Yes, this is similar to 'trust in science' really meaning 'trust in mainstream scientfic authorities' as distinct from 'in favor of using empirical investigation to answer questions, even politically sensitive ones'.
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.
You were going to build in a swamp? Well, I suppose if you hire a starchitect firm, you get stunning designs that have little to no correspondence with reality.
I'm sorry to be laughing here, but where I'm living we have (relatively) new housing built over the past twenty years or so on what was bogland, and there's plenty of reasons why you leave a lot of room for drainage, don't build on every square inch, and pray to God you don't get spring tides washing your living room furniture out the front door.
I'm glad sanity took hold for this building project, at least!
No, we always knew we were going to have to place pilings to stabilize on top of the wet area. The problem was it seemed to be 5-10ft deep, which was manageable in the current budget. the 20ft depth is what broke the budget and made us move.
Well, it's *possible* to build on a swamp. Washington, D.C. is built on a swamp. (For political reasons, they didn't want the capital to be an existing city, so they found some land that no one was using.)
Land near a river is sometimes swamp, sometimes not. Rome is on a river, and is famously hilly (though parts are swampy). Cleveland is on a river, but doesn't have any swamps as far as I can tell, and most of the city is several feet above the water.
I'd count your description of Rome as a win for my guess that "major cities are built on swamps". San Francisco matches that description (well, it's not really on a river, but it is on a major natural port, in a naturally swampy area) and the swamp is still present in the unbuilt areas near the city.
For Cleveland, I'd ask whether it used to be a swamp. Step One in building a city on a swamp is that you drain the swamp, because the standing water and muddy ground are terrible for human habitation. Los Angeles used to be a swamp†, but we decided a city would be better. Does that mean that Los Angeles isn't "built on a swamp"?
† This is something that's bothered me about the fad for Georgism on ACX. The undeveloped value of land in Los Angeles is negative. People are happy to point out that there is proximity value from developed land in Los Angeles, but according to the Georgist principle that proximity value is only counted against your land if you don't also own the land that provides it. As soon as one guy owns all of Los Angeles, the state should be paying property taxes to 𝘩𝘪𝘮 because of the negative value of his property.
Surely the value of swamp land is zero, not negative? Negative value would require something that is a source of mandatory costs. Maybe if people were being held legally liable for the mosquitos emanating from their swamp? Even then.
My hometown is built in swamp. No big deal, the whole country used to be covered with peatlands, and nowadays there are easy cheap ways to connect a building to the rock under a 26 feet layer of peat. Maybe mud is worse than peat, otherwise I don't know why such a small issue would hinder building.
The bogland round here is beside a river and the sea coast. So it is very susceptible to tides, high rains, and flooding.
You can build (and they have built) on *part* of it, but you can't build on *all* of it. You have to leave drainage for the displaced water. And it's conventional two-storey housing, not the kind of huge "have your own hot tub and swimming pool and balcony" lots the Prospera designs were.
I can easily imagine the thing sinking into the muddy, muddy waters of the coastal swamp 😁 And depending on the geology, there may not *be* any rock underneath, just soil, clay and mud all the way down.
Though yes, if Venice could do it, why not the 21st century free libertarians?
Do they? I'm surprised — in my industry/area, about half the roads we use daily are not publicly-funded (neither maintenance nor initial construction). They're not really much worse (if at all! maybe a little bit?) than equivalent public roads.
Not sure if the arrangement would work in a context that's less influenced by, uh, a certain culture, shall we say — e.g., in some places I've been (NE US for one) I get the impression that maybe this would last roughly five seconds, heh — but: it's sort of an ethos of "do your part / be fair / don't be an asshole, and we'll all make money together!" ("...because the shoe will always soon be on the other foot, out here").
I.e., we let other companies use our roads all the time without asking for a dime, and vice versa. If I'm sending our equipment or crews along [RivalCorp]'s roads, I rarely if ever really need ask permission (unless there's going to be *significant* / sustained traffic), on the assumption that next time it'll be their guys needing our roads.
Same with maintenance: if there's heavy joint use, we take turns re-grading and compacting etc. (Very rarely, someone gets stubborn about It's Not Our Turn or whatever — in which case you just do it, but make sure to kind of cause minor delays for their crews for a bit, just to say "hey I see what you did there buddy".)
So, clearly, the solution is: build up generations of a culture based around fair play and responsibility and hard work, and then throw so much money around no one can be added to pinch pennies anyway.
...hmm might not be as universally-applicable as I'd hoped—
So is your vision to take the underlying developments in fields like JIT automotive manufacture or custom PCB prototyping services and apply them to the construction sector?
yes actually! we have a 3D system of property rights that unbundles rights via ownership of 3D voxels of space instead of normal 2D property rights. I have a paper on this I wrote awhile back describing how it works, I'll see if I can share it
Yeah this is the strongest critique of our legal system--sharp tradeoff between these novel institutional designs and ease with which people can litigate. At scale, you could see this being a big issue. Time will tell! I'm hopeful new norms will develop around this as we scale, and it's a solvable problem.
You can do it right now! That 90% employment requirement only applies to, in effect, day laborers. If you have any degree of self direction, are in a management position, have an ownership stake in the company, or a bunch of other criteria, you can work there just fine. Also if you live in Prospera but work remote for a US firm these rules don't apply as well.
Doesn't it kinda solve that? If I buy a house with a view over my neighbour's roof, and I want to protect myself from a scenario where my neighbour builds a taller house, I can simply offer to buy up the air rights above his property for a fair price.
On the other hand, I guess my neighbour might want some kind of assurance that I will use those air rights purely to keep space clear for my view, and not to build some bizarre cantilevered structure over his house. The price at which I'm willing to sell the air space above my house depends greatly on what you want to do with it.
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.
The larger map makes more sense, because yeah light industrial/manufacturing near the airbase is much more sensible, with the residential part being on the river front.
It still looks like one hell of a commute, whatever way people take. There isn't an easy route, it's all broken up by the inlets of the bay.
