Craigslist also undermined the entire newspaper classifieds business, which paid for local news reporting in communities of all sizes.
Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.
The first priority should be an agreement between the two heavyweights of ai: America and China. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should affirm the principle that humans must remain stewards of ai systems until adequate frameworks for reliability and security have been built.
This is naïve. The goals of both men have nothing to do with protecting humanity, but rather furthering their own personal agendas.
In Trump’s case, it’s all about amassing more wealth and power.
For Xi, it’s realizing an ethno-nationalist dream where China under the CCP is at the center of world power, the independent nation of Taiwan as well as disputed border areas that are currently controlled by India and Russia and the Philippines are annexed by China, and Xi’s eternal legacy is remembered as the savior of the Chinese people.
International cooperation and touchy-feely rhetoric about saving humanity from AI have no place in either man’s worldview.
Agreed, and their zeroeth order prerogative isn't much better: to ensure the continued need and demand for the thrall of centralized authority that allows them to achieve their disparate goals. This ensures strong AI is never going to be able to empower autonomy that removes, causes questioning, or even causes awareness of their zeroeth order.
What's really amazing is that they still don't know the "why" other than some interesting speculation: religious purposes, places for psychadelic trips, "the creation of surpluses in some kind of hierarchy."
Coincidentally, last week the local public television station was replaying a very old program of Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, who died in the late 80s and was known for studies of mythology. He had visited Lascaux, and believed that it was used for coming of age ceremonies:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves, it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have. You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes, and that world up there in the sun with all those … that’s a secondary world: this is primary. I mean, this just overcomes you. ...
Now, what were these caves used for? The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this, is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank. You’re banging your head on projections all the time, and it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that, and go into the womb of the earth. And the shaman, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy.
BILL MOYERS: And then there was a release, once you got into that vast, torchlit chamber down there. What was the tribe, what was the tradition trying to say to the boy?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is the womb land from which all the animals come.
BILL MOYERS: I see.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when: the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.
Joseph Campbell is not regarded within anthropology and paleontology as a serious scholar. He is a purely pop-sci phenomenon, boosted by his association with Star Wars and friendship with Bill Moyers. Maybe not exactly a crackpot Graham Hancock kind of figure, but more comparable to that instead of anyone authoritative.
That's for the best, but I usually hear him quoted in the context of storytelling. His popularity definitely makes him relevant there, but I think he also started with real insight about hero-quest stories.
Beowulf and Episode IV – A New Hope may not have much direct bearing on any given person's pubescent path, aside from media consumption, but within it: much.
There's no way to determine a "why" and there probably wasn't a single purpose in my opinion. The most interesting part to me, though, is how a lot of the hand "prints" include children.
Pelley and Garcia-Navarro spend a lot of time talking about the shortcomings of Weiss and Bilton, and really seem to give David Ellison the benefit of the doubt.
It should be the other way around. Ellison is completely out of his depth, trying to fulfill a lifelong dream of being a Hollywood player. He tried the actor route, and that didn't work out, so now it's major studio acquisitions on daddy's dime.
He made terrible calls hiring Weiss and Bilton, and now it looks like 60 Minutes is going to go the way of other failed newsroom makeovers by clueless rich guys. See: Bezos buying the Washington Post,
Historically normal. Inevitability is the critical tool in the autocratic playbook. This is why they work relentlessly to suppress any sort of synchronization signal between their opponents; it is effective at making things feel hopeless, and making the resisters feel isolated.
Cf Putin, Germany of a certain vintage.
The solution is rhythm and trust. You do things regularly and predictably whenever it is safe to do so -- potlucks, rallies -- and recharge trust in those moments, hopefully enough to carry you through until the next one.
> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.
Not being directly in cybersecurity, is the situation there different from, say, CS grads as a whole? That is, not sure if the point is that hiring for entry-level tech is a disaster across the board and cybersecurity is one particular manifestation of that dynamic, or if cybersecurity is for some reason specifically worse than overall new grad employment in tech.
Big tech companies use their influence to push the "shortage" narrative in the media, because it gives Congress political cover to increase the H-1(b) cap.
I had a tech career spanning from the late '80s until the 2020s, and I read articles in major media outlets about a shortage every single year. In all that time we had a actual, bona fide shortage for about two years in the late '90s.
If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions (the boiler room retention script always gave you an option to extend at the cheaper rate, but it was a pain to have to go through the motions). IIRC new consumer laws at the state or local level ended that practice.
I'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk.
Works for telcos and Adobe, too.
As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.
> This was presumably because Microsoft and the NFL had a deal where everyone on the sidelines were using Surfaces and they thought it was a good idea.
