bradchris

Not just spirit, they do entirely apply. Some Supreme Court decisions (there are many clarifying the first amendment)—

Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945)

> freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.

Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)

> constitutional protections extend to “all persons” within the U.S, including undocumented immigrants.

The US constitution has generally been thought to apply to _everyone_ interacting with the US government, citizen or not.

It’s why in the past tourists could expect due process under the law, and not be disappeared out of the blue, etc.

So if the US is rewriting that social contract, they should probably explicitly say what provisions only protect US citizens and which apply to everyone. Because otherwise, is it none?

Do we think that Bell Labs, if it were to avoid being broken up, would have existed in any way the same way today ?

Cynically, it likely would have ended up a zombie shell of itself, like IBM

Topically, assuming it avoided such a fate and was held in high regard by the industry and employees, this current administration would likely be meddling with every single grant, contract, or project that did not align with the administrations' priorities (see: colleges and research grants)

In *some parts of Los Angeles. The city is getting better district by district, if only incrementally.

The east side of Los Angeles (Los Feliz Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park) has managed to replace most of its neighborhood councils with YIMBY-sympathetic types that are pushing for mixed use and density along their arterials.

Not that it’s the end-all-be-all solution, but compared to the west side where I have family, it’s a breath of fresh air to see neighbors generally cautiously enthusiastic about new development rather than immediately trying to figure out how to stop it by default

It would be worse for the United States dollar, probably. The D in USD historically could’ve been associated with “Diplomacy”— the military was willing and able to globally enforce the value of the US Dollar by favoring countries that willingly supported its hegemony.

When no one relies upon us any more, what makes our dollars and debts so special? What’s to stop everyone from taking their ball and going to play somewhere else? From calling in debts, from reneging on debts to us, from accepting our dollars, from providing land for military bases, from honoring our passports… because that is what happens to nearly every other country not at the Top.

The global order currently only works in our favor because we’re on top. We are the ones who lose the most when other countries don’t need us, not the other way around.

> I supposed the unstated implication is that the US could just take the IP by force

Isn’t that what China’s stated plan is?

Also— for B2B SaaS, a big component of what is being sold is not the product, but support. No matter how modern or antiquated the tech is, many B2B companies don’t actually care about the experience per-se; they care about compliance, security, data integrity, and ongoing support. That’s essentially Oracle’s entire playbook!

How do LLM SaaS replacements solve that?

Because PG&E was the cause. If a lightening strike caused the fire, then that would be the cause. If a stray arsonist poured gasoline over the field and lit it all on fire, then the arsonist would be the cause. If it was teens lighting fireworks, then they would be the cause.

But none of those things actually happened. PG&E’s equipment caught on fire because it couldn’t handle its normal electricity load anymore, because they delayed maintenance for years.

There is no sense talking about all the things that “could” be the cause in some hypothetical future where PG&E hadn’t caused the fire that actually happened first. Because that would require PG&E to prevent the fire that actually happened, which they did not.

Yup, I get the economies of scale, hence why I wonder why we don’t use statewide utilities for more rural areas and municipal utilities for denser metro areas that support it (e.g. LADWP for Los Angeles).

But even if you have a private company capitalize on these efficiencies of scale, there’s no competition to force them to do anything other than the bare minimum (“provide this utility, today, above some bare minimum acceptability standard that doesn’t cause the state to nationalize is” with barely an afterthought toward what maintenance capex looks down the line), and even then Edison and PG&E still can’t hop over the low bar they set for themselves.

Sure, I get that having a profit-motive is one way the market can incentivize efficiency. But without the ability for any real competition (i.e. there will only ever be one set of main transmission wires or water pipes for an area, we won’t ever have two completely distinct physical competitor networks serving the same identical addresses) does that still hold?

For a private company in sole ownership of a utility, how does the market keep the incentive to cost-cut (i.e. increase profit by reducing expenditures on things like timely customer service or deferring capex) in check versus actually improving service and efficiency above “it still works” ? It’s not like any individual could choose another provider of electricity, so therefore it’s not much of a market at all.

What is the motive to do anything other than rent-seek without a competitor to incentivize them to improve?

At least municipal and state leaders have some sort of accountability in that they could get voted out if it’s going wrong on their watch. Meanwhile PG&E was rewarding its shareholders by raising rates and deferring maintenance for paying out high dividends rather than re-investing in itself, which seems like exactly the opposite thing the public would want to incentivize.

Considering PG&E delaying and ignoring maintenance was 100% the cause of the 2018 Paradise fire that burned down an entire town of 30,000 people, it would be foolish to not investigate

I don’t understand much about transmission lines as an industry, but I really have never understood why California allows what seems like essentially a duopoly to manage its electrical grid, especially around its major population centers like LA and SF. The rates aren’t low, they’re routinely linked to natural disasters, and they’re slow to respond to customer complaints.

It seems as absurd to me as if one single company were to own all of a city’s water pipe infrastructure. Maybe that’s actually common too, I just don’t understand why. If it’s simply because municipalities sold them off long ago for short-term windfalls, my next question is why we as a state allow that, in the same sense that we don’t allow selling state parks without major hullabaloo.

