pj_mukh

“Demand is fixed, they're coming or your jobs” is your “Temperatures always rise and fall, there is no global warming”.

I'm sorry to be this dismissive, but I've had this conversation too many times and you will simply see what you want to see. There is no convincing coal workers of global warming.

Seeing this pablum on Hackernews is quite startling. It seems like its going to remain the "global warming is fake" of the economics world.

"Oh but I know of this study that.."...I know..I know.

It's not most people you meet, its most people you remember you meet.

https://dictionary.apa.org/distinctiveness-effect

I say this as an immigrant: But if you're not an immigrant, a medicare recipient or maybe in the military, your state and municipal governments have significantly more influence on your life than your federal government and most people rarely pay attention to this level of politics.

This lets the people who do pay attention have complete capture. You know your rent is high? Yea that's mostly your state and municipal government doing the bidding of landlords and landed gentry.

“The assumption here is that, without AI, none of that capital would have been deployed anywhere.”

The question is could the capital be deployed somewhere more productive. If that was just used park it into REIT’s buying single family homes, would you be happier?

Cursor/Claude works decently enough for react-native.

Would love some models optimized for Swift and also closing the loop with the simulator would be clutch.

Ugh, looking for something like this for Front-end Mobile Dev (React-Native, Swift etc.). The closest thing I've found is https://www.magicpatterns.com, but that doesn't work on existing repos. Keep that in mind!

“leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers.”

They certainly are in my neighborhood.

https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/48-hills-cost-of-growt...

The “private developer risk” the article derides is an enforceable approval timeline that lets private developers have bounded risk. Apparently that’s a bridge too far.

"I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016"

Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city.

It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro cities.

When it comes to 100% affordable housing, yes the Hillary voters are on their own, but those are like 1-2 headline causing projects. For every affordable housing project there are 10 market rate housing projects that never even see the light of day.

FWIW: Ezra Klein called for Biden to step down before most others and asked for a fast national convention (not Kamala). Broad brushstrokes are energy saving, but just incorrect.

Not what I’m contesting.

That privacy concerns are secondary to safety concerns.

Even if this were true, I don't understand why this information is not placed behind a court warrant requirement? Seems like a simple fix.

One solution: Some sort of checksum confirming that a bot belongs to a human (and which human)?

I want to able to automate mundane tasks but I should still be confirming everything my bot does and be liable for its actions.

Question: What is stopping from a new or old entrant from creating a $10-15K electric car? American mfg may be slightly better at automation than China.

When I said "in the context of Silicon Valley", I meant the geographical region not "what are the bad things tech has done".

Most SV politicos that drive living conditions in the valley don't take PAC money and aren't affected by Billionaires. There's a housing shortage and a cost of living crisis anyway (example: no matter how much you pay gig economy workers, they are not going to afford a home in the valley).

The issues you mentioned are because of Citizens United - a federal issue w/ consequences all over the country (not just SV).

"destructive consequences."

In the context of just Silicon Valley, what are they?

I have the same issue as OP.

Piecemeal sales aren't affected by the total amount though? If I'm a billionaire vs a 100 Billionaire, I'm still taking out the same amounts to live and buy yachts.

Also, as far as I can tell, it's not these 9 Billionaires hoovering up housing in the valley either. They all utmost have 2-3 properties, most of the rest of the market remains unaffected by this inequality.

In this local context, Citizens United is irrelevant too, most of the state MP's and local council members are not funded by the Billionaires and do not need to kowtow to their policy preferences.

So how exactly is inequality driving the cost of living?

EDIT: I do wish someone would actually answer this question. Everytime I bring this up I get yelling (or downvotes) in response. I agree Citizens United has really changed how Billionaires are able to affect federal elections, but in these local cases like "Silicon Valley", how does inequality affect the cost of living? This is a sincere question.

I presume this average includes 20-something’s that are far more mobile on all fronts except for housing costs at a higher opportunity destination. If they are not moving to seek better opportunities, it does signify a bit of a deep rot in the system.

I'm sorry but if I have to convince you that the last 15 years have been a serious continuous backsliding of physical connection and physical spaces towards online spaces and algorithmic feed, this is not a fruitful conversation. This is obvious to me from all the data.

It's also obvious to me, that anytime any worker feels financially comfortable to stay home, a huge chunk of them will inevitably be hijacked by algorithmic feeds. Everything else is just some version of "pick yourself up by the bootstraps".

I am expecting Social Media Managers to be paid hand over foot to handle this transition even though they might find other work more meaningful (much like Real Estate Agents now, who would rather be doing something else, but the money is too good).

