belligeront

I have not been myself, but there is an exhibition currently at The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University called "Day Jobs":

https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/day-jobs

Shouldn’t individuals and companies also have a set of morals?

What is antisemitic about suggesting that there should be conversation about how AI is used in warfare?

He claimed in 2002, after the book was published, to have found additional evidence that IBM established a Polish subsidiary after Germany invaded Poland to sell machines to the Nazi government.

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/The-business-of-makin...

Highly recommend listening to this HBR podcast about the same topic. [1]

TJ Watson (of IBM) is quoted as saying: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.”

I hear a lot of similar echos within tech companies right now. People using “we’re a business” to shut down discussion about the role of supplying AI technology to Israel, who has been using AI to choose bombing targets [2].

[1] https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/11/lessons-from-ibm-in-nazi-ger...

[2] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

It has been reported Israel is using AI to choose bombing targets. How is that not intellectually interesting or relevant to a forum about technology?

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

I find the use of "this is a business" logic to dissuade political discussion about a company's own business practices to be extremely troubling. Yes, there can be a discussion about the proper way to have these conversations, but dismissing discussion of ethics with an attitude of "this is a business" has lead to some horrific outcomes throughout history.

I highly recommend listening to this podcast about IBM's role in Nazi Germany https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/11/lessons-from-ibm-in-nazi-ger...

TJ Watson (of IBM) had a similar "this is a business" outlook: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.” IBM's machines were extremely important part of Nazi Germany's Holocaust efforts, and there is evidence that IBM was actively working with Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland [1].

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/The-business-of-makin...

I thought this was relevant given recent stories about AI being used to identify military targets.

The author claims that IBM established a subsidiary in Poland named "Watson Business Machines" to work with Nazis after Germany invaded Poland.

>bulldozed the forests for 100km in every direction, covered the area in housing

Luckily we invented the elevator so we don't have to bulldoze forests to build more housing if we don't need to

What are peoples concerns here?

3 companies owning 11% of the single family homes available for rent in a metro area doesn't seem like a massive concentration of ownership. Some people prefer to rent rather than buy. Some people don't have savings for a down payment. Someone needs to own the houses that these people rent.

There are probably economies of scale to managing rental properties (e.g. larger companies can hire full time maintenance staff). Some people prefer to rent from small-time landlords, but those can have there problems too.

Is it the maze of LLCs? That does seem problematic.

Many people are reading this stat to say that NYC is dying because of post-covid crime or some other stat. I really think this is a misreading of the situation.

I think it is far likely composition effects from: - High-income people who work remote or hybrid started demanding more space for work and living. Given NYC housing is basically fixed (there is almost no building), this trend has decreased the average number of people per housing unit. - As the article notes, "the city’s populace is overall older and wealthier": wealthier people use more housing per person and tend to have fewer children.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the events of the past several days. But a lot of the behavior I’ve seen on twitter from Open AI employees, some led by Sam, feels very cult like: posting in all lower case, the heart emojis, rumors of employees calling each other in the middle of the night to pressure people to sign letters supporting Sam.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like your coworkers, but something about the manipulative nature of it triggers an “ick” feeling that I can’t really put into words.

I’ve also spent very little time in the Bay Area, but from afar, there does seem to be something in the DNA that makes people there more susceptible to cult like behavior.

Relatedly, University of Chicago has a popular survey where they ask Economists their views on policy proposals (along with their confidence in their answers), and their most recent survey was on LVT:

The question: > Shifting the burden of municipal property taxes towards land and away from improvements such as buildings - as proposed in the Detroit land value tax plan - will enhance the incentives for owners to develop their land and thereby give a substantial boost to local economic growth over a ten-year horizon.

And responses: 7% Strongly Agree, 46% Agreed, 17% Uncertain, 2% Disagree,2% No opinion, 24% Did Not Answer

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/land-value-tax/ (The link also shows the responses weighted by the responder's confidence, and the individual responses).

Why is providing rental houses bad? Should people who don't want to or cannot afford to purchase a house not have access to single family houses?

Seems similar to what Venkatesh Rao has written about "The Clueless" in his "The Gervais Principle" article.

