pasabagi

In Europe there are very many successful examples of national housing projects, indeed many countries have large portions of the housing stock in public hands to this day.

This was generally instituted after WW2, which left the EU housing stock in a far worse condition than the US's today, and left the EU totally impoverished.

So, you can come up with hypothetical problems, but practical experience shows it can absolutely work.

> I think you are advocating for some kind of government reallocation or loosening of property rights

I'm really just drawing attention to the fact the relevant property rights (what you can build, who can live there, how much it is worth relative to other things) are the product of continuous government intervention (planning, consultations, law, etc). Further, the government has basically free reign to legislate however it likes, unlike regulating conventional industries (automakers, etc).

My point is not that the government should just seize all inner city land - that would work, but it would also work to just rebalance the right to own land against the right to shelter in planning law, then use existing procedures to work out the consequences. For instance, one thing that could help would be to obligate developers to increase the number of housing units on a residential site if they redevelop.

While there are legitimate planning problems (does it make sense to run utilities out to serve yet another suburb?) that are separable from pure politics, I think you're sort of burying the lede when mention the 'cost of the land' then quickly move on to other topics.

'Cost of land' is inherently a political question, because land is not generally produced by human labour. It exists, then is divided according to some moral or political criteria. A state cannot arbitrarily say 'everybody gets a free car', because the car industry will go bust, then nobody will get a car. A state can (and states have) say that you can divide land ownership in whatever way you want. It's a purely political decision.

In many countries, areas, and states, land costs account for the massive majority of new construction costs. What's more, they force planners and developers to act in a counter-intuitive way to work around them. They incentivize insane behaviour, like empty lots in the middle of highly dense cities, due to the logic of financial speculation.

You can't 'fix' housing without fixing the political question, which ultimately starts with making people broadly recognize it is a political question, and addressing it as such.

Rent is income that the government enforces your right to collect. A distinction between 'rent-seeking' and government is meaningless.

Well, it's really hard to find a place to put them because of planning regulations, and because of land costs.

If you, for example, nationalized all inner-city land, you could easily find plots to build high density housing. At which point, you're stuck there wondering why you should bother with the capsules: it's cheaper to just prefab the building in concrete then assemble at site. That's what the kruschevkas are: you leverage economies of scale to produce millions of units of housing for peanuts.

Obviously, nationalizing inner-city land is hard in the current political makeup of most nations today: real estate is a favoured investment for very rich people, and they have a lot of political power. So the question of housing becomes less one about houses, and more about what kind of finessed regulation you need to avoid offending the small number of very wealthy people that own inner city land, while actually allowing the state to build on it.

The facts aren't in question, although the police say they 'evacuated' the camp (at four in the morning, with force) - and they've done so four times, destroying everything in the process.

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20221206-strasbourg-city-mayor-...

The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity? You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes. A car, despite being an industrial miracle assembled out of precision parts, is far cheaper than a house. Food insecurity is largely manageable for most people in rich countries.

The answer is, of course, politics - and that's also why you'll never solve homelessness with a better capsule hotel.

A friend of mine works for the city in Strasbourg, and the mayor's office wanted to improve the situation of the homeless, so they installed some basic amenities for a homeless camp. Within a fortnight, the police had trashed the amenities. If you make the situation better for the homeless in a state that wants the homeless to go elsewhere, the politics will unsolve your solution.

I guess there are two aspects to prison: the first is as you said, a deterent, an agent of rehabilitation, a place of punishment, etc - the ideal form. Questionable, but ultimately something a lot of people could agree to. Then, there is really-existing-prison, which is a place of misery for the people who, almost entirely due to structural reasons, get railroaded repeatedly into its embrace.

So even prison abolitionists are often rather sanguine about imprisoning people like CEOs and high level officials who, despite being absolutely manifestly not railroaded, who have the structure covering from them at every turn, and end up both committing and being convicted as criminals.

I don't think this is necessarily contradictory: you can be fine with the idea of some kind of prison while also recognizing that the current system is a rather pointless and dysfunctional form of sadism that has no relation to any practical or ethical goal.

The word 'house' is doing a lot of illicit work in your metaphor. A better analogy would be if a bunch of families had decided to install CCTV cameras, then got their neighbor Garry to watch them.

Unbeknownst to them, Garry was storing the tapes a lot longer than anybody imagined, was pointing the cameras so they looked into people's bedrooms, and he was selling some metadata to third parties, and he also kept the key to his house in a plant pot by the door.

