jlhawn

a full suspension e-bike, 500+Wh battery, with a belt drive for $4,500 is honestly a really good deal. There is a shortage of options when it comes to full-suspension bikes that are good for commutes. Compare this to any e-bike with the Bosch e-bike system. The big risk here for consumers if whether they can match the service, support, and reliability that Bosch has. There appears to be a class-2 e-bike option which is something that significantly differentiates it from bikes with the Bosch system.

gotta listen at 2x speed!

this isn't necessarily true. While it generates less direct revenue, it increases nearby land value in two ways: 1) business activity which would have taken place on that parcel "overflows" to nearby parcels, ie, the demand for those other land uses doesn't go away and increases prices in the surrounding area. 2) the park provides real value to its users and access to that value also increases nearby ground rents.

The camera systems are also superior from an infrastructure maintenance perspective. You can update them with new capabilities or do re-striping without tearing up the pavement.

Yep... If I didn't mask while at work and home, I'd probably be annoying my family and coworkers with state and local land use politics issues all the time.

One of the issues that AC Transit (SF East Bay bus agency) has is that it purchased a lot of Hydrogen Fuel Cell busses which have issues which dramatically impact their reliability. It's also very expensive technology. There's a decent argument that public agencies _should_ invest in early emerging technologies like that but the costs should not be borne by the transit agency alone, at the cost of poor service for its riders.

surveys show that if you ask most people what happens to the price of X when the number of X available increases, people correctly understand that the price falls and vice versa. There are some things though, particularly housing, where more people think the opposite happens.

This comment is one of the things I refer to in my top-level comment. People have just enough of an education in economics and an understanding of personal finance and budgeting to be dangerous. They conflate economics with federal budget politics, have a one-sided and incomplete view of what debt is (especially US national debt), and then build a whole model of a system called "debt-based economics" which is based on political observations instead of fundamental economic understanding.

I mostly think economics education is fine... most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses, etc. But that doesn't mean that people are prepared to talk about economics on a daily basis, especially when it comes to politics. People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports.

Do I think economics in higher education needs to change? no. But the base level of economics knowledge and principles are very lacking for the everyday person, to the detriment of society at large.

This goes back to my top-level comment: the assessment of your property should not be based on sales of nearby property but on observed rental values. Just because your neighbor has sold their plot and the new owner has the intent to build 99 houses on is so far inconsequential ... we have yet to observe any actual rent increases and likely will not until those houses are actually constructed and rented/sold themselves. Only then can we accurately observe the potential rental value of your adjacent land.

I found some more to nitpick, from the section on "LVT implicitly taxes improvements on nearby land":

> For instance, if a developer owns multiple adjacent parcels and decides to build housing or infrastructure on one of them, the value of the undeveloped parcels will rise due to their proximity to the improvements. As a result, the developer faces higher taxes on the remaining undeveloped land, making development less financially appealing in the first place.

This analysis misses the point. It doesn't make development less financially appealing, it makes owning land you're not planning on using any time soon less appealing. It disrupts (in a good way) the current land development model where one entity buys a large tract of land and develops and sells it off one piece at a time. That's a model based on land speculation. They may see it as the development of the first 20% of land increases the value of the remaining 80% (which they feel justified in profiting from) but that is neither guaranteed nor is it an accurate description of what causes the remaining 80% of land to increase in value. It's more accurate to say that the agglomeration effects of the people who moved into that first 20% (and their interaction with the existing local economy) are more responsible for it.

> ... These assessments would require intricate and subjective valuations that are very difficult to quantify accurately.

I continue to believe that "full cash value" assessments which try to ascertain the market purchase price of real estate are very foolish. And there are so many inputs and methods of formulating an assessment. What all of them have in common though, is that they consider the rental value of the property. It would be so much simpler if the tax was only assessed on the rental value. It eliminates things that effect the sale price estimates like interest rates, subjective risk tolerances, speculative premiums, and even the tax itself. The tax rate on the rental value would of course be much higher than the tax rate on the purchase price (25% compared to 1% for example) but it's a much more stable assessment with a lot more reliable data backing it up.

disclosure: I am a Georgist and former president of Common Ground California.

A quick and dirty version:

    docker -H host1 image save IMAGE | docker -H host2 image load

note: this isn't efficient at all (no compression or layer caching)!

The outage was global. For my team specifically, a global Identity and Access Management outage meant that our internal service accounts could not refresh their short-lived access tokens and so different parts of our infrastructure began to fail over the course of an hour or so, regardless of what region or zone they were in. Services were up, but they could not access critical GCP services because of auth-related issues which resulted in internal service errors for us.

