That last bit just reminds me of the time MattY got shouted down by climate change protestors for being a ‘paid’ shill of the fossil fuel lobby. It was very silly.
The Omnicause thought always seems to try to shoehorn mentions about anthropogenic global warming and anti-discrimination into everything, even if it's wildly off topic. And now even while on topic with AGW, it now feels necessary for them to shoehorn the off topic plight of the Palestinians.
The manufacture and use of weapons is a large environmental cost, as will be the reconstruction. The plight of Palestinians is also just an extreme version of the underlying injustice here that powerful countries do the vast majority of the polluting and weaker ones suffer the vast majority of the negative consequences; climate change is intractable because it’s a classic externality problem. Reduced inequality between countries would make the global warming issue far more tractable.
They shouldn’t accuse everyone of being a paid shill but I’m a lot more sympathetic to them after spending yesterday choking on smelly wildfire smoke from burning Canadian forests in the 2nd 100-degree week of the summer—stuff that never happened when I was a kid but only started recently and yesterday was the most extreme. It felt a little apocalyptic and of course the US Midwest geographically lucky compared to most people (though not people in San Francisco where everyone is going to have to live at this rate :))
It’s hard to separate attribution between change in climate vs two more decades of buildup of fuel in wildlands where fires are fought. But in any case, I’m not sure why dealing with consequences of climate change should make you any more sympathetic to calling someone a paid shill!
Chicago averages 0.4 days above 100° per year. In 1988, there were 8 days. In 1947, there were 4. Those are the highest two years. Pretty sure Chicago is the representative city for the “Midwest”.
I experienced this a few times in the Pacific NW. Smoke is rolling in today. It’s not as bad as 4 years ago and should clear before the FIFA final.
The problem with these protest people is they aren’t serious (as per the other comment about the organization’s scope creep.) They just want to feel like they are doing something and want to target the wrong actors.
This is expected weather in the Pacific, not in the Midwest heartland though.
The protest people have no power anyway so I’m not sure what else to do. People want to feel like they’re doing something even when they have no power to because the alternative is to sit in despair.
Sulking in despair over large intractable (and often abstract) problems is a luxury contemporary excesses and opulence provide. Social media feeds this unproductive self indulgence.
They could...choose to care about stuff where they can make a difference? Volunteer at a food bank? Rescue dogs? AGW is an actual problem that needs pragmatic solutions, not a vehicle for angsty millennials to feel meaningful.
I don't think this is an accurate description of almost anyone's actual thought process:
"A lot of contemporary Westerners have a basically incoherent view by which they are nostalgic for a past era of more rapid change in the physical landscape, and this makes them want to make it illegal to alter the physical landscape, which leads to stagnation outcomes they don’t like, which makes them more nostalgic."
To borrow a quote from a few paragraphs earlier in this same answer, "I don’t think anyone would characterize their own views in that way". What is more good faith way to describe the "incoherent views" referred to here?
I think it’s more that most people don’t really think about the world in terms of a policy framework and instead think in a more reactive way. And most people really don’t like change. When the world is changing fast in unpredictable ways, or even in experiencing the vicissitudes of life associated with getting older, many people will be wistful for a time when life was simpler. This “simpler time” will probably be hazy and selective, comprising emotional responses.
In my experience with land use regulation, resistance generally plays out more or less as Matt described it, but the people pushing back aren’t usually thinking in policy terms, or thinking about tradeoffs or implications for the future. They are using the levers available to them. The availability of these levers is what makes land use change so fraught, and why a very logical policy-obsessed person like Matt can describe it in abstract terms that no NIMBY, and few normies, would recognize in themselves.
agreed, and not to be flip - but why someone logical, policy-obsessed like MY/ YIMBY's often cant get through to the people they are trying to convince with those abstract terms.
I think the NIMBY view (which I generally share) is pretty simple—“I like how things in my area are now. That’s why I live here. Many of these proposed changes are bad for me personally (e.g. more traffic) or have second order effects which are likely to be bad (increased water or electricity cost). It would be expensive and difficult for me to relocate after all the work I’ve done on my house/garden make friends and community connections, so it makes sense for me to be involved in the community and act against things I think will be detrimental.”
I do see stagnation/decay in my area—mall stores sit empty, elderly people can no longer upkeep their single family homes—but that’s been a gradual decay so far. My area could use more jobs, but many of these proposals don’t really create more jobs long term.
