I want a brighter and more abundant future (than I had) for my son and others of his generation. That means building a lot more stuff in the highest opportunity places in the country.

One of the signs that rent control is obviously a bad policy, and simultaneously a factor that makes it by definition an unfair one, is that new rent control initiatives almost always apply only to old apartments. This is because you literally cannot get anybody to agree to this deal, so the only way to make any apartment a rent controlled apt is to force it on people who can’t opt out. Developers can just opt out by not building any new units and investing their money elsewhere, which is of course exactly what they do. The idea that this isn’t a taking is absurd on its face. Again, politicians who pass these laws realize that literally no new units will be created under a rent control regime, because the value proposition is so terrible. So they explicitly design rent control laws to apply only to existing units; this is a direct admission that rent control destroys value. Obviously a taking. A 12 year-old can see that it’s a taking. The Supreme Court cannot ban it soon enough.

State Capacity Baby! 😎

It just seems really naive to see it as safety related at all instead of as a lever for the government to try to pick winners in the AI race that will pay them bribes and support Republicans. These strong anti-selection forces against integrity are unlikely to go away.

Like, there’s a real question of sacrifices and tradeoffs, but before we even get to that the question is, “do you want to solve homelessness enough to allow a developer profit from building housing?” A majority of voters still answer no to this question.

“They should have less wealth so the economy has more investment,” my brother in Christ what do you think investment is?

Someone was talking about how in the New Deal era it was “free enterprise,” and I like that a lot better. Everyone should be free to start a business and provide value for profit as they see fit. Sometimes that requires capitalism (open markets, property rights), sometimes that requires socialism (welfare state to hedge downside risk).

You can’t make it through the gauntlet of diehards in the primary.

This person is coping with the disappointment of their own life by believing they have no agency and life is done to them. It’s a miserable way to live. Nothing is ever totally within our control, but America is a place more than any other where hard, purposeful work can translate into a fulfilling life.

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

In 1996 the allowed width of an urban street with curbside parking was 28’. Two lanes of travel, 18’ of clear width to setup an engine or ladder. ~2000 the NFPA began to engage in traffic engineering, creating a 20’ clear requirement. One way or not, doesn’t matter. 20’. Today it is a default of 26’ for an urban street or even a pull along fire lane, even if one way. 28 is common for urban “arterials”. Over 30 years we increased the minimum width deemed “safe” for fire response by 44%. We mandated excess asphalt in every new urban street and development across the country, foregoing sidewalks and bike lanes for wider, faster access. We gained no statistical improvement in deaths per fire from this. We did gain significant increases in traffic and pedestrian deaths as these standards became ubiquitous in every new or “improved” urban street design.

too busy with spacex this week but there's a shitstorm over at meta w/r/t morale a blowup at an internal meeting this week basically made zuckerberg send out a companywide memo to calm things down wired has more deets on all the furor wired.com/story/mark-zuckerb…

For anyone wondering what this means: - Anthropic (and potentially future OpenAI, Google, xAI) models that cost billions to develop will make 0 revenue outside the US - a big double digit percentage of Anthropic (and potentially OpenAI, Google, xAI) workforce can no longer work there, because they are foreigners and are not allowed to use those models So Trump just made frontier model development effectively unprofitable and tremendously slowed down Anthropic (and potentially others in the future) He's handing China the win on a gold platter. *potentially: if the same restrictions are imposed on other frontier labs and models

Andreesen is the worst kind of libertarian, the one who believes only he should be exempt from the rules If the president personally banned his company's newest product with 0 warning, he'd throw the biggest hissy fit in history, but he cheers it on when it happens to others

Elon is still popular with a pretty big crowd because he’s one of very few people with a cool techno optimist vision for the future. It’s bad that no one in the lib sphere of influence articulates a vision for doing cool stuff.