friend_Fernando

Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't (there's a bit of slack with relocations, house sharing and spare bedrooms but it's largely inconsequential.) That means that supply (i.e. quantity) is enough.

It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on housing, there would be less incentive to create artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land use policies.

Isn't it interesting how certain online forces affiliated with the letter Z are against copyright for Western IP in general, but are pro copyright when it comes to hamstringing Western AI?

> such as former convicts, individuals with substance abuse issues, those with mental health challenges, people who lost jobs or income, refugees, and more

The one thing they all have in common is how much more expensive it is to house them than it used to be.

> I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the housing market than mental illness

This is absolutely the right diagnosis. For instance, SROs used to be very affordable.[1] Placing someone into housing was well within the means of local governments and non-profits.

In Coppola's 1974 movie The Conversation, a large portion of the titular dialogue is about a homeless person Williams' character spots while walking around a crowded Union Square. That's how much homelessness stood out back then.

[1] https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/

We don't have shareholders that will blame us for the apocalypse just because we didn't pay to play.

Tech leaders are just making do like the rest of us, swirling around while the world goes down the drain.

This just mirrors the fake zealotry babbled in Venezuela while the country was cratering. I don't have to prove that mainstream economics works. That's risible Putinist nonsense like the rest of your line of "reasoning."

That's a strawman. Using the right economic policies would fix the problem. Argentina had a cold, maybe pneumonia. The right fix was antibiotics, not a bullet to the head.

No one is objecting to knowledge preservation - when you just preserve it instead of abundantly replicating it with a wink.

Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.

Even more reasonable people are objecting to weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.

I live in SF. The vast majority of new construction above 3 stories is reinforced concrete, including many high-rises such as the (infamous) 58-story Millenium Tower.[1] Seismically, modern reinforced concrete performs well.

As I explained in sibling threads, "speed bumps" are the most important thing here in CA. It's not about whether your structure can withstand a 1000-degree fire all around it. It's about whether your structure will set fire to three others within minutes of when it goes up in flames.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...

See sibling posts for the cost argument.

> These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material.

That's just not the case. Fire-resistant construction might not always help the first house at the subdivision's edge, but it will help the rest. One analogy is control rods in a reactor.

As I said in another post, the problem with firestorms here in CA is the rate of initial spread. We always get massive numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.

Your argument only applies to unreinforced masonry, which is no longer allowed by code in seismically-prone areas. For fire resistance you can use reinforced concrete, steel or aluminum framing, or wood framing with non-combustible walls. Or even go exotic with various prefab options and 3D printing.

As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)

A 53% poverty rate is economic suicide.[1] Scrambling for food is not economic activity, it's idleness and ruination.

Incidentally, this conversation parallels the one that would follow mass deportations. People complaining of the crashing economy, and the fans of racial cleansing claimimg that it had to be done and that it's a good thing in the long run.

This is exactly the point I was making.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/27/poverty-rate-a...

An even better fix for this category of problems is DC distribution at the homelab scale. I've replaced most of my 5V and 12V wall warts with a PC PSU. A number of transient issues that used to affect some of the gear disappeared.

It's still a special interest group, even if it happens to be a large one. It's orchestrating decisions that effectively siphon money from non-members (e.g. renters and young families), and in proportion to the number of properties each member owns no less.

In any case, we don't seem to disagree all that much. My original point was more legislative than executive in nature. Local executive accountability is desirable, provided that the budgeting and rulemaking were made uniform state-wide. Education already works that way.

It's not so much an informed electorate as a rent-seeking one.[1] The regulatory capture [2] of obscure local boards is much easier than that of state agencies. Voters who are part of a special interest group are much more aware of what and who they're voting for. The prime example are landlords and homeowners. They have managed to strangle the supply of housing to inflate prices, creating the crisis we're in now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Local governance in general is FUBAR. Here in CA, housing supply policies from the legislature have gotten a lot better in recent years, but construction still gets bogged down at the local level.

