It's obvious that homes in Singapore are smaller than those in the US and many other parts of the world. Why is this so?

Demand:

• What percent of Singaporean household income is spent on housing? How regressive is this? How do we account for purchases using retirement funds (CPF)?
• How does the demand curve for living space depend on household size and demographic group?
• Do school districts have an observable influence? What about expat areas?

Supply:

• What proportion of the cost of an apartment due to the land?
• How linear is the dependency between apartment value and apartment size?
• How much cheaper are apartments with longer commutes?
• How big is the effect of regulatory limits on living space to land ratios?
• Does it make sense for the government to manage house prices because of their role as household collateral in a fractional reserve system? Are there significant interactions with monetary policy?
• How much monopoly profit does the local building industry enjoy?

I am currently reading Approximate Dynamic Programming by Warren Powell. The book comes out of work that Powell did with Schneider National, a company that operates a large fleet of trucks in the US.

I haven't gone very far in the book, but it definitely seems very promising. The central premise that I can grasp is that it is fruitful to consider the quality of a model strictly in light of the decisions that the model is being used to make. This can be contrasted with typical surrogates like the root mean squared error or mutual information - those measures for model quality are largely derived using definitions of convergence towards total knowledge, and attempting to reach the state of total knowledge is often futile in reality.

In building practical models with practical approximations, choices in the early steps of an analysis often contain implicit knowledge about what the output from those steps is to be used for. To carry this process to its logical conclusion would be what I imagine approximate dynamic programming accomplishes - this way of dealing with ignorance trades off uncertainties in such way as to minimize the impact they have on decision quality, as measured by what you actually care about for the specific problem.

Came across this page on reddit: How to Maximize Your Sales Appointments

The advice is to structure the meeting like this:

1. Small talk and being human
2. Brief self introduction
3. Understand the client - ask questions and understand needs
• If no fit, end the meeting
4. Discuss price range
• If no fit, end the meeting
5. Find out more about how the purchasing decision gets made / what support or information the prospect needs to make the decision
• Try to get the process for this next step going
6. Schedule a concrete followup

I think that this is an excellent structure for the people who are networking - i.e., when the product is yourself. How would you sell yourself if you were going to follow these steps?