Some teenagers messing around, find the key, and have a look around.

Suddenly, it's the teenager, not Garry, who's the problem here. That's how data breaches work at the moment. And because it's Garry's 'house', we all think of the company as the victim.

Bad safety standards create strong unions. Strong unions create good safety standards. Good safety standards allow stupidity. Stupid people allow safety standards to get rolled back.

Calling the European conquest of the Americas 'immigration' is kind of like calling operation Barbarossa 'tourism'.

I also think the anecdote is kind of ridiculous. There was no India when the Parsis arrived. There was no India for a millennia after the Parsis arrived. The whole concept of assimilation to 'Indian culture' is even more ridiculous than it is to vastly more uniform (and vastly smaller) european cultures, because India, to its credit, is composed of hundreds of distinct cultures. Especially if you are going to backproject India (a country founded in 1947) to 700 ad.

> Borders have two sides. Gaza controls one side of her border, Egypt and Israel control the other. No state has control over both sides of its borders, not even in the Schengen states or the US.

Yes, but the kind of blockade that Israel employs around Gaza would be considered an act of war by essentially every state on earth.

I think this idea you have that Palestinians are oppressed by basically everybody except Israel is totally insane, and comes across as strategic blindness rather than honest conviction. If you just go to Hebron, you have to be pretty deluded not to see oppression, even if you're unwilling to think through the fact that Israel having defacto power in the West Bank entails that the rights of Palestinians are being denied by Israel, and it's immaterial whether that's by commission or omission, even if you're going to ignore any of the many ways in which the Palestinians rights are regularly infringed by Israeli security forces.

Maybe you're just the wrong reader, or reading at the wrong time? I've noticed books get a lot worse or better depending on the age I read them, the conditions I'm in.

That said, I read (and liked) Flaubert in translation, so maybe it's worse in French.

> The people - and their suffering - are a means to an end to establish that state.

I think this is really wrongheaded on a couple of counts. Because Israel as a state 'for the jews' is an ethnostate, it must keep a jewish demographic majority. So long as that is the case, there is no way for Palestinians to have rights without having their own state.

Second, that suffering is directly caused by Israel. You can't blame the political projects of the Palestinians for the actions of the IDF.

Thirdly, what form of self-determination would actually be acceptable to Israel? Would it include the banning of settlement activity, and the settlers having to live under Palestinian law? Would it include palestinian's right to border control? Or a military? The reason why people call Gaza a prison is because the Palestinians had absolutely no ability to leave, import, or export, because it did not have control over its own borders. That is obviously just as intolerable as an explicit military occupation.

> And Israel has been trying to pass off that occupation to an entity that would establish an independent state there for almost 30 years.

I was thinking the other day, why doesn't Israel offer the west bank to Jordan?

I think that by permitting, providing security and infrastructure for, and aiding settlement activity, Israel demonstrates a lack of interest in actually passing off occupation. Because of the settlements already there today, it would be already very difficult to maintain the rights and security of Israeli citizens who live in the west bank without the military occupation.

So while I think your argument about Ottoman law is mostly sophistic (why is Ottoman law in 'force'? Because Israel has not allowed self-determination) I think it's really hard to argue that Israel has demonstrated any commitment to ending the occupation: rather, the settlement program makes the occupation a permanent necessity, even if the Israelis elected a government that had ending the occupation as a number one issue on the agenda.

I kind of take the opposite position. History is complicated, always. However, the basic problem of Israel and Palestine is that Palestinians either live under military law (the West Bank) or in a big prison (Gaza). That's obviously not a democratic, dignified, or otherwise morally defensible situation.

Ultimately, the security needs of Israel need to be balanced against the rights of the Palestinians, and as it stands, the Palestinians have no negotiating power, so they get nothing. If politicians around the world made it clear you cannot be 'the only democracy in the middle east' while having millions of people subject to military law, I expect the Palestinians would have enough negotiating room to force some kind of reasonable settlement.

Tbh, I also didn't find it a big deal. The only thing I registered as a personal problem during the pandemic was two of my grandparents dying.

I don't think it's particularly careless: SBCL is short for 'Steel Bank Common Lisp', which is a reference to how the CMU university, named after Carnegie Mellon, could be respectively substituted with 'Steel' (Carnegie) and 'Bank' (Mellon).

