Simply prove them wrong (earnestly and in good faith). When they realise the LLM is fallible, they'll learn to be skeptical of it without you needing to teach them that specific lesson.
Dumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink.
I put this question to grok; its response:
> Unfortunately, Australia's legal, regulatory, financial, and practical systems make this extremely difficult (bordering on impossible at any meaningful scale).
Crazy that the reason we can't have an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of the most important thing people need (shelter) is not due to resource constraints, but man-made ones.
> Crazy that the reason we can't have an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of the most important thing people need (shelter) is not due to resource constraints, but man-made ones.
You say that as though reduction in cost of housing is a universal desire, but it isn't.
Suppose a couple of years ago you took a $500,000 loan to buy a $700,000 house, which you'll be paying off for the next 10 years. Would you like the market value of your house to decline substantially during that time?
If there's enough of the population bought into property, it won't be politically feasible to allow the value of homes to decline.
> Suppose a couple of years ago you took a $500,000 loan to buy a $700,000 house, which you'll be paying off for the next 10 years. Would you like the market value of your house to decline substantially during that time?
No, but when your city proposes a "missing middle" plan, watch who all comes out of the woodwork to scream murder at their research that shows that the projected effect of doing so will lower property values in my town from an 11.5% YoY average increase to a "mere" 9% YoY increase. You'd have thought the city was suggesting executing grandmothers in the streets.
(I cannot personally complain, I put down 10% on my home purchase here in 2021 and was able to get out of PMI due to having 20% equity against appraised value 366 days later, while only making required payments.)
When the problem is particularly exacerbated, it's not even "I got mine", but rather, "I already went into eye-watering levels of debt and I'm still paying off the roof over my head."
You can't start a new city. I city exists for all the things you can do. Your new city will have nothing to do because nobody lives there and there are no jobs to attract anyone to move.
that is why we build suburbs - they get anound this by being right next to a place with everything you want in a city
This is actually how you start a city though, you build a suburb and wait for it to grow into a city. This takes a really really long time so it's better to build near existing cities.
We don't observe this phenomenon occurring often in the modern day only because cities sprawl rapidly and so the evolution of the suburb becomes a borough of the existing city rather than a brand new city. Otherwise Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, etc. would all be considered new cities instead of being referred to as the NYC metro.
Sure you can. You just need enough land and money to start basic things like a post office, city hall, courthouse, roads, and a way to get power to the whole thing.
Starbase TX isn't a city in any sense other than a legal designation. It's a massive SpaceX industrial facility that has its own municipality similar to the way Disney World has one for its park.
I would expect the adjacent area to become some sort of a city over time. Suppliers will move nearby. Population, amenities and competition will follow. Unless of course SpaceX keels over before all this can happen.
It obviously wouldn't be successful on day one, and it would take some kind of exceptional pressure to jump start it, but these things have been done in the past in the US and have been done recently in China. Not arguing these were good things, but they have happened before.
Think back to the old "company towns". Lowell, Massachusetts, built for a textile mill. Hershey Pennsylvania, built around a chocolate factory. Fordlandia, Brazil, a rubber plantation town. All of these were essentially cities and towns planned out around a central industry.
Similar things happened with the ghost cities in China with several of the big notable ones eventually actually growing into real, functional cities.
Once again, these have all kinds of messy histories and I'm not saying they're all good ideas. But just pointing out, it can be done.
In this hypothetical, who is the individual or group of people that you envision would take the initiative to start a new city? What is their incentive to do so?
most people posting here are talking about california or texas - desert or near deserts where there isn't enough water.
however there are many places where there is more than enough water. East of the mississippi for example. other continents also have areas where there is plenty.
Subject to the same constraints. They tried to make one in California and it was blocked by others in the same county. It’s fine to be honest. Over time California will become less relevant to the US and Texas more so.
Why would you think that the same thing preventing density and new development in cities won’t stop your new city from growing before any building taller than 2 stories is built?
