comes up is, "I think such-and-such city should have higher density because I think it will lower housing costs", which is a completely valid opinion. But it should be argued as just that - an opinion about how a specific bit of land should be governed, not some immutable law of urban development. Land use is incredibly complicated.

Insane like they're off their rocker, or insane like holy **** how did this happen?

Insane like how did their editor let them open with that first paragraph in a major investigative piece.

Mark Galeotti, an expert in the international activities of the Russian mafia, said the country’s security services frequently cooperate with organised crime groups. “How it works is an order comes down from the top saying this person needs to die,” he said, and the security services have to work out “What is the most efficient way of doing this?” That might be to send state agents to conduct a sophisticated and undetectable killing, he said, or it may be simpler to enlist some “hoodlums” to carry out a crude hit. At the same time, Galeotti said, “technically challenging organised crime killings” are often carried out by “state agents basically moonlighting”.

That Buzzfeed story is bewildering on all sorts of levels. I have so many questions I don't know where to begin.

Literally the very first.

Don't point the ****ing gun at something you don't want to shoot.

Well, on the bright side, the lesson was probably effective.

So what are the odds this guy just cooked up the gun training lessons to cover for the fact he wanted to kill his daughter? I have a hard time believing anyone points a gun at a family member and pulls the trigger on accident.

I have an even harder time believing that a guy had three children and wanted to kill only his young daughter, and figured that shooting her in front of his other kids would be the best way to stage an accident. I'm gonna wield Hanlon's Razor on this one.

sure there's still zoning but it seems much less restrictive than basically any other rich country

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.dk/2014/...se-zoning.html

or

this is what basically no rules of any kind looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

which has some charm to it, but doesnt seem terribly safe

Read blog, watch uToob, become urban land use expert

This is disingenuous. The specific mechanics of land-use regulations are indeed very complicated, and often unjustifiably so. But the big picture question that is relevant to this conversation is whether land use-regulations should favor a higher level of density than they currently do. The answer to that question is a definite yes for most cities in America. In some places it's needed as an answer to rent crises, but everywhere it's necessary to reduce carbon emissions, make transit more viable, and allow more people to escape dying cities in the deindustrialized rural heartland (which is how this topic got started). Those are all national problems that have nothing to do with all the trivial details of specific pieces of land.

It was amazing Japanese were buying up stuff all over the world on top of that wave. They probably owned half of Hawaii at that time. It certainly did pop hard.

Has anyone heard from Dids?

Its very very revealing to read all the its different this time, this is fine rationalisations in much of the mainstream punditsphere of the time.

It was a bit before interwebs, but the articles are out there.

This specific point interestingly ties back to the article you originally posted, though:

Will increasing access to big cities save those struggling in the rust belt?

https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/statu...77016917745664

And yet the gop is running on an economic platform from 1980 of tax cuts for the rich. Thanks Grover.

oops fake news deleted

Many of the cities in the rust belt and mid-west really aren't doing that bad to begin with. It's not clear to me why everybody should move from Cleveland to Austin instead of just figuring out how to make Cleveland be more like Columbus and Pittsburgh.

Kind of out of my depth here, but I wonder a bit what those numbers really prove. For example, if you're in the world of Elysium, where all the rich people live on a utopian space station and everyone else is forced to live on terrible Earth, you might observe that, after Elysium filled up, the benefits to migration went down, because the only people migrating were moving from one spot on terrible Earth to another terrible place. The migrants you see are accomplishing less. That doesn't mean, however, that net migration to Elysium wouldn't be highly valuable or that the restrictionist policies on Elysium aren't harmful. It just means that high-value migration is being choked off by policy.

But we don't live in the world Elysium (yet). We live in a country with dozens of perfectly fine small to mid-sized cities where you can live a very good life. There's no compelling need for arcologies in the Bay Area just because a bunch of 20-somethings really wish they could live there.