It is a really great read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

> looked at census data on the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas and found there are 5.47 million vacant housing units, with an average vacancy rate of 7.22 percent.

This feels sensational. Imagine a common scenario: a unit is rented for 2 years (24 months), and then is vacant for 1 month while the owner repaints, performs maintenance, and relists the property for rental. That is 1/(24+1) = 4% vacancy. Given you can easily get to 4% vacancy with simple turnover, you can see why very low vacancy rates are bad for renters: they indicate it is extremely competitive to find housing. You can see this anecdotally in extremely tight housing markets like NYC where renters looking for apartments often report they need to move extremely quickly to secure rentals and some people even ofter to pay more than the listing price for desirable apartments.

Allowing SROs, which have been banned in most cities.

It seems like many companies have recently become more willing to take actions that I view as extremely trust breaking:

- Forcing employees who were hired as remote employees to relocate for RTO

- Rescinding offers

- Layoffs with seemingly little connection to performance

What I'm trying to understand is do companies not think these actions will limit their ability to hire in the future?

Are they:

- Hoping that future candidates have short memories or they can hire new grads who don't have other options?

- Calculating that the job market will stay slack for a long time?

- The C-suite has short time horizons and thus see these problems as someone else's future problems?

- Something else?

Obviously companies will do these sorts of things if faced with existential threats, but the recent trend seems far more widespread than this.

I also believe they will increase congestion in cities since when occupants switch from drivers to riders, they are less affected by the costs of road congestion (congested roads may mean riders get to their destinations slower, but because they are no longer driving, people may make extra trips where previously they would say "I don't want to make that trip now because driving during rush hour is too stressful").

But the public will face negative externalities of greater congestion (noise, pollution, slower travel times for busses & walking).

Without congestion pricing and right of ways for bikes, walking, and transit, automated taxis seem like a way to double down on a space inefficient mode of travel.

I've seen both versions of these. A good TPM is extremely valuable though, especially for work that is highly reliant on coordinating other teams. The bad version was a net negative to team productivity.

Citation here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/gettingstarted-...

paulg has now been banned from twitter (presumably for noting that he was making a mastadon account) https://twitter.com/paulg

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.".

It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

He's also acted with hubris with his engineering claims. For example claiming that the reason twitter is slower in india is that there are 1200 RPC calls, which is pretty absurd.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952

People who travel frequently, does the lack of physical SIM card concern you? I'm not sure how widespread eSIMs across countries.

This is a regressive tax. It forces higher taxes on renters (as a class, less wealthy than homeowners) than homeowners.

Here is a recent case where a driver of a Jeep swerved into the oncoming lane to at high speed try to hit a bicyclist. They were only given a misdemeanor.

This person should not be allowed to drive a motor vehicle. There is almost no consequences for motorists who repeatedly violate the law and risk others' lives. We should be much more aggressive about taking away people's drivers licenses who demonstrate that they are incapable of public safety.

https://jalopnik.com/jeep-driver-gets-misdemeanor-after-tryi...

I don't think there is much evidence, since voters don't directly vote on this, but some points to no: - Houston voted against zoning on a public vote - Many people report wanting to live in more walkable neighborhoods - The few cities that have walkable, dense neighborhoods in the US are much more expensive than other cities and walkable neighborhoods are more expensive than non-walkable. This suggests that there is something limiting the supply of walkable neighborhoods (zoning).

It is a huge amount of stuff: parking minimums, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, height limits, maximums on number of units, density, architectural style, etc., etc., etc.

Zoning codes are massive and complex documents that require hugely specialized knowledge. And they are different in each municipality, so housing developers can't easily work across different municipalities. This also increases costs by making it harder to standardize building plans and use cheaper, more automated building techniques.

Compare this with Japan which has a small set of zoning uses set at the national level.

The origins of zoning were to exclude black, Chinese, and jewish workers and residents from white neighborhoods. https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Today, they continue to be used to exclude poorer residents from richer neighborhoods through mechanisms like minimum lot sizes (housing is much more expensive if you require 10000 sqft lots, etc.) and prohibitions of multi-family dwellings (which make housing cheaper by allowing multiple households to split the cost of land).