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jameslkon What happens when private equity buys homes in your neighborhood

> But the bigger problem for housing affordability, he adds, is that "we just haven't built enough [homes] to keep up with the population growth and household formation."

The circular incentive here is left unsaid. If a house is an investment, you and every other homeowner has an incentive to keep supply low and demand high. This ultimately drives votes, lobbying, and policies that prevent houses being built. Otherwise you end up with falling rents and stagnating property prices, like in Austin.

https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/cooling-rent-growth-d...

jameslkon How can England possibly be running out of water?

Does this snarky point you’re trying to make connect with anything in the article? I saw no mention of taxes

jameslkon How can England possibly be running out of water?

What do lowering taxes have to do with water running out in the UK?

jameslkon Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone (2014)

* $1,599 for a computer

* $799 for a camera

* $149 for a speaker/woofer

Over 30 years ago and yet these are roughly the prices I’d expect today

jameslkon Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

Some assumptions it seems you’re making:

* The customer has a phone

* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting

* The customer has cell service in their location

* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant

jameslkon Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

I interpreted it as the AI system added something strange to the order, and when someone saw it, that’s when the system was cut off. Otherwise the next word sounded like a confirmation

That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly

jameslkon Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

It seems so, and yet here we are

There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out

jameslkon Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru

When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready

https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc

https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)

jameslkon Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

The FAQ of the actual study contains a lot of useful info that addresses some of the comments here, for anyone curious:

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

jameslkon AI hype is crashing into reality. Stay calm

The title is clickbaity compared to the content of the article, which seems to have more nuance. Its claim is that recent AI advances were both overhyped and still have a lot of utility that hasn't propagated fully yet (a la the Internet). Not terribly revelatory at this point

jameslkon Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

> so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years

I'm guessing the GENIUS Act had something to do with it too? Now that bank depositors have an incentive to hold bank-issued USD stablecoins given their priority in cases of bankruptcy[0], it seems likely there will be a lot more transactions with them as well

0. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/158...

jameslkon An eyecare foundation model for clinical assistance

They posted the training/finetuning code here: https://github.com/eyefm/EyeFM

There’s a sample of the data here: https://zenodo.org/records/15546254

Looks like the weights are not available though. Several have asked in the GitHub issues it seems

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Isn’t the point of insurance to provide protection against black swan events? If it’s more likely to happen then it’s not really a black swan?

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

A sudden claim against many should be priced into the cost of the insurance, offset by some risk adjustment. The goal is ultimately price stability, if the price is not too high (that’s the unknown)

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Sure, I get your point. It all comes down to the pros and cons of each on the rest of the economic system. The goal isn’t to get industry onshore at the expense of the economy. If you have a better tool, use that instead

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Incentives work better than tariffs. Tariffs are less effective due to their uncertainty (why would I build a factory if the next admin removes the tariffs?)

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Historically this would be a good bet, due to inflation:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

Not really a question of that. More so how much will prices go up

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Perhaps in the short term but I wonder if that calculus changes as more time goes on with erratic tariff changes (which has technically been going on for years, just to a much lesser degree).

Is there a market need great enough for price stability to offset the risk? It seems tariff whiplash will be an ongoing problem

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

My assumption is that businesses that are negotiating their prices between retailers are not experts in geopolitics and what the next move will be from the government and courts. Someone may study this more or have connections to know that better, and therefore are more willing to take bets

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Consumers will pay more regardless in this type of circumstance. But they will pay less if businesses don’t suddenly start going out of business, eliminating competition and jobs

jameslkon Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

> Repricing, though, isn’t as easy as changing a tag—in part because suppliers and big-box stores are engaged in an epic tussle over who will pay what.

> Retailers, including Lowe’s and Home Depot, buy Thompson Traders’ wares and set the retail price themselves. And they have been reluctant to pay Thompson Traders more.

It seems like this sort of scenario would benefit from some kind of risk protection, like insurance, or a futures market

jameslkon Grok Code Fast 1

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-br...

jameslkon Grok Code Fast 1

Yes, the US has been scaling back on China-sourced renewable energy supply chains since 2023 at least, with tariffs and by removing incentives

Not exactly your wording at that time, but my point still stands that the outcome was going to be the same because the imports were heavily skewed towards China. This has all been in motion before this current admin

jameslkon Grok Code Fast 1

Yes, moving away from China

jameslkon Grok Code Fast 1

China controls 80% of the supply chain for solar and has most of the rare earth magnets needed for wind. Since China is America’s bugbear and containing China’s influence is a bipartisan issue, this was a likely outcome whoever is in office

https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...

Of course, renewables aren’t the only source of energy

jameslkon AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

There's likely a slippery slope fallacy in there somewhere (I hope). If interested in the (not so) sci-fi aspects of automated weapons and their ramifications, I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI

jameslkon AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

> So what comes next?

When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive healthcare, food production, and water to keep them all alive

jameslkon AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Language barriers: The outsourced workers I know use AI to help them ask and answer questions about things in English they don’t perfectly understand because English is their second language. They use it to write better English from English with grammatical mistakes

Knowledge: True to an extent, but my assumption here is that it would be used to fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings. Not wholesale doing my job. At least that’s often how I use it

jameslkon AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Since this article is about AI, and since this comment seems rather low effort compared to the Stanford study, I went ahead and used low effort to analyze the report compare it to this comment. Here's my low effort AI response:

> Prompt: Attached is a paper. Below is an argument made against it. Is there anything in the paper that addresses the argument?: High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs

> High rates/firm shocks: They add firm–time fixed effects that absorb broad firm shocks (like interest-rate changes), and the within-firm drop for 22–25-year-olds in AI-exposed roles remains.

> “Less investment” story: They note the 2022 §174 R&D amortization change and show the pattern persists even after excluding computer occupations and information-sector firms.

> Other non-AI explanations: The decline shows up in both teleworkable and non-teleworkable jobs and isn’t explained by pandemic-era education issues.

> Tariffs: Tariffs aren’t analyzed directly; broad tariff impacts would be soaked up by the firm–time controls, but a tariff-specific, task-level channel isn’t separately tested.

jameslkon AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Have you taken a Waymo yet?