I haven't been to Portland for years, but I remember it as being a transit-forward city, with several streetcar lines (one connected to an aerial tram), and decent light rail service covering much of the metro area.

It sounds like they're going to leave that behind, at least for the foreseeable future. A $300 million cut will probably lead to a death spiral in ridership.

He could be an uptalker?

I like that the site offers your choice of two fonts, but they're both ugly and hard to read. Mono is too narrow, and OpenDyslexic is cartoonish and o v e r k e r n e d.

GDP isn't wealth. This is closer to making $1M/year and owing $4 million.

Half of those things were not brought about by violence. Labor laws? Absolutely. Gay rights, maybe? Gay marriage was famously won non-violently by showing the wider public that gay is normal.

What violence brought about women's rights or environmental protection laws? I suppose protestors destroyed the fur market.

The moldy rice used to ferment soybeans into soy sauce, and to make sake.

There's always another 80s computer I'd never heard of...

The Tatung Einstein was released in 1984 in the UK, was kind of MSX-like architecturally, and used the same 3" (not 3.5") floppies as the Amstrad CPC.

I'm curious what US-based C64 devs would have used. Probably not this machine?

From what I’ve read it was not at all uncommon to have a MS-DOS machine that assembled your code much faster and spat it into the c64 over a parallel link.

> housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build

I take your other points, but I can't see the connection there. I've heard that they increase electricity rates in many cases (poorly managed electric utilities that can't build out grid capacity without raising rates for everyone), but not that they're affecting housing.

For The Netherlands, construction work causes emissions. There are limits to these emissions. Building a data center means you can't simultaneously build a house anywhere nearby the construction site as that would cause the local emissions to go over the set limits.

Next to that there is net congestion. The energy grid is currently critical, if you add a data center that means you will not be able to connect 20 to 30 newly build homes to power. There are currently new homes that are waiting for a connection to the grid before people can live there.

Space. In the densest country of Europe (non-microstate), a hyper scale data center could have been a neighborhood.

Latest point, maybe not the strongest, is construction workers. While construction workers building a data center are different from construction workers building homes, it doesn't really help with the labor shortages in construction if electricians are all busy building data centers.

> For The Netherlands, construction work causes emissions. There are limits to these emissions. Building a data center means you can't simultaneously build a house anywhere nearby the construction site as that would cause the local emissions to go over the set limits.

This is an insane regulation, and I wonder if it was passed by NIMBYs whose actual goal is to prevent the construction of housing near them.

I recently read an article that 8 cows needed to be moved 5 kilometers so they could build a bicycle path. The cows combined with the construction of the new bicycle path caused too much local emissions.

The municipality bought the emissions rights from the farmers that held those 8 cows and the farmers then had to move/remove/slaughter 8 cows.

Welcome to The Netherlands.

This is the sort of thing that people are willing to elect politicians who deny the existence of global warming in order to avoid.

Thanks for the perspective. It sounds like you'd run into the same issues (except for the electrical load) building any large industrial project, which does not bode well for your economy.

Correct. At the moment the expansion of ASML is halted because of nearby farmers that create a negligible addition to the GDP.

If the Dutch government was a bit smarter, they would buy out the farmers and create a mega-campus for ASML, including housing for all those expats.

Edit: I stand corrected, last month ASML was granted permission to expand by 20.000 employees.

SF has tall buildings downtown, so that can't be it. A better question is, why are they only downtown and not so much west of there.

It's possible, just expensive. Just like everything else about SF.

Because we mustn't disturb the unique character of the box-like 2-storey homes stretching off into the Sunset district (and served by 2 different light rail lines, no less).