I'm sorry, I know the Beyabu thing is confusing. Yes, we had to move it for geologic and soil quality reasons. Yes, it will still be on a hillside with stunning views for basically every unit. But recall that Beyabu is the testbed & proof of concept for Circular Factory's robotic modular construction techniques. We iron out the kinks with this first Beyabu build, which then enables us to refine further the kit of parts such that in 1-2 year's time, anyone can log into the configurator, build whatever they want in the planned development, buy it, those plans get sent to CF, CF manufactures it, and the construction crew on the ground puts it together like really complicated legos. Drastically reduces the cost of construction and time to new construction while using less material, generating less waste, and building beautiful Zaha Hadid Architects structures.
By the way, if you're wondering "but why haven't you published the development master plan," it's because it constantly changes as described above. We're constantly adjusting it, adding things, moving things, etc. as entrepreneurs come along that wanna build stuff. Unfortunately, we aren't central planners, which means no beautiful-looking Praxis-style 3D master plans. We could do that, but we'd have to update it weekly, which would mean we spend as much on digital design as we would on actually building things. The reality of building a city is much messier: sometimes, the place you wanted to put the cutting-edge robotic homes turns out to be 20 feet thick of unstable mud.
One of my deregulatory utopian thoughts is that land near airports could be perfect for deaf people to live cheaply in their own communities, instead of just banning housing there.
> My model - which I won’t justify here - is that non-tech elites have hated tech since about 2015 and tried to build a consensus against it, part of which involves using the media to convince everyone that everyone else hates tech. Ordinary people continued to trust tech a lot until about 2020 but are starting to waver.
My take is that there is a long-running moderate intensity culture war between Tech and Media (and that firmly aligning with Tech is a key aspect of the Grey tribe, where the Blues are mixed but tend towards Media). It's not that elites* are using the media as a tool, so much as the inherent nature of being Media is that those concentrated interests tautologically shape the narrative. The pendulum swung hard in Tech's favor in the late 2000's, and nowadays the embittered survivors of dead or wounded newspapers are reclaiming lost ground.
* I think the informational value of "elites" has finally dropped below zero, time to taboo the word and rework arguments as necessary. Where no synonym exists, this is a feature and not a bug.
Regarding transport from Flannery, I wonder whether this is a viable place to run a next-generation ferry service. In particular, the last couple years have seen huge strides in development of electric hydrofoil ferries that look like they'll be cleaner, faster, and quieter than existing ferry services by a significant multiple (>2x in all metrics).
In particular, Candela is (scheduled to?) be launching a real pilot program in Stockholm this year that looks very promising. I think their current boats don't quite have the combined range+speed combined to make the trip to SF from Flannery in less than an hour, but a second or third generation product probably would, and the resulting passenger experience could easily be better than a train or bus route, while being largely immune to traffic.
> "My model - which I won’t justify here - is that non-tech elites have hated tech since about 2015 and tried to build a consensus against it, part of which involves using the media to convince everyone that everyone else hates tech. Ordinary people continued to trust tech a lot until about 2020 but are starting to waver."
I'd love to read a post that explains the. reasons behind this / your analysis in detail! Sounds like an interesting topic I know very little about (public opinion on tech in the US)
On the other hand it also includes reference to an actual Elon Musk tweet about "The real President is whoever controls the teleprompter", so it's possible the American satire isn't being picked up on, but either way it doesn't establish their credibility.
"The government’s other option is to have the Supreme Court declare ZEDEs unconstitutional. This would be a bold strategy, since they were passed through constitutional amendment and it seems like the constitution should be constitutional by definition."
India's Supreme Court ruled way back that amendments which alter the "basic structure" of the Constitution are unconstitutional, though I think what constitutes the basic structure has been interpreted narrowly. Their argument was that "amend" is a term implying limitation in scope, but I think that was a fig leaf and it was just a (perhaps somewhat benign) judicial power grab.
Regarding the Travis AFB and its consequences for the Solano County City, quick googling confirms that fighter jets are literally 3-4 orders of magnitude louder than civilian jetliners. So the people telling you that living next to an airport is not a big deal and a deal can be arranged are misinformed: yeah it's not a big deal if it's a civilian airport, I actually live next to one myself, and the usual planes are quieter than the trams 150m away, but the occasional military planes are a whole different business.
>A belated update from our friends in The Black Hammer Party bodes poorly for the prospects of Hammer City. Apparently their leaders were arrested and are facing charges for “kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, conspiracy to commit a felony, and taking part in street gang activity,” and one of them for sexual assault.
