willholloway

Well heres the thing, the house I am in is non-conforming multi-family.

Its only allowed to be mutli-family because its grandfathered in. Believe me, the town and neighbors would rather it be single-family, because multi-family brings in a lower class of occupant.

And heres the other thing. It was originally a single family house that was converted to multi family. So things change, markets change, demand changes.

Codifying usage in zoning laws and making it immutable might be a luxury affordable for places like NYC, but its not affordable for places with tons of sellers and little buyers, places where foreclosure rates threaten the value of homes with current mortgages.

The occupants of my house go to restaurants, rent kayaks, go to the local attractions. This is a tourist town, and vacation rentals are expanding our reach.

People will stay at a vacation rental that wouldnt stay at a hotel. Because they get a kitchen and a room for the kids. They will stay for a week in the summer. Who wants to stay for a week in a hotel room with four kids?

Vacation rentals are keeping this town alive, and I don't think this is being represented in this debate.

There is near unlimited affordable housing available in this area.

I bought a three family house. I live on the second floor and rent out the first and third floor units on the web.

It is sharing my house.

When I first bought the house I inherited a 12 month lease tenant from the previous owner.

When I had that tentant, I didn't feel like this was my house. I couldnt go on the first floor, I had to walk on eggshells around the tenant and her kid.

Now this is my house! My house! I own it, and I let in guests that I screen through airbnb and other sites. They come for a few days, pay 300-600, and I make the beds and greet them and its really nice and I have met some cool people.

So in my case we are talking about turning a three family house into a basically single family house with some guests. That is a use case I dont think is being represented in this conversation.

The law in this case is a hammer looking for a nail. If a short term rental is violating noise ordinances, fine it or shut it down, don't shut down every short term rental just because you fear it.

The biggest thing I have learned from running a couple short term rental listings is that people are basically good.

I hosted 68 guests in the last three weeks and every last one of them was nice and respectful and quiet.

Anti short term rental sentiment is based on paranoid hysteria.

I don't live in NYC, but in a neighboring state and bought a three family house with the express intent of living in one unit and renting the others as vacation rentals.

The prospect of nosy, controlling moral scolds shutting down my American dream, is extremely maddening. ' The only externality to my house is that there are cars in the drive way with license plates from a variety of states. Fear of new cars in the driveway should not trump my rights as owner and tax payer on this land.

Luckily in public meetings our town planners have declared their need for vacation rentals. The housing market is weak here and if the town were to shut down vacation rentals, it would put even more pressure on an already cold real estate market.

Maybe this is good law in New York City because its so dense and everyone is stepping on one another, but its not good law for the entire, gigantic state of New York.

My cousin does cleaning and management of vacation rentals in the Catskills, in parts of New York that used to be vibrant but are now extremely economically depressed and taxed exorbitantly.

Forbid vacation rentals that violate noise ordinances, don't cast generalization blankets and act out of prejudice.

I escaped NYC and moved to a neighboring state, along the coast, in a tourist town in a relatively economically depressed area.

I grew up in this town, and it used to be vibrant and vital and full of young families. It has gotten older, as the younger generation has not been able to afford to take on the homes of their parents, as the job market is not strong.

I bought a waterfront three family house, a house that used to be one owner, and one or two tenants on the other floors.

I renovated the house, and furnished the other floors. It took me all summer, doing the work myself. I have been renting the other two floors out on airbnb and other sites. I love it.

I feel like I have reclaimed my house from other tenants. I own the whole house, yes I let in guests for a few days on the other floors, but they leave, and I can go back into the floors when they are not booked.

I can have a change of scenery, and I get income from this whole thing.

I love this. I don't want to rent to long term tenants. Its a house, but divided into apartments for each floor. I want to control it. I like taking guests but I dont want to sell a floor for a year.

It books well on these sites because its waterfront and in a tourist area. Its a lot of work. A lot of work. I have to scrub showers and toilets and make beds, and I only get a few hours in between guests many days. But the money is good and its a form of early retirment for me.

I don't see any externalities to the neighbors, in fact the neighbors are better off living next to a vacation rental than a multi family house.

