Manhattan is arguably America's most iconic city, and more arguably, its only 'real' city.
But its own laws have made the buildings that make it so iconic illegal to build more ofđź§µ
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today are too tall by current standards.
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today have too many apartments by current standards.
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today have too much space dedicated to business by current standards.
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today have building footprints that are too tall by current standards.
But the buildings that make New York tall, dense, and filled with architectural juxtaposition also made New York so iconic, they made it more livable than it would've been otherwise, and they made it great.
The new laws simply don't respect the old vision for New York.
This problem isn't unique to New York either.
In tons of American cities, existing builds are illegal by new standards that are generally not justified by any sort of safety or quality concerns, but which instead are driven by local interest groups and dumb policymakers.
For example, in San Francisco, 54% of all homes that exist there are illegal to build today!
Roughly one-third of all of Japan's urban building was done through a process of replotting land parcels and reconstructing homes to increase local density while making way for new infrastructuređź§µ
Conceptually, it's like this:
In that diagram, you see an area of low-density homes that has undergone land rights conversion, where, when two-thirds of the area’s existing homeowners agree, everyone’s right to their land is converted to the rights to an equivalent part of a new building.
This works well to generate substantial, dense amounts of housing, and it's, crucially, democratic.
All the decision-making power was held by those who were directly affected, and not outsiders to the situation.
If 2/3 wanted to upzone, they could, and they did!
I've seen a lot of people recently claim that the prevalence of vitiligo is 0.5-2%.
This is just not true. In the U.S. today, it's closer to a sixth of a percent, with some notable age- and race-related differences.
But where did the 0.5-2% claim come from?đź§µ
The claim of a 0.5-2% prevalence emerged on here because Google's Gemini cited a 2020 review in the journal Dermatology which proclaimed as much in the abstract.
Simple enough, right? They must have a source that supports this estimate in the review somewhere.
They cite four studies for the 0.5-2% claim, so let's look into those studies.
Relationships between class and fertility and IQ and fertility used to routinely be negative in the not-so-distant past.
But across the developed world, they're increasingly positive, albeit only slightly. In this Swedish birth cohort (1951-67), the transition came early:
In this example, there's also some interesting confounding: between families, IQ isn't monotonically associated with fertility, but within families, it is.
Something seems to suppress the IQ-fertility relationship between families!
Sweden's positive IQ-fertility gradient (which, above, is just for males, since it's draftee data), has been around for quite a while (but has varied, too), whereas in countries like France, Japan, and the U.S., the gradient shift towards being slightly positive is more recent.