He’s not alone. Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and last but not least Peter Thiel. They all appear to be in some kind of death cult thinly disguised as “transhumanism.” But once you start to think about the implications of “uploading your consciousness to a computer”, the line between transcendence and death becomes very blurry. Im absolutely terrified of these people and I think as more people become aware of this there will be a massive public backlash. They seem to be acting under the assumption that there will be a power vacuum / large scale institutional breakdown in the US soon and are positioning themselves to run things. It’s imperative that we don’t let them.
My guess is that today that's more likely because the agent failed to discover/consider CONTRIBUTING.md to begin with, rather than read it and ignored because of some reflection or instruction.
Relevant: I just listened to an interview with Max Buchholz, US Berkeley assistant professor and the lead author of a new working paper titled "Inequality, Not Regulation, Drives America's Housing Affordability Crisis."
He says that building housing does bring prices down, but not very much. In his paper they argue that income inequality is a big driver of making housing unaffordable. (Not billionaires, but more those making more than the median income vs the rest) Because (among other reasons) those with higher income have leeway to spend more on housing versus those at the lower end of the income scale who can’t spend more on housing even if they get a raise.
This is nonsense. In every material good, the buying power of nearly everyone has increased in real terms over time, regardless of inequality. It's only in housing, with constrained supply, that inequality can drive up prices; and even in that case, it doesn't actually change the housing supply- if prices are high, that just means a lot of people who want to live there! Inequality doesn't reduce the number of houses.
Building a little reduces prices a little. Building a lot reduces prices a lot. If the prices are very high, then it's very profitable to build, so unless stopped by regulation, you will get a lot of building. Even if building merely keeps the price from going up as density increases, the value provided by living in an area goes up from agglomeration effects as it grows.
Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous".
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
People may not remember that Apple once had a product lineup like this (before SJ returned) with tons of different model numbers nobody could tell apart.
> Remember Apple in the late '90s? The tech giant was facing significant struggles until Steve Jobs returned and pinpointed the crux: a lack of innovation and focus. Jobs took bold steps to streamline Apple’s bloated product line. He cut down on the excessive range of choices, simplifying the product lineup to focus on quality and innovation. Jobs famously asked his team, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?" When he didn’t get a simple answer, he decided to reduce the number of Apple products by 70%. This move included cancelling projects like the Newton digital assistant and focusing on just four key products: the iMac, iBook, Power Macintosh G3, and PowerBook G3.
Nothing can be done about it. If you leave it up to the market it will spiral away forever since the cost of dealing with the problem always increases both due to the size of the problem growing and the cost to insure solutions compounding.
The "obstructionist" greens understand that the system is flawed and needs a structural change. We don't live in capitalist fairyland, there are baseline energy costs that can't be inflated away and our ability to work on the problem degrades after every disaster.
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