Devon ☀️
@devonzuegel
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I've gone to look for myself. If I return before I get back, please ask me to wait. Prev @GitHub @NotionHQ @Affirm @StanfordReview. Building a modern Chautauqua
Joined July 2012
I've been quietly working on something for a while, so I'm excited to finally be able to share it with you. We are creating a new town called Esmeralda!. Our team has an exclusive option on a beautiful piece of land 90 mins north of SF, in California wine country
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I've never learned a fact about Karl Marx's personal life that didn't increase my dislike of the man.
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The Netherlands is one of the most sci-fi places on earth. The Dutch deserve a new word: hydropunk. Over centuries, they have created & maintained one of the most advanced water management systems on the planet
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Reminder: It is illegal to build storefronts with such a small footprint in most cities in America.
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A while back, I was talking with a friend who'd moved to the US a few years prior. At some point, I said something like "we Americans. " and he froze with shock. He asked, "Wait, do you think of me as American?" Without much thought, I said "Of course!". He paused for a while.
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Removing query params before sharing a link is a basic sign of respect.
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Removing query params before sharing a link is a basic sign of respect.
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We've all been targeting 10k steps a day because some Japanese pedometer company thought the character for 10,000 (万) looks like a person walking. .
You don't need to walk 10,000 steps a day. "It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy. [T]he actual health merits of that number have never been validated by research."
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DocuSign has how many employees??? Do they do more things than I realized?!
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The problem with learning Spanish from Argentinians is you pick up vocab about monetary policy before you learn basic survival words like food and water.
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SimCity had to pretend all parking lots were underground, because the game would be "really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots". "We were originally just going to model real cities … We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive"
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The fact that there aren't more economists that are very rich should be a red flag.
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I’m increasingly of the belief that incentive design is the most important problem to work on. Humans are good at overcoming obstacles when they have reason to do so — the worst problems tend to be ones of cooperation, not technological or scientific understanding.
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Why do we call them "open source developers" when we could call them "open sourcerers"???.
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Why does it feel so much better to have one friend pay for dinner & the other to pay for something roughly equivalent — say, the ubers to go there & back — rather than splitting both bills?.
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"Good science fiction predicts not the automobile but the traffic jam.".
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Fun fact: SimCity was forced to pretend that all parking lots were underground, because the game would be “really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots”
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I once heard Hans Zimmer say something like:. "Every time I'm hired to write a movie score, I'll feel like I'm making no progress for weeks. I'll feel like I should go to the director and confess that I can't do it. but then all of the sudden it starts to come with me, bit by.
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I have found heaven, and it turns out it's on earth after all. It's called Las Catalinas, a small town in Costa Rica. The key design principle: cars are parked in a lot outside of the gorgeous hill town
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I know my brain is broken because my first thought was "how the heck did they get regulatory approval for that?!".
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It kills me when people critique walkable, human-scale places as "built for the rich". They're not inherently expensive, they're just expensive today because we don't build enough of them!. In fact they're inherently more efficient in their resource use, which makes them cheaper.
We've come to treat places like West Village in NYC or Savannah's Historic District like a scarce resource. This is maddening because they aren't that complicated – many of these buildings were originally built for the immigrant working class and are simple boxes of local brick!
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This quote from Karl's mom is a real banger:. "If only Karl had *made* Capital, instead of just writing about it".
Since it’s his birthday, I’ll repost this incredible take from Marx’s mom
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The saga of Israeli water management is one of the most inspiring stories of the last 75 years. Israel went from having a serious water problem to being a net water exporter to neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the population grew from ~1 million to well over 9 million
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Marx's family had a working class maid, who often went unpaid because Marx couldn't hold a job. Karl cheated on his wife & slept with the maid, then had a baby boy. It gets better – Engels claimed paternity to protect Marx's reputation, only confessing the truth on his deathbed.
