Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 445

Anyone who has ever worked on a development pro forma will know that the process generally works like this: You start with a bunch of assumptions. You assemble those assumptions in a way that will allow you to determine if the project in question is feasible. And then, you realize that almost everything is more costly than you initially thought and that the project may not actually work. Oh shit.

In fact, a sure-fire way to know that you're on the right track is if the numbers sort of don't work. If the returns look too good to be true, they almost certainly are and you're likely missing something big and meaningful. As we have talked about before on this blog, development happens on the margin. That means that you have to work at it. You have to be creative. And often you have to find ways to increase revenues and cut costs.

The common way to find money is through something known as value engineering, which is just a fancy way of saying, "I need to cut costs, so let's see what I can tolerate losing from this project." That's generally how it works. And we do it on every project. You're trying to find high-cost items with relatively low perceived value.

This process often gets a lot of criticism because people view it as a distasteful cheapening of a project. But the reality is that it is usually an important part of maintaining project feasibility. You may really want to use that fancy material you can only get from Switzerland, but maybe development charges were just increased and now you need to offset those new costs by finding savings somewhere else.

This isn't a perfect analogy, but imagine you were shopping for a new car. You might start out by wanting the fully-loaded version, but then you see the price and realize you can't afford it. So you decide to start trimming features and add-ons until you get to a place where you feel more comfortable. I would imagine this happens with cars, and I'm not sure it's right to point to that person after and say, "oh my god, I can't believe you cheaped out and didn't buy the fully-loaded version."

At the same time, I think it would be perfectly reasonable to argue that you don't need to spend a lot of money to (1) care deeply about the work that you do and (2) have taste. You can't fight the economic realities of the world, but you can care and you can be creative. And I don't think it's too much to advocate for these things.

https://youtu.be/G_If80OpuqE

Cruise, which I wrote about earlier this year , has just announced that its autonomous taxi service will soon be available to the general public 24 hours a day , across all of San Francisco. Initially the service was only available between 11PM and 5AM (when traffic volumes are lower), and in certain parts of the city. It was also free to use. In total, the company now has about 300 AVs operating across San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. And it has been charging for rides since June of this year.

If you're curious about what it's like to ride in one of these, check out the above video .

For those of you who are interested in crypto (and for those of you who aren't but are open-minded), Vitalik has just published this post talking about what in the Ethereum application ecosystem currently excites him. A lot of it is pretty technical, but the 5 overarching categories he talks about are: (1) money, (2) decentralized finance, (3) identity, (4) decentralized autonomous organizations, and (5) hybrid applications.

Money has always been considered the first and most important application of crypto. But there is no shortage of people who will tell you that it'll never work and that fiat currencies backed by a government will always be superior. Today I already think the answer is: it depends. So lately, I have been responding to this comment by asking: Would you rather own the Argentine Peso or would you rather own someting like ETH?

Here's how Vitalik talks about this same point:

When I first visited Argentina in December last year, one of the experiences I remember well was walking around on Christmas Day, when almost everything is closed, looking for a coffee shop. After passing by about five closed ones, we finally found one that was open. When we walked in, the owner recognized me, and immediately showed me that he has ETH and other crypto-assets on his Binance account. We ordered tea and snacks, and we asked if we could pay in ETH. The coffee shop owner obliged, and showed me the QR code for his Binance deposit address, to which I sent about $20 of ETH from my Status wallet on my phone.

This was far from the most meaningful use of cryptocurrency that is taking place in the country. Others are using it to save money, transfer money internationally, make payments for large and important transactions, and much more. But even still, the fact that I randomly found a coffee shop and it happened to accept cryptocurrency showed the sheer reach of adoption. Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in  Argentina  and  many  other  countries  around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a  reality  every day. Cryptocurrency often steps in as a lifeline.

The other category that I find very interesting is that of identity. And it relates to a post that Fred Wilson also happened to share today where he talks about the importance of identity and the coming need for us to start cryptographically signing everything . In my mind, what this comes down to is proving things like who is who, who is doing what, and who owns what.

This may sound counterintuitive since crypto is often held up by the media as a way to obfuscate identity and conceal nefarious activities. But the thing is, as soon as you link a real human to a blockchain, you can now have identity and ownership records that are institution-independent and fully interoperable. One use case that immediately comes to mind is property deeds, which is of course already being done in some places .

For Vitalik's full post, click here .