Granted, I’m covered by LADWP, the nation’s largest municipal water and power utility that even predates this form of the city’s government itself, and I’ve really only had outstanding service with them (I noticed a small leak with a water main forming a minor puddle on a side street and within an hour someone was out there fixing it), so I guess I am wondering what the case for privatized utilities even is.

Could someone who knows better than I please explain why the state or local municipalities don’t/can’t manage their grid?

Ok, except I guess I would say your definition of mid-level and junior both fall under what I would consider “junior”— maybe I would call what you define as “junior” as “intern” ?

I don’t see how LLMs completely eliminate anyone who is doing anything more than simply pulling well-defined tickets off a board

I believe you have this backwards.

The market value of almost every single home in the Palisades, as someone with family from there, is due to the location, not the homes themselves.

If the land loses its intrinsic value because it is inherently unsafe, it will be cheaper to buy. Maybe only modest homes get rebuilt because decreased land value cannot support estates anymore, but that is the situation.

> It’s basically never a financially good idea to build a house in California, since market value will be below construction cost

No, I can assure you as someone who has both built and remodeled in Los Angeles, this is not the case. This region is so housing starved that even spending $200k to a convert a 500sqft garage into an ADU (which is extremely high cost per square foot, compared to national averages) immediately increased the property value by almost $400k. The reason Los Angeles has a housing shortage and not a housing boom is entirely self-inflicted: this city has a terrible zoning and NIMBY problem, and the city refuses to meaningfully fix it. Developers would _love_ to build here, if only they could: projects that take 60 days to get permitted in Dallas, TX take 3-5 years here.

Yes. I live in Los Angeles. Huge swaths of our entire city are ripe for development— the safest areas are often some of the least densely populated, and that needs to change.

Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has less people near it would naturally also have less crime from people within it, because there’s not many people to commit crimes nearby in the first place. E.G. Los Angeles National Forest

Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has a lot of people near it would likely have more crime, because you’ve essentially created a glorified alleyway. E.G. Central Park in the 70s, when you didn’t want to be nearby it near sundown.

Central Park is a good case study of this phenomenon, because it’s now one of the most heavily used parks in one of most densely populated areas in the world, and billionaires pay premiums to live next to it. That didn’t always used to be the case, and it was considered dangerous.

Isn’t that what everyone said about outsourcing too?

My view is LLMs will compete with outsourced developers (and contractors/consultants for one-off jobs), where job context and project scope is already subject to a communication gap.

A big role of full time employees is not just to code, but to interact to various degrees with PMs/Sales/Customers/the rest of the company stakeholders to varying degrees.

Ultimately someone has to know enough of the technical side of both the product and company to actually _know_ what to prompt/review for.

Sure, if the entire industry becomes agents selling agent-developed products to other agents and providing agent-on-agent support, then… yeah. But that is a shell game.

It is also likely not solvent for statewide mass disaster scenarios like earthquakes, even if you do purchase that coverage.

It all depends on exactly how the ballot measure is phrased. After all, Prop 19 recently passed which partially repealed Prop 13 (1970s property tax-basis freeze at point of every sale) because enough people realized that now-$20m homes by the beach paying taxes on a valuation of $100k since the 1970s is bankrupting the state. Still a lot to do to fully repeal Prop 13, but at least now the tax basis can’t be passed down across generations (yeah, California voters really did codify aristocracy into law in the 1970s. It’s mind-boggling).

That was a real case of voters voting against their individual interest (near-guaranteed higher property taxes) for their collective wellbeing (the solvency of the state)

We’re no stranger to ballot measures here, for better or worse. I think most Californians will agree with insurance reform when they realize they won’t be able to get insurance otherwise— also the fact that many people in safer areas probably would see rates decrease.

You’re not trying to convince me here, you’re trying to convince the state. I agree!

People should rebuild where they want as much as they want, so long as they’re willing to accept the financial risk to do so (I.E. higher premiums that reflect the risk… which may be 10x higher, who knows! A lot of these Palisades home owners could, and would, pay for that risk, if only the law would let an insurer charge them for that)

State law does not let that happen, and all the risk is therefore subsidized by everyone else or not offered at all. Both worse outcomes!

The issue is state law forbids them from not taking their money if they operate anywhere else in the state, with certain exceptions such as historical disasters (which now the Palisades has). And the rates can’t be adjusted on a per-property basis, either. That’s why many insurers have left the state entirely.

Many properties have no willing insurer left, and have to participate in a state-funded plan (that many fear is not actually solvent). Many more properties only have one or two insurers left.

State Farm was the only insurer left in the Palisades, and my guess is after the moratorium to cancel policies is up in one year, if they can’t reflect the risk in their premiums to account for this fire, the Palisades will have no insurer left either. And then rebuilding will be impossible.

Affordability would be adversely affected in the short term, yes. In the long term, more housing production would be incentivized in less-risky areas. The reduced property prices to come out of this would also mean insurance rates would decrease for them proportionally— insuring for $600k is cheaper than insuring $6m, all else being equal.