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I've been collecting a list of recently-built places with good urban fabric. Here are some of my favorites:. 1. Las Catalinas is a hill town overlooking an ocean cove in Costa Rica, built just over a decade ago with the bones of a classic Mediterranean hill town (@LasCatalinas)
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I've been impressed by Mexico City's street design. One detail I particularly like: their streets narrow at many intersections, shortening the distance that pedestrians need to cross and encouraging cars to slow down:
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I just noticed Americans use different prepositions to say "go back east" vs "go out west". This implies that "east" is where we started & "west" is where we ended up. I wonder if this is a subtle echo of how the frontier has shaped how this country relates to our geography.
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First step when landing in Argentina: exchange USD for pesos. Largest bill is 2,000 pesos, ~$2 USD per today's exchange rate. Each brick in the photos below is worth ~$1,000 USD. You know the bills are fresh because they're still in the original packaging from the Central Bank!
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Growing up, I read books where kids played in the forest or street or farm for hours without supervision, and I thought it was lovely fantasy but totally made up. Over time I've realized that that's simply how things used to be! It's now that's the anomaly. Children used to roam,
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Some of the best marriage advice I've heard:. Marry someone only if you'd be proud for your kids to turn out like them.
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"We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.".— Ellen Ullman.
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As I get older, I realize it's a huge bummer that we collectively decided in our early 20s that Facebook was uncool. It's the one place where I added everyone I knew in real life, and it would be a great way to stay in touch now. I want to know when friends go through big moments.
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Broke: Most people are too sensitive to receive feedback. Woke: Most relationships don't have sufficient context, investment, or trust for feedback to be taken in good faith.
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When using my cellphone, I tend to become a passive consumer of the internet. When using my laptop, I become an active creator of it. The difference is the input mechanisms. The friction and inefficiency of typing on a mobile device is high enough to discourage most production.
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What is your pettiest form of rebellion?. Mine is that I still change links to before sending them to friends.
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In any partnership, it's wise to assume that your partner is doing 150%+ of the work you think they're doing. You notice all the ways you help them, but many of the ways they help you are invisible to you. This applies to marriages, companies, projects, & beyond!.
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architect: so what kind of house do you want?. client: not sure how to describe it, just. i love windows!. architect: stop right there, i know exactly what you mean
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Tinder's Gini coefficient is 0.58, meaning "it has higher inequality than 95% [of] the world's national economies"
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America: "We love small businesses!". Also America: "No nooo, not literally small, that was just a figure of speech".
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Seriously, this is cartoon villain level shit
Man, I didn't realize Karl was an entitled little shit. Explains a lot
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California Coastal Commission.
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"God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands" is a common cliche. But if you stop to think about it, it's a pretty epic motto for a country!
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@AskYatharth Typically because the city planner thinks they know what people want better than the market (which might be true sometimes, but imo is not worth risking unless it's a question of safety).
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How people think Tokyo looks. and how most of Tokyo really looks
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The Dutch flood protection system, Delta Works, is an epic feat of engineering. Not to mention, it looks straight out of a Frank Herbert book. Below, the 9km Eastern Scheldt Barrier stands guard against the North Sea’s storm surges & rising waters
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I built a little tool – it's called Small World, and it helps you make new friends and stay in touch with old ones: it's like a Marauder's Map, but for the people you follow on Twitter
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Notting Hill is one of my favorite neighborhoods in London because of its unique spatial layout. Instead of large private backyards, the homes and apartments back up to large private communal gardens shared by the entire block
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What is a book that was so good that after reading it, you went and bought everything published by the author?.
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If Holland isn't the epitome of a hydropunk utopia, I don't know what is
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Paris is almost entirely ≤6 stories. If SF were built to that standard, we'd have 3x the housing supply.
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Just discovered @googlemaps' new isochrone feature, which shows how far you can get on foot or by car from a particular point on a map! So cool
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Thrilled to announce that I'm officially join GitHub today! . I'll be working on—you guessed it—cooperation problems in open source. So excited to work with this talented team and to be part of building out @GitHub to its fullest potential.
