From the article, I think the "remaining money" may be entirely notional. It talks about Ron Graham chipping in $5k to help cover a $10K bounty.
Besides, these days the money is mostly beside the point. It is like those Knuth reward checks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check. In most cases, certainly the most recent $500 "happy ending" problem, the bragging rights are worth more than the money.
It would be nice to be able to move or get rid of the task completed box to review your solution and look for modifications. Then you could reset and replay. The inability to review after completing is annoying.
Meh. I have prime and keep getting $10 off coupons but here in Minneapolis I don't see anywhere I want to order from. Bitesquad has places that I order from every now and then. If Amazon had a decent network they might entice me in to becoming a restaurants customer... but as it is, it is like the crappy prime video selection.
The article addresses that a couple of paragraphs down. Thats her whole point.To quote:
"The Nation at Risk report that started it all turned out to be bullshit, by the way -- grounded in another laughable statistical error. Sandia Labs later audited the findings from the report and found that the researchers had failed to account for the ballooning number of students who were taking the SATs, bringing down the average score.
In other words: SATs were falling because more American kids were confident enough to try to go to college: the educational system was working so well that young people who would never have taken an SAT were taking it, and the larger pool of test-takers was bringing the average score down."
Wow! My life in the Minneapolis strongly resembles my former life in Seattle. I have walkable/bikeable neighborhods, good local restaraunts and food coops/farmers markets, etc etc
The problem isn't the Midwest, it is suburbia. I've know contractrs at MS like in the article. Plenty of folks in Boston or Northern Virginia or RTP are living in the far suburbs and working in unsatisfying jobs they aren't good at... nothing to do with the Midwest.
To take this a step further, you don't even have to be in a substantial city to get the walkable atmosphere. Granted you'll suffer a smaller variety of restaurants, but there are towns of just 10k or 20k that manage to get things right, and some of them are really cool places.
It's really all about suburbia. It's isolating, expensive, and unproductive. The places that come to grips with this fact soon (or already) will face a much less painful contraction in the future. And they won't find themselves with a bunch of impoverished people stuck out in suburbs that no one else will live in.
Suburbia is all about cost per square foot. It's not going anywhere. It'll just be apartments rather than single family detatched.
At least in the US, we're not exactly constrained by land availability. And as you may notice, the sustainability of NYC and SF style property prices isn't guaranteed.
The constraint isn't the amount of raw land, but rather the necessity of productive density if we are to afford the level of public services that most of us are accustomed to.
I have nothing against people living in sparsely populated areas, but the people living there now are mostly not seeing true costs of their lifestyles. If they weren't so heavily subsidized, they would probably have a lot more wells, septic tanks, and gravel roads; the school buses would not run to their houses; and they would have slower emergency response times and less police presence.
Faced with those painful realities, I expect more people would choose dense living. That's not to say they'd have to. Me personally, I just hate driving and love eating, in both cases too much to commute by car.
So eat while you drive, man :) ( I too hate driving, but live suburban and have been extremely lucky in being able to keep commute times to a minimum - like on the order of five minutes ).
Productive density is constrained by things like how accounting works, how we can't get out of our own way, by other things that are like public choice economics. At each job I've had, I've seen people walk away from millions of dollars, either in increased sales or reduced cost because somebody just didn't understand it ( or rather, did understand it all too well ).
I couldn't agree more - people who live farther out should expect less services unless they're prepared to pay what they actually cost. In cases like California, the Pubic Choice Theory stories about water are ... interesting enough that it's a central plot element from a movie from the 1970s - "Chinatown".
I've lived on well water and septic.
This being said, I don't think real estate development public debt is even on the radar as a threat to anything. They can always raise rates...
Lol, I meant that I need the energy consumption of walking to support my carb-eating habit. I can handle the time commitment of eating mostly.
As to the policy questions, I admit that I don't know how to solve that one. I know a start would be to clean up the mess made by FHA standards. And I think a lot of places have moved, or are starting to move, away from Euclidean zoning, which is a step in the right direction, if not a very large one.
The Center for Economic Policy Research has a great free pdf ebook on Secular Stagnation from 2014 which has essays from a variety of economic heavyweights discussing the possibility of lower growth going forward.
