Miscellaneous Rambling
The cold blast continues. I ginned it off last night, now I'll use it to blast off my hangover this morning. I suspect I shiver it off on my trip to the office in a few minutes.
This is interesting: "A growing body of research indicates that restrictive zoning–which often blocks the services and housing that families need–may help to explain why family sizes are shrinking in the United States." Link. Now that we've had a century of urban planning, we're seeing that the planners were often hubristically wrong in their assumptions and methods. We know zoning ordinances are hopelessly ham-handed, so much so that they have to be riddled with exceptions and, quite often, non-enforcement. It's also significant that zoning intuitively "hates" business. If you're doing something for profit, it's subject to far greater regulation than if you're doing something for yourself, and the restrictions normally aren't remotely related to public safety. They're simply restrictions built around the assumption that, if you're doing it for profit, you must be watched carefully.
Random Blurb from the Notebooks: The Marquis de Condorcet told us that civilization would have 37,000,000 poets like Homer and 37,000,000 philosophers like Newton when the common man's resources were plentiful and his work time limited. This is one of the worst predictions of all time (which isn't surprising since he was working with some of the worst principles of all time). The average work week these days is forty hours and people have a lot of free time. So where are all the poets and philosophers?