Wildly, they also are under fire from the Justice Department for spreading Russian propaganda in exchange for payments from a Russian influencer, who has since been arrested by the FBI and was allegedly bankrolling Hammer City.
"You can't make this stuff up.." is an overused phrase, but wow......
Re: trust in the technology sector-- umm... it’s a pretty darn big sector. My guess is that the overall sector is best represented by big market cap companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which people generally do trust very highly (and put their money where their mouth is by using their tools to interact with their most private and sensitive information). But there are various sectors of the technology area that people viscerally distrust, for merited reasons: crypto, for example, or social media companies, or generative AI.
I trusted tech companies in 2015. Since then I have observed a number of things to change my mind. Amoral algorithms keying on emotional tribalism which are probably inevitable without some kind of huge counter-incentive. Initial remarkable respect for free speech transforming into fact checks that serve as narrative enforcement. People getting banned for political comments from platforms where they make their livelihood. The emergence of volunteer morality police who use social media as the organizing site for judging and enacting their punishments. Payment processing companies partnering with the SPLC to exempt people on the SPLC's 'hater' list from normal financial transactions. The large scale efforts of politicians and intelligence agencies to use social media as their special first amendment exemption. The wholesale replacement of normal social connections with Instagram causing a vast increase in depression starting in 2014. Mark Zuckerberg giving $300 million to swing state governments for get out the vote advertising which allegedly was directed by volunteers of the non-profit that the money went through to bias the spending by as much as 20-1 in favour of liberal areas of the states
Some of these are not intentional and in the case of Twitter particularly the company was quite resistant and irritated with outside efforts to instrumentalize them. Overall though I don't even trust that big tech is good on net, much less good compared to a decent null case alternative
>Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”.
I think you may be talking past each other. Sure Zuckerberg is an elite, but that's like saying Kim Jong Un is a government worker. True in direction but not magnitude. I think the word "elite" in this context better refers to people like high-paid tech workers, lawyers, psychiatrists, etc.
I think the entire tech angle is a giant distraction based on meaningless generalizations.
First, the trust in tech does not seem to be actually falling, by your own data source. I say this partly because the 2023 report is available and shows a huge rebound back into the regular band (worlwide) or at least halfway there (for the US). But partly, the very link you posted sufficiently explains the issue - people trust tech less if social media is included within tech, and in the common nomenclature, it very much is. This is very much not media actually successfully convincing people to hate tech, and very much media ecosystem being hilariously distrusted, to the point where a mere association with them drives tech down.
Second, there's an obvious issue here that has nothing to do with "tech". Mainly, the "rich" part. Bluntly put, approximately nobody looks at billionaires buying off land and thinks "oh, but they're from the Silicon Valley, so it's all right, it'll probably work as well as my mobile". More constructively put, the "tech leaders good" and "billionaires evil" heuristics are (i) both common, (ii) not mutually exclusive, and therefore many people hold both at the same time, (iii) when they contradict, context is key, and there's just clearly not enough tech in the project that would trigger the positive associations of tech to overcome the revulsion towards billionaires. (Never was, so I guess on that front, it was doomed from the start.) (I also think there's also a third heuristic mixed up here, mainly "Silicon Valley pompous and self-important". Which, likewise, does not preclude holding the other two. Even you don't think it does, judging from your "Bay Area Party" series.) (And again, nothing about it was caused by media. The media elites hated tech giants for being an alternative power centre, they attacked them with everything they could to see what sticks. The "rich" and "pompous" angles stuck, along with several others, simply because they were basically true, but this does not affect the "tech" as a whole because people are fully used to every successful thing being composed of rich and pompous individuals.)
The Smoky Mountains Songwriters Festival, held annually in Gatlinburg, Tennessee every August https://smswf.com/, beautifully melds music and storytelling. Founded by Cyndy Montgomery Reeves, it honors Appalachian musical heritage and empowers songwriters. This event unites artists and enthusiasts, unveiling the tales behind melodies, making it an intimate and unforgettable experience. Its mission: spotlight the often unsung heroes, songwriters, and preserve their craft.
I'm sorry, I know the Beyabu thing is confusing. Yes, we had to move it for geologic and soil quality reasons. Yes, it will still be on a hillside with stunning views for basically every unit. But recall that Beyabu is the testbed & proof of concept for Circular Factory's robotic modular construction techniques. We iron out the kinks with this first Beyabu build, which then enables us to refine further the kit of parts such that in 1-2 year's time, anyone can log into the configurator, build whatever they want in the planned development, buy it, those plans get sent to CF, CF manufactures it, and the construction crew on the ground puts it together like really complicated legos. Drastically reduces the cost of construction and time to new construction while using less material, generating less waste, and building beautiful Zaha Hadid Architects structures.