In a multi family investment propery the incentives are all about putting in as little money as possible. In a vacation rental its all about making it look as nice as possible.

The extra margin of the vacation rental makes all the difference. Now I care about reviews, so now I want the outside to be professionally landscaped. Now I want the lawn to be perfectly manicured. I want the siding to be nice cedar shingles, I want it to look perfect.

Because people rate your house on the basis of whether or not its nicer than their house at home. If its nicer, they give you 5 star reviews and that helps your listing SEO, if its less nice than their house they give you 4 stars and that hurts your listing.

So if I lived in this neighborhood, I would want to live next to a vacation rental. It is a higher class of occupant. Instead of working class tenants that can afford 1000 a month, you get professionals that can put 1000 on a credit card 4 months ahead of time for their kids graduation weekend.

So its a form of gentrification. But its also a service to the community. In the spring, summer and fall months where demand is high I am doing short term vacation rentals. But in the winter months I am opening up a fully furnished place to people who may be between houses.

The working class renters have plenty of options in the less desirable, more inland parts of town. And those options will stay because the only reason I can get decent occupancy rates are because the house is waterfront and in a tourist area.

And at the end of the day this is my house! I want to be able to do what I want to do with it, and I like having short term guests. I like meeting all of these people. Its like international travel without having to go anywhere.

So I raise my middle finger to Cuomo and his lackeys, I support homeowners rights. The battle cry is My House! My House!

Punish people for bad behavior, not for uses you don't like. And maybe in a city where everyone is packed in like tuna in a can its impossible but one size fits all law is unjust.

There are plenty of communities in upstate new york where vacation rentals are completely appropriate. My cousin does cleaning and management for vacation rentals in upstate NY, and Cuomo just fucked her, a working class person running her own business in an economically depressed region.

So Fuck you Cuomo, fuck you.

Gilfoyle: Why would Dinesh lie about having friends? Why would Tara lie to me about fucking other guys when we have a totally open and hedonistic relationship that allows for behavior like that? Because people like to lie, Richard. It's a war of all against all. The history of humanity is a book written in blood. We're all just animals in a pit.

Jared: I feel very sad.

Dinesh: Fucking Gilfoyle.

I think the change will come through total surveillance, mutually assured destruction for nation states and genetic engineering for asymmetric threats.

When technology advances such that individuals have the power to cause massive destruction in lone wolf attacks, and science advances to the point where we have the ability, we will have the choice of whether or not we will allow traits such as psychopathy to continue in the gene pool or to be edited out.

We will come to a point where we will just not be able to tolerate the destructive power of anti social individuals.

I think we will edit out the sadistic, dominating and anti social parts of our nature or we will become extinct.

In the hopefully not too distant future, when humanity grows out of its barbaric infancy and we cease to kill each other over petty disputes a long term global renewal project will commence.

We will use all the means at our disposal to clean up and undo the damage we have done to our home.

Swarms of autonomous robots, and possibly nanites will replenish the soil, water and air. We will restore coastlines and replant forests.

Wiser, and ashamed of our primitive past, we will rebuild a pristine paradise fitting of a spacefaring civilization.

Call it optimism, and a faith in modern American democracy and a reassurance from the amount of pushback Trump is getting from his exclusionary statements.

I wasn't aware of the GOP's platform this year, and now that I've looked into it I see what you mean.

My take from watching the RNC was what seemed to me to be a new found inclusiveness of the GOP, with Peter Thiel's prominent speaking spot, and several speakers including Trump himself vowing to include and defend LGBTQ Americans.

I took it as the strength of the civil rights movement and it's victories over the last eight years. Just from watching the convention I took away that the LGBTQ movement has won, and even the historically adversarial GOP seemed to have to concede.

It seemed that the GOP had changed, but from the party platform it seems that the producers of the RNC and the rank and file power base of the GOP are at odds.

I tend to agree on Trump, as someone who has been studying him and the campaign closely.

In the final analysis, if he were to be elected, I think he would be a fairly typical Republican president, and one that seriously toned down the GOP's cultural conservatism.

From looking at his history and my take on his personality, if he were to take office he would want to 'win' at the job.