So I'm wondering if the original intent was not to try making this a start-up friendly planned town, where people would take their money from tech jobs and start up new Silicon Valley type firms; I don't know where the nearest commercial airport is there, but it seems like it would be easier to fly into SF from Solano County to schmooze with the VCs, then go back to the new city and work on your version of Stripe or whatever genius idea you have.
That, or it's going to be a fancy retirement community for the people who worked like dogs so they could retire at 50.
The three hour each way commute is doable, but it's going to be miserable when you have to wander all over the map like that.
EDIT: Or feck it, what do I know, maybe they're going to build chip fabrication plants in case China does anything untoward with Taiwan, and people will live in the new Solano City (or whatever they call it) because they'll all be working in the plant. No long commutes, it'll be a company town.
That's an attractive idea, but most deaf people have some hearing. The definition of "deaf" is basically "functionally deaf" - ie doesn't have enough hearing to hold a normal conversation. "Profoundly deaf" is what you're thinking about and that's much rarer - only about one in five deaf people are profoundly deaf.
"Severe hearing loss" means that the threshold volume to be able to perceive something is above 75dB. That's generally the level at which you would legally be defined as "deaf". "Profound hearing loss" is a 95dB threshold. While individual airports vary, the highest noise contour near an airport would typically be around 95dB, so even profoundly deaf people might hear an aircraft taking off if they were closer to the airport than residential is permitted.
(hearing loss is a medical term, normally standardised internationally; deaf is a legal term which will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction)
Fair, but it's a much smaller community, so the demand would be a lot smaller - and the sorts of deaf people who would want to live in an all-deaf community are likely to want to live with a broader range of deaf people (also likely to want to live with CODAs- "Children Of Deaf Adults").
I could certainly see some noise pollution areas being set up as deaf communities, though. I just suspect that flight routes into airports are a bit too noisy.
Right up to the moment when they birth a child without hearing problems. Or somebody from the community marries someone from outside. Communities based on a single common principle never last long, I think (unless it's religion). I guess you can say "well, if they need it, they should move out to more pricey place", but things never work this way, and instead some people will refuse to move and complain about airplanes. Again.
> 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.
It also shows that trust in tech for young people (ages 18-34) has dropped 21% over ten years, which is almost as much as for older people, and that trust for higher income people has dropped 24% over the same period, compared to 20% for low income people. It says it doesn't have data for changes over time for Democrats and Republicans.
The change seems more relevant than the snapshot of last year.
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.
It looks like it's about 40 miles by water from Flannery to SF. The site says it's 60 kph = 40 mph, so one hour if there are no stops, no time needed to accelerate, and no awkward maneuvers to avoid container ships. I don't think it would beat the BART by much, and it's harder to get from the SF ferry terminal to wherever else you want to be compared to the SF BART stations.
I see BART as being about a 40min drive + 1 hr on the train in order to reach downtown SF, with 10-20 minutes of additional time waiting at the BART station depending on the particular BART schedule that's active (since predicting traffic accurately enough to synchronize with the trains is tricky). That's a total of 1h40m to 2hr for a drive+BART or bus+BART journey, which is not great, and BART trains are also seen as loud and dangerous in a way that Flannery planners can do little about.
Regarding ferry speeds, I think you're somewhat overestimating how much overhead is required. Traffic with other boats is not a significant issue in practice because the bay is really big and boats are maneuverable, acceleration times are pretty fast because the boats have good power/weight ratio anyway, and ferries typically operate on point-to-point schedules especially small ferries like the Candela one. As a point of comparison, last time I took the ferry from Richmond to SF it took 30-35min from scheduled departure to getting off the boat, for a route that "should" take 15min based on pure speed calculations. That implies a 15-20min overhead, which I suspect is mostly taken up by boarding/undocking/docking/unloading operations. I wish I could find good references for international comparison, since I don't know how close to optimal that is.
I think my bigger source of optimism is that electric ferries "feel" like they're on the right side of trends like battery density, integrate well with self-driving cars for last-mile transit, and are largely under the control of Flannery planners, while BART is infrastructure that requires huge political work to change or improve.
> "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)
People have successfully established a fear of being digitally tracked. This mostly takes the form of a taboo on targeted advertising. (The practice is widespread -- that's not the taboo -- but if you subscribe to this belief complex, you see targeted advertising as evil.)
What's surreal to me is that the majority of this group thinks of targeted advertising as the harm they wish they could prevent. Secondarily, they are afraid of being tracked by foreign governments (usually China), and tertiarily, if at all, they are afraid of being tracked by their own American government. Often they are willing to vocally support tracking by the government.
The problem is that this is exactly backwards in terms of the harms of tracking. Your own government is the body with the power and desire to hurt you. The more information they have about you, the worse off you are. China does not know or care who you are, and if they did they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. (Exceptions exist, but they know who they are and they don't contribute to the popular fear.) Targeted advertising, on average, makes you better off! The actual problem with tracking for purposes of targeted advertising is that information collected for that purpose is routinely commandeered by the government.
I wouldn't have much trouble believing in a theory of the sociology that went "some people tried to sound the alarm about tracking, and media/governmental groups sucessfully co-opted that into a crusade against digital advertising, because they wanted to hurt digital advertisers for economic (the media) or political (politicians) reasons."
Oh no, not the "Targeted advertising is good you you! Eat your targeted advertising!" again.
As far as I understand, the theory goes:
1. Make simplifying assumptions typical of economics - that dollars can be exchanged for utility, and so on
2. Nobody is making you buy things at gunpoint, therefore you must be getting more value from the widget than you give up in dollars
3. Therefore, seeing an advertisement and buying the product increases utility for both producer and consumer
4. Combine that with ads you don't want being a waste of time, and we should use systems that get the most clicks using the fewest ads
The vital mistake is in step 1. People are complicated, and their desires are complicated. Akrasia is a thing that exists. You might be perfectly content... until someone reminds you that Oreos exist, and then suddenly you want Oreos. You might even have been on a diet. The simple reminder that Oreos exist has given you negative utility - previously you were content, and now you feel desire for that which you do not have. So step 2 becomes irrelevant; even if in your new mental state the Oreos are worth the money, you have already taken the hit to your contentment and that isn't factored into the price.
