mistursinistur

> 2/3 of households own their own homes

1. "Household" is not the right unit of analysis, since a household is defined as the set of people in an existing home. Some of these include adults who would like to move out, creating a new household not accounted for in your denominator.

2. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American moves approximately 11.7 times throughout their lifetime. In other words, current homeowners generate demand for housing just as non-homeowners do.

FWIW I've seen noticeably better results on (1) and (4) extracting JSON from images via Claude, although (2) and (3) still take effort.

Silly to say without evidence that preventing some people from doing their jobs somehow creates more jobs for other people. H1-B visa holders aren't competing with workers in the retail services industry!

Rent controlled duplexes are already protected by the regulations that were violated here. You can't remove rent-controlled units without a permit!

Obviously some onlookers don't understand current laws and don't understand the proposed legislation. It's important for them to know that their trust in the legislator to do this for them is misplaced.

Like notacoward's post below, this one misses the point. The shaming is not about how good or bad or complex you are.

Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing some bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.

You might claim that this pressure will never work, or that it will cause Facebook to shut down the "Are You Safe" feature, or gut the charity tools, or avoid developing these kinds of projects in the future. But we should avoid hand-wavy claims that Facebook and the people who work there are just too complicated to influence.

This misses the point of completely. This shaming is not about how good or bad you are.

Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.

You might claim is that this strategy can't positively affect Facebook's incentives, operations, or effects. But nobody should be distracted by navel-gazing or fancy philosophizing.

This key graf at the end describes why it's a bad demo that may cost taxpayers a lot of money:

"The result is that the tunnel would have negative value to the region. As a transportation service based on how Musk wishes to construct and operate it, it has practically no value. But in the event of upzoning in West Los Angeles, the tunnel would complicate any possibility of rail under Sunset connecting Hollywood with Downtown. Metro may even need to acquire and demolish Musk's tunnel, or else dig under the tunnel, which would complicate intermediate stations in Silver Lake and Echo Park."

Upzoning might seem like an obvious preference for tech companies and sometimes they act on this preference. It's useful to remember, though, that they have countervailing short-term preferences for single-family zoning.

Tech companies themselves have many internal constituencies (managers, line programmers, service workers). Since these companies are extremely not democracies, it's very easy for the preferences of a small valuable constituency (executives and managers) to override the preferences of a larger commoditized constituency (new grad engineers and janitors). Valuable internal constituencies are already compensated enough to buy a single-family home and generally don't want density.

It would be difficult for e.g. Facebook to publicly support upzoning in Menlo Park when half the NIMBYs in the room are relatively valuable mid-level engineering managers at Facebook. So we don't see these tech companies in general putting big resources behind really transformative upzoning projects.

Why does policy need to be "fair" to investors? New government policies move asset values (including real estate values!) in both directions all the time. Investors -- including homeowners -- are not entitled to an investment that always appreciates.

This belief that we cannot do a thing unless that thing benefits wealthy homeowners is harmful.

> I bought my first house in Berkeley > rented out 2 remaining rooms > buy a house in south SF > my mom and I bought a 3 unit run-down place in Oakland and fixed it up > rental income coming in around 13k / month > Looking back, the best thing I did for myself is to refrain from living extravagantly

Surprising! Sounds like the best thing that happened in this story was partnering with other wealthy people to engage in leveraged speculation on Bay Area real estate.

What's the evidence that speculation is driving price increases in California?