Favorites August 15th 2023
Relatedly, Joseph Politano offers this cursed fact: "More of America's housing stock is from the 1950s than the 2010s" Maybe we should allow new homes to be built. This week there’s folks in Mountain View arguing that we can’t tear down a bank to build housing because it’s historic. It was built in the 1970s.
Oh dang, I did not realize that European conquest in Africa happened so late.
Larry Summers has been criticised for predicting we'd need high unemployment to end inflation. Now that it's easing on it's own, there's a question of "why", one of the leading theories is that the Fed is able to use expectations of future inflation to drive down inflation without unemployment. And expectations of future inflation are way down.
John Gruber is getting out the popcorn for this, he points out that Twitter doesn't appear to have a way to delete messages, only hide them, so they're being turned over as well.
Longer Reads
• Thread about a second case now where 'social noise' is being counted as environmental damage under CEQA, blocking multifamily housing. (cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– "The average President/Ex-President has been changed with 2 felonies over the course of U.S. history" (src)
– Research indicates that property taxes are better for economic development than other options (src)
– Above Research simplified: Property taxes (most pro-growth) > Consumption taxes > Personal income taxes >> Corporate income taxes (super bad for growth) (src)
– Musk/Zuck as an Always Sunny bit (src)
– LLMs could run out of training data like a student running out of textbooks to read. (src)
– Old pro-liberalism poster (src)
– "China is an alternate America where the Republicans always win." (src)
– OpenAI proposes architecture for using GPT4 for very effective content moderation. Here's their write-up. It's good to need fewer humans to do this very unpleasant work. (src)
– District court judges partisan affiliation have a measurable influence on their rulings. (src)