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dventimi

304 karma · joined March 11, 2011

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dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Just as I thought. You said you know a working-class person who can afford a Tesla, in a thread about homelessness in San Francisco which, last time I checked, is in the United States. You said she was a nursing student in Shanghai in the past, and does own an apartment in Shanghai now. I know people from China who are nurses in California now, and I know people who live in California who own property abroad, and nothing you wrote ruled out any of that.

So, if it turns out your friend isn't a nurse, doesn't have a high salary, and doesn't live in San Francisco, or some combination thereof, I'm going to score that as a giant lapse in reading comprehension in a thread about high salaries in San Francisco.

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
> Then perhaps you should clarify it in the beginning as to not have these exchanges on semantics

Well, nobody's perfect. After all, perhaps you could've been perceptive enough to understand that I meant that for a long time, and even now, Elon's cars have been premium products at the high end in their category, priced accordingly, and tend to be less affordable for working class people than the alternatives (and even out of reach for some of them), without getting wound around the axle on these "exchanges on semantics." And yet, here we are.

> Anyway, of course a cheaper product is more affordable than a more expensive one, that's a vacuous, trivially true statement that does not add anything to the discussion being made in this thread.

In my experience, it's the trivially true propositions that internet debaters most readily overlook.

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Indeed
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Quick question: why do you ask?
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
The commenter above that introduced the word affordable, that commenter was me, and I'm free to clarify what I meant, which I just did.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
The median price for a Tesla Model 3 in 2024 was ~$47k. The median price for a 4-door compact sedan in 2024 was ~$26k, or almost half as much. I'm sure some working-class people can afford a Tesla. None of these are hard and fast rules, and there are exceptions. But, which do you think is going to be more affordable to a typical working class person? The $47k car or the $26k car?
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
> Humans

Can you be more specific?

> Chicago

Chicago's tech sector, while growing, is still smaller than SF's and was much smaller in the past.

> Letting people who want to live in San Francisco live there

Obviously, that's not being accomplished.

> If you’re not saying that San Francisco can’t build enough housing to satiate demand, what are you saying, exactly?

I'm saying such a program would be unlikely to succeed and would be too disruptive to satisfy me, personally (and evidently many other San Franciscans as well). I'm also saying there's another option to increasing supply to meet demand: reducing demand to meet supply.

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
> the two groups you name are not coherent classes

Sure, they are. "tech workers" tend to work in tech companies. "everyone else" tend not to work in tech companies. It's quite coherent. Are there exceptions? Of course. Does the presence of exceptions mean the classes are incoherent? Of course not.

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Continue to say there's infinite demand if you like, but I won't be joining you.

As for "we're actively accomplishing it in other cities", I'm interested in these questions:

1. Who's "we"?

2. Which cities?

3. What exactly is being accomplished?

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
What's her secret? She works in healthcare, which is very expensive in the United States and especially in the Bay Area, and tends to pay nurses very very well (especially in the Bay Area). This illustrates my point. Her high salary as a nurse comes at the cost of many people around her, in many ways: we all pay higher healthcare costs, in part because of the high pay for doctors and nurses (as well as to hospital administrators, insurance companies, drug companies, etc.), and she's yet another highly-paid professional with the ability to outcompete other people for things like housing. Is she working class? I'm not convinced that she is.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Why are you curious? I didn't say there were only two classes. I said there's been "roughly" two classes over the last 30 years. Add other classes if you want (billionaire tech owners who don't code, billionaires in non-tech fields like real estate or agriculture or petroleum, old-money San Franciscans, millionaire non-working property owners who don't know how to open a Google Doc), it doesn't affect the conclusions: "tech workers" (and the "tech owners" who pay them) are an important factor causing many of the problems in SF.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
> You claim that it’s impossible for San Francisco to satiate demand

No, I don't. I claim it's difficult and unlikely.

EDIT: so long as it offers an urban playground to people earning high salaries, that is

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Personally, I don't know any working-class people who can afford a Tesla, let alone a space launch vehicle.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
People did vote with their feet, moving out of the core of the Bay Area to its periphery.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67b36262-3c7c-8013-aa61-f1ff8088fb...

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
I'm sure there isn't.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Not necessarily.

https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Except that the "side effects" of being rich aren't "side effects", they're the essential effects. Being richer than other people by definition means you can outcompete those other people for goods and services. That's the whole purpose. Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10 megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive capacity being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar as it largely benefits just one person.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
No, I don't think that the demand to live in San Francisco ever has been or ever will be "infinite." I also don't think that's a relevant question.
dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
> Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes

You're describing income inequality. Personally, I don't believe income inequality is good for everybody. I think it tends to benefit some people at the expense of others.