I've spent a lot of time since I first encountered this idea wondering how anyone can possibly believe it. Until now I had only heard it from other Caltech students, so I figured maybe the difference could be in money? I come from a poor and thrifty family, but a lot of the students were pretty rich. Maybe if you have so much money that you don't know what to do with it all, it's a relief to have someone tell you. But then, why not take it a step further and visit a website made entirely out of targeted ads? Surely there are other ways you can get the same service, without it popping up on you while you're trying to get other stuff done? The story doesn't make any sense.
When I ask people who support this idea directly, they usually say the choice is between lots of untargeted ads, or fewer targeted ads, and that without ads we wouldn't have as much content on the internet. I think at this point, the opposite is closer to being true. I think that without ads, it would be much much easier to find high-quality content on the internet, even if the total amount of content becomes smaller. Look at Wikipedia, and then look at Fandom. ("Look at Fandom" also succinctly refutes the claim that targeted advertising means fewer ads.) I think nowadays it would be much more difficult for a big nonprofit community-driven project like Wikipedia to get started, because too many ad-driven websites are able to spend more time and money, sacrificing quality and ease-of-use if necessary, on the SEO game.
The "we'd have more content" argument is then usually followed by "it's good for poor people!". The idea being, everybody can view the content for free, in exchange for some time and annoyance from ads. Poor people put a lower dollar value on their time than rich people, therefore poor people are getting more benefit per cost. This is again sneaking in that economics assumption that everyone behaves perfectly rationally, from which it follows that rich people (who assign lower utility to their money) will do the vast majority of the buying. Is this actually the case? I have no idea, and would be interested in seeing statistics. I do know that akrasia is much much more common among my (poor) family members than in any other group of people I've met. So my gut feeling is that poor people ARE spending money because of advertisements, and in many cases, spending more than they can really afford to.
I haven't yet responded to the claim that with targeted advertising, each ad makes more money and so fewer will be needed. I propose instead that if each ad makes more money, there will be many, many more of them. If this is not obvious, look at the effect on labor when the cotton gin was invented. It does the same thing faster, so there will be fewer people-hours spent on cotton, right?
So in conclusion: targeted ads mean more advertising, not less, ads may sometimes be helpful to rich people but are worse than nothing for poor people, and we would have more quality content without ads. If I've mischaracterized any of your arguments, or if I am factually mistaken on a particular point, please let me know.
> If I've mischaracterized any of your arguments, or if I am factually mistaken on a particular point, please let me know.
You don't actually seem to have responded to any of my arguments. You could have written that post without bothering to read my comment at all. You're off on a separate topic.
Thanks for getting back to me. I was responding to
> People have successfully established a fear of being digitally tracked. This mostly takes the form of a taboo on targeted advertising. (The practice is widespread -- that's not the taboo -- but if you subscribe to this belief complex, you see targeted advertising as evil.)
> What's surreal to me is that the majority of this group thinks of targeted advertising as the harm they wish they could prevent.
and
> Targeted advertising, on average, makes you better off!
(You're right that I gave a much longer and more detailed response to that last bit than was maybe warranted, but I would really like to be able to get to the bottom of this for once. And I suppose I should admit I have no idea what "group" and "belief complex" you mean.)
If I understand right, you're saying targeted advertising good + government tracking bad, and I am trying to argue that targeted advertising bad + government tracking bad, except I left off the last bit because we're already in agreement on that. If you're still of the opinion that targeted advertising is good, then I very much want to hear your argument in favor of it.
Your qualm with (1) does not stop with targeted advertising, and rather is applicable to all advertising. Within that frame, your position is simply "advertising = bad."
I'm not saying that you're right or wrong on that account, I could see a good argument to be made that all advertising is bad. But you can't make this claim you make against targeted advertising without going on to expand to the general case.
That is mostly the case, yes. And targeted advertising is more profitable, so we should expect it to increase the overall number of ads. I'm also of the opinion that passing around people's private data is inherently bad, which makes things that incentivize it bad too.
"Mostly the case", because I don't think I need to claim that ALL advertising is bad. But I'll happily claim that 99% of it is bad, and I think that's enough to support the argument.
In the specific case of Honduras, a reason for the sudden hostility to the ZEED may stem from the fact that in 2009 there was a undemocratic coop followed by a period of violent political repression. That is the context in which Prospara was established.
Now also consider that Honduras was the original “Banana Republic”, and you might begin to understand why there is hostility to a bunch of rich Americans coming down with plans to override local sovereignty.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. It makes total sense to us why the Biden administration would want to dismantle or co-opt everything the Trump administration did, so I don't see why it's so shocking that something similar might happen in another country. Sure, maybe some ink got spilled on some paper, but that can't possibly impede Democracy.
Exactly. And now imagine that Trump, instead of being a boob, was as bad as all most hysterical liberals thought he was going to be in terms of political repression. Now on top of that imagine he was selling coke.
Or worse yet, that Trump had created an enclave on American soil where American laws and rights no longer applied, like Guantanamo Bay except run by a foreign superpower, in this case Russia or China.
That's what I meant by "co-opt". And the border stuff, and Operation Warp Speed, and Fauci. And it's not like Obama actually shut down Gitmo.
But it's a hard pill to swallow when someone's running an economic experiment with the hypothesis, "everything will be fine as long as YOU have no control over it".
> it's a hard pill to swallow when someone's running an economic experiment with the hypothesis, "everything will be fine as long as YOU have no control over it".
I have read that one of the British administrators of Hong Kong rejected a proposal to collect some kind of information, on the stated grounds that if the government started collecting that information, it wouldn't be able to help itself from trying to do something about whatever it learned. That seems like a close match to the form of the "bitter" hypothesis, though since the administrator was (for the moment) the government the YOU would have included him.
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I don't really understand the significance of observing that the Biden administration must want to either dismantle, or leave in place, everything its predecessor administration did. Those are the only two options!