I think that for him 'winning' at president would be measured by economic metrics and his approval numbers.

I went into the cycle outraged at the fascistic overtones of his campaign, and fearful. Now I think it was mostly showmanship and an effort to win the votes of the rubes in the GOP base.

I think he would approach the job as being CEO of America, and focus on economic growth and negotiating better 'deals' for the country.

He will quickly find that the ISIS problem is intractable, and that he has seriously overpromised on that front. The situation is going to escalate no matter who takes office. There is no sizable cohort in America working on de-escalating tensions with the Islamic world, no peace movement to be found.

The West has a serious empathy deficit in regards to the Middle East. It just can't see past the religious identity of the terrorists, and see it as essentially a desperate and weak revenge effort by people that feel transgressed against and humiliated. This blind spot means more aerial killer robots, and more pissed off people on the other end of those hellfires.

Both Trump and Hillary will inevitably play right into the hands of the extremists, and the diabolical ISIS plan of eliminating the grey zone will no doubt work, as Europe's social cohesion is on the brink and repression against the Muslim population will no doubt increase due to these grotesque asymmetric terror attacks. This is a very sad state of affairs for liberalism, and the chance for peace in our time.

Tragically, it's going to be counterproductive military action from the West, and insane, lunatic barbarism from the Islamic side in response.

The current phase of this conflict really kicked off when I was just 17, on 9/11/2001, it heated up during my 20's and got seriously out of control around when I turned 30.

Lately I've been pondering the fact that I've never been the victim of a terror attack, and I've never fought in a conflict overseas. My entire interface with the horror show has strictly been through the media, and just the images and knowledge has effected me very negatively. I could have just avoided the news and lived in safe and tranquil ignorance. Instead I've endured this impotent worry, a feeling of something terrible happening to people all around the world that I could do nothing to save.

I'm now resigned to this stupid conflict continuing for my entire life.

There's a good chance that in x number of years the accumulated toll of the now near subliminal low grade stress of the city will reach a tipping point.

At the start the excitement and glamour masks the near subliminal, slow, consistent erosion of inner coherence that nyc produces in humans. But in time accumulated erosion will become evident.

Your insides will be knotted up and tightly coiled, and you won't even know it, because humans can get used to almost anything.

Your fellow denizens are experiencing it as well, and many cover and compound the feeling with excessive alcohol consumption, and status seeking.

One day a tipping point will be reached. But you will think to yourself, "but if I leave nyc, where will I go? Where else is there?"

The city is a parasitical mind virus that takes over your decision making, in order to extract rents from you.

But there is still a faint penumbra of humanity inside of you. And it will want out. But you will be scared. FOMO, and a feeling that outside the city you will be socially isolated.

Well I am here to tell you that cool small towns and cities are out there. They have enough smart and interesting people to easily fill up your Dunbar number limit.

You can only really know and relate to 150 humans, we don't need 7 million surrounding us, and online dating apps have changed the social scene in small towns and cities. There are plenty of young women (or men) around you, even in smaller towns with an older median age.

Your range will have to increase, but for that we have cars. In nyc it can easily take an hour and a half to travel five miles via public transit.

tldr; it's not binary between nyc and bumfuck suburbs, and even many small 'boring' towns have a lot more culture, singles, restaurants and bars than you would think, or at least more than I thought.

My feelings on moving back to a small town halfway between NYC and Boston as a still fairly young single are probably best expressed by the Grateful Dead in their song Shakedown Street:

"Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."

I live in a small coastal village in Southeastern Connecticut and work remotely. What I did was purchase a three family house that provides a good bit of revenue on it's own. This makes me much less dependent on coding for money and smooths out the ups and downs of contracting.

I'm also looking into diversifying income streams with some seasonal side business in an effort to capture some of the tourist dollars that flow through the town.

My new goal is to buy up as much of the town as I can, I now see contracting as an income source to park in more rental property, and thanks to the magic of leverage and anticipated low interest rates, this should be a viable exit strategy in relatively little time.

There also currently exists a massive standard of living gap between different regions of the world.

Further development and economic growth will also create a leveling effect.

The future standard of living and costs in China and India looks a lot like the present in the United States.

