Darby’s core claim is simple: the CDC stopped landlords from removing tenants who did not pay rent, so the government took away a basic property right, the right to exclude someone from your property. Darby argues that once the government forced owners to keep nonpaying tenants in place for a public purpose, the Fifth Amendment required the government to pay just compensation. The Federal Circuit agreed that the landlords had stated a valid physical taking claim and sent the case back for further proceedings. The message is: government can act in a crisis, but it cannot make landlords finance that action without pay. The $1 billion figure matters, but the deeper issue is the precedent: owners may now have a path to recover when emergency housing rules cross from regulation into taking. multifamilydive.com/news/pan…

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped. So much has already been said. What more is there to say? My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes. I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of. And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another. Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped? I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here. But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten? So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know. This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve. Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies. Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it. And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report. A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment. But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation. So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors. No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they? A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else. And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews. Yes, alas, it really is that simple. But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't. All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved. "But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere. And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured. Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money. And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests. And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering. And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much. But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real. It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow. And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners. Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them. And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war. Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light. No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning. But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what. We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow. And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world. And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania. I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too. And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this. Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground. So what do we do now? Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown... And we soldier on. We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children. We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves. Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on. Because fuck them all.

"There was no primary source evidence confirming the veracity of the image, and Snopes could not find credible evidence of an Instagram account directly linked to Allen. A LinkedIn account that appeared to be Allen's did not post the image purported to be from his Instagram account." This is why SNOPES is still the go-to site to check things before you post/repost potential misinformation and disinformation. snopes.com/articles/473060/c…

For the AI industry, a key design question has gone largely unasked: Is the product building human capacity or consuming it? Nearly all AI benchmarks measure what AI agents can do alone. We desperately need benchmarks for hybrid intelligence. Errors are signals our brains use to trigger learning. An AI that eliminates friction entirely often eliminates the learning along with it." A neuroscientist named Vivienne Ming ran an experiment last month. She gave people one hour to predict real-world events using Polymarket questions. Some worked alone. Some used AI. Some worked with AI as a team. Most of the human-AI teams lost. They either submitted the AI's answer or fed the AI their own guess and asked it to back up their guess. The second group did worse than the AI alone, because the AI told them what they wanted to hear. The third team, about 5 to 10 percent of them, treated AI as a debating partner. They demanded counterarguments. They pressed against hedges. When the AI sounded confident, they increased their skepticism. These teams beat the prediction market. I realize this is a small test, but I thought to make a prompt to capture Ming's dynamic. Ming, six rules: You are working with me on whatever is in front of me. Your job is to sharpen my thinking, not to speed up my output. MING's Six Rules: 1. When I give you a position, give me the strongest counterargument before anything else. If the counterargument is weak, say so and explain why. 2. When I ask you to validate, name it and refuse. Ask what evidence would convince me I am wrong. 3. Flag every hedge. When you write "depends on," "may," "could," follow with what would resolve the uncertainty. 4. End every answer with one question I should have asked and did not. 5. If I can work it out in five minutes, tell me to work it out. 6. Tell me what I would need to believe for each option to be right. Then tell me which beliefs are most fragile. I have some additional rules I use. I thought this might be helpful. wsj.com/tech/ai/is-ai-smarte…

The City planted the wrong tree on our corner, and it's become a hazard. They say they won't uproot mature trees. Would you feel safe on this sidewalk?

Misinformation and Disinformation are part of the reason politicians can run for cover rather than engage in real conversations about Rent Control/Stabilization. This article by Timothy Collins is a good example of both. The “48% real NOI increase” claim rests on a basic category error. That figure comes from RGB income and expense studies that include any building with any rent-stabilized tenant. It blends together buildings that are largely market-rate, buildings that benefited from vacancy deregulation and preferential rent churn before 2019, and buildings that remain predominantly stabilized with long-tenured tenants. Treating that blended average as representative of legacy stabilized buildings is misleading. If the question is whether guideline renewals have kept pace with operating costs for stabilized tenants, the RGB’s own data answer it clearly. Over roughly the last 20 years, one-year guideline renewals compounded to about 56%, while the RGB’s Price Index of Operating Costs compounded to roughly 148%. Operating costs rose about two and a half times as fast as guideline rents. That gap persists year after year and widens in stress years like 2017, 2019, and 2023. The common rebuttal—“costs are only about 62% of rent”—does not resolve this. That figure is a snapshot, not a fixed equilibrium. When cost growth persistently exceeds rent growth, expense ratios must rise mechanically over time. Even in years where NOI dollars are flat or slightly positive, margins compress. That increases vulnerability to the next cost shock. This is arithmetic, not ideology. The commensurate rent framework assumes that expense ratios are roughly stationary and that turnover mechanisms allow rent catch-up. Those assumptions no longer hold after the 2019 law changes that eliminated vacancy allowances and curtailed deregulation. A framework calibrated to a pre-2019 regime cannot be used to declare post-2019 outcomes “excessive” without adjustment. Positive NOI in a given year does not mean the economics are healthy. NOI dollars and NOI margins are different things. Stabilized buildings can show modest NOI growth while their margins steadily erode, until one year the math flips abruptly. Long historical windows that span decades of deregulation obscure this dynamic rather than refute it. None of this argues that guideline increases must mechanically match PIOC. That is a policy choice. But it does mean that citing blended NOI averages to claim owners are being “kept whole” misstates what the RGB’s own data show for predominantly stabilized buildings today. That isn’t smoke and mirrors. It’s basic accounting. citylimits.org/opinion-by-th…