By the way, if you're wondering "but why haven't you published the development master plan," it's because it constantly changes as described above. We're constantly adjusting it, adding things, moving things, etc. as entrepreneurs come along that wanna build stuff. Unfortunately, we aren't central planners, which means no beautiful-looking Praxis-style 3D master plans. We could do that, but we'd have to update it weekly, which would mean we spend as much on digital design as we would on actually building things. The reality of building a city is much messier: sometimes, the place you wanted to put the cutting-edge robotic homes turns out to be 20 feet thick of unstable mud.
One of my deregulatory utopian thoughts is that land near airports could be perfect for deaf people to live cheaply in their own communities, instead of just banning housing there.
> My model - which I won’t justify here - is that non-tech elites have hated tech since about 2015 and tried to build a consensus against it, part of which involves using the media to convince everyone that everyone else hates tech. Ordinary people continued to trust tech a lot until about 2020 but are starting to waver.
My take is that there is a long-running moderate intensity culture war between Tech and Media (and that firmly aligning with Tech is a key aspect of the Grey tribe, where the Blues are mixed but tend towards Media). It's not that elites* are using the media as a tool, so much as the inherent nature of being Media is that those concentrated interests tautologically shape the narrative. The pendulum swung hard in Tech's favor in the late 2000's, and nowadays the embittered survivors of dead or wounded newspapers are reclaiming lost ground.
* I think the informational value of "elites" has finally dropped below zero, time to taboo the word and rework arguments as necessary. Where no synonym exists, this is a feature and not a bug.
On the declining trust in tech thing, the report (https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2022-10/2022%20Trust%20Barometer%20Special%20Report_Trust%20in%20Technology%20Final_10-19.pdf) seems to show that Democrats, higher income, and young people are *more* likely to trust tech than Republicans, lower income, and older people. This is exactly the opposite of what I would expect from "elites have hated tech for a while and are trying to spread that view". I don't know how to square this with the fact that that's also my intuitive sense, for the most part.
Regarding transport from Flannery, I wonder whether this is a viable place to run a next-generation ferry service. In particular, the last couple years have seen huge strides in development of electric hydrofoil ferries that look like they'll be cleaner, faster, and quieter than existing ferry services by a significant multiple (>2x in all metrics).
In particular, Candela is (scheduled to?) be launching a real pilot program in Stockholm this year that looks very promising. I think their current boats don't quite have the combined range+speed combined to make the trip to SF from Flannery in less than an hour, but a second or third generation product probably would, and the resulting passenger experience could easily be better than a train or bus route, while being largely immune to traffic.
https://candela.com/p-12-shuttle/
> "My model - which I won’t justify here - is that non-tech elites have hated tech since about 2015 and tried to build a consensus against it, part of which involves using the media to convince everyone that everyone else hates tech. Ordinary people continued to trust tech a lot until about 2020 but are starting to waver."
I'd love to read a post that explains the. reasons behind this / your analysis in detail! Sounds like an interesting topic I know very little about (public opinion on tech in the US)
Increasing hostility to Tech seems to be part of an overall increasing antipathy towards capitalism. Ngram for the word "Postcapitalism" has gone up every year since 1967, but the slope suddenly got much steeper after 2010: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=postcapitalism&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
The Republicans don't even like laissez-faire capitalism anymore.
Looking into the Chinese site with the Kerguelen article, their front page in Chinese right now has an article ( https://min.news/zh-hans/news/a86b1bb3d8b47f56bbf074dbb5b72b41.html ) that google translate suggests does appear to incorporate information from this Babylon Bee article ( https://babylonbee.com/news/republicans-call-for-impeachment-of-whoever-is-telling-biden-what-to-do ), in particular the reference to the quote from "Republican Representative Bob McCobb".
On the other hand it also includes reference to an actual Elon Musk tweet about "The real President is whoever controls the teleprompter", so it's possible the American satire isn't being picked up on, but either way it doesn't establish their credibility.
"The government’s other option is to have the Supreme Court declare ZEDEs unconstitutional. This would be a bold strategy, since they were passed through constitutional amendment and it seems like the constitution should be constitutional by definition."
India's Supreme Court ruled way back that amendments which alter the "basic structure" of the Constitution are unconstitutional, though I think what constitutes the basic structure has been interpreted narrowly. Their argument was that "amend" is a term implying limitation in scope, but I think that was a fig leaf and it was just a (perhaps somewhat benign) judicial power grab.