As economies grow, and regulations increase (another way of saying externalities start getting priced in) the wage gap will diminish.

For a decent overview of this, watch Steal This Movie, or look into the life and work of Abbie Hoffman.

The stated goal was to levitate the Pentagon, meaning to lift it in the air, and Hoffman claims that they actually did and many saw the Pentagon rise... but you're not supposed to take that seriously.

Hoffman was a prankster, and a self-admitted fadist. He went from straight laced voter registration in the racist South, to being a leader of the New Left and anti-war movement in the late 60's and early 70's.

He felt that the old and new left were both boring and their methods were outdated. He had a better understanding of the new media environment of television, and importantly that America was a post-literate society.

He adopted a lot of the ideas of the diggers from SF. He captured the attention of the media with his outlandish claims and antics, on purpose.

He was a pioneer in street theater. Some of his actions include:

Running a pig for president

Throwing money from the gallery in the NY stock exchange so that the traders on the floor could be photographed greedily picking it up, to illustrate the complicity and greed of wall street (through the investment in defense companies that profited from napalm) in what he saw as genocide in Vietnam

A free speech activist, he was arrested for writing the word Fuck on his forehead and for wearing an American flag motif shirt.

He was also tried for incitement of riot in the Chicago 7 trial. He turned the trial in a circus through things like coming into the trial dressed in judges robes and other antics.

He did all of this in an attempt to politicize youth and drug culture of the 60's and mobilize it against the war.

An anarchist, he published steal this book, a book chock full of practical advice for avoiding corporate employment and living free through cooperation and petty scams like methods of placing free phone calls. All of this was based on the idea that American middle class values were fundamentally morally bankrupt and hypocritical, due to it's support of what he saw as an active genocide in progress.

He was brilliant, charismatic and somewhere between brave and crazy. Women loved him, and he loved them. And he loved drugs.

A rare specimen, of the same stock as the founders of this country. A person motivated by extreme empathy and a sense of justice, and someone not afraid to die for his beliefs.

He was a man with the same kind of creativity and media insight of someone like David Ogilvy, he could have easily made a fortune on Madison Avenue.

Instead his got his head beat in and his nose broken registering black voters. All the money he made from sales of his book and his fleeting celebrity were donated to civil rights groups.

The FBI and COINTELPRO had him under near constant surveillance and eventually caught him in a drug deal.

He skipped bail and went underground, and eventually emerged in the 80's and started working on environmental campaigns and against the Reagan administrations support of the Contras in Nicaragua (which was expressly illegal due to the Boland Amendment).

He was found dead due to an overdose of sleeping pills, but many think he was murdered.

I didn't express myself clearly, running on very low sleep, I was trying to agree with you and elaborate on your point, except for the one statement about the low ROI of the programs.

Chavez was immensely popular. A coup by the army was overturned by mass protests.

His government was very successful by most economic metrics during his time in his office. It is his successor that has dropped the ball with his bungling of the currency mess. And that's the root cause of all this suffering, a bad currency system, and low oil prices.

You call them populist programs with little ROI, but they were investments and initiatives that were improving the lives of giant swathes of the nation's citizens.

If the price of oil was still $100 per barrel the country wouldn't be in this situation, and we wouldn't have all this gnashing of teeth over the inevitable downfall of socialism.

From my position, capitalist economies shouldn't be so arrogant right now. Instead of blaming the economic system of the country, take it as a warning for what happens when natural resource assets stop producing bounty, or currency exchange moves against being in your favor.

American Capitalism would not be immune from an ecological recession caused by plausible threats like warming and ocean acidification and biodiversity loss, and America might not always have the subsidy of the petrodollar. The dollar's status as reserve currency is equal to a finger on the scale in all American's economic favor.

Venezuela's present could be our future.

The Galactica was a ship from the past, non-networked and seemingly out of date. It was about to be turned into a museum when the cylons took out the rest of the fleet through a very intimate social engineering attack that took out all networked defenses. The Galactica, because of it's air gaps, become the ark that gave humanity a chance for survival.

As the physical and virtual worlds blend more and more into one another, as bits become more capable of effecting atoms, we become more like the colonies on the eve of the attack.