To give an example, our web servers connect to our GCP CloudSQL database via a Cloud SQL Auth Proxy (there's also a connection pooler in between but that also stayed up). The connection to the proxy was always available, but the proxy wasn't able to renew auth tokens it uses to tunnel to the database, regardless of where the webserver or database happened to be located. To mitigate this in the future we're planning to stop using the auth proxy and connect directly via mutual TLS but now it means we have to manage TLS certificates.

okay, for now I'll just continue to live in a tent in some Berkeley NIMBY's backyard for $50/week while I pick up whatever small time gig-app contract jobs I can. You've convinced me to look at the bigger picture. Our generation really doesn't deserve to benefit from any solutions anyway.

If I were a centibillionaire and I really thought Georgism was a good idea, I would make it my life's work to prove it out by using my vast net-worth to buy land in existing urban areas and actually implement it at a large scale. But instead the closest thing we have is the California Forever thing in East Solano County.

How much work do you think it would be to also have a separate xattr which has a human-readable description of the file contents? I wonder if it that might already be an intermediate product of some of the embedding tools, like "arbitrary media" -> "text description of media" -> "embedding vector". You could store both of those as xattrs and you could debug by comparing your text query with the text description of the file contents as they should produce similar embedding vectors. You could even audit any file, assuming you know what its contents are, by checking the text description xattr generated by this program.

I understand that LLMs aren't involved in generating the embeddings and adding the xattrs. I was just wondering what the value add of this is if there's no other background process (like mds on macOS) which is using it to build a search index.

I guess what I'm asking is: how does VectorVFS enable search besides iterating through all files and iteratively comparing file embeddings with the embedding of a search query? The project description says "efficient and semantically searchable" and "eliminating the need for external index files or services" but I can't think of any more efficient way to do a search without literally walking the entire filesystem tree to look for the file with the most similar vector.

Edit: reading the docs [1] confirmed this. The `vfs search TERM DIRECTORY` command:

> will automatically iterate over all files in the folder, look for supported files and then embed the file or load existing embeddings directly from the filesystem."

[1]: https://vectorvfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#vfs-se...

If I understand correctly, this is attaching metadata to files in a format that LLMs (or any tool that can understand the semantic embedding vector) can leverage to understand what a file is without having to actually read the contents of the file.

That obviously has a lot of interesting use cases, but my first assumption was that this could be used to quickly/easily search your filesystem with some prompt like "Play the video from last month where we went camping and saw a flock of turkeys". But that would require having an actual vector DB running on your system which you could use to quickly look up files using an embedding of your query, no?

> One could argue, as many have, that some of this increase in housing cost is offset by decreased costs in other expenditures such as food or technology.

A Georgist perspective on this would be that it's the decreased costs in other goods and services which have (partially) contributed to the increased cost in housing, as any increase in disposable income allows you to bid up the price of land. Not everyone does, but enough do so that it has this overall effect, and the effect is stronger where housing supply is already limited.

yeah but one of the reasons why land value for single family homes is even higher is due to the zoning constraints which cause what I like to call "land value spillover" effects. Land value in suburbs an hour from a city center is higher than it naturally would be because zoning constraints closer to the city center cause housing demand to spread out across a larger geographic area. To give an example in the bay area, the cities of Livermore and Concord primarily exist in the form and population they do today because more homes could not be built closer to the core of the bay area, not to mention places like Antioch, Brentwood, and Tracy.

Higher location values are supposed to lead to more intensive land use (more dwelling units per acre) but we don’t tax land enough for this to work properly. I’d still consider a housing market without land value tax to be fundamentally broken. Adding on arbitrary constraints on building (eg, beyond health and safety regulations) makes it si much worse.

As for 100 year old houses being considered high quality… there’s definitely going to be a survivorship bias for such buildings that didn’t get replaced while they could (prior to mass downzoning on the 1970s) but they literally didn’t have building codes back then. Lots of money needs to be spent to retrofit old buildings for modern seismic and energy standards.

Also — not saying you’re guilty of this — there is a lot of racial prejudice when folks criticize the “poor craftsman” of modern construction workers compared to those of past generations, as they more often tend to be Latino workers these days.

A new construction unit is always going to be priced higher than a similar sized and located unit that is older. This should not be surprising.