These are not reasons not to do UBI, but if there is economic devastation after, you can expect a quick reversal and a generation-wide flopping of the idea. So might as well fix these underlying issues as you do UBI.

The chips we need for the machines that will defend Taiwan are being built in Taiwan is just a ridiculous game of chicken to be setup.

I wish they’d take the next step with the defense treaty to move even more capacity (esp for the highest grade stuff) to stateside.

You think UBI will reduce the attention economy? We already ran that natural experiment. COVID. Screen time exploded. You're gonna need a lot more social media managers, and nursing will be a lot less appealing, no matter what you pay them.

Cool!

One suggestion, your language can be more specific, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. You know this will be for drone formations, so:

"Every simulation is modelled as a scenario. You can add multiple nodes to your world in a scenario."

A scenario is a single formation? or Multiple formations (with the transitions encapsulated)? Nodes are just drones?

I realize you might be adopting the language from some ROS framework, but for you specific situation you can make it so much easier to read!

I think you're hung up on fractions, while the business logic is obviously hung up on the value. The cost of wood has gone up, but wood is a critical element in construction. What is the "value" of paying $100,000's in lawyer fees?

It's like buying a home and having to pay 10% in agent fees and having a 6 month arbitrary holding period while you are still having to pay the mortgage. "Well the money you're losing is less than the cost of the land!" you would say. lol.

That's basically what's happening to construction projects, it's an industry-wide show-stopper regardless of what fraction it is of the land price.

All the links I've shared confirm that these costs are the prime-driver of project cancellations and projects dying on the drawing board, not that the costs are larger than all other costs in an absolute sense because obviously mortgage payments while you're waiting for lawsuits are less than the whole land value itself.

Nurses deserve more money than we can give them but their salaries are around $100K and Hospital Margins are 5%. So yea, UBI-style, the government pretty much just has to print the money to hand to the nurses to get them more money.

"We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators."

Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.

Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?

There have been 3-4 different comprehensive reports linked in this thread laying out that actually holding costs (please search), legal fees are one of the main drivers of cost along with the 2 others you mentioned.

But specifically, it's the worst one because it's unbounded (labor and materials is really costly now, but its a known cost) especially in states with heavy environment regulations or other zoning regulations. In those states, usually any one person can bring in a lawsuit alleging a lack of environment studies or alleged personal damage to slow down construction, so how much holding costs do you budget for? How much lawyer fees? How many people will bring lawsuits? You have no idea!

Most projects just don't start if they have a bracket for unbounded costs like that. So now you have fewer and fewer parties willing to take on these projects with more and more people (neighbors, bureaucrats etc.) having the bandwidth to pour over each individual project looking for an opening to sue and stop. It's a doom-loop of red-tape.

Do you think the California legislature (not the San Francisco legislature mind you) is wasting its time dealing with this, if it's "not that big of a deal" [1]. The governor ransomed the whole state budget to get this passed. Similar things happened in Minnesota. This is a huge deal.

I encourage you to read the various books laying out example after example of these issues and the background data [2], [3].

[1]: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...

[2]: https://www.philipkhoward.com/the-rule-of-nobody

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...

It all started in San Francisco and New York, but now the disease has spread everywhere. Frankly the disease was always there. Millennials trying to buy houses en-masse over COVID is what exposed it.

Nobody notices it because it's nationwide (and to a certain extent worldwide) and it's a city-by-city policy issue [1][2][3]. But it's the same issue everywhere, over-indexing neighborhood preferences to slow down and kill construction projects behind a permitting process.

[1]: Denver, https://denverite.com/2025/04/14/denver-construction-permitt...

[2]: Toronto/Ontario, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-const...

[3]: Atlanta, https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2024/06/20/metro-at...

It's not just carrying cost, it could be the full A&D cost, so you're paying the loan on the mortgage without being able to build anything. That's huge and has sunk major projects around me. This happens, literally all the time [1][2][3], all around the country.

What's more, the fear of doing this has basically staved off all but the most brave companies, or giant conglomerates that can buy land cash, which is the most predictable byproduct of excessive regulation at a local level like this.

[1]: https://jerseydigs.com/american-dream-owners-default-on-1-2-...

[2]: https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2023/11/08/one-camelback...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/y2ein5

"The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry."

Confusing statement, the IRR is low and the risk is high because the carrying cost is unknown (and unbounded).

This is a red-herring. No one is suggesting loosening laws on whether a building will stay standing.

The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.

What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy