Granola Shotgun

A lot of the tech ones I follow have already been listed so I will try to list some that others may not be aware of. 1. Applied Divinity Studies. Rationalist adjacent. Obviously influenced by Scott Alexander, but less optimistic, a bit more cynical. - https://applieddivinitystudies.com/ 2. Scott Locklin's blog. He used to post on HN. Mostly covers tech related things (but physical tech, not web stuff). Many HN readers will find him too abrasive and will miss the point. - https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/ 3. Granola Shotgun. Hard to pin down what this blog is about exactly, but generally focused on tradeoffs between different configurations of the built environment. The author will baffle the ideologically prejudiced. He's a gay guy in SF who has nice things to say about Mormons and rednecks. - https://www.granolashotgun.com/

I love reading Granola Shotgun, it's a blog focused on how to navigate the current macro trends in urban/suburban real estate design but from a very interesting and personal viewpoint. https://granolashotgun.com/

Jim Kunstler's podcast is good when he doesn't veer off into peak oil civilizational collapse speculation http://kunstler.com/writings/podcast/ Granola Shotgun https://granolashotgun.com/ http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/ I really enjoyed the books 'The Great Good Place' by Oldenberg , 'Streets are for People' by Rudufsky and the Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler

The Power Broker is a great book about Robert Moses, a very influential city planner in NYC. The book shows how much of planning is politics. Just look at how much trouble San Francisco has and you'll see that the problem isn't lack of ideas or lack of money. This is also a great blog that frequently discusses urban planning themes: https://granolashotgun.com/

https://granolashotgun.com/ if you are into failed American urban design / doomsday prepping

Hi Doreen, Happy to see your new effort! Have you ever communicated with Johnny Sanfelippo (https://granolashotgun.com). You two have a similar voice and some overlap in perspective. I suspect you’d find his work interesting (if you haven’t already). Cheers!

"The Mayans and Egyptians built pyramids. The Chinese built the Great Wall and armies of clay soldiers. The Khmer built temples in the jungle. Americans build highways. It’s our state religion." https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/

Although I think you're trying to use these examples to highlight that regulation can indeed be valuable (and to insinuate that such an idea should be obvious to anyone), I think that even these examples have subtlety. See the following article for an interesting exploration of how building regulations contribute substantially to urban blight in America: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/13/mind-the-gap-2/

https://granolashotgun.com is an interesting blog about the sustainability of these communities.

If you want tips, I recommend the Granola Shotgun blog: https://granolashotgun.com/2018/05/08/the-mangiapocalypse/ https://granolashotgun.com/2018/07/08/little-experiments-on-the-cheap/

Housing policy, formal and informal, just drives me crazy. I despair that the future everywhere will look like third world countries, where only relatively wealthy people can afford to live in legal housing. Everyone else, maybe me too, will live in 'favelas'. Here's a great post about this by a blogger I really like on this topic: - [Spring In The Silicon Favela – Granola Shotgun](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/02/08/spring-in-the-silicon-favela/) But on the plus side, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do once you stop playing by the rules!

I’ve been reading some oral histories from early/mid-20th century, midcoast Maine in the last month. One theme is scarcity (and the ingenuity borne of it). People didn’t have a lot, so they needed to be clever with what they had. They worked incredibly hard, and invented/sought out tools to make their lives physically easier. They toiled for most of their lives, but they saw their known tool get easier as time went on (upgrading from jute to nylon netting, hydraulic winches instead of manual cranks, sonar instead of trial and error). The people who worked (what seemed to me to be) the worst jobs had a common refrain: “the best thing about X is nobody tells me to do <hard thing> at <unreasonable time> in <unreasonable conditions>. I’m my own boss, make my own decisions, and it keeps me happy.” They owned all the highs, lows, and war stories of business ownership. Also, a fun anecdote. They asked one guy “what would you tell somebody young who’s new into fishing?” He thought hard, then said “I would tell them to study hard and become a doctor or a lawyer or something, if they’re interested in money”. Made me chuckle! Anyways, this is to say that it’s always been hard to seek out self employment or total self sufficiency. Generally, you could always trade off comfort for autonomy [1]. Nowadays, we as a society have made inhabiting that material discomfort nearly illegal, as you imply. We raised the floor of material suffering, but the emotional and psychological floor is…

