New and Old #267
The cost of rezoning, a Pet Sounds commemoration, supply, demand, and luxury, and the persistence of the vacuum tube
Why does rezoning cost so much?, Housing in Practice, Brian Goggin, March 17, 2026
This is extremely important, and is probably not understood well by regular people. It’s a kind of Schrödinger’s Apartment Building—impossible to build but also going up everywhere. And—frankly—I view this entire “discretionary” process as more or less legalized corruption.
In most major American cities, developers must change the zoning code before they can build an apartment building. This is because, in most places, zoning is still extremely restrictive and apartments are not allowed on paper. This doesn’t mean that new apartments aren’t built at all. It just means that builders have to seek special permission to build apartments in a lengthy, costly process known as rezoning. The exact details of this process vary from place to place, but usually involve some combination of required community outreach, public hearings, special study by government staff, and, ultimately, an up or down vote from the local city council.
In most cases, rezonings are what known as a “discretionary” review process, meaning that, after careful study and public input, the government staff and elected body use their judgment on a case-by-case basis to decide whether to grant permission to build. This contrasts with an administrative – often called “by-right” – process that you would get if you were building purely what the zoning code allowed on paper.
In other words, a huge part of the “expense” of building stuff is not construction or land, it’s the time and money involved in negotiating this red tape. And that also has the effect of forcing up the scale of development firms and developments, because little guys doing little projects don’t have the wherewithal to negotiate this process.
The piece breaks down the actual costs and process of rezoning, which you should read if the details interest you, but the big takeaway here is that “zoning reform” is not just a byword for “build apartment buildings everywhere,” or something. It truly means reform—the liberalization, but also, even more important, the simplification of the code and process. Which, as I noted, would have the effect of making it easier for alternatives to big developers to do smaller, less dramatic projects.
Let Me Hear Your Heart Beat: “Pet Sounds” at 60, Political Currents by Ross Barkan, May 11, 2026
Pet Sounds was a response to Rubber Soul—not so much in sound as in form. The album era was just dawning, and Brian was deeply impressed that the new Beatles release seemed complete to him, devoid of the filler that made up so many rock albums of the period. Until the 1960s, albums were an afterthought, with singles dominating the market. A record label did not care about anything approaching a unified artistic statement. The story goes that Brian, upon hearing Rubber Soul, charged into the kitchen and told his new wife, Marilyn, that he would make “the greatest rock and roll album ever made.” For anyone else, this would be a sign of mania. Brian meant every word.
Well, that’s the only thing I know about Pet Sounds—that Wilson was inspired by Rubber Soul. (People online argue over whether that was the altered Capitol release in America, or the real British version, but as far as I could tell, he was inspired by the Capitol version, which ironically was not what the Beatles actually put together.) I like Rubber Soul, but I’ve never listened to Pet Sounds, which is often put alongside it.
Nonetheless, this is a really nice piece going through some Beach Boys history as well as some of the nitty-gritty of how Pet Sounds was produced. Some day I will get to the album itself!
The Vacuum Tube’s Last Stand(s), Hackaday, Al Williams, May 11, 2026
This was a fun read:
When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swept away by the transistor in the 1950s. But the reality is much more interesting. Vacuum tube technology did not simply stop evolving when the transistor appeared. In fact, some of the most sophisticated and technically impressive tube designs emerged after the transistor had already been invented.
Yes, that was what I thought too. I’ve seen vacuum tubes before—some random new-old-stock tubes I saw at a garage sale once. They looked like old camera flashbulbs or small lightbulbs. That was what I thought all vacuum tubes were, basically.1 But no:
If acorn tubes were specialized, lighthouse tubes were positively futuristic. Lighthouse tubes abandoned the classic cylindrical glass form almost entirely. Instead, they used stacked disk-like electrodes arranged in a compact coaxial structure. The resulting geometry minimized transit times and parasitic reactances, allowing operation into microwave frequencies.
The tubes vaguely resembled a lighthouse tower. These tubes became essential in radar systems during World War II and the early Cold War period. Some lighthouse designs could operate in the gigahertz range, something impossible for conventional receiving tubes.
Their construction also introduced new manufacturing techniques. Many used ceramic and metal rather than large glass envelopes. This improved heat resistance and mechanical stability while reducing losses at high frequencies.
There were other consumer-level advances too:
Technically, nuvistors were excellent devices. They offered superior performance in many RF applications compared to early transistors, particularly in television tuners, instrumentation, and aerospace electronics.
High-end studio microphones also adopted nuvistors because of their low noise and desirable electrical behavior. Some audiophiles still use nuvistor-based equipment today.
But despite their capabilities, nuvistors arrived too late. Semiconductor technology was improving rapidly. Silicon transistors were becoming cheaper, more reliable, and easier to manufacture in large quantities. Integrated circuits loomed on the horizon. The nuvistor may have been the best small receiving tube ever made, but it was competing against a technology whose economics would soon become overwhelming.
It’s interesting to wonder, as the article sort of raises, what would have happened had the transistor not been invented? How much could the vacuum tube have been perfected? Often we think of a technology as being played out or dead-ended where we saw it end, but often it ends for other reasons: commercial, not technical.
Lots of highly advanced stuff today was clunky when it first came out; if it had been outmoded then, we would never have thought about it again. How many paths in science and tech are there that the consumer and industrial economy simply never fully developed? Food for thought.
After China turned it into a cheap snack, caviar is at risk of losing its status as a luxury good, Washington Post, Laura Reiley, April 22, 2019
Cheap Chinese caviar is flooding the U.S. market, causing prices to plummet, and with it, the product’s cachet. Wholesale prices have fallen more than 50 percent since 2012, down 13 percent just in the past year. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the import price has gone from $850,000 per ton in January 2012 to $350,000 per ton in November 2018….
But there’s little evidence millennials or Gen Z has any connection to fish eggs outside tobiko on a California roll. Younger generations favor indulgences that play up their local and sustainable credentials. When it comes to caviar, however, producers have struggled to find customers who will pay top dollar for a made-in-the-USA premium product.
Neat little story about the shifting consumer perception of caviar as well as the difficult import-export aspect of the industry.
Related Reading:
With the single exception of the cathode ray tube—a tube TV’s tube—which is actually a kind of vacuum tube itself, though I suppose we don’t really think of it as one.
We should distinguish rezoning of specific areas or tracts (which are bad) from comprehensive rezoning, such as the reform in Minneapolis to allow triplexes everywhere in the city.
Funny thing, I actually work with vacuum tubes all the time.
I work at a particle accelerator, and they are the only things that can work at both high frequencies and high powers that we need.
Well, except transistors are slowly taking over that space, too, in the form of large solid state amplifier arrays.
Also, on your note about what a vacuum tube based society would look like, that's kinda part of the background of the Fallout series (although contrary to popular belief, they do have transistors, too).