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Google/Waymo is importing a Chinese EV van into the USA and putting in its own electronics (they would have done that anyways, even if it wasn’t banned).

Is Honda even bothering with a LHD version of the Suoer-N? As far as I can tell, they never bother with left side versions for Kei cars, and just limit them to right side markets. It’s a pity because I always wanted a Daihatsu Copen.

Well, you also see them in the Russian far east which gets a lot of used cars from Japan.


If demand picks up because supply increases, you will reach the previous equilibrium even with more supply. It isn’t rocket science, there is a price people are willing to pay to live in SD, and the market will keep gravitating to that price unless demand is somehow limited. The price people are willing to pay can even increase as density makes brings in things (eg culture, job opportunities) that make the city more desirable (eg see Hong Kong).

At the levels of density seen in Paris, San Diego could house 16 million people. That's city proper. The metro area could house 226 million people.

You're gonna have to do a lot better job convincing me that 16 million people would move to San Diego if they just built more housing. Let alone 226 million.


Twist do you think happens to every city that has reached 16 million people? Did they become more popular or less? Given that I’ve lived in a city of that size, my answer will differ from yours (they become more expensive, not less).

I’m confused on why you think paris is affordable and San Diego metro could somehow have enough water to grow to 220 million. The nearest comparison I can think of is south China Bay Area population (87 million), and if you think that those cities are affordable…I’m guessing we really have to agree to disagree.


> Twist do you think happens to every city that has reached 16 million people?

It's not about the exact number, it's that one city is not going to 10x in population from getting the price of housing down to "still a city but not skyrocketing".

> I’m confused on why you think paris is affordable

Compared to San Diego, it does seem to be significantly more affordable, and mainly because of rent.

> and San Diego metro could somehow have enough water

The most expensive source of water, desalination, should be under $1 per day per person. And there's probably better options.

> to grow to 220 million.

That number is a silly number to explain density, not a proposal.

> and if you think that those cities are affordable…

No, the only comparison point was Paris, and the density of Paris.


There is no way for San Diego to grow that fast overnight anyways. If it grows gradually, and it’s still desirable, that will attract more jobs and more people eventually, the city won’t become more affordable (long term) until it stops attracting new residents. Otherwise, new housing simply provides temporary relief while the city grows.

Paris is a good example, I think, of a city expensive by French standards. My point was that if your theory is you can build to affordable, there should be at least one example on the planet where that actually worked (even Tokyo is considered expensive by Japanese standards).


San Diego would be a very popular city at lower prices, but simply put there isn't enough population in the US to even think that demand could grow anywhere close to those levels. It would take a 50 year long gold rush, draining of other American cities, etc. The fastest growing city in modern history, Shenzen, grew 6000% in 30 years, and it could only do so because China simultaneously had the highest population growth in the world and the highest urbanization rate in the world.

At some point, demand is saturated, and it takes an extremely delusional belief that demand can perpetually grow so that prices never drop. We have proof in the article that prices can drop with even moderately fast construction rates. Keep going.


Yet the rent in Paris is still too high for an average French resident; and while rent is lower than in San Diego, the price of an apartment is higher. And, of course, median salary in San Diego is far higher than in Paris.

There a lot of desirable areas in a country and a fixed amount of people.

The equilibrium between demand and supply has the supply curve impacted by a whole host of policy choices.

Eg housing is impacted by cost of permitting, regulations, cost of materials and labor etc.

All of these things can be improved by policy.

There's a strong argument that especially infrastructure but housing should be built with people on work visas.


Water is the primary limiter on city population sizes in the west. I wouldn’t be surprised if San Diego wasn’t at its limit already with respect to water resources, but I haven’t looked into it. Desalination could improve that.

If we could have Chinese work crews come in and build housing, especially 30 story concrete towers that are popular in Asia, we could build fairly cheaply, that isn’t really the limitation (it’s easier to solve than getting water to those new units for expanded population).


San Diego in fact has a surfeit that it's looking at selling off

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/san-diego-water-s...


They thought Vegas was at it's limit years ago, but no they found efficiency upon efficiency.

No, this is a false belief known as supply skepticism: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=supp...

Weird title for a paper that argues that "Government intervention is critical to ensure that supply is added at prices affordable to a range of incomes". I would personally classify that position as "supply skepticism".

Supply increased, rents declined.

Short term. Long term the market will change to equilibrium. If you are buying, just lock in lower housing prices now. If you are renting without rent control, you get one or two years of reasonable rates and then it will go nuts again.

This is an obviously farcical belief.

If everywhere built more housing do you think the price of housing would go up? Where are these people bringing up housing prices coming from?