The claim that housing supply advocates make about affordability is not that new units will be most affordable than but that older comparable units will become more affordable due to the increased competition. The people who’ve been bidding up the prices on older rental and resale homes will choose the newer housing instead because they are able and more willing to. The older stock becomes more affordable. Time goes on and even newer buildings cause what was once new to become a more affordable option. It should eventually get to a point where nobody would ever choose the older (again, similarly sized and located) units with poor amenities because it’s not worth it compared to newer options that are a better value. And those get replaced with new construction. That’s how a housing market should function.

But instead we have housing that is over 100 years old going for ever increasing prices even without modern renovations. Thats a broken market.

> Gentrification actually only affects a very small percentage of people who end up refusing to sell and holding out until they cannot afford anymore.

In California, gentrification almost never affects long time homeowners. Once you pay off your mortgage, your only housing costs are maintenance and property taxes which are highly subsidized thanks to Proposition 13.

However, renters who make up 44% of all California households very often do experience increasing housing price pressures which drives them to move to lower cost (and lower opportunity) areas. Some municipalities have tight rent controls, but most do not. There's a state law which prevents rent increases in older units above 5% plus inflation but that is still an allowable rate which quickly outpaces income growth.

I happen to like some rent controls but I'm not saying that universal rent controls are a solution here. There just has to be some explanation for why housing construction costs seem to grow just as fast as housing prices in general. If housing prices are growing faster than wages and the producer price index for materials then it cant just be construction labor and materials!

What I am alluding to is that there is simply a lack of locations which are able to be developed into new housing. Sometimes that's onerous land use constraints, very long project entitlement and permitting timelines which increases financing costs, local taxes/fees or exactions on development, or some combination of all of these!

> If they were people would have moved, or somewhere would have ended up being a lot better.

sorry, I am not going to bother reading the rest of your comment before writing this reply because reading this part stopped me immediately.

Gentrification and displacement has been a growing issue for decades. Especially in California, people who grow up here can't afford to stay here and end up moving from high cost coastal areas to exurbs in the central valley or inland empire or just leave the state entirely for places like arizona, nevada, texas, or beyond. These are the places that have been growing most over the past couple of decades. Population in the high-cost areas may be increasing too (or at least staying the same) but that's because higher-income people who can afford it are willing and able to move there.

would you rather live in poverty or be wealthy enough to afford one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Los Angeles? lol

A better comparison might be: would you rather live in a 4,000 sqft mcmansion in Santa Clarita or a modest 1200 sqft 3 bed 2 bath condo in Santa Monica?

this is actually just several different comments I made on Bluesky yesterday about this paper, but I combined them into one comment here so that's maybe why it's a little weird. https://bsky.app/profile/josh.hawn.xyz/post/3lkopsdsxis2j

home ownership is directly tied to rental affordability, as the rental market is always going to be the alternative. Even if people aren't perfectly rational agents, everyone has their own subjective present value function or heuristic to compare the cost of owning vs renting. They may be separate forms of tenure, but they do in fact compete with one another on price/value. If the price of alternatives to ownership were to fall, the price homebuyers are willing to pay would also fall.

> [multifamily housing units are] not really the kind of place that most people want to buy to live in

this is a descriptive norm - observed or perceived behaviors, preferences, and trends among a group of people who, typically, don't really have a choice to buy anything other than a detached house. Family-sized condos are actually highly sought after in dense urban areas where a detached house is an overt luxury, while in suburbs and rural areas they're a rare choice simply because it's illegal to build them.

From the abstract:

> These results challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that easing housing supply constraints may not yield the anticipated improvements in housing affordability.

If their finding is that increases in incomes leads to increases in demand which then increases prices, that’s not surprising. But their claim is that reducing artificial constraints (onerous land use regulation, discretionary entitlement and permitting, etc) would not have any impact on the supply curve. That’s highly suspect.

To make a plainly true statement which sounds similar to the paper title, "Increasing Incomes Coupled With Supply Constraints Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities." Spot the difference.

This paper primarily considers house prices and quantities in terms of single-family homes. They use data sources like the single-family repeat-sales index and the median home value from the American Community Survey, which mostly tracks single-family homes.

This focus limits their analysis by not fully accounting for multi-family housing units or rental markets, which are far more significantly impacted by supply constraints.

This emphasis on single-family homes in their data sources affects the generalizability of their conclusions about the impact of supply constraints across different types of housing markets, especially in dense urban areas where multi-family units and rentals are more prevalent.

They also only go as far back as 1980. The difference between supply constraints between 1980 and 2025 is very small compared to the difference between 1965 and 1980. Take Los Angeles as an example [1]. The zoned capacity of many metro areas was dramatically reduced by the mid 1970s.

[1] https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2020/...