Have there been any demonstrations of machine learning to either detect or initiate networked systems breach? All my internet connected servers are probed by automated bots trying to brute force their way in. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

I do know our systems are very fragile and we are incredibly vulnerable. In 2016 computing is just not secure enough for the tasks we are assigning it.

It is poverty itself that creates short term thinking that leads to those choices.

This is why poverty is expensive for society, and investment by society to eliminate it would be paid back and much more.

I would call it a comeback story with a happy ending, as I got to semi-retire at 31 in a beautiful place. The thing is I know I was able to do this because of the wealth effect, and not because I am personally better or more deserving. That's a point that many well off people miss.

The experience gave me insight and empathy. I really learned how the other half live. I will never be a poverty scold because of it.

I posted the story because I think your spreading incorrect information. It's not easy to be public about money troubles, something I think hurts workers and benefits the capitalist class.

I read your blog post for the second time (saw it on HN before) just now and I still don't see the mechanism by which people can choose to receive 22,000 per year by not working.

Has UBI been instituted without my knowledge?

For what must one apply to make the rational decision to not work.

Update to reply:

Ok so I read the paper, it says exactly what I state in other comments.

If your not going to work you better be in a protected group.

The paper lists 5 means tested transfer programs

Temporary assistance for needy families - this is only for people with kids and mostly single mothers

SNAP or food stamps - which isn't enough to survive off of unless your pancreas handles carbs really well

Section 8 housing - you can get on a wait list or maybe find a landlord willing to deal with you

Other than that it lists

Ss disability : you have to be disabled or severely mentally ill

Ss. You have to be over 65

Pell grants - students only

So that's it. So tell me how does a 35 year old non disabled man or woman with no kids make the rational choice to not work?

Even with subsidized housing and food and Healthcare they would still need spending money.

I'm telling you that there's a lot of people that get by with work in the informal economy and that isn't accounted for in those BLS stats.

You are right about western poverty if we tall about germany, but not us, unless you are in a protected group.

Oregon is just one program, why is life expectancy for wealthy rising, and falling for the poor?

Why is the gap around a full dozen years?

> So you're saying that we overestimate poverty because the poor engage in extensive tax evasion/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud? And that if we properly tracked work activities by the poor, that poverty would be a much smaller problem than it really is?

No, Im saying that almost all poor people work, they have various hustles to get by. Most of them are not illegal activities, but yes for the most part these are untaxed cash transactions.

Even the homeless man on the corner with a sign is engaged in a form of work, as it is an active process that takes time, and if they did not do it, they would not have money.

Is it productive, no not very, but the good ones provide entertainment in the form of funny signs, stories or puns. I have donated to quite a few who made me smile on my trip across America.

It does less harm than many respectable professions.

And yes, if you are living off the dividend payments from S&P 500 companies that you neither created, work in nor manage, you are mooching.

It's a respectable mooch, for sure, but a mooch none the less.

What else can we call Sam Waltons heirs other than epic mooches?

Tens of thousands of people toil everday for them, all over the world. They have expert MBA's manage the entire operation for them. The pharoahs themselves didn't have such a great system of exploitation of labor.

My main point in all of this is to be aware of class biases in our perception, and the ideology that comes from, and mainly that we should stop beating up on the poor and scolding them.

Have you lived in Western style poverty? Have you mingled with those who patronize pawn shops and payday lenders?

Please cite the various randomized control trials, and I would say it is far too early to draw conclusions on the effects of the medicaid expansion as it has only been two full years since rollout.

I speak from experience, as someone from a wealthy family and a wealthy area that shunned the family business and went out with nothing to seek startup fortune. I had a good start in 2009 with a success in affiliate marketing, when that dried up I put all that I had made into another venture that limped along at sub-ramen levels for a while and then I pulled the plug.

The fallout was not fun, and the effects not benign. It was pre medicaid expansion and there was no healthcare to be had, and almost no safety net to be found whatsoever.

I could have gone home and had everything I needed but I wanted to make it on my own. I had been living in Boulder, Colorado and thought a move to Austin would lower expenses and extend the runway for the company.

