Re: "Exclusionary Zoning". Owens' argument here is that certain groups tend not to follow the law, so the law should therefore be abolished.
That's a trendy view these days across all kinds of domains - and over the long run will lead to behavior standards regressing to the lowest common denominator. It seems to me that exactly the opposite policy should be pursued: set high standards and enforce them strictly, coupled with outreach campaigns to improve compliance.
Re: "sprawl is good" - the author presents a false dichotomy. Americans tend to assume that you can have either car-dependent sprawl, or a Manhattan-style rat warren. The ideal density (IMO) is "European town" urbanism of rowhouses and small apartment buildings; for a downtown urban core, maybe offices and apartments of 10 stories max.
On delivery speed: that's one thing that has gone backwards.
At the start of the 20th century, there were four (4!!!) daily postal deliveries in London. Someone could mail a letter in the morning in one part of the city and it would be delivered that afternoon. A letter posted to Paris would be there the next morning (and that was via train and ferry. Now there's a direct train between the two cities, you can expect your letter to take 4-5 days).
New York (and many other cities) had a pneumatic system, to get letters across the city in minutes.
We have faster travel in other ways, but we accept the mail operating on a slower schedule than our great grandparents.
There are examples of “missing middle” in California: Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, Balboa Island, and Old Corona Del Mar. Nobody would confuse these with Manhattan!
The issue with quantum computing that has everyone in arrears is the fact that the widely used encryption technologies are (at least theoretically) vulnerable to easy cracking by quantum computing. That is indeed worrisome because virtually everything we do online that is "protected" (think anything "https") would be vulnerable. This has been well known for some time now and NIST has been leading an effort with top academics in cryptology to develop a new set of encryption algorithms that are not vulnerable under the (known theoretical) capabilities of quantum computers. These are in final selection and testing. No doubt the research community will bang on these for many more years to see if they hold up before being put (or federally mandated) into wide use. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography_Standardization (Wikipedia is a very reliable source for computing information, unlike other genres).
Re: "Exclusionary Zoning". Owens' argument here is that certain groups tend not to follow the law, so the law should therefore be abolished.
That's a trendy view these days across all kinds of domains - and over the long run will lead to behavior standards regressing to the lowest common denominator. It seems to me that exactly the opposite policy should be pursued: set high standards and enforce them strictly, coupled with outreach campaigns to improve compliance.
Re: "sprawl is good" - the author presents a false dichotomy. Americans tend to assume that you can have either car-dependent sprawl, or a Manhattan-style rat warren. The ideal density (IMO) is "European town" urbanism of rowhouses and small apartment buildings; for a downtown urban core, maybe offices and apartments of 10 stories max.
On delivery speed: that's one thing that has gone backwards.
At the start of the 20th century, there were four (4!!!) daily postal deliveries in London. Someone could mail a letter in the morning in one part of the city and it would be delivered that afternoon. A letter posted to Paris would be there the next morning (and that was via train and ferry. Now there's a direct train between the two cities, you can expect your letter to take 4-5 days).
New York (and many other cities) had a pneumatic system, to get letters across the city in minutes.
We have faster travel in other ways, but we accept the mail operating on a slower schedule than our great grandparents.
There are examples of “missing middle” in California: Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, Balboa Island, and Old Corona Del Mar. Nobody would confuse these with Manhattan!
The issue with quantum computing that has everyone in arrears is the fact that the widely used encryption technologies are (at least theoretically) vulnerable to easy cracking by quantum computing. That is indeed worrisome because virtually everything we do online that is "protected" (think anything "https") would be vulnerable. This has been well known for some time now and NIST has been leading an effort with top academics in cryptology to develop a new set of encryption algorithms that are not vulnerable under the (known theoretical) capabilities of quantum computers. These are in final selection and testing. No doubt the research community will bang on these for many more years to see if they hold up before being put (or federally mandated) into wide use. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography_Standardization (Wikipedia is a very reliable source for computing information, unlike other genres).