1,458 karma · joined March 21, 2011
Little projects: https://github.com/yonran/
I’m curious about the failure cases. Are they caused by exceptional circumstances, such as the train moving more slowly than normal or skipping a station? Or when you unexpectedly catch an express train or go the opposite direction? Does the algorithm know that it doesn’t know where you are, or does it confidently tell you the wrong station until the GPS is acquired?
Is San Francisco still failing to approve housing in a timely manner, or did the Brownstone drag thier feet?
What I meant by “jealous” is that the Internet Archive’s interest was not to improve author notification or to protect foreign authors; it was to provide a competing service under similar or better terms than Google was able to negotiate without spending the time and money that Google did litigating. Kahle wanted what was in Google’s settlement.
And what I meant by “Kahle was wrong” is not that every argument that his lawyers thought up was false; I think the agreement was later amended to fix some issues. My point is that Kahle’s theory of change was wrong. He thought that when the settlement was rejected, then Google would push Congress to create an orphan works law which the Internet Archive could use to publish old books too. As he wrote in his op-ed, “We need to focus on legislation to address works that are caught in copyright limbo. … We are very close to having universal access to all knowledge. Let's not stumble now.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0... As it turns out, the rejection of the class action settlement did not cause Congress to create an orphan works law. In retrospect, we would have been more likely to get an orphan works law if Google had been allowed to set up a proof of the concept, making the monopoly on orphan works temporary.
I was at Google in 2009 on a team adjacent to Dan Clancy when he was most excited about the Authors’ Guild negotiations to publish orphan works and create a portal to pay copyright holders who signed up, and I recall that one opponent that he was frustrated at was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who filed a jealous amicus brief (https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yo...) complaining that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too. In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing which is what actually happened in the 15 year since then. Instead of one company selling out-of-print but in-copyright books, or multiple organizations, no one is allowed to sell them today.
Since then, of course, Brewster Kahle launched an e-library of copyrighted books without legal authorization anyway which will probably be the death of the current organization that runs the Internet Archive. Tragic all around.
They are supply-regulated by governments. According to Niskanen Center, the high cost of health care is due to the American Medical Association limiting new accredited medical schools and certificate-of-need laws limiting new hospitals. https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liberating_the_...
In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.
In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.
Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.
> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?
Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.
In fact, can you sue Zillow for publishing a Rent Zestimate? It does seem like the ordinance bans “provid[ing]… any algorithmic device”. An “algorithmic device” “perform[s] calculations of non-public competitor data” and “advis[es] a landlord… on the amount of rent that the landlord may obtain”. “Non-public competitor data” is “information that is not available to the general public” (such as data on historical rental ads on Zillow). I’m not sure whether Rent Zestimate would fall under the exception “(A) report that publishes existing rental data in an aggregated manner but does not recommend rents or occupancy levels for future leases” since they provide a Zestimate on an individual address, not “aggregated”. Someone should try suing Zillow.
It is also pandering by mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin, who has opposed many efforts to loosen zoning to increase housing competition. Where the Board of Supervisors can make a big difference at increasing competition, he has stood in the way (e.g. opposed SB 50 upzoning near transit, banned group housing because there was a “glut” of old units, increased the inclusionary housing fee/tax to reduce construction, empowers nonprofits to make demands on development). But he’s happy to do something that supposedly promotes competition but has no substantive impact.
Scott Wiener did not create the builder’s remedy; it was created in 1990 and rediscovered by Chris Elmendorf https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1474286606982934528 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38x5760j. But Wiener did make the builder’s remedy apply to more jurisdictions by increasing the RHNA quota (SB 828).