slg

>The massive downzoning of the 1980s...

To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.

Especially with this sort of map regarding this specific city. For example, Beverly Hills is a separate municipality contained entirely within the borders of Los Angeles. It appears here like an empty black space no different from the ocean, lakes, mountains, and parks also scattered around the city. The styling of this map makes it impossible to tell if an area is truly undeveloped and if so, why. Throw in the way there appears to be arbitrary selection criteria for some buildings outside city limits that make them appear as lone buildings in undeveloped space, and I think it adds up to potentially give people a wrong picture of the area.

"The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering" is how the richest man on the planet amassed his wealth. OP is doing the exact same thing he's accusing other people of doing, focusing too much on identity.

Holmes surely used her gender as a tool the same way all these striving psychopaths will use whatever is at their disposal, but if it wasn't her gender, it just would have been something else. And singling out her gender as uniquely responsible will do more harm than good as it will be used as a cudgel against all future women founders in a way someone like Musk or Sam Bankman-Fried won't for men. Or maybe this early xkcd[1] put it better.

[1] - https://xkcd.com/385/

Two things can be true at once, the entire system is corrupt and the current administration is much more corrupt than any prior administration.

This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.

The doctor hits my leg with a hammer to test my reflexes. The comic isn't saying hitting legs with hammers is always bad.

The AI debate has often been flattened into "Do you believe in the long term viability of the tech?" when there is also another question that needs to be asked in "Do you believe in the long term viability of these companies' business models?" It's a lot easier to believe the former than the latter.

It's entirely possible for this tech to be humanity altering in the long term while we are also in a huge bubble that could pop at any moment. In that way the housing analogy is apt. The utility of the houses themselves didn't change, the problem was purely with financial markets until eventually those markets made it everyone's problem.

What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people.

People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.

The last census I saw of the Los Angeles homeless population found that the percentage of homeless people in LA that were never housed in LA was higher than either the percentage of homeless people who had a severe mental illness or substance abuse issue.

The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?

My comment was made knowing and understanding the Nazis use of tech. But it's an argument of efficiency and efficiency matters less and less when dealing with the state due to their relative resource and power imbalance compared to individuals. Tech might have sped up the Nazi death machine, but the desire and intent for murder is all that matters in the long run. Their efficiency was of note really only because their time in power was relatively brief. If they were like some other authoritarian regimes and remained in power for decades, they likely would have eventually racked up the same death toll with or without the tech.

We also never seem to accept this answer for other forms of tech. Should we ban encryption because it makes it easier for terrorists to hide? Should your phone run ever photo you take through a CSAM database to catch preditors? Should we ban 3d printers because someone might print gun parts? For some reason we understand that people motivated enough to commit crimes will find a way to do it. This is much truer when it comes to the actions of the state than it is for individuals. I'm never going to learn to smith parts for a gun, but I could figure out 3d printing pretty easily. If the state wants me dead or in jail, I don't think the Flock cameras are that meaningful.

I find it frusrating how the conversation around this almost always focuses on one side of the equation. Why is it always about preventing tools from being built in case authoritarians comes to power rather than preventing those authoritarians from coming to power in the first place? I'm far more scared off the authoritarian aspect than the tech. The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions. It seems like focusing on the actual bad guys is going to be more effective because if the state wants to bear its weight on you, it rarely requires tech to do it.

>Additionally, as somebody who was around pre-ACA, I can not tell you how much better, in every single way, the post-ACA healthcare world is. Pre-existing conditions? Access to healthcare as an individual? These are life-changing possibilities, especially for entrepreneurs.

The failures and politicization of the ACA have caused us to be a little too dismissive of its successes and popularity.

Protections for pre-existing conditions and allowing children to stay on family plans until 26 in particular have made an incredible difference in a lot of people's lives and are wildly popular. So much so that it would be close to political suicide to try to remove them as evidence by Republicans controlling all three branches of government including both chambers of Congress and there is no serious talk of repealing them.

There is belief among a lot of its supporters that universal healthcare would have a similar wave of support if enacted and that the opposition is mostly irrational political arguments rather than people's true feelings about an actual policy. This is why the "ACA" polls higher than "Obamacare" despite those being two terms for the same legislation.

>It’s so incredible to me that now we have a chat interface we can ask about anything in any language and get really great answers, something literally considered science fiction a few years ago, and people still act like that is no big deal at all.

Because the importance of this is all about perspective. It wasn't like these systems created this information out of thin air. They were trained on something. That means the answers they are giving you have been available for decades. You just needed the know-how to find that information and synthesize the answers yourself. To many of us, it's like going from the old physical card catalogs to a modern digital system that would have seemed like sci-fi to a prior generation too. It's definitely more efficient and easier to use, but people acting like it's revolutionary seem to be suggesting that the old system didn't exist or wasn't usable with a little effort.

Which is only possible if people give it the keys. Skynet didn’t hijack the nuclear arsenal, control was given to it intentionally.

Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.

The ethics of the people controlling the AI is always going to matter more than the ethics of the AI itself.

Once again, you can only say this if the idea of "politician" is some abtract concept that you can dehumanize. If you get involved in local politics, I guarantee you will meet someone who cares.

I find it difficult to give some people on this site the benefit of the doubt when they say nonsense like this. How can you possibly believe that free hot lunches in schools leads to slavery? Like what is the literal chain of events that you imagine happening to lead from one to the other?

>I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.

Sure, but limited to "family and friends". Following that up with "who does not know my children" indicates you clearly view empathy as extending to merely one's personal relationships and you seemingly can't imagine caring for a stranger's child. I'll grant you cyncism is not the correct description of that worldview, but I stick by the general label of disturbing.

Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?

This level of cynicism is only possible if someone has never interacted with people on a local political level. Once again, it's more a reflection of your own worldview than an accurate reflection of all of humanity. There are some people who genuinely have empathy for others and want to do good. The way some of you refuse to believe that is truly disturbing.

>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!

What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?

The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?

Then let's ban child safety locks, child labor laws, and any law that distinguishes child abuse from other forms of abuse. Let's also allow minors to buy tobacco and alcohol while we're at it if we're claiming that any law that exists to protect children as children is inherently misguided.

The main example that comes to mind is anything having to do with the environment. “The kids” will face the brunt of our actions (or inactions) on that front so a “for the kids” argument is completely valid. Dismissing a proposal simply because of a “for the kids” element is incredibly reductive and will genuinely end up harming kids.

Do folks realize how many people would need to be a part of this conspiracy to get these laws passed at the state level? Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided. And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light.

If this can be reduced to a culture war, all of politics is a culture war, making the term meaningless.

>because data centers are this year's culture war hot topic?

This ain’t the culture war. The public at large is fairly united on one side of this across the typical US political divides. If you want to dismiss this with a cute label to pretend that there aren’t any real concerns here, the only label that comes close to matching the actual dispute is class war.

Would we apply this same logic to Tesla Autopilot?

As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.

There doesn't appear to be any control in this study. Sure, someone taking the LLM's financial advice might end up in a better position than someone who took no advice, but would they end up better than someone who hired a financial adviser, asked a friend, or simply read the first article that came up after googling their question?