Everyone except Bill Belichick, who famously hurled his Microsoft Surface to the ground when he was first forced to use it:
The problem we're seeing across many professions is AI output is not getting vetted by knowledgeable people, whether it's an experienced analyst, senior engineer, expert attorney, or the resident physician. At best they skim, at worst they don't even see it at all before it's published, pushed to production, distributed to clients, or submitted to the court.
In many cases the skills are available in house to do the necessary vetting, but these people are already overwhelmed with their existing day to day.
Anyone remember that item a few months back about Amazon now having senior engineers vet generative AI output (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017)? I had to LOL when I read that. These folks are already slammed. And the idea that Amazon would allow human bottlenecks to multiply across projects and underlying infrastructure development is ridiculous.
Part of the problem: you get given a complete document to review after it's been fully baked.
I'm pushing the need for basic engineering principles across whole organisations.
You wouldn't give an engineer 1000 lines of code to review without the original spec of what you're trying to achieve for context (at a minimum, ideally the reviewer was in the room when the work was introduced, and has full context).
So, these docs, they're given as an all or nothing.
Do you push back on the 39th metric that is defined to the utmost detail? Or just resign yourself to the fact that it is what it is?
A one (6 is the goto if we're talking Amazon?!) pager.. "this is what I am proposing" at least gives the skeleton of the idea to push back at the general shape of the idea, refine it, before all the emotional investment of your precious report being complete.
Y'know.. the traditional product running through the spec in a SCRUM* environment.. the engineers doing proper code reviews..
So many people get buried in tech debt due to constantly choosing "let's be productive now and iterate later". Then later never comes.
This was already proof that, when a company is given the chance of getting a reward now and putting in the effort later, they will take the reward and postpone the effort indefinitely.
AI now offers "generate now, review later". Fill in the pattern.
We're cooked and it's not due to AI, it's due to the fundamentals of an economy and society that only sees the short term.
I've had this situation and basically just had to throw out stuff that was written because its completely terrible/wrong. Either start again or just give up.
As an attorney, I feel like vetting AI output takes longer than just doing it from scratch, let alone versus just using a traditional form.
With AI, I have to read through everything, often explain why it's wrong, and then rewrite everything anyways. I mean, I get way more billables, but I think it's symptomatic of how AI loses its advantage of being quick and accessible to those who don't understand the subject matter.
>As an attorney, I feel like vetting AI output takes longer than just doing it from scratch, let alone versus just using a traditional form.
This is my issue with AI.
In the type of work i do the work needs to be precise down to the context of how individual words are used.
Having AI pump out 20 pages of content but then me having to go through the 20 pages word by word, cross checking references and prior statements is going to take a long time.
Not to mention I didn’t write it, so my brain doesn’t already know what’s been written so it takes several passes to confirm its complete and that it all fits together.
I find it easy to just write it myself use AI for the more menial tasks like logic check, completeness checks, etc.
One task AI was very useful in was where we wanted to understand the gaps in a submission relative to a process requirement document. We didn’t care if the output was 100% complete or perfect, we just wanted a few examples.
Being able to input a couple 300 pages documents and have AI spit out a dozen examples in 30 seconds was a huge time saver.
Fact-checking and editing a mediocre piece of writing be way harder than writing from scratch. Proving that something isn’t true or can’t be substantiated is hard work, and so is arguing that a word choice is subtly inappropriate.
And making a ton of corrections to a document everyone was hoping was ready to go is never fun politically.
Another attorney here. I understand your plight. But I can't believe law firms are sending out briefs and opinions without carefully checking all of the citations. I mean, even when Lexis or Westlaw identifies an (actual) case on point, you still have to check if the case has been overturned, whether it is truly on point, or if it can be distinuished from your case. So even if the cited case is not a halucination, someone would still have to read and analyze the cited case in the context of the present case.
It's not really any different in programming. Like if you have a well structured code and want to do a clear refactoring across it and you know what to expect, it can speed things up. But if it's generating any significant (and relatively complex) new code, you have to go through the whole thing manually again and then you find out you have to fix way to many things and get bogged down in different paths the AI didn't do correctly.
Of course, it's pretty much impossible to hear a dissenting point of view today and everyone is going crazy on these drugs. I might be hilariously wrong but I think this is the best time to start a software company.
I think its the perfect time to be contrarian - think about it. If youre wrong - So what? The world will have changed for everyone in the field. If you are right? You stand to be positioned to win big financially whilst everyone elses brain is rotting away.
You can also feed the document or source file to another frontier-level model, ideally two others, and tell it to vet it aggressively. The goal is to goad the models into erring on the side of false positive findings rather than potentially missing true positives.
I find that if Gemini Pro agrees with Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 on something, it's almost certainly correct at a level where I wouldn't be likely to catch any errors myself.
To be honest, I don't use it at all professionally except I guess transcription or search engine summaries to point me to actual documents. I mostly come across it when a client makes a contract or legal memo on his own and sends it to me to review. If I'm drafting a lease or a trust or whatever, I already have forms that cover everything they need, have been used thousands of times, and can be easily tweaked as needed cuz I half have them memorized at this point.
I can't imagine using them for a court filing. Those are either so short that they're trivial or they require painstaking research, precision, and often citations for every single sentence.
This is the realization I had too. We had a manager update a policy at our org. He just shit it out through AI. It had tons of mistakes, people who read it had questions. Not only did it have mistakes it was causing people to do things in a way that added a manual step when an automatic process existed. Then the engineer VP commented on it asking the original author what its about who then had to bring it back up to the attention of the manager who made the first change.
It wasted many people's time, probably an order of magnitude of time wasted (and money) than if the initial person put a modicum of effort into making it right in the first place. Instead they hand it off to their life partner claude and just assume its good enough.
It's to the point where I am feeling insulted when I get ai slop like this from people. If I am expected to perform at a high level then I expect that at the very minimum the slop throwers will proof read their slop.
Ugh same. I take pride in delivering software that is bug free, performant, and to spec.
When our product managers just send us AI generated JIRA tickets that are extremely long but contain no actual details and tons of irrelevant or wrong content I get extremely frustrated and are seen as not a team player. At that point I’d rather not have the product managers present in the process.
I have experienced this several times lately when writing software with claude/codex. Sometimes vetting and steering the agent takes longer than it would have taken me if done manually. Sure you can just decide not to vet the output and go into full vibecode, but agents tend to do a lot of dumb things (such as not deleting unused private methods or having temporary variables that are not needed).
In my experience the most effective work pattern for me is using agents to perform research and feedback on high level design, then I write the code manually, then I ask the agent to review the code for potential bugs/issues and fix those. The agents have a much easier time making small changes once the design is 90% there without going fully off the rails and generating slop.
I am working on writing skills to make the agent better but it is a bit painstaking. For example I had to write this inside of a skill because sometimes the agent would just stub out methods and leave TODOs: “always fully complete the requested task before finishing edits unless input is needed”.
> AI output is not getting vetted by knowledgeable people
You mean the people they fired and demoralized?
One of the things that "great [wo]men" like about "vibe-coding" (and that includes blindly producing non-code product), is that they, and they alone can now do what used to require the painful process of "passing it to context experts."
Now, the LLM is a "built-in context expert," and they don't need to vet the output anymore.
> Now, the LLM is a "built-in context expert," and they don't need to vet the output anymore.
Serious orgs are going to have to figure out the human layer. It will be needed, no matter how 'hallucination-free' the AI tooling gets. AI will still have some spectacularly bad fuck ups or even worse time bombs that get embedded in a system and don't become apparent until months or years later.
A lot of this will be dumped on existing staff with predictable results as they don't have the bandwidth to do it right. I can envision "output compliance" or "AI QA" becoming dedicated positions at many orgs. It's clearly needed.
Let's be honest, how many orgs are really serious? Playing the game of the day for shareholder appeasement is taken far more seriously than whatever the domain experts might think.
> In many cases the skills are available in house to do the necessary vetting, but these people are already overwhelmed with their existing day to day.
This is an interesting topic. We treat vetting output the same as doing the work ourselves, but that is not the case.
Doing the work is not the same as reviewing work done by others.
I have heard reports of software engineering companies that have gone full agentic. Their seniors only review stuff written by LLMs and it burns them out, because they have to switch context constantly.
I find this interesting because part of being a senior developer is that you are experienced enough that you won‘t make grave mistakes anymore. This is the case in many professions: you are relied upon to not make grave mistakes.
But those same people are now swamped with stuff that they are not able to review, so they will let a grave mistake slip through at some point.
>>The problem we're seeing across many professions is AI output is not getting vetted by knowledgeable people
I am particularly interested in Education and Human Knowledge Management. I have seen the rate of IT training going to zero. Think about specialized training, where if you make a mistake, the consequence of your errors, are talked about on the tv news of the evening.
The whole idea everybody is just planning to save their butt, using these strings coming out of these numeric matrices, while suspending judgement, just shudders me in horror. A bit like those South Asia Airline companies, that were forbidding their pilots from landing airplanes with manual piloting, leading to an increase loss of skills causing some well known disasters...
If well paid consultants cant even bother to check their links...