Most budgeting should be moved to the state level, IMO. It's crazy for Western Springs, Atherton and Beverly Hills to waste money while Chicago and Oakland fall behind. If some magnates decide to move to Texas as a result, good riddance. The dependence on property taxes is particularly perverse, as it incentivizes the housing pyramid scheme.

Here in CA, it's more about reducing the spreading speed than about the resistance level once the fire gets there. All the large structure fires in recent years spread at breakneck speeds during an offshore wind event. In these cases, all that firefighters can do early on is evacuate people.

The largest power company in CA is in the process of burying its cables.

The risk level is not just affected by proximity to forests. For offshore (Santa Ana) wind events, the riskiest areas are the SW bottom of hills and near canyons. That's where the current LA fires are.

IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe. Alas, here in the US the colonial and cabin aesthetics still win out, even when fire-resistant options aren't more expensive.

Coffey Park in Santa Rosa was destroyed in 2017, and most properties were rebuilt to lower fire-resistance standards.[1] The second little pig just doesn't wanna hear it.

https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/11/19/after-the-tubbs-fire-ho...

It typically takes a special camera and software. You need focus, a large-enough sensor in low-light conditions, adjusting or bypassing compression, etc. Not always impossible of course, just highly unreliable otherwise.

Dwight -> Diapers

"The real-time video and data feeds don’t require any usernames or passwords to access."

I wish I found this to be more surprising. About 400 of these are being deployed in SF: https://sfist.com/2025/01/03/sfpd-refuses-to-say-where-theyv...

I guess you're saying he's unlike Bolsonaro, Orban, Vucic, Kickl, Trump, Weidel, Le Pen, Duterte and Farage? He's larger-than-life and bombastic. He's overthrown the political order and engineered a downward spiral faster than Maduro's. Putin couldn't ask for more. Argentina has always had problems, but economic suicide is not a disease cure.

Having voiced support for Ukraine doesn't mean much. Even Trump has once or twice.

Obviously not all the advocates share that goal - that's the whole point. Most people would not be OK with intentionally trashing the economy to overturn democracy. It's a camouflaged poison pill policy.

Here are two other Russian proxies achieving totalitarianism. Economically, they're not doing it by racking up pats on the back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/VEN

https://apnews.com/article/argentina-economy-crisis-javier-m...

If you're center-left like me, here's something you might not have realized yet. The conventional wisdom is that racial cleansing is the goal and that the economic cost of mass deportations is the price. It's actually the other way around.

The economic cost is the goal. The racial cleansing is just how that cost is initially justified to the base.

Once the economy really starts heading south, blame Democrats and other phantom enemies. It's much harder to jail the opposition and overturn democracy when things are going well. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina.

Little by little, we're getting an answer to the question: "What kind of investment does an outrageous influx of capitalization spur?" One might think it would be an AI silicon-moat, and it might yet be some of that.

But it's clear that everyone's favorite goal is keretsuification. If you're looking for abnormal profits, you can't do better than to add a letter to FAANG. Nvidia already got into the cloud business, and now it's making workstations.

The era of specialists doing specialist things is not really behind us. They're just not making automatic money, nor most of it. Nvidia excelled in that pool, but it too can't wait to leave it. It knows it can always fail as a specialist, but not as a kereitsu.

I suspect a similarly ugly reality is what happened in Cambodia after Pol Pot's genocide. It's done very poorly compared to its neighbors.

It's good that you brought up Hitchens. Like Trump, Dick Morris, Gingrich, and a variety of other larger-than-life 20th century figures, Hitchens had a magnet inside. When Russia switched its primary polarity from left to right, they promptly turned 180' in unison, like an iron bit in an MRI machine.

The PayPal Mafia smell a lot like those guys, like a 21st century unit of the same brigade. Some may have just waited longer than the others before dropping their cover.

One io_uring to root them all.

Eventually, all the better AGI tests should have large private evaluation datasets with no possible cheating or feedback loops. We're getting there.