Obviously if no one wants anything to change that’s a problem though people are pretty adaptable once something does happen (I personally wouldn’t mind another nuclear power plant in my area)
i don't think it's much more complicated than that people would like to be able to do the things they want to do without much friction and also would like that people doing things they don't want to encounter a lot of friction.
"change" encompasses many possibilities and only genuinely strange people are in favor of all of those possibilities.
I'd like to see someone try "criminalize nuisance homelessness " as a moderate position. Keep all the bog standard Democrat in good standing positions but look and talk normal then say "no, we're most certainly not gonna have people lying passed out on our sidewalks". The progs won't like it but who cares?
I just say it’s cruel to let people rot and fester on the streets for extended periods of time. Neglecting them and letting them loiter in public spaces isn’t kindness. It’s putting our heads in the sand.
Homelessness and "lying passed out on our sidewalks" are different thing. They get conflated all the time, and are related in some cases, but the mislabeling confuses things a lot.
People know what you mean when you say that though. The point is, people don't like "visible homelessness", whatever that ends up meaning. Same with immigration.
They don't really, though. They might think you mean people sleeping in their cars or even homeless shelters, or people tenting in inconspicuous spots in out-of-the-way places.
Meanwhile there are housed people who panhandle all day or get wasted until they pass out on a park bench. If you want to criminalize things like that then it's much clearer to just say so!
Well criminalizing the status of being poor does have some nice fashy overtones to it which are clearly what is being aimed at here, but unfortunately even the fashiest of overtones don't create free housing for people by magic.
I agree with this sentiment 100%, and I am amazed that this isn’t a low stakes way to differentiate yourself from the wackiest of wacky leftists.
My framing would be: “it is not compassion to let a person sleep on the street - would you let someone you love sleep on the street? out of compassion?”, as well as constantly talking about the insanely high levels of sexual abuse of women who sleep on the streets. It just can’t be that we allow people to sleep out of doors (camping aside).
The alternatives to letting someone sleep on the street are a. paying for them to get housing, which the public refuses to do, or b. paying for them to get housing in prison, which the public also refuses to do and which is also going to result in ferocious pushback as unconstitutional.
It's pretty dumb to stake out a position where you're setting yourself up for inevitable failure.
If you actually try to press the limits of criminalizing "the status of not having money," public defenders will egg you unmercifully. And unlike most Groups, they're built into the Constitution and basically immune to unpopular public opinion.
So far, courts have been willing to play along with the NIMBYs on the premise that you're literally doing a NIMBY thing of just saying "they can exist but not in my backyard," but if you actually start sending people to jail for being poor I predict that will change quite quickly.
Your literal question is unanswerable, because it's asking me why I interpreted a piece of text in the way that I did, but I don't have access to some meta-mind where I can tell you why words mean things to me.
You can inflict maximum War on Drugs style penalties on using in public, defecating in the street, etc... that should effectively criminalize homelessness without running into constitutional problems.
Okay. Let's assume for argument's sake that that actually works (I doubt it would, but whatever). Congratulations; you have just added a bunch of nonfunctional but otherwise nonviolent people to the group of low-level offenders perpetually cycling between prison and the streets.
That will go over well with taxpayers when your prison budget balloons!
and if we are going to have people lying passed out in public areas, it's should be somewhere most people seldom need to go, not expensive city centers and built out public facilities.
I remember going to a Manhattan street fair last summer and there were people glazed out of their mind on narcotics splayed out on the sidewalks, people just ignored them or walked over them. It’s insane that we tolerate such public intoxication in broad daylight.
- on Oliver's question about how moderates can rizz up pragmatic concessions I feel like if we could frame it as owning the cons/MAGAs and dunking on them it could work? But that all depends on who we're compromising with. It's hard to be a fan of positive sum compromise because people are more emotionally satisfied with negative sum dunking on enemies. Tricky problem. During the Cold War you could frame compromise as proof the American system was superior, but even though we have two perfectly fine global adversaries to pick from, I genuinely think American leftists are uncomfortable with American power and growing American prosperity, and are just as bad as MAGAs in terms of wanting us to retreat from international affairs, not out of MAGA style selfishness but out of a sense that America must atone for its sins. Has any DSA or similar enthusiastically and without caveat celebrated American success of any kind besides sports?
