My dad ran much of the planning for Broward County (one county north, home to fort lauderdale) until he retired a few weeks ago. There are a lot of dynamics at play in South Florida which make this very complicated and obviously an impending disaster.

The first is that while Broward County is progressive and has been proactively dealing with and planning for sea level rise, Miami Dade county has a very large Cuban voter base which tends to sway the politics more center if not altogether right. I always postulated that this is mostly a reaction to the communism that they immigrated away from however it is my opinion that the newer generations will slowly move more to the left (granted, this phenomena is probably larger than just SoFla’s cuban population).

As the article mentions, most of South Florida is built on top of limestone (calcified reefs from a previous geological period)...

eye tracking + amazon + internet connectivity + mobile can only mean one thing (besides a pretty sweet phone). ADS.

premium ads where instant feedback about viewing time can be easily retrieved for ad pricing. click through is its predecessor as far as an extremely simple metric for pricing an ad. ad viewing has been bit tricky to understand as it was hard to know what contributed to a sell. there might be an add on a billboard, on a tv or in an adwords block, but when you bought it a week later on a random device its pretty hard to understand what combination of those ads might have caused you to purchase that product and by how much. while external factors will still contribute to a sell, it will be easier for amazon (or anyone else) to price ads dynamically or with the new click through - view through ™. Essentially, if you looked at the ad (and they will know that you did)...

Yesterday Nest announced their API (Finally!) but as someone working on a hardware startup in a related space, something about how they did it smelled and it seems to be a common practice.

Nest announced that they had already started on integrations with Mercedes, Whirlpool and a number of other larger names. In a similar manner, Apple’s HomeKit announcement was followed up by Honeywell announcing Lyric which already had a head start with HomeKit. Sure, there are major reasons to have strategic partners as it would be hard to become the homes hub without others integrating, but the early access feels wrong, and if not wrong, just kinda shitty. It has echoes of exclusivity which if you ask me is one of the lynchpins of the cable industry preventing what we all know is superior and inevitable.

In particular, its worrisome as its well recognized that the home is one of the next...