> My only lingering issue is that it is a highly processed food As is a huge portion of the food consumed by people today, including things that are marketed as forms of meat. The difference here is that the climate impact of mass-production of beef and the associated mass scale animal cruelty is mitigated. Quoting from one of my favorite recent commentators on this subject (https://granolashotgun.com/2019/03/12/bite-me/): "If you think all this talk of laboratory food is ridiculous or unappealing you really need to spend some time discovering where your current food supply comes from. Most of the nitrogen molecules in your body right now were created in a factory using the Haber Bosch method. Natural gas is used to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a usable form needed by plants. Enormous amounts of this synthetic fertilizer is what makes it possible to feed seven billion people. Take away that factory made nitrogen and our crop yields would drop like a stone. Without Haber Bosch nitrogen half the humans on the planet would starve to death. Synthetic food grown in fermentation vats is just a matter of cutting out the inefficient middle steps of agriculture. Like it or not it’s coming to fish sticks, chicken nuggets, and meatballs near you. And you might not even notice."

Cash please; https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/smart-cities-and-fina…

Thank you for the link. Enjoyed this in particular: https://granolashotgun.com/2020/07/23/not-for-camera-view/

Listen to an expert analysis of {insert random topic} (bonus points if you are not very familiar with the topic in question) AlphaZero teaches Stockfish a lesson in the French Defense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ebzevCLGbQ Mississauga: Density Without Urbanism https://granolashotgun.com/2014/01/15/77/ Masked 1: Rise to the Rubedo Stage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWNPN6PtuUc

Found this article to be the other half of the explanation: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/07/12/an-open-letter-to-chuck-marohn/ Tldr: Zoning isn't going away, that will take educating multiple generations.

There was a recent Granola Shotgun blog post talking about a new wine tasting room being stuck for months in a local board review process over the proposed color of white for the building, and being required to have a parking space for each bar stool. These kinds of regulatory hurdles really put into perspective how good software developers have it. https://granolashotgun.com/2017/08/04/the-precariat-shoppe/

There's a blog I enjoy that covers this sort of issue very frequently. It's interesting to see a hard data approach to explaining some of the municipal funding problems that are brewing nationwide. https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/

The process you are describing can be automated a bit. Imagine your feed reader automatically subscribes you to feeds of articles you liked (star/thumbs up/favorite). Let's say you start subscribed to an HN feed of items that got more than 100 upvotes: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100&count=100 Then you find the OP link and like it in your feed reader: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/this-is-the-year-of-the-rss-reader-r… Your reader automatically subscribes you to the source feed of this article: https://feeds.feedburner.com/NiemanJournalismLab You like more content => you get subscribed to more feeds automatically. Your feed reader can also take care of unsubscribing you from feeds that are posting too often or are not posting interesting to you content. If you don't like the content of a feed for awhile then your connection to that feed becomes weaker and the content from that feed is ranked less prominently. The content from feeds with a high signal-to-noise ratio (ie, how often you like content from that feed) is ranked higher for you. This is how my little project https://linklonk.com works. If you'd like to give it a try: "thumb up" a few items from the above HN feed: https://linklonk.com/feed?url=https:%2F%2Fhnrss.org%2Fnewest%3Fpoints%… and then check your recommendations on the home page. Through this mechanism I am currently subscribed to 201 RSS feeds and I know that I won't miss content from high "signal-to-noise ratio" feeds. Here is a sample…

I've been in Seattle for three years now, and I'm moving out of state in a month. Why? first, they're doing everything wrong. (Here's an article that explains what most towns in America get wrong: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/13/mind-the-gap-2/) - South Lake Union could have been rebuilt with narrow European-style streets (https://twitter.com/SteveDombek/status/593997707481481217). but instead they left all of their old regulations in place, which meant that they ended up building it for cars instead of people. - all of the activated alley projects have failed. the one in Chinatown failed because most of the street died from a museum they put in. another one in the university district only has a single coffee shop in it - Tokyo offers people nice 1BR apartments for roughly $900-1000 a month, because they are pro-development. that same apartment costs me $2k a month in Seattle - spending by the city of Seattle has doubled over the last few years, but the population did not double. this means that taxes will eventually be raised to fill the gap. I'm not my brother's keeper, so I'm moving to another low-tax state. - the city just put in an income tax on high earners. one of the things that helped me choose Washington state was the fact that there is no state income tax currently. the city's attempt to impose one bothers me because although I don't earn enough presently to have to pay into it, all they have to do is tweak the brackets to get me later on in the…