That was ill-advised, and another story, but it added another dimension to my troubles at the time.

Was it a stupid risk? It was but I was young and felt invincible, and in 2010 with a liberal arts education there weren't a ton of jobs waiting for me.

The wealth transfers you speak of are not easy to get. I'm not even sure where you get the 15-20k number. What else is there for a low earning single male besides SNAP, and now Medicaid.

In that time, as someone who found themselves with no assets and no income the only benefit I seemed to have qualified for was about $160 a month that could be spent at the grocery store.

Feeling a tremendous amount of shame I applied for SNAP benefits, even though I knew that they were really a subsidy for American farmers, ideology had trained me that subsidies for corporations are virtuous, while subsidies for basic human needs are shameful.

Even though I qualified, the overworked staff denied my valid claim. It took them over a month to tell me this. It would have taken another month to apply again and maybe they would get it right that time. I gave up and having good credit financed my nutrition via credit card.

I hadn't coded since elementary school, but I was able to pick up django web dev and find a high paying job in a couple months.

But that happy ending is not typical. There is no way that the stress from that period didn't shave a little bit of time off my life.

And the lack of liquidity prolonged the period by a good bit. I spent so much time doing this or that to get $200 for the rent, it was tremendously inefficient and stressful. Bad terrible memories, a place I never want to go back to. I was sad during all of this. It broke up the relationship I was in with someone I really loved.

I spent a lot of time with those who ride the bus, with those who pawn. Their lives are very different than the lives of the families from my coastal home town. Their lives do kill them slowly, which is why life expectancy is a full dozen years longer for the wealthy.

I have since moved back to the wealthy coastal town I grew up in. Life is so easy here, because there is wealth here. You can get a nice boat for almost nothing because someone just doesn't want it anymore.

Someone I knew was just gifted a boat for $1 because the owner was just happy it was going to stay on the island.

No one ever gives my former bus riding compatriots anything.

The thing is the people that live here are no different genetically than the people at the pawn shops back in Texas. The only difference is the presence of wealth, and the virtuous effects that has when it's sustained for a few generations.

60% of the poor don't collect income reportable on a w2 form. That does not mean they do not engage in productive activities that produce cash.

There is a huge informal cash and barter economy of legal goods, and another one for illegal goods.

And yes, the tax man will sell your home out from under you in a tax sale if you do not pay property taxes for long enough.

All of us live under a sword of damocles in regards to cash flow. You gotta keep putting quarters in the meter to live in modern capitalism.

I define rich as those who have sufficient wealth in financial instruments and assets such as treasury bonds and equities to pay for their lifestyle without the need to collect 1099 or w2 income.

They are the only ones who truly do not work, the only ones who can truly sit back and relax. They are the real loafers, the true moochers, and the laziest of all classes of society, I also have the ambition to become one myself, but I will have no pretensions that I would be engaged in anything other than having found a way to have others serve me, no different than any lord or pharoah or emperor, and in fact with much greater security and ease.

Obama (almost) fixed this. The Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid coverage from the absolute indigent, to those making up to 133% of the poverty line in their state, something around $16,000 per year.

The group that is in a bad spot are those right above that number, as even though their premiums are subsidized, deductibles are anywhere from 2400 to 6400 per annum.

That said, you are right the dead are everywhere.

Poverty kills. It deteriorates every system of the body, and it's first target is the brain.

The status quo is an evil waste of humanity, and poverty is grossly expensive and inefficient.

UBI can't come fast enough.

Depends on why they aren't working. If they have no capital, and no pension they better be in a protected class, like students, seniors, disabled, single mothers with children or be very attractive.

Otherwise there is almost no financial support coming their way in the United States, except for a meager food ration that has to be primarily carbohydrates, and basic health care.

Everyone will hate them, they will be chased out of any dwelling they inhabit by a man with a gun (eviction), and death will come for them eventually, as it does for us all, but for the destitute it moves with all possible haste.

And that is why there is no army of millions of non working people in the US, getting by on welfare. That is a middle class myth. The only group that could do this are those who qualify for S.S disability.

Most of the non-working are the rich. A lot of the people we think of as non-workers are getting by by other means, and a lot of it is the underground economy, and most of that is drug sales.