People move to where there is jobs and money. You can't build the housing first, in our society you need capitalists to invest into building businesses to make people want to move there. And because we have spent decades killing small business in favor of corporations, you need corporations to decide to build where there are no people and they have to pay a small short term premium to attract workers. Except corporations don't like doing that because it is a longer term investment and they are worried about next quarter's numbers and maximizing executive level bonuses which means short term planning.
China was dumping money into those cities for people to build businesses and paying people to move there though, it wasn't just the housing. So yes I agree it can work if you go beyond that, but not through applying capitalist principles first and foremost. If you tried to pay people to live in a specific city and pay them again to build a small local business in the US, people would go bonkers about communism and 99% of politicians and capitalist investors would spend every waking moment trying to stop it.
Did we forget Gresham's Law applies to content and has done so since humans could communicate?
Bad or wrong ideas are the ones that get talked about. Do we discuss the 10 issues politicians get correct, or the 1 they screw up?
Platform is irrelevant here; the exact same phenomena occurs/ed on radio and TV decades before it did on social media platforms, and in news papers centuries prior.
You have finally identified the problem. It all started with Homo habilis and misinformation has been rampant ever since. But even protozoan parasites mimic host proteins and block signals, so you really have to go a lot further back to deal with fake news.
Sponsorblock instantly 'broke' video for me; I feel incredible discomfort watching any video without it. Amazing extension.
Such is its utility, this single extension lifts youtube as a platform higher above tv or or native video players on other sites which don't have any sponsorblock capability.
I recently travelled to Vietnam for dental work, it's really shocking how easy to it to shop around when dentists actually publish their price lists online for easy comparison/perusal. In my native country, dentists rarely if ever publish prices online, and it's hard to get prices over the phone.
If hospitals could be forced to publish price lists, it would be game changing, allowing patients to shop and compare quality/prices.
But at a consumer level it's still quite difficult to predict what your total out-of-pocket expense will be for the same course of treatment at two different facilities.
Oh wow. Appreciate the correction. I wonder what improvements in price transparency Trump has in mind. Perhaps it's that website in the parent comment.
In the Netherlands dental service prices are set by the government [1]. Under 18 are universally covered by basic health insurance; for adults average dental for regular work + emergency is 30/month.
My SaaS is almost done and I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal). I'll probably use a google sheet as a database. Any better suggestions?
Unless you actually plan on building as successful SaaS... then just, you know, use Salesforce. There are exceedingly few reasons a $100m SaaS company shouldn't just be running on SFDC.
I hadn't heard of SFDC, but watched a ~5min summary vid [0]. Seems like overkill for a one person startup, but seems decent for a larger company [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntZbRd-DPII
I'll probably use a google sheet with a row for each prospect, and columns for spoke to, hotness (degree of suitability for my SaaS), and 'notes' (will put a new bullet point with brief summary of each call).
I was thinking it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc.
I might even vibe-code something myself, since I prefer primitive and reduced clutter. May open source it if I do. However, I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't already exist..
> I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal)
This is something I need to do, have no knowledge about and is definitely going to be harder than building the thing.
> it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc
This is very close to what the software I've been building over the last few months is, offline note transcription with summary file generation in a nicely formatted PDF/Docx using local models. Codex is available if you don't want to do the inference on your laptop (I will sort claude out soon as well).
If it sounds like something of interest then feel free to send me a message. More than happy to send you a 30 day trial version.
Frankly google sheet will take you a very long way... Attio and most CRM are built for teams with sales pipeline, not a solo founder trying to find PMF.
Most of the features aims at describing complex sales processes and collaboration.
So basically what you want to do is to try different takes (cold emailing, phone, events, influenceurs), get your first 50 customers, try to understand the process (who takes the decision, who will pay, who will use, etc) and based on that, design your CRM to match this process.
My 2 cents (saas solofounder with 6000 users): very important not to overengineer everything. As dev it's our natural tendency but your time and marketing effort is probably the biggest leverage you have.
> You’ll sit exhausted on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You will have to throw away 3 months of your work while somehow keeping your mental health intact.
Sounds strikingly similar to early-stage startup lifestyle.
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