For some of it, it isn't simply leaving in place, but making it so that people forget that it was ever a Trump thing For the border stuff, it's blaming Trump for some things that Obama started, while continuing other Trump policies with a disturbing lack of media attention.
The missing alternative is saying something like "yeah, that was a Trump policy, and it seems good enough for now, so we're leaving it in place".
I don't think a lot of this is Biden's doing, per se. It's the media which can't seem to handle a story more complex than "Trump bad Biden good".
My view on this is that if you deliberately pick somewhere because it has rickety governments that aren't too fussed about the rule of law, since all that means you can buy the land and do what you damn well like, you haven't a leg to stand on when the rickety government you bought off collapses and the next rickety government decides it's tearing up legal agreements the last lot made with you.
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.
That may be better than the alternative. The French constitutional council has taken the position that the constitution cannot possibly be contradictory, and if it appears that one power granted to the executive would violate the declaration of human rights, that's not a problem.
The USA handled this problem through the common law principle that stuff enacted later overrides stuff enacted earlier unless explicitly stated otherwise. Hence, for example, incorporation based on the 14th Amendment overriding the 10th, and the Bill of Rights overriding the OG Constitution.
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.
I have lived next to a military air base (right at the end of the runway, in fact), and also under the Heathrow flight path. Heathrow was much more disruptive.
EDIT: Sorry, that was needlessly snarky and unhelpful. I had a bad night's sleep. My statement was true, but failed to meet the other two criteria of the moderation policy. In an attempt to rescue it, let me say: yes, military aircraft can be extremely loud, but you can't just say "military air bases are louder than civilian airports", you have to be more specific. Not all airbases fly fast jets, and a busy civilian airport like Heathrow can be significantly more disruptive to life than a military base with relatively few flights.
>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 think most of your distrust of crypto and generative AI comes from a concerted media effort to make hating them seem "obvious". I think if it weren't for that, your natural response would be "There's a robot that will draw beautiful paintings for anybody who wants instantly for free, on whatever topic and in whatever style they find most aesthetic, consuming no resources? This is one of the greatest achievements in human history!"
Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me. I’d be willing to bet that way more people have lost money than gained it as a result of crypto. I was enchanted with generative AI for a few weeks, but the more I used it, the creepier I found it. And then last night, as I’m reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to me son, I ran across this line, “There may be two views about humans, but there’s no two views about things that look like humans and aren’t…. In general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.” Maybe immersing myself in these books as a kid shaped my intuition on this, but for whatever reason, my intuition is that generative AI will not, over the long term, enrich the human experience. Everybody else may be reacting to a concerted media effort, but their distrust may still have merit.
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
Additionally maybe the single biggest thing has been Google weighting and editing their search results. A study claimed a moderate source of news needed quite a bit higher key traffic metrics to make the top 5 results, conservative sources like 80% more
Much more has been the vertiginous experience of seeing things that show up as the top result on other engines not coming up on Google at all, such as the series of articles that claimed swing state get out the vote advertising was biased
A fun bonus has been the experience of modding being taken over by the most motivated and biased volunteers. Discussion of nuclear energy is soft banned permanently on r/energy. You can post if the mods really like it. One of their rules directly links to a post that announced a months long hard ban on nuclear topics
The problem is that many (most?) of the people who hate tech companies hate them for the opposite reason from you - they don't ban people the SPLC doesn't like *fast enough*. It seems like a problem to me if the polarized media is so good at this that they can make it literally impossible for tech companies not to be hated by at least half (and realistically much more) of the population.
My impression is that tech companies have been at least somewhat against this kind of stuff, forced into it by journalists and the government, and that "people should hate tech companies" is the hammer that journalists and the government use to weaken tech's ability to resist so they'll roll over and censor more. So I try not to hate tech companies, or at least to hate them in some kind of very specific way that isn't serving this agenda.
From my uninformed viewpoint, I think people distrust tech companies because of the creep of things like "Software as a Service" - once you could buy for a one-off price and own the thing outright, now you're paying a subscription every month for eternity. There's limitations on what you can do with the software. If you want to do X, Y or Z - that'll be an extra charge on top. There's fears around data harvesting and identity theft. There's the annoyance of ads and nagging "want to read more of this article? buy a subscription!"
No, of course it's not tech companies asking us to take out a sub to the New York and Washington Examiner Herald, but it's when you're online that you encounter these - and it looks more and more like 'sponsored results' and ads and nagging to subscribe and algorithms recommending you crap because you bought this/watched that/clicked on the other thing.
There was a sweet spot magical moment when tech companies gave you the highway to the world. Now it's all yet more attempts to take money off you.
>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.
Yes, this is similar to 'trust in science' really meaning 'trust in mainstream scientfic authorities' as distinct from 'in favor of using empirical investigation to answer questions, even politically sensitive ones'.
Huh. I never thought of it like that, but it is indeed a distinction I now perceive to be very common.
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.
"They have decided against building in the swamp"
You were going to build in a swamp? Well, I suppose if you hire a starchitect firm, you get stunning designs that have little to no correspondence with reality.
I'm sorry to be laughing here, but where I'm living we have (relatively) new housing built over the past twenty years or so on what was bogland, and there's plenty of reasons why you leave a lot of room for drainage, don't build on every square inch, and pray to God you don't get spring tides washing your living room furniture out the front door.
I'm glad sanity took hold for this building project, at least!
No, we always knew we were going to have to place pilings to stabilize on top of the wet area. The problem was it seemed to be 5-10ft deep, which was manageable in the current budget. the 20ft depth is what broke the budget and made us move.
Well, it's *possible* to build on a swamp. Washington, D.C. is built on a swamp. (For political reasons, they didn't want the capital to be an existing city, so they found some land that no one was using.)
yeah exactly, it was just a matter of cost!
Aren't most major cities built on swamps? Cities are built on rivers, but the land next to a river is... a swamp.
Houston says "Hi!"
Land near a river is sometimes swamp, sometimes not. Rome is on a river, and is famously hilly (though parts are swampy). Cleveland is on a river, but doesn't have any swamps as far as I can tell, and most of the city is several feet above the water.
I'd count your description of Rome as a win for my guess that "major cities are built on swamps". San Francisco matches that description (well, it's not really on a river, but it is on a major natural port, in a naturally swampy area) and the swamp is still present in the unbuilt areas near the city.
For Cleveland, I'd ask whether it used to be a swamp. Step One in building a city on a swamp is that you drain the swamp, because the standing water and muddy ground are terrible for human habitation. Los Angeles used to be a swamp†, but we decided a city would be better. Does that mean that Los Angeles isn't "built on a swamp"?
† This is something that's bothered me about the fad for Georgism on ACX. The undeveloped value of land in Los Angeles is negative. People are happy to point out that there is proximity value from developed land in Los Angeles, but according to the Georgist principle that proximity value is only counted against your land if you don't also own the land that provides it. As soon as one guy owns all of Los Angeles, the state should be paying property taxes to 𝘩𝘪𝘮 because of the negative value of his property.
Surely the value of swamp land is zero, not negative? Negative value would require something that is a source of mandatory costs. Maybe if people were being held legally liable for the mosquitos emanating from their swamp? Even then.
"where I'm living we have (relatively) new housing built over the past twenty years or so on what was bogland"
I misread this as "...what was Bongland" and thought it was some sort of bizarre Troubles reference.
IRELAND UNFREE SHALL NEVER BE AT PEACE! THIS IS UNCEDED NATIVE TERRITORY OF THE PADDIES! 😁
Actual lol
My hometown is built in swamp. No big deal, the whole country used to be covered with peatlands, and nowadays there are easy cheap ways to connect a building to the rock under a 26 feet layer of peat. Maybe mud is worse than peat, otherwise I don't know why such a small issue would hinder building.
The bogland round here is beside a river and the sea coast. So it is very susceptible to tides, high rains, and flooding.
You can build (and they have built) on *part* of it, but you can't build on *all* of it. You have to leave drainage for the displaced water. And it's conventional two-storey housing, not the kind of huge "have your own hot tub and swimming pool and balcony" lots the Prospera designs were.
I can easily imagine the thing sinking into the muddy, muddy waters of the coastal swamp 😁 And depending on the geology, there may not *be* any rock underneath, just soil, clay and mud all the way down.
Though yes, if Venice could do it, why not the 21st century free libertarians?
If libertarians have problems arranging for public funding for roads, how bad would canals be?!?!?
Do they? I'm surprised — in my industry/area, about half the roads we use daily are not publicly-funded (neither maintenance nor initial construction). They're not really much worse (if at all! maybe a little bit?) than equivalent public roads.
Not sure if the arrangement would work in a context that's less influenced by, uh, a certain culture, shall we say — e.g., in some places I've been (NE US for one) I get the impression that maybe this would last roughly five seconds, heh — but: it's sort of an ethos of "do your part / be fair / don't be an asshole, and we'll all make money together!" ("...because the shoe will always soon be on the other foot, out here").
I.e., we let other companies use our roads all the time without asking for a dime, and vice versa. If I'm sending our equipment or crews along [RivalCorp]'s roads, I rarely if ever really need ask permission (unless there's going to be *significant* / sustained traffic), on the assumption that next time it'll be their guys needing our roads.
Same with maintenance: if there's heavy joint use, we take turns re-grading and compacting etc. (Very rarely, someone gets stubborn about It's Not Our Turn or whatever — in which case you just do it, but make sure to kind of cause minor delays for their crews for a bit, just to say "hey I see what you did there buddy".)
So, clearly, the solution is: build up generations of a culture based around fair play and responsibility and hard work, and then throw so much money around no one can be added to pinch pennies anyway.
...hmm might not be as universally-applicable as I'd hoped—
Kinda curious what industry you're in. I'm split between logging, oil, or some other type of mining.
Clay and sandstone seem to be good enough. I don't know about seashores though, I wouldn't build where the tide rises...
So is your vision to take the underlying developments in fields like JIT automotive manufacture or custom PCB prototyping services and apply them to the construction sector?
Yes, more or less! here's the mastermind behind it, Alicia Nahmad, if you wanna learn more details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsvQFBe_YJ8&pp=ygUNYWxpY2lhIG5haG1hZA%3D%3D
Is there any entitlement to the persistence of the stunning views in question or are those on land that could be developed in the future?
yes actually! we have a 3D system of property rights that unbundles rights via ownership of 3D voxels of space instead of normal 2D property rights. I have a paper on this I wrote awhile back describing how it works, I'll see if I can share it
"ownership of 3D voxels of space"
The future lawsuits over "you're blocking my view" are going to be *stunning* 😁
Yeah this is the strongest critique of our legal system--sharp tradeoff between these novel institutional designs and ease with which people can litigate. At scale, you could see this being a big issue. Time will tell! I'm hopeful new norms will develop around this as we scale, and it's a solvable problem.
So this question isn't primarily about housing in Prospera, but it's a related concern.
I looked into Prospera briefly a while back and it seems like companies operating there are required to employ a minimum share of Honduran workers.
Suppose I (not Honduran) would like to move to Prospera and get a job. How realistic is that?
You can do it right now! That 90% employment requirement only applies to, in effect, day laborers. If you have any degree of self direction, are in a management position, have an ownership stake in the company, or a bunch of other criteria, you can work there just fine. Also if you live in Prospera but work remote for a US firm these rules don't apply as well.
Doesn't it kinda solve that? If I buy a house with a view over my neighbour's roof, and I want to protect myself from a scenario where my neighbour builds a taller house, I can simply offer to buy up the air rights above his property for a fair price.
On the other hand, I guess my neighbour might want some kind of assurance that I will use those air rights purely to keep space clear for my view, and not to build some bizarre cantilevered structure over his house. The price at which I'm willing to sell the air space above my house depends greatly on what you want to do with it.
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.
The larger map makes more sense, because yeah light industrial/manufacturing near the airbase is much more sensible, with the residential part being on the river front.
It still looks like one hell of a commute, whatever way people take. There isn't an easy route, it's all broken up by the inlets of the bay.