I figure that digital photography is by its very nature 'computational', both in the obvious sense, and in the sense that the camera from hardware up imposes a set of signal-forming decisions on what is essentially just structured noise.

The problem is more one of what controls the camera exposes to the user. If you can just take one kind of picture: whatever picture the engineers decided was 'good', then it limits your expressive options.

People still do wood block printing - even though printing is commodified to the nines.

At the moment, making 3d models is a lot of skilled, monotonous work, especially for stuff like scene furniture. I guess I'd be pretty happy if some of that work could be automated away, and I'm pretty confident that there's no point automating away the remainder, for the same reason you don't want ChatGPT writing your screenplay.

That's true. On the other hand, people have been working with flint for longer than there have been people, and it remains fiendishly hard to make anything with it.

I think it could be one of those 'grass-is-greener' scenarios. Steel is really nice to work with. It's strong and elastic and you can do all sorts of things to alter its properties, like even in a home shop.

Titanium always looks really hard to work with, just from the few times I've seen youtube types get some into their lathe chucks.

Would the added (in some ways just different) performance make up the difference? No idea. I mean, would people use so much aluminium if it wasn't straightforward to extrude it into interesting shapes? I don't think I would.

The straight characteristics of a material are one thing: what you can actually do with it are another.

The idea is to have an opensource compiler (to avoid lock in) and a paid IDE-style tool.

I guess I fundamentally don't think charity is the right way to solve social injustice. If you went around giving out blankets to antebellum American slaves, I guess you're helping the specific person you're handing the blanket to, but are you helping with the actual problem? After all, the problem facing the slave is not that they don't have enough things, but rather, that they don't have enough rights. Until you have the rights, no amount of material palliatives will ever save you. So that's why I didn't really go for EA when I first heard of it.

Now, we have Sam Bankman-Fried's version, which is at least intellectually rigorous: if you can make billions (through scams) then give those billions (eventually) to charity, are you not morally obligated to do so? At which point I am somewhere between laughing and crying.

If you ask anybody who a) isn't part of EA and b) has philosophy training, they'll tell you EA is just utilitarianism with some new buzzwords.

Tbh, I always thought the whole stuff about 'intelligence' was just marketing garbage. There are no really good rigorous descriptions of intelligence, so asking if a product exhibits intelligence is basically nonsense. There are two questions about LLMs that are good, though:

1. Are they useful?

2. Are they going to become more useful in the forseeable future?

On 1, I would say, maybe? Like, somewhere between Microsoft Word and Excel? On 2, I would say, sure - an 'AGI' would be tremendously useful. But it's also tremendously unlikely to grow somehow out of the current state of the art. People disagree on that point, but I don't think there are even compelling reasons to believe that LLMs can evolve beyond their current status as bullshit generators.

Most content creators are either doing it for free, or getting a percentile of a cent on the dollar. As far as I'm concerned, that makes it communication infrastructure, not service provision. Youtube is providing the infrastructure, the creators are providing the service.

As I think that infrastructure should be publically owned, I'm happy to do my bit for nationalization, and use adblock.

It's basically a line out of the Expanse series: if you make getting into orbit trivial, and if doing things in space becomes trivial, it becomes conceivable to redirect asteroids so they hit the planet, which would be bad for the people living there.

I don't know if it's a realistic problem, my guess is it probably is, but not significantly worse than what we already have with nuclear proliferation.

The basic problem is pretty real, though: we're at a stage of technical development where it's really easy to render the planet uninhabitable, while we're at an uninspiring level of cultural development that makes it really hard to produce sensible policy.

> Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities.

That's just wildly wrong. I think you should probably just try to deepen your understanding of fields you're interested in, and leave your prejudices at the door.

How do you isolate the philosophy without engaging in philosophy yourself?

My suspicion is that most people who don't like philosophy have lots of philosophical ideas - they are just really dogmatic about them and don't like to be challenged.

Philosophy is like maths. You can build a lot of bridges with a crummy understanding of maths. The Romans did it with the most pathological notation for numbers imaginable, and lacking all sorts of basic mathematical concepts. So you can say all that maths stuff is just nonsense and you can do it all by these seventeen-hundred ambiguous rules of thumb you really carefully follow. It's just you're not actually avoiding maths - you're just doing it in a really ad-hoc, inflexible, and inelegant manner. That's what people are doing when they say philosophy is a load of bunk but they still believe a whole load of things about the universe.