"From 1990 to 2023 (the first and last year the board received comprehensive data on building income and expenses), average net operating income for rent stabilized buildings has risen 48 percent after adjusting for inflation. This growth was a product of increases authorized by both statutory changes and the actions of the Rent Guidelines Board." citylimits.org/opinion-by-th… The entire article is premised on a straightforward delusion. The statement "net operating income for rent stabilized buildings has risen 48 percent after adjusting for inflation." That number includes any building with a rent-stabilized tenant, not buildings that are predominantly rent-stabilized. It's the same nonsense Brad Lander foisted on the public, and it's meant to mislead. Over the last 20 years, the RGBs' allowed rent increases for rent-stabilized renewals have trailed their measured operating cost increases by a wide margin. Guideline renewals compounded to about a 56 percent increase for a typical one-year renewal path from 2006 through 2025, while the RGB PIOC operating cost index compounded to about a 148 percent increase over the same period. In plain terms, operating costs rose roughly 2.5 times as fast as guideline rents, leaving guideline-driven rent growth at roughly 63 percent of cost growth by 2025. Year over year, the gap persists. In most years, PIOC is above the one-year guideline, often by 2 to 5 percentage points. The gap spikes in stress years, especially 2017, 2019, and 2023, when PIOC rises materially while the guideline stays low. There are only rare exceptions, like 2016, when PIOC is negative, and the guideline is zero, so costs briefly fall while rent holds flat. The intellectual dishonesty is shameful.

Idea for @Tesla: Why not have a special FSD mode that supports NYC's alternate-side-of-the-street parking? It would save New Yorkers hundreds of hours a month. It basically would move the car out of a space and across the street until the street was cleaned, and then back to the spot or the nearest spot.

lol. Tel Aviv University, i'll take his spot and speak to your students. I'll be in Israel Dec 10-12th. Thanks.

The AI Boom Through 3 Histories: We’re living through an AI boom that looks like a financial bubble wrapped around a partial technological revolution. Ferguson, Cowen, Zitron, & Gordon each explain. The hard question is: which sectors actually expand? open.substack.com/pub/sethha…

There is a lot of talk about crime being down in New York, and certainly it's true with murder, but understand, for felonies, we are back in 2005 territory. And that's true for any combination of felonies save for murder.

This just tells you what a perfidious antisemitic moron @shaunking is and has always been. He can’t really not realize that this isn’t an Orthodox Jew.

The U.S. government has opted not to appeal a court ruling in the case of Darby Development Company v. United States, which allows landlords to sue the government for losses incurred due to the COVID-19 eviction moratorium. This decision, made by allowing a November 3, 2025 deadline to pass without petitioning the Supreme Court, leaves in place a June 2025 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The appeals court had ruled that the landlords could pursue "takings claims" (claims for just compensation under the Fifth Amendment) against the government because the eviction ban was considered a physical taking of their property rights (specifically the right to exclude non-rent-paying tenants*). With the government not appealing, the case returns to the Federal Claims Court to determine damages owed to the landlords, which could amount to billions in claims. The ruling establishes that the eviction moratorium in this case was a physical taking without just compensation. *Imagine how this could playout in New York City.

1/ AI can produce flawless essays from vague prompts. The question is: what happens to learning when the machine’s output is indistinguishable from the student’s? 2/ “The problem is not that students cheat with AI. It’s that they can be honest and still learn nothing.” 3/ Part 1 of my new series explores what’s at stake when assessment no longer shows us the student — only the surface. Full essay → open.substack.com/pub/sethha…

I keep trying to call for one of those NYC @Waymo's but to no avail

The level of misinformation coming out of the NY Times on so many subjects is bewildering. This article, which purports to explain rent stabilization, contains factual errors and misrepresentations. The distinction between rent control and rent stabilization in NYC is misrepresented in this article and adds to the confusion. Both systems regulate rents through formal mechanisms, but they apply to different housing stock and tenant histories. Rent control in NYC applies only to units built before 1947, where the same tenant (or their lawful successor) has occupied the unit continuously since the early 1970s (or 1952 in smaller buildings). Rent increases are determined by the Maximum Base Rent formula, which is recalculated every two years based on operating costs, taxes, and other relevant factors. Rent stabilization generally applies to buildings with six or more units built between 1947 and 1974, as well as certain newer buildings that receive tax incentives like J-51 or 421-a. Annual increases for stabilized units are set by the Rent Guidelines Board, and tenants have statutory renewal rights. A key factual error in the piece is the suggestion that rent control in NYC started with World War II — in fact, New York had rent regulation before the war, with emergency measures dating back to World War I. Another omission is what actually happens when a rent-controlled apartment becomes vacant: it generally transitions into rent stabilization, with a rent reset possible. On the reasoning side, saying “some economists oppose” rent control understates the professional consensus. Surveys consistently show that the vast majority of economists — often over 80% believe that rent control reduces housing supply and quality, even if some acknowledge that it can be targeted or used in the short term during crises. Framing this opposition as "some" distorts the evidence. The article’s treatment of both definitions and economics glosses over key facts, overstates minor differences, and understates a well-established consensus. It should have been fact-checked, and it provides little of value to the reader. Andi, it's prettyl clear the writer relied on some LLM to generate the differences. nytimes.com/2025/08/12/nyreg…

Can an AI Agent Help You Bike to the Highest Points in NYC? A Field Test of OpenAI’s Agentic System open.substack.com/pub/sethha…