So I'm wondering if the original intent was not to try making this a start-up friendly planned town, where people would take their money from tech jobs and start up new Silicon Valley type firms; I don't know where the nearest commercial airport is there, but it seems like it would be easier to fly into SF from Solano County to schmooze with the VCs, then go back to the new city and work on your version of Stripe or whatever genius idea you have.
That, or it's going to be a fancy retirement community for the people who worked like dogs so they could retire at 50.
The three hour each way commute is doable, but it's going to be miserable when you have to wander all over the map like that.
EDIT: Or feck it, what do I know, maybe they're going to build chip fabrication plants in case China does anything untoward with Taiwan, and people will live in the new Solano City (or whatever they call it) because they'll all be working in the plant. No long commutes, it'll be a company town.
Are there not indirect effects of sound waves that are still detrimental even to people who can't directly hear them?
Yes, but the thresholds are higher than for mere hearing loss.
That's an attractive idea, but most deaf people have some hearing. The definition of "deaf" is basically "functionally deaf" - ie doesn't have enough hearing to hold a normal conversation. "Profoundly deaf" is what you're thinking about and that's much rarer - only about one in five deaf people are profoundly deaf.
"Severe hearing loss" means that the threshold volume to be able to perceive something is above 75dB. That's generally the level at which you would legally be defined as "deaf". "Profound hearing loss" is a 95dB threshold. While individual airports vary, the highest noise contour near an airport would typically be around 95dB, so even profoundly deaf people might hear an aircraft taking off if they were closer to the airport than residential is permitted.
(hearing loss is a medical term, normally standardised internationally; deaf is a legal term which will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction)
All true, but it would only be an option for those deaf enough to be OK with living there.
Not somewhere all deaf people are forced to live.
Fair, but it's a much smaller community, so the demand would be a lot smaller - and the sorts of deaf people who would want to live in an all-deaf community are likely to want to live with a broader range of deaf people (also likely to want to live with CODAs- "Children Of Deaf Adults").
I could certainly see some noise pollution areas being set up as deaf communities, though. I just suspect that flight routes into airports are a bit too noisy.
Right up to the moment when they birth a child without hearing problems. Or somebody from the community marries someone from outside. Communities based on a single common principle never last long, I think (unless it's religion). I guess you can say "well, if they need it, they should move out to more pricey place", but things never work this way, and instead some people will refuse to move and complain about airplanes. Again.
Deaf people often, if not usually, have family members that aren't deaf. You're talking about a vanishingly small minority here.
> 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.
It also shows that trust in tech for young people (ages 18-34) has dropped 21% over ten years, which is almost as much as for older people, and that trust for higher income people has dropped 24% over the same period, compared to 20% for low income people. It says it doesn't have data for changes over time for Democrats and Republicans.
The change seems more relevant than the snapshot of last year.
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/
It looks like it's about 40 miles by water from Flannery to SF. The site says it's 60 kph = 40 mph, so one hour if there are no stops, no time needed to accelerate, and no awkward maneuvers to avoid container ships. I don't think it would beat the BART by much, and it's harder to get from the SF ferry terminal to wherever else you want to be compared to the SF BART stations.
I see BART as being about a 40min drive + 1 hr on the train in order to reach downtown SF, with 10-20 minutes of additional time waiting at the BART station depending on the particular BART schedule that's active (since predicting traffic accurately enough to synchronize with the trains is tricky). That's a total of 1h40m to 2hr for a drive+BART or bus+BART journey, which is not great, and BART trains are also seen as loud and dangerous in a way that Flannery planners can do little about.
Regarding ferry speeds, I think you're somewhat overestimating how much overhead is required. Traffic with other boats is not a significant issue in practice because the bay is really big and boats are maneuverable, acceleration times are pretty fast because the boats have good power/weight ratio anyway, and ferries typically operate on point-to-point schedules especially small ferries like the Candela one. As a point of comparison, last time I took the ferry from Richmond to SF it took 30-35min from scheduled departure to getting off the boat, for a route that "should" take 15min based on pure speed calculations. That implies a 15-20min overhead, which I suspect is mostly taken up by boarding/undocking/docking/unloading operations. I wish I could find good references for international comparison, since I don't know how close to optimal that is.
I think my bigger source of optimism is that electric ferries "feel" like they're on the right side of trends like battery density, integrate well with self-driving cars for last-mile transit, and are largely under the control of Flannery planners, while BART is infrastructure that requires huge political work to change or improve.
> "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)
People have successfully established a fear of being digitally tracked. This mostly takes the form of a taboo on targeted advertising. (The practice is widespread -- that's not the taboo -- but if you subscribe to this belief complex, you see targeted advertising as evil.)
What's surreal to me is that the majority of this group thinks of targeted advertising as the harm they wish they could prevent. Secondarily, they are afraid of being tracked by foreign governments (usually China), and tertiarily, if at all, they are afraid of being tracked by their own American government. Often they are willing to vocally support tracking by the government.
The problem is that this is exactly backwards in terms of the harms of tracking. Your own government is the body with the power and desire to hurt you. The more information they have about you, the worse off you are. China does not know or care who you are, and if they did they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. (Exceptions exist, but they know who they are and they don't contribute to the popular fear.) Targeted advertising, on average, makes you better off! The actual problem with tracking for purposes of targeted advertising is that information collected for that purpose is routinely commandeered by the government.
I wouldn't have much trouble believing in a theory of the sociology that went "some people tried to sound the alarm about tracking, and media/governmental groups sucessfully co-opted that into a crusade against digital advertising, because they wanted to hurt digital advertisers for economic (the media) or political (politicians) reasons."
Oh no, not the "Targeted advertising is good you you! Eat your targeted advertising!" again.
As far as I understand, the theory goes:
1. Make simplifying assumptions typical of economics - that dollars can be exchanged for utility, and so on
2. Nobody is making you buy things at gunpoint, therefore you must be getting more value from the widget than you give up in dollars
3. Therefore, seeing an advertisement and buying the product increases utility for both producer and consumer
4. Combine that with ads you don't want being a waste of time, and we should use systems that get the most clicks using the fewest ads
The vital mistake is in step 1. People are complicated, and their desires are complicated. Akrasia is a thing that exists. You might be perfectly content... until someone reminds you that Oreos exist, and then suddenly you want Oreos. You might even have been on a diet. The simple reminder that Oreos exist has given you negative utility - previously you were content, and now you feel desire for that which you do not have. So step 2 becomes irrelevant; even if in your new mental state the Oreos are worth the money, you have already taken the hit to your contentment and that isn't factored into the price.
I've spent a lot of time since I first encountered this idea wondering how anyone can possibly believe it. Until now I had only heard it from other Caltech students, so I figured maybe the difference could be in money? I come from a poor and thrifty family, but a lot of the students were pretty rich. Maybe if you have so much money that you don't know what to do with it all, it's a relief to have someone tell you. But then, why not take it a step further and visit a website made entirely out of targeted ads? Surely there are other ways you can get the same service, without it popping up on you while you're trying to get other stuff done? The story doesn't make any sense.
When I ask people who support this idea directly, they usually say the choice is between lots of untargeted ads, or fewer targeted ads, and that without ads we wouldn't have as much content on the internet. I think at this point, the opposite is closer to being true. I think that without ads, it would be much much easier to find high-quality content on the internet, even if the total amount of content becomes smaller. Look at Wikipedia, and then look at Fandom. ("Look at Fandom" also succinctly refutes the claim that targeted advertising means fewer ads.) I think nowadays it would be much more difficult for a big nonprofit community-driven project like Wikipedia to get started, because too many ad-driven websites are able to spend more time and money, sacrificing quality and ease-of-use if necessary, on the SEO game.
The "we'd have more content" argument is then usually followed by "it's good for poor people!". The idea being, everybody can view the content for free, in exchange for some time and annoyance from ads. Poor people put a lower dollar value on their time than rich people, therefore poor people are getting more benefit per cost. This is again sneaking in that economics assumption that everyone behaves perfectly rationally, from which it follows that rich people (who assign lower utility to their money) will do the vast majority of the buying. Is this actually the case? I have no idea, and would be interested in seeing statistics. I do know that akrasia is much much more common among my (poor) family members than in any other group of people I've met. So my gut feeling is that poor people ARE spending money because of advertisements, and in many cases, spending more than they can really afford to.
I haven't yet responded to the claim that with targeted advertising, each ad makes more money and so fewer will be needed. I propose instead that if each ad makes more money, there will be many, many more of them. If this is not obvious, look at the effect on labor when the cotton gin was invented. It does the same thing faster, so there will be fewer people-hours spent on cotton, right?
So in conclusion: targeted ads mean more advertising, not less, ads may sometimes be helpful to rich people but are worse than nothing for poor people, and we would have more quality content without ads. If I've mischaracterized any of your arguments, or if I am factually mistaken on a particular point, please let me know.
> If I've mischaracterized any of your arguments, or if I am factually mistaken on a particular point, please let me know.
You don't actually seem to have responded to any of my arguments. You could have written that post without bothering to read my comment at all. You're off on a separate topic.
Thanks for getting back to me. I was responding to
> People have successfully established a fear of being digitally tracked. This mostly takes the form of a taboo on targeted advertising. (The practice is widespread -- that's not the taboo -- but if you subscribe to this belief complex, you see targeted advertising as evil.)
> What's surreal to me is that the majority of this group thinks of targeted advertising as the harm they wish they could prevent.
and
> Targeted advertising, on average, makes you better off!
(You're right that I gave a much longer and more detailed response to that last bit than was maybe warranted, but I would really like to be able to get to the bottom of this for once. And I suppose I should admit I have no idea what "group" and "belief complex" you mean.)
If I understand right, you're saying targeted advertising good + government tracking bad, and I am trying to argue that targeted advertising bad + government tracking bad, except I left off the last bit because we're already in agreement on that. If you're still of the opinion that targeted advertising is good, then I very much want to hear your argument in favor of it.
Your qualm with (1) does not stop with targeted advertising, and rather is applicable to all advertising. Within that frame, your position is simply "advertising = bad."
I'm not saying that you're right or wrong on that account, I could see a good argument to be made that all advertising is bad. But you can't make this claim you make against targeted advertising without going on to expand to the general case.
That is mostly the case, yes. And targeted advertising is more profitable, so we should expect it to increase the overall number of ads. I'm also of the opinion that passing around people's private data is inherently bad, which makes things that incentivize it bad too.
"Mostly the case", because I don't think I need to claim that ALL advertising is bad. But I'll happily claim that 99% of it is bad, and I think that's enough to support the argument.
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.
The increase in 2010 is almost surely due to the Great Recession, but that doesn't explain its continued rise.
In the specific case of Honduras, a reason for the sudden hostility to the ZEED may stem from the fact that in 2009 there was a undemocratic coop followed by a period of violent political repression. That is the context in which Prospara was established.
Now also consider that Honduras was the original “Banana Republic”, and you might begin to understand why there is hostility to a bunch of rich Americans coming down with plans to override local sovereignty.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_C%C3%A1ceres
You can also read a little about the president who approved the project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_Lobo_Sosa
Yeah, I was wondering about that. It makes total sense to us why the Biden administration would want to dismantle or co-opt everything the Trump administration did, so I don't see why it's so shocking that something similar might happen in another country. Sure, maybe some ink got spilled on some paper, but that can't possibly impede Democracy.
Exactly. And now imagine that Trump, instead of being a boob, was as bad as all most hysterical liberals thought he was going to be in terms of political repression. Now on top of that imagine he was selling coke.
Or worse yet, that Trump had created an enclave on American soil where American laws and rights no longer applied, like Guantanamo Bay except run by a foreign superpower, in this case Russia or China.
> It makes total sense to us why the Biden administration would want to dismantle or co-opt everything the Trump administration did
But they don't. Not even close. Most of what you see between the two administrations is seamless continuity.