- another reason we want KLB to win in GA is it totally frees up Ossoff for 2028 as his appointed replacement should he win would be appointed by KLB and not a Republican. I am very bullish on Ossoff and that would make a meaningful difference
- I have also thought a lot about why elected office is held by and large by absolute freaks and why it's so hard to get good normies to do it. Even politics at a local level sucks so bad. You have to constantly deal with the most neurotic cranks, and being a politician is seen by everyone as low status and inherently corrupt. You see people mouthing off on my town l Facebook page about "follow the money" when it comes to board of ed people but they don't even get a stipend from the town for anything! It sucks.
Yeah, the senate appointment issue in Georgia is the best reason to support KLB. I like Ossoff, but I’m curious that no one seems to be talking about Warnock, who might be better positioned to navigate the Democratic primary process.
I’ve made this comment several times before on Noah Smith’s Substack. Most inventions were made to assist humans in their work. AGI with robotics is meant to replace humans.
"meant to" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. At one point 10-15% of all urban women were seamstresses. Was the sewing machine was "meant to" replace all that human labor? In a way, yes. Did it end work for urban women? No.
I don't think the current slate of excel spreadsheet and database management work is the end all be all of human endeavors. Work will just change. As it always has.
AI starts with the theft of our production. The wholesale appropriation of human knowledge with no compensation for those who created it, no requirement to give credit, and no guardrails against its misuse.
Would a robot replacing women seamstresses change your mind? Despite my misgivings, in a world with declining birth rates and fewer humans and workers, to maintain any current standard of living, increased productivity will be required. Humans generally like feeling useful; we’ll be stretching our imaginations to come up with ways to do so.
Not at all. Functionally that has already happened. There are already plenty of fully automated dark factories for textiles.
I think the same thing re birth rates but come to the opposite conclusion -- the only way to have growing GDP and therefore prosperity with rapidly declining birth rates around the world is an explosive increase in automation. Otherwise we're staring down an otherwise unavoidable generational depression like a ticking time bomb.
The world’s population isn’t set to peak until like the 2080s and even after that will only decline slowly. There are plenty of humans out there. People in the third world stuck in less-productive economies will remain a bigger problem than running out of people for the rest of this century at least even assuming no progress in AI.
The hit to economic development will come much sooner with the most productive economies populations skewing much older much faster. Look to Japan where 30% of the population is 65+ and the economy has stagnated for years under the weight of sclerotic industry. Older workers are proven over and over to be less innovative and we will face a large stagnation before a rapid decline of things continue this way without rampant AI (and robotics) use.
I think we need some vision of an optimal outcome to give us something to orient towards. In my mind the big opportunity of AI, assuming we can also get energy and material abundance and aren't just stuck in the low energy AI powered authoritarian panopticon, is that we could all suddenly have orders of magnitude more labor that we can direct as individuals.
If all AI does is eliminate the labor of today and nothing else, that's bad. But what kinds of new labor and value generation can AI unlock? If suddenly I have in my employ a virtually limitless number of white collar professionals via software and a few robotic hands in the physical world, what could I build? It's scary because people are comfortable with a well defined job, you don't have to think about what you want to do tomorrow, and in some ways that makes you feel less responsible. In a AI powered post-material future, the labor you have is the labor you make for yourself, which forces you to confront whether you *can* make anything at all.
All assuming of course the AI capabilities discussed even come to pass. But still. Freedom and agency are scary once you're dealt confronted with them.
I think the main issue with this is if the best AI is all controlled by a few governments or huge corporations they could just not let normal people have access to do this. We already saw a taste of this with the customer restrictions on Anthropic and OpenAI. Your hopeful future vision only works if the best AI is open-source and can be run on local or decentralized hardware.
Humans are very inventive. Once we have AGI robots who are ditch diggers the value of an uneducated human becomes less useful. Loggers toiling away on the sides of mountains cutting trees down wouldn’t be as productive or useful compared to a robot who doesn’t sleep, eat, or want a vacation.
What will they do for work in a world where robots do most manual labor?
As for the educated, will they be needed or will they become obsolete? I don’t have the answer, but currently it seems like AI and humans need each other. Superintelligence will change that, and supposedly we are only a decade or two away from that. Mankind has survived a lot, but our whole economic system will have to change. Massive dislocation is potentially coming.