Buffalo has 50% as much housing now as it did at its peak, since demand dropped and housing was just razed rather than maintained. There are lots and lots of cities in the USA that aren’t San Diego, LA, SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, Boston, … and they have plenty of supply that there is no demand for. You can buy a house for cheap in Toledo. For some reason, people would rather pay $3000/month to live in San Diego than $700/month to live in Buffalo or Toledo. It shouldn’t be a mystery why.

I lived in Beijing for 9 years so I get a different perspective. But ya, the market for people who want to live in Beijing rather than Chengde or Langfang is surprisingly vast, and Beijing has a resident system to prevent at will migrations.


Housing prices always go up (they seem to believe this)

Houses can be built (this seems obvious)

Ergo, we can remove the national debt by building between 59 million and 121 million houses (depending on if you count the value of the land there).


> But it's the law there. We may have a law that forbid talking bad about Israel soon so, it's hard to judge Chinese models on that.

We don't, so we can still judge. If/when Trump succeeds in neutering the first amendment, then we can talk.


> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.

20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.

People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).


> 20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it,

Absolutely not, especially not on an Apple thread.

By example, the iPod released in 2001. Anyone who used those early knows the user experience was competitive with the current experience. In 2006, I was using the version of iTunes then which was probably objectively the best desktop music app ever created. There are features then that were just there, that were pioneered, or now absent, like an automatically sorted "least listened to" playlist that are now nearly impossible to find. Sync alone is still an headache the OS community just does on the side, and no one is even bothering to compete on it anymore.


Amarok was way better than iTunes in that era. Massively better UI, separation of playback queue from collection browsing, plugin ecosystem, better metadata fetching including lyrics support... And its dynamic playlists were way more capable too.

I had an iPod in those days and Apple's firmware updates that periodically broke third-party sync (while bringing no improvements) is the reason that to this day I've never bought Apple hardware for myself from Apple since that time. Used hardware only.

Every time I had to use iTunes was regrettable. The app was an insanely massive download for the time. It tried to install fucking Safari on Windows for no reason. The UI was somehow simultaneously a sprawling mess and feature-deprived.

Maybe there was a brief period where iTunes was genuinely an interesting app, but even by the mid-aughts, it had been totally surpassed by a number of open-source music players.

But Amarok at that time was only available on Linux. I assume most iTunes fans of the time never got to try it.


I was using (and writing) software as long as 35+ years ago and I disagree with your assessment that we were “just tolerating it” 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I was using Mac OS X Tiger on a new Intel-based MacBook Pro and it ran like a dream, and had software which mostly followed Apple’s human interface guidelines. Now I run macOS Tahoe and curse under my breath at the lack of design consistency and the iPad-ification of the interface. I’m also shown ads, and in some cases ads that can’t be dismissed or disabled, for things like iCloud and Apple Music.

When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.


I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute. Of course the intel MBP came out in 2006 (or 2007?) and was an absolute dream setup where hardware caught up with Windows while the software was pretty good as well (I was using a Mac since 2004 or so).

I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.


> I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute.

I understood that, and I was using it in the same way.

> I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse…

Yeah this is the part I was disagreeing with, and I gave a couple examples showing why it’s meaningfully worse now.

I’ve been using Macs since the 1980s. The timeframe of 20-25 years ago (post Classic Mac OS) was some of the best software Apple has ever released.


Maybe. I personally couldn’t afford to switch until 2004. And I grew up with PCs (well my first computer was an Osborne). Even then, it felt expensive and slow until the Intel switch.

Same here. Two decades ago, I was excited to install updates to commercial software I used because they fixed bugs and brought useful new features. These days I fear updates because they introduce new bugs, remove features I care about, and come with new anti-features that I actively do not want.

The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.


Not just citizens, it applies to American residents as well. A Swiss citizen friend of mine couldn't open up an account in Switzerland because the banks didn’t want to deal with FACTA and he had an American green card.

> The UK has a real problem with pseudoscientific nonsense invading the education system.

Not just the UK, pedagogy/education is a very soft science, along with any other field that revolves around human behavior (psychology, sociology, etc...).

Using AIs in experiments and studies will be an improvement even if they do not accurately reflect human behavior, just because you don't need a harm review and you can repeat your experiments multiple times under different variables.


It’s not the designers pushing that, it’s the product managers and marketers. UXDs generally roll their eyes at pure branding stuff.

Guess it’s a bit of both.

Whenever I said “this is a website, not an app” I would get confused looks from designers.

UX people fight some of the BS, but “looking pretty” usually wins over “being useful”.


Jimmy Carter might have been our last left of center president. Clinton, Obama, and definitely Biden were pure center to right of center.

We get more progressives in local government, like Seattle’s newly elected mayor, but Democrats become more center the more votes they need to get elected.


Doesn’t Apple place RAM directly into the SoC package? We aren’t even talking about soldering it to mother boards anymore, it is coming in with the CPU like it would as a GPU.

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