Look what happened when Chinese diplomats hoped Biden might not be interested in pushing forward with Trump's weird China policies.
That's what I meant by "co-opt". And the border stuff, and Operation Warp Speed, and Fauci. And it's not like Obama actually shut down Gitmo.
But it's a hard pill to swallow when someone's running an economic experiment with the hypothesis, "everything will be fine as long as YOU have no control over it".
> it's a hard pill to swallow when someone's running an economic experiment with the hypothesis, "everything will be fine as long as YOU have no control over it".
I have read that one of the British administrators of Hong Kong rejected a proposal to collect some kind of information, on the stated grounds that if the government started collecting that information, it wouldn't be able to help itself from trying to do something about whatever it learned. That seems like a close match to the form of the "bitter" hypothesis, though since the administrator was (for the moment) the government the YOU would have included him.
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I don't really understand the significance of observing that the Biden administration must want to either dismantle, or leave in place, everything its predecessor administration did. Those are the only two options!
For some of it, it isn't simply leaving in place, but making it so that people forget that it was ever a Trump thing For the border stuff, it's blaming Trump for some things that Obama started, while continuing other Trump policies with a disturbing lack of media attention.
The missing alternative is saying something like "yeah, that was a Trump policy, and it seems good enough for now, so we're leaving it in place".
I don't think a lot of this is Biden's doing, per se. It's the media which can't seem to handle a story more complex than "Trump bad Biden good".
My view on this is that if you deliberately pick somewhere because it has rickety governments that aren't too fussed about the rule of law, since all that means you can buy the land and do what you damn well like, you haven't a leg to stand on when the rickety government you bought off collapses and the next rickety government decides it's tearing up legal agreements the last lot made with you.
Strange, I don't really recall seeing that specific term much even after 2010.
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.
Apparently it popped up on Chinese social media six months ago. It was debunked by another Chinese website at the time: https://m.huanqiu.com/article/4CapQuZIzl6
"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.
Which is to say that it has been done; obviously that has no direct impact on other countries or Prospera.
That may be better than the alternative. The French constitutional council has taken the position that the constitution cannot possibly be contradictory, and if it appears that one power granted to the executive would violate the declaration of human rights, that's not a problem.
The USA handled this problem through the common law principle that stuff enacted later overrides stuff enacted earlier unless explicitly stated otherwise. Hence, for example, incorporation based on the 14th Amendment overriding the 10th, and the Bill of Rights overriding the OG Constitution.
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.
Travis AFB doesn't often handle fighters, it's for big cargo planes. (Of course the USAF might change its mind about that in the future.)
I have lived next to a military air base (right at the end of the runway, in fact), and also under the Heathrow flight path. Heathrow was much more disruptive.
EDIT: Sorry, that was needlessly snarky and unhelpful. I had a bad night's sleep. My statement was true, but failed to meet the other two criteria of the moderation policy. In an attempt to rescue it, let me say: yes, military aircraft can be extremely loud, but you can't just say "military air bases are louder than civilian airports", you have to be more specific. Not all airbases fly fast jets, and a busy civilian airport like Heathrow can be significantly more disruptive to life than a military base with relatively few flights.
>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 think most of your distrust of crypto and generative AI comes from a concerted media effort to make hating them seem "obvious". I think if it weren't for that, your natural response would be "There's a robot that will draw beautiful paintings for anybody who wants instantly for free, on whatever topic and in whatever style they find most aesthetic, consuming no resources? This is one of the greatest achievements in human history!"
Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me. I’d be willing to bet that way more people have lost money than gained it as a result of crypto. I was enchanted with generative AI for a few weeks, but the more I used it, the creepier I found it. And then last night, as I’m reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to me son, I ran across this line, “There may be two views about humans, but there’s no two views about things that look like humans and aren’t…. In general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.” Maybe immersing myself in these books as a kid shaped my intuition on this, but for whatever reason, my intuition is that generative AI will not, over the long term, enrich the human experience. Everybody else may be reacting to a concerted media effort, but their distrust may still have merit.
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
Additionally maybe the single biggest thing has been Google weighting and editing their search results. A study claimed a moderate source of news needed quite a bit higher key traffic metrics to make the top 5 results, conservative sources like 80% more
Much more has been the vertiginous experience of seeing things that show up as the top result on other engines not coming up on Google at all, such as the series of articles that claimed swing state get out the vote advertising was biased
A fun bonus has been the experience of modding being taken over by the most motivated and biased volunteers. Discussion of nuclear energy is soft banned permanently on r/energy. You can post if the mods really like it. One of their rules directly links to a post that announced a months long hard ban on nuclear topics
The problem is that many (most?) of the people who hate tech companies hate them for the opposite reason from you - they don't ban people the SPLC doesn't like *fast enough*. It seems like a problem to me if the polarized media is so good at this that they can make it literally impossible for tech companies not to be hated by at least half (and realistically much more) of the population.
My impression is that tech companies have been at least somewhat against this kind of stuff, forced into it by journalists and the government, and that "people should hate tech companies" is the hammer that journalists and the government use to weaken tech's ability to resist so they'll roll over and censor more. So I try not to hate tech companies, or at least to hate them in some kind of very specific way that isn't serving this agenda.
From my uninformed viewpoint, I think people distrust tech companies because of the creep of things like "Software as a Service" - once you could buy for a one-off price and own the thing outright, now you're paying a subscription every month for eternity. There's limitations on what you can do with the software. If you want to do X, Y or Z - that'll be an extra charge on top. There's fears around data harvesting and identity theft. There's the annoyance of ads and nagging "want to read more of this article? buy a subscription!"
No, of course it's not tech companies asking us to take out a sub to the New York and Washington Examiner Herald, but it's when you're online that you encounter these - and it looks more and more like 'sponsored results' and ads and nagging to subscribe and algorithms recommending you crap because you bought this/watched that/clicked on the other thing.
There was a sweet spot magical moment when tech companies gave you the highway to the world. Now it's all yet more attempts to take money off you.
>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.
All right, "A lawyer is an elite, but that doesn't mean all their clients are elites."
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.)
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