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
I can't agree with this. At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else." The "everyone else" comprises teachers, restaurant workers, retail workers, delivery drivers, and others, who cater to the whims of "tech workers." "Everyone else" works in industries subject to competition, market forces, and the ruthless demand for profitability (try keeping a restaurant open for 3 losing quarters). "Tech workers" work in an industry often shielded from these exigencies, cossetted in a pillowy cocoon of VC money. "Everyone else" serves the local community. "Tech workers", if they serve anybody, tend to be disconnected from the local economy and serve national or global markets. Relatedly, "tech workers" are paid high salaries that rise quickly. "Everyone else" is paid much more modest salaries that tend to stagnate. To add insult to injury, not only did this set of circumstances arrive in SF, it also arrived quickly, in waves, representing a series of shocks. Then came the last and possibly the most serious shock: remote work. Altogether, this is a recipe for: spiraling costs, social fragmentation, homelessness, and political turbulence.

Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference. Make it two thimbles, ten thimbles, a hundred thimbles, it's still going to leave a mess.

dventimi··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
"engineers making six figures" is the cause of San Francisco's problems, not "nimbyism."
dventimi··on The Dome (2005)
There are many good treatments of this supposed loophole. I happen to like this one: https://blog.gruffdavies.com/2017/12/24/newtonian-physics-is...

It points out many flaws in Norton's reasoning, some fatal to his argument, some not. Putting it as simply as I can, Norton seems to claim that "Newton's Laws" are non-deterministic. That's not quite right. Rather, they are non-complete. I.e. they are incomplete. They're incomplete insofar as Newton's First Law ("An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force") establishes first-order and second-order derivatives (momentum and acceleration) as state variables but places no constraints on higher-order derivatives. However, higher-order derivatives are (as many as are needed) among a system's state variables. In many real systems (but far from all), higher-order derivatives are zero and human experience with them is rare, so they're easy to overlook. Norton's (unphysical) Dome is a specific example of a general class of systems where higher-order derivatives are not zero. Given that, the two branches of Norton's equation of motion (for the stable and unstable trajectories) cannot both describe the same system (or the same particle) with the same set of state variables. That's the sleight-of-hand.

Again, all credit to Gareth Davies for working this out. I am absolutely not trying to pass off his work for my own. Just reporting it and trying to summarize it.

dventimi··on The Dome Paradox: A Loophole in Newton's Laws
That was a typo from a phone keyboard.
dventimi··on Why I don't do Domain Driven Design (2018)
I was friends with Eric at the time (we've long since lost touch) and he asked me to review a draft of his book. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was unpublishable gibberish. The joke's on me, obviously: turns out, it was very publishable gibberish.
dventimi··on The Dome Paradox: A Loophole in Newton's Laws
I'll take that as a "no".
dventimi··on The Dome Paradox: A Loophole in Newton's Laws
There are many good treatments of this supposed loophole. I happen to like this one:

https://blog.gruffdavies.com/2017/12/24/newtonian-physics-is...

It points out many flaws in Norton's reasoning, some fatal to his argument, some not. Putting it as simply as I can, Norton seems to claim that "Newton's Laws" are non-deterministic. That's not quite right. Rather, they are non-complete. I.e. they are incomplete. They're incomplete insofar as Newton's First Law ("An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force") establishes first-order and second-order derivatives (momentum and acceleration) as state variables but places no constraints on higher-order derivatives. However, higher-order derivatives are (as many as are needed) among a system's state variables. In many (but far from all), higher-order derivatives are zero and human experience with them is rare, so they're easy to overlook. Norton's (unphysical) Dome is a specific example of a general class of systems where higher-order derivatives are not zero. Given that, the two branches of Norton's equation of motion (for the stable and unstable trajectories) cannot both describe the same system (or the same particle) with the same set of state variables. That's the sleight-of-hand.

Again, all credit to Gareth Davies for working this out. I am absolutely not trying to pass off his work for my own. Just reporting it and trying to summarize it.

dventimi··on The Dome (2005)
> Not on Norton's Dome

Really? Are you sure about that? Have you tried it? Where is this "Newton's Dome" so that the experiment can be replicated?

dventimi··on The Dome (2005)
From the second paragraph:

    A mass sits on a dome in a gravitational field. After remaining unchanged for an arbitrary time, it spontaneously moves in an arbitrary direction, with these indeterministic motions compatible with Newtonian mechanics
Well, no. "It" does not spontaneously move in an arbitrary direction. It remains in place forever.
dventimi··on The Dome (2005)
https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/DomePSA2006.pdf
dventimi··on Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
Sounds like a YP
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