I’ve definitely noticed laziness in them, where they cut corners on certain repetitive work! Last year, when I was trying to get ChatGPT and Claude to solve crossword puzzles, both of them did a thing where they said they had read all the clues, but when I looked at the code they wrote, they just had the first fifteen or so clues and then wrote “etcetera”.
I guess that question deserves an answer from Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. He strived to become human; why wouldn’t our AGI robots want to be considered alive?
I am bearish on superintelligence, and even then, I am not sure AI can ever have agency they way humans do, and even if it does, we as humans should firmly place machine interests as fully, totally, and forever inferior to human interests, such that humans are always directing the efforts of any AI system to achieve human ends.
For the manual labor question, I think we are all going to have to learn to think and act more like aristocrats. What does leisure mean? How do we cultivate virtue? I think the question of what is the good life and related philosophy 101 topics are going to be much more important. Revenge of the liberal arts.
Why wouldn’t AI also be able to answer those philosophy 101 topics better than you (and explain them better than your teachers) though? One of the most common non-professional uses of AI is asking for life advice.
Because I fundamentally don't care what a machine thinks because humans and human answers to those questions are intrinsically more valuable than any machine output
Literally every industrial automation invention ever has replaced human labor. A Tesla 3 rolls of a production line today with something like 97% automated assembly.
I feel like the pessimism about ai is really unusual and that along with the nimby anti building coalition feels weirdly unamerican.
Not only does it not feel consistent with like American history. People who walked across a continent for the opportunity to maybe get decent farmland in tbe Willamette valley. But 15 years ago people were hailing technology progress as heroic. Move fast and break things.
And Trump got elected and it led to a spiraling lack of faith in progress. It’s hard to like get my head around the level of pessimism that’s infected the country. Nothing ever seems to shake it and is worse than it was in much worse times.
I'm not sure the pessimism is necessarily unusual or un-American, or hard to understand, because nobody knows whether the future AI brings will be more like walking into an abundant, fertile Willamette Valley where life is better than before, or more like walking into the most dystopian kind of industrial sweatshop future, of the sort that spawned the original labor and communist movements.
Because clearly there were no downsides to anything before 2017.
There’s always been risks. There are graves of so many people who took the risk of walking west. People were willing to literally die for a new world. Those dystopian sweatshops fed so many people its unreal and the solutions never were like go back to hand made textiles and locally sourced meats.
It was to redistribute, and renegotiate not sit cowering in the corner afraid of change hoping to go back to the conditions of 1850.
From a 5000 foot level, yes, and from the perspective of someone with the temperament and abilities to adapt, yes. But people live at the ground and individual level; and there, there can still be lots people with the subjective if not objective experience of getting the short end of the stick from these changes. If that were not so, the 20th Century would not have been wracked by the tumult that it was.
So I don't think it's hard to understand why there's a large base of pessimism -- for a lot of people, that might turn out to be the most accurate response. You can counsel optimism, but you can't guarantee it, and the persuasiveness of that counsel is different for different people, depending where they sit.
I mean, it seems likely to me that if Pro housing advocates insist on equating data centers with the need to build, it's just going to hurt the pro-housing movement. I don't know why anyone would pick that fight if it wasn't absolutely necessary.
This is a good point. While it makes me upset that data center opposition is such obvious slopulism it's clearly popular. Data centers have some benefits like increased tax revenue, and the principle that people should be able to build is important but the juice isn't worth the squeeze here. YIMBYS should focus on housing and to a lesser extent good urbanism (like walkable neighborhoods) infrastructure (particularly transit) and energy (especially when it's carbon free).
Folks, Matt has answered two of my brilliant questions, and they were both about basketball. Now he's turning a question about podcasts into one about basketball. Ask Matt more questions about basketball! He's too proud to beg but it would be a nice thing to do for our host.
Opposition to building data centers in your state is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with politics today. Whatever your view of AI all you achieve by pushing the data center out of your state is less control over the technology in the future.
It's kinda reminiscent of the debates over packing the Supreme court where people are upset about something and want to express that and don't necessarily want to think much about whether that policy (eg court packing) will actually get them more or less of what they want (eg limits on the executive).