Also wondering on this whole review process with someone who wrote it with AI. Even if you comment and noted all issues. Do they have skills or willingness to correctly correct it all? And how many times would you need to keep the loop going for error free outcome? Is there even enough calendar time for that?
> In many cases the skills are available in house to do the necessary vetting, but these people are already overwhelmed with their existing day to day.
I think a lot of the time it's just pure laziness. AI gives people a magical "do all the work for me" button and it can bring out the worst in them.
I constantly battle this dichotomy where I care about the work I do but I also cannot possibly care about the corporate model, given 0 ownership of flawed processes across the org and the looming layoff that'll happen any day now.
Some people are given the button and really do not care.
It looks like when you sum up: the cost to generate information using an LLM + the cost to actually verify the information, the result on average is the same as not using the LLM. That does not mean some times it isn’t faster and cheaper. It just means other times it’s slower and more costly. This along with different people’s tolerance for accuracy explains why we see such diverging experiences with it.
So in order to make it pan out the forces at play are trying to make everyone believe we now have to accept wrong, even dangerous results.
But wait, if knowledgeable people have to vet the output, the process will not be 10X faster and you will not be able to fire the knowledgeable people. Therefore, your objection makes no sense. QED.
>> Amazon now having senior engineers vet generative AI output
Software and news are apples and oranges. The software engineer looks at AI code to spots errors and make/suggest corrections. But the software still exists. A doctor vetting a news article ("Owning a Boat Causes Cancer") isn't there to tweak language. The doctor's job is to stop the entire article. It would be like the amazon engineer deleting all the source code and telling the dev team to abandon the project. That will never be a popular task.
It's similar to tokenmaxxing in various companies. Who cares about reviewing the design and the code, just code generation all the way. If it runs it's good
If the main job is putting out a report, starting with AI is wrong in any case. What's the value of an AI-generated report, even if experts fix the biggest issues with it? Maybe this kind of report didn't have all that much value before, I don't know. But starting with AI just makes sure it's generic drivel.
> The problem we're seeing across many professions is AI output is not getting vetted by knowledgeable people, whether it's an experienced analyst, senior engineer, expert attorney, or the resident physician.
Yeah probably not for the same reason I left VFX rather than have a lifetime of completely disregarding my own generative creativity and cleaning up LLM-generated bullshit. Fuck that. Double-fuck creating ‘content’ to train the models.
In code, LLMs automate away a lot of the drudgery. I wasn’t sad to avoid spending a couple hours looking up the usage patterns and idioms for some ported library, or do some rote task that didn’t make the project significantly better. In most other jobs, they automate away the only fun part and leave humans with all of the drudgery.
The tech industry has always been arrogant to some extent, but assuming the world of talented professional knowledge workers and creatives would be content to professionally proofread, apply lipstick to pigs, and polish turds is a whole new level of out-of-touch. I’d rather live out of my car and dig through the garbage for bottles with deposits.
I loved solving problems with code but I don’t think it’s controversial to say most people enjoy the novel problems much much more than pulling apart an obtusely designed, non-idiomatic API. The AI is better at the details than the novel problem, so whoever is driving still needs to sort that out. In art, writing, and so-on, it only does the interesting part, but it does it poorly. So for professional use cases, it involves a lot of tedious cleanup of other people’s art that a machine (very economically) amalgamated into a pile of shit, and you’ve no opportunity to do anything interesting. At all.
I grew up in the Boston area around the same time. Another factor that limited interest in flying to sunny beach places was we already had options close to home during the warmer months, such as Cape Cod, Cape Ann, Hull, Rhode Island, Southern Maine, and so on. Lots of people including families of modest means had cabins in these areas.
For the winter months, there were two "sun" locations that weren't too far away: Bermuda and Florida.
As the author described, new flying options and generally cheaper fares have upended the old vacation order. People are also more open-minded to going places that were never considered as vacation destinations in the past, such as Iceland (only 4 hours from Logan).
But a few strange geographical outlooks remain. For road/train vacations, for as long as I remember, the dominant perspective has been focused on New England, New York City, and maybe Washington DC as a stretch (7-8 hour drive). Montreal is less than 5 hours away but I never knew anyone from my generation that went there until we were in our 20s. Other parts of Quebec and the Southern Maritimes and Northern New York are still basically terra incognito to 90% of the population of Boston. It seems further away even though these locations are closer than Washington DC.
We moved to the area in a very middle class neighborhood when I was young, around the same time as the author of TFA. Like you said, what I saw was a lot of families had family summer homes on the Cape or one of the NH lakes. Everyone but the Dad would pick up for the summer, and then he'd work during the week & then go to the summer home on the weekend. But these weren't luxury homes by any stretch. These were small, often rustic, closer to shack than nice summer home. A place to sleep at night and not much more.