We can fix this, we can take the carbon out of the atmosphere [1]. There is reason for optimism. We. Are. Not. Doomed. The optimum level of carbon is probably slightly above pre-industrial levels. We definitely need to get back below 350ppm to keep human civilization... civilized.

400ppm+ is a trajectory to anarchy. The chimpanzee raiding impulse is alive and well in our DNA, a survival adaptation for stagnation and decline.

We have the technology, bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration, its a scaling problem, but first we have to stop pumping so much carbon up into the air. We have made progress there as well:

1) Cheap Solar PV has arrived, growth has been exponential for two decades. [2]

2) Energy storage is possible. Think underground maglev trains, on circular tracks, working as massive flywheels.

3) Fusion is attainable in the time frame we need it in, if we increase research funding, but its not required. That said if we cracked fusion, we would have all the energy we would need to desalinate seawater and sequester carbon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture...

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

Sounds fanciful, right? Only if you impose the constraint of this being an effort by ~4% of the human population, the population of the United States.

The U.S once spent 75% of global research dollars, it's share has now dropped to below 50% as Asia has come online in this sphere.

If current spending is just 95 billion in the US, that has been quite a drop from previous years, but for a thought experiment, if US level research spending was the same per capita for the rest of the 96% of the human population, we would be somewhere around 2.3 Trillion globally.

There are billions of people outside the U.S, some with minds as sharp as WSU's Joe Harding, who as of right now are left out. But where do we find the money to lift them out of poverty?

One answer, we discover cures for some really expensive ailments, like diabetes, heart and respiratory disease.

What is the cost of disease? It is terrible. With an aging population, it has the capacity to ruin developed nations.

While we tinker around the edges, and manage chronic disease like diabetes with insulin, or Parkinson's with carbidopa, we spend large fortunes and get poor outcomes.

SENS is moving in the right direction. We need the ability to repair ourselves at the cellular level, and we are making progress in this regard.

What is the prize of discovering how to repair the inner workings of the molecular machinery that make us up?

> First, Non communicable diseases already pose a substantial economic burden and this burden will evolve into a staggering one over the next two decades. For example, with respect to cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, cancer, diabetes and mental health, the macroeconomic simulations suggest a cumulative output loss of US$ 47 trillion over the next two decades. This loss represents 75% of global GDP in 2010 (US$ 63 trillion). It also represents enough money to eradicate two dollar-a-day poverty among the 2.5 billion people in that state for more than half a century. [1]

So yes, $9.4 trillion is a good global goal, but I believe there is opportunity for tremendous cost savings.

Open source drug discovery, open source cancer treatment, that is what I am interested in these day. I would like to see an army of pro-amateurs collaborating online and performing experiments on mice in their garage, a hacker movement for biotech.

We are on the cusp of fantastic gains in health and longevity. We have only just begun to understand the molecular processes that age us and make us sick. Lets pick up the pace.

[1] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Harvard_HE_GlobalEconomicBu...

And PS:

I checked out your page, you did some work for my favorite band, The Hold Steady. Awesome :)

Exponential growth doesn't happen in one discrete operation, friend.

Here's some more interesting info about the trials for s-ketamine as a tinnitus treatment.

The vision for the company that is trying to bring intratympanic s-ketamine to market as a tinnitus treatment was very interesting to me.

The founder was looking for new uses for drugs that are currently approved and with long safety records, that could be tested on animals.

I thought it was interesting criteria for a low-hanging fruit search of the problem space in medicine, considering regulatory realities as well as financial ones.

S-Ketamine injected through the ear drum, into the middle ear, is currently undergoing phase III trials as a treatment for noise or infection induced tinnitus.

Chronic tinnitus is currently a condition which if one were to go to the doctor and ask for a cure one would be told to get used to it as there is not much that can be done.

The pace of medical and biotech advancement is increasing as the FDA has relaxed a bit and better understanding of human biology is creating cures for what once were incurable diseases. Exciting times, but not fast enough for me.

The most interesting question for me these days: How can we 10x the number of dollars and scientists engaged in medical research, and then 10x that?