On the other hand, affordability will also be adversely affected in the short and long term if nothing changes. Once the moratorium for insurance companies to leave the state is up in about 1 year, and no one can get a mortgage because no insurance providers are left. Banks will not take on the implicit roles of insurers in a no-recourse loan state.

Doing nothing is not an option. The writing is on the wall.

And of course, maybe property values in fire-prone areas should fall ! In fact, by not subsidizing them, perhaps the market would eventually restabilize these homes at saner insurance premiums to cover the reduced property value due to the risk.

A $600k home that is sure to burn within 20 years will have a much lower premium than a $6m home in the same location, after all.

As a Californian, the ballot measure that limits the ability of insurance companies to increase and tailor rates to reflect risk is absurd. I hope someone funds a ballot measure to repeal the statute.

In its “best” form, it’s requiring those who have bought homes in safer areas statewide to subsidize those in more dangerous areas, which is already absurd, considering those more dangerous areas are already predominately wealthy coastal and hillside areas that can and should pay their own full cost of insurance.

My annual payment with a different insurer nearly doubled after our insurer had to drop the entire zip code purely because half of my zip code is in a high fire hazard zone, even though my property and half of zip code is rated one of the lowest fire hazard zones in the state.

At its most extreme, because of the provisions limiting risk adjustment based on and within zip codes (originally, for redlining, which I understand, but for fire risk it makes no sense considering different locations are inherently riskier), it will and has caused insurance companies to exit the state entirely, and then we’re all screwed.

I do wonder if SCOTUS will revisit this and declare the original ballot measure limiting risk an unconstitutional “taking” from those in safer locations (or insurers themselves), given my understanding is Florida has the same issues too…

This was so fun to read, and reminded me of Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK), Disney’s other popular mmo at the time which was basically a Disney-fied Habbo Hotel [1].

It ran for about 3 years, but what I found interesting is the chat took the initial approach that the creators here dismissed: a whitelisted vocab list of safe words that you could type, and anything not on it would preclude the message from being sent.

There were definitely ways around it, but I also presume active monitoring of the slang, because eventually words like “dam” or phrases “what the shell” were banned too. Another thing that I recall is that case-sensitive spelling mattered, and there was no word bank, so in a way it enforced better spelling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Magic_Kingdom

If that turns out to be true, the it looks like AI just gave universities a new reason for being.

What a shift from twenty years ago when optimism over “information superhighways” on the “world wide web” would end knowledge gatekeeping and educate the masses, to now— worries of AI slop and finely tuned ML algorithms frying older and younger generations’ brains, while information of human value gets buried, siloed, and paywalled, with no way to verify anything at all.

College costs in the US are similar to US healthcare costs in that they’re very dependent on both the school/program, whether it’s private or public, and individual circumstances.

For example, many top private schools have tuition+board costs upwards of $90k/yr, now— yet if you (or your parents) bring in less than $100k-$200k/yr (again, depends on the school), tuition is completely free, with a sliding scale on incomes based above that threshold. Stanford does not even publish their total cost for a degree any more so much as a matrix to provide a ballpark estimate.

State schools often provide massive discounts for their tax-paying residents to attend. In California, that could be the difference between $20k/yr versus $70k+/yr for UCLA or Berkeley. University of Texas just announced tuition will be free for all in-state families earning less than $100k/yr going forward.

Then of course, there’s the need-based and/or merit-based scholarships, which schools may give out to entice someone they particularly want to attend, or through blanket policies to incentivize their student body: e.g. University of Southern California (tuition with board around $90k/yr now) still gives out 50%-tuition scholarships based on an objective SAT score cutoff.

That’s not to say paying full sticker price for college never happens, but there’s many options before taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I believe the average amount of total debt per student is something like $40k, or ~10k/yr.

EDIT: most of these discounts usually only apply to US citizens; international students are often paying full sticker price, and ineligible for government-backed student loans. Some schools use this policy to have international students subsidize their domestic students, to the point that the UC system got in trouble for prioritizing international students over US ones because it was better for the balance sheet.

I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.

American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access

That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.

As pointed out, Carr wrote the FCC section of Project 2025. Aside from the continuing discussions around Section 230, I found this excerpt interesting from his chapter, which I presume was written before the bi-partisan TikTok ban bill Biden signed into law:

> As of this writing, the Biden Administration's Treasury Department has not announced a final decision concerning its long-pending review of TikTok. If that inaction persists, or if the Administration allows TikTok to continue to operate in the U.S., a new Administration should ban the application on national security grounds. [1]

Given that the ban is supposed to go into affect Jan 19, one day before Trump’s inauguration, pending any December court decisions I wonder if Carr will still stand by this or not, given Trump has indicated he’s now less likely to want to ban it [2]

[1] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2024/11/15/for-embattl...

She has a net worth of $100-$200m dollars. I doubt she wants $5-10m more.

OpenAI cannot hurt her standing in the industry— in fact, “ScarJo takes on Big Tech and wins”, in an era after the Hollywood unions called a strike and won protections from studios using generative AI for exactly this scenario, is ironically probably one of the best thing she can do for her image right now.

She is also one of the most litigious actresses in the industry, taking on Disney and winning what’s estimated to be 8 figures.

Good luck OpenAI!