Regarding the Travis AFB and its consequences for the Solano County City, quick googling confirms that fighter jets are literally 3-4 orders of magnitude louder than civilian jetliners. So the people telling you that living next to an airport is not a big deal and a deal can be arranged are misinformed: yeah it's not a big deal if it's a civilian airport, I actually live next to one myself, and the usual planes are quieter than the trams 150m away, but the occasional military planes are a whole different business.
>A belated update from our friends in The Black Hammer Party bodes poorly for the prospects of Hammer City. Apparently their leaders were arrested and are facing charges for “kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, conspiracy to commit a felony, and taking part in street gang activity,” and one of them for sexual assault.
Wildly, they also are under fire from the Justice Department for spreading Russian propaganda in exchange for payments from a Russian influencer, who has since been arrested by the FBI and was allegedly bankrolling Hammer City.
"You can't make this stuff up.." is an overused phrase, but wow......
Re: trust in the technology sector-- umm... it’s a pretty darn big sector. My guess is that the overall sector is best represented by big market cap companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which people generally do trust very highly (and put their money where their mouth is by using their tools to interact with their most private and sensitive information). But there are various sectors of the technology area that people viscerally distrust, for merited reasons: crypto, for example, or social media companies, or generative AI.
I trusted tech companies in 2015. Since then I have observed a number of things to change my mind. Amoral algorithms keying on emotional tribalism which are probably inevitable without some kind of huge counter-incentive. Initial remarkable respect for free speech transforming into fact checks that serve as narrative enforcement. People getting banned for political comments from platforms where they make their livelihood. The emergence of volunteer morality police who use social media as the organizing site for judging and enacting their punishments. Payment processing companies partnering with the SPLC to exempt people on the SPLC's 'hater' list from normal financial transactions. The large scale efforts of politicians and intelligence agencies to use social media as their special first amendment exemption. The wholesale replacement of normal social connections with Instagram causing a vast increase in depression starting in 2014. Mark Zuckerberg giving $300 million to swing state governments for get out the vote advertising which allegedly was directed by volunteers of the non-profit that the money went through to bias the spending by as much as 20-1 in favour of liberal areas of the states
Some of these are not intentional and in the case of Twitter particularly the company was quite resistant and irritated with outside efforts to instrumentalize them. Overall though I don't even trust that big tech is good on net, much less good compared to a decent null case alternative
>Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”.
I think you may be talking past each other. Sure Zuckerberg is an elite, but that's like saying Kim Jong Un is a government worker. True in direction but not magnitude. I think the word "elite" in this context better refers to people like high-paid tech workers, lawyers, psychiatrists, etc.
I think the entire tech angle is a giant distraction based on meaningless generalizations.
First, the trust in tech does not seem to be actually falling, by your own data source. I say this partly because the 2023 report is available and shows a huge rebound back into the regular band (worlwide) or at least halfway there (for the US). But partly, the very link you posted sufficiently explains the issue - people trust tech less if social media is included within tech, and in the common nomenclature, it very much is. This is very much not media actually successfully convincing people to hate tech, and very much media ecosystem being hilariously distrusted, to the point where a mere association with them drives tech down.
Second, there's an obvious issue here that has nothing to do with "tech". Mainly, the "rich" part. Bluntly put, approximately nobody looks at billionaires buying off land and thinks "oh, but they're from the Silicon Valley, so it's all right, it'll probably work as well as my mobile". More constructively put, the "tech leaders good" and "billionaires evil" heuristics are (i) both common, (ii) not mutually exclusive, and therefore many people hold both at the same time, (iii) when they contradict, context is key, and there's just clearly not enough tech in the project that would trigger the positive associations of tech to overcome the revulsion towards billionaires. (Never was, so I guess on that front, it was doomed from the start.) (I also think there's also a third heuristic mixed up here, mainly "Silicon Valley pompous and self-important". Which, likewise, does not preclude holding the other two. Even you don't think it does, judging from your "Bay Area Party" series.) (And again, nothing about it was caused by media. The media elites hated tech giants for being an alternative power centre, they attacked them with everything they could to see what sticks. The "rich" and "pompous" angles stuck, along with several others, simply because they were basically true, but this does not affect the "tech" as a whole because people are fully used to every successful thing being composed of rich and pompous individuals.)
The Smoky Mountains Songwriters Festival, held annually in Gatlinburg, Tennessee every August https://smswf.com/, beautifully melds music and storytelling. Founded by Cyndy Montgomery Reeves, it honors Appalachian musical heritage and empowers songwriters. This event unites artists and enthusiasts, unveiling the tales behind melodies, making it an intimate and unforgettable experience. Its mission: spotlight the often unsung heroes, songwriters, and preserve their craft.