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maybe one reason for low fertility among educated women is that health class in US high schools hammered it into us that having a baby will ruin your life.
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the older I get and the more systems I see up close, the I'm amazed that anything works at all.
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Procrastination is more often about lack of clarity rather than lack of motivation.
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One thing programming teaches you is to look for reasons why you're wrong, instead of looking for reasons why you're right. If the computer is not doing what you expected, it's almost always because your mental model is incorrect, not because the computer is incorrect.
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I mean c'mon, this is straight out of a Studio Ghibli movie. (Sound on!)
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the Disney board of directors initially couldn't stomach the risk to build Disneyland, so Walt started a new company to build the park. he funded it by borrowing against his life insurance & selling his vacation home, & he transferred his home to his wife in case he went bankrupt
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A whopping 17% of the country's current land area has been reclaimed from the sea or lakes. 26% of the Netherlands lies below sea level. Without water defenses, 60% would be at risk of constant flooding
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Obsessed with these low-angle satellite images from @planetlabs. 1: Doha, Qatar. November 11, 2017.2: Houston, Texas. March 14, 2018.3: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. March 10, 2018.4: Osaka, Japan. March 13, 2018
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Sounds silly but one of the best tactics I've found for overcoming procrastination is chanting "less think, more do" on repeat under my breath.
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The Falkirk Wheel canal bridge in Scotland is ridiculously cool 😱
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Miami has the most solarpunk aesthetic of any American city I've seen ☀️🌴🌺
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it bugs me that most utopian art is pictured from an aerial view rather than from a human perspective. it elevates grandeur over what people would actually experience day-to-day if we were to build that future
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I'm starting a podcast with my favorite urban economists, Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud. We've recorded the first two episodes already, and I'd love feedback!. DM me if you'd like an early listen
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From her beacon-hand.Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command.The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she.With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,.Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,.The wretched
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Since moving to Miami a few months ago, I've had a lot of fun exploring my new stomping grounds. I wanted to share what I've found, so I wrote some field notes to give you a peek into what life is like here: Questions/additions welcome!.
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Mustard's ratio of flavor to calories is off the charts. Name a better nutritional bang for your buck, I'll wait
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California has one of the highest income tax rates in the country, but one of the lowest property tax rates (especially once you take Prop 13 into account). We're essentially punishing productivity while rewarding non-productive property ownership. C'monnnnnn 🤦🏽♀️.
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We've come to treat places like West Village in NYC or Savannah's Historic District like a scarce resource. This is maddening because they aren't that complicated – many of these buildings were originally built for the immigrant working class and are simple boxes of local brick!
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What are things that are getting dramatically cheaper right now?. For example, the cost of genome sequencing is plummeting. (The graph below is log scale, so it's even more impressive than it looks!)
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If you dream of living in a small town while being surrounded by creative, high-agency people, we’re building this for you. Two key components will make Esmeralda special:.1. Our "hardware" – an Italian hill town.2. Our "software" – a culture of learning & building
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Lots of people work from cafes, but hotel lobbies are often way better third spaces to work from. The hotel business is not predicated on turning over tables, so they don't mind you sitting somewhere for hours – yet they often still have coffee/snacks for sale!
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The Dutch have solved this environmental threat by shortening their coastline by 900km, from 1200km to 300km
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in discussions of declining fertility rates, the fact that many women are terrified of giving birth almost never comes up. women are acutely aware that pregnancy can be extremely painful, cause lifelong physical damage, and even be life-threatening. this seems. relevant. .
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How people think San Francisco looks. and how much of San Francisco really looks
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This is one of my favorite stops to take people when on a walk in San Francisco. This place is surreal, feels like you are inside of a fascist beehive.
The Brutalist design of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco . By architect John Portman (1973)
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Simply doing what you say you're going to do puts you in the top decile of competence.
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A few months ago I overheard someone ask “How do you define your purpose in life?”. Without missing a beat his friend answered “To spread my memes and my genes”. That answer has been ringing in my head ever since.
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