In the intervening decades, that's all changed. Today's summer homes are so much more different. I've seen a lot of those families I knew back then sell their homes over time. Developers scoop up several properties in a row and build some huge McMansion. So now these areas are the sort of wealthy person summer home people picture when the term is used.
> Today's summer homes are so much more different. I've seen a lot of those families I knew back then sell their homes over time. Developers scoop up several properties in a row and build some huge McMansion.
Exactly. Lake Winnipesaukee is a playground for the rich now. No one is selling seasonal properties on Cape Cod anymore, they've all been converted to condo developments or year-round homes starting at $500-$600k and often well over $1m.
This is exactly what I was picturing when I said McMansion. We took the family on a trip there a few years back and rented a boat. Riding around the lake was eye opening. Especially when you'd see one of the smaller old style multi-generational family homes squeezed in the middle of 2 behemoths.
>In the intervening decades, that's all changed. Today's summer homes are so much more different. I've seen a lot of those families I knew back then sell their homes over time. Developers scoop up several properties in a row and build some huge McMansion. So now these areas are the sort of wealthy person summer home people picture when the term is used.
The call is coming from inside the house!
The developer would love to build four new half mil cottages instead of one new 1mil McMansion. But they can't they have to bundle four old lots or whatever to be able to do something that's legal because of the laws and rules championed by the EXACT. SAME. PEOPLE. who complain about all the new McMansions on the lake. And then they complain about the jet skis and the boat stereos and whatnot. Did you think that the people rich enough to buy this stuff would not have toys? And the whole time they vote to raise taxes too so that hastens the whole turnover process because the people who would hold onto the seasonal properties have to either bend over and take the carrying cost or renovate into a high end rental (if that's even possible to do economically with the grandfathered in cabin they've got) to make it worth it (or just sell out, which is what their kids almost always choose to do because screw all that work).
You literally can't have a shitty old trailer type "hunting camp" or seasonal cabin in most of Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine because once again, the people that got there first pulled up the ladder via the government.
Source: Have some of these assholes (lake variety) in the family
Yes and no. The developer doesn't *need* to develop anything. They could have just not bought the property looking to make a quick buck, and instead let someone else buy the cottage and keep it that way.
I grew up in Toronto and the family of my university girlfriend owned a small cottage in the northeastern part of the province that didn't have road access. You had to take a boat across a lake to get to it. It had a tiny camp kitchen, a table for everyone to eat at, and a bunch of single and bunk beds and that was it. No power or running water. The whole point was spending a weekend living simply, not just living your regular life in a different location.
I miss it dearly and there is nothing like it any more.
- New Brunswick is very economically depressed and only has a few things of interest to your average tourist (primarily along/near the Bay of Fundy). It's about a 8hr drive just to get to Moncton from Boston.
- Nova Scotia - Also struggling economically in many areas outside of Halifax. Halifax is 11hrs out of Boston and what's arguably the most interesting scenery in the province (up in Cape Breton) is more like 13hrs.
It's also cold much of the year so the optimal tourism season is short and even in the warm months it's often not that warm (and the ocean water certainly never is).
Quebec:
- Quebec City is decently known and about 7hrs. The rest of the province besides that and MTL I agree are basically a mystery to most.
- That Maine is basically a remote wilderness along the Quebec border and has almost no land connections (and no good ones) makes exploring up beyond Quebec City less common than it seems like it should be. (Also no bridges over the St. Lawrence beyond Quebec City).
That's exactly what my child did with friends a few years ago when they were 19. I know that college students in Vermont frequently go across the border for the same reason.
Also in greater Boston and had the fortune to do a family trip to Bermuda in that era. One more possibility not mentioned in the article is that Bermuda could have also 'lost its crown' as a popular destination for New Englanders because it was simply promoted less. I don't think the island cluster is as dependent on tourism revenue as maybe it once was in 70s.
The airline would rather the trip take zero hours because crew costs hourly and they want to turn that seat around and sell it again but they have to balance that against fuel costs.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I went to Ottawa once or twice when I was a teen, but only made it to Montreal for the first time about 15 years ago.
I agree with you about the Maritimes. The bridge has made a difference but it's still a long drive and as you noted there are few famous destination cities or attractions.
Regarding Quebec: It seems that far more Quebeckers are aware of New England attractions in Boston and points north than the other way around. You see them or hear them at ski slopes, beaches, concerts in Boston, etc. Yet few New Englanders have been to Montreal, and even fewer have even heard of Quebec City, the walled European city and heritage site just a few hours downriver.
Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.
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