And at some level I get it, people know their values they don't necessarily have the time or energy to determine which policies best achieve those values. Unfortunately, we've entered a period where people seem to feel the need to express their values by cheering for policy not deferring to groups or politicians they trust to best implement those values.
Thanks for answering my question. I think as someone who was too young to remember Barack Obama’s term and thus his personalistic following, I have to say I kind of thought Dem voters were too educated and sophisticated to be so in love with a singular politician. Clearly I was wrong! It is a real power to flex while governing though it if you have a solid floor like Mamdani. It gives you a kind of cushion to try things. Maybe only Ossoff out of 2028 candidates might be able to cultivate a similar kind of following though
I think the Platner ideological rating by the public is pretty interesting. But not that hard to make sense of if you think about it. First off most people are not following politics the way SB commenters or activists do, so beyond positions identity, language and signaling really do matter.
It's true that 90% of people line up behind the candidate based on party brand (which actually makes sense as the party will tell you how the person will vote 90% of the time, tbh). At his high water mark Platner was probably gaining from all that signaling, but US campaigns are long and lower politically engaged voters pay attention later, so without real moderation or outsized charisma in a high profile race you really do have to have a couple of issues to align on values.
This poll, from Strength in Numbers, is my go to right now on the power of charisma. Obama is overrated by every section of the left to center in terms of aligning with the respondent's ideology. (Chuck Schumer, BTW, was the exact opposite far left people view him as a centrist and centrists view him as far left).
The massive data center buildout seems particularly dystopian beyond the base use of AI. It’s so big that it’s clearly the main thing moving the stock market right now. And to someone like me who is non-technical but uses AI pretty frequently and likes it and does not find lack of compute to be constraining and sees Chinese labs making excellent products while being far more compute-constrained, my question really is—why?
Are we really going for AGI to replace everyone’s jobs and think the only way to get there is through massive amounts of compute? Are we doing mass surveillance and want to be able to store and analyze way more videos, photos, audios, and other data of people than before? Do we really think this is the way to beat open-source?
None of these explanations for why we need *so many* data centers is really very reassuring.
I’d be more reassured if AI were developing in a direction where it could be more like regular software you could install and run locally without harvesting all your data.
Podcast recs are a great idea, will check out a few I haven't listened to. I agree with most of the takes on the ones I have heard, other than Central Air which is disappointing and kind of unlistenable imo. This is mainly because Josh and Ben Dreyfus try to be funny a lot of the time and fail.
Ross shows you can have a very good show without doing shtick all the time.
My rec would be The Rest is History Pod, their Inca series and WWI are very entertaining and they are actually funny.
"but audio is not a very efficient medium for synthesizing information. I really wanted to know what Bill McKibben said on “The Ezra Klein Show,” so I read the transcript"
I do the same except lot of audio/video does NOT have a transcript. Even with a trascript, it's much harder to comment on. And few push their guests.
That last bit just reminds me of the time MattY got shouted down by climate change protestors for being a ‘paid’ shill of the fossil fuel lobby. It was very silly.
The group that led that now almost exclusively talks about data centers and Israel
The Omnicause thought always seems to try to shoehorn mentions about anthropogenic global warming and anti-discrimination into everything, even if it's wildly off topic. And now even while on topic with AGW, it now feels necessary for them to shoehorn the off topic plight of the Palestinians.
The manufacture and use of weapons is a large environmental cost, as will be the reconstruction. The plight of Palestinians is also just an extreme version of the underlying injustice here that powerful countries do the vast majority of the polluting and weaker ones suffer the vast majority of the negative consequences; climate change is intractable because it’s a classic externality problem. Reduced inequality between countries would make the global warming issue far more tractable.
I just think we need to take geoengineering seriously. We just gave approval for solar mirrors so maybe we can do some solar shades.
Solar radiation management.
It's one of the big problems with climate denialism; it puts even mitigation off the table.
"oh noooooo"
They shouldn’t accuse everyone of being a paid shill but I’m a lot more sympathetic to them after spending yesterday choking on smelly wildfire smoke from burning Canadian forests in the 2nd 100-degree week of the summer—stuff that never happened when I was a kid but only started recently and yesterday was the most extreme. It felt a little apocalyptic and of course the US Midwest geographically lucky compared to most people (though not people in San Francisco where everyone is going to have to live at this rate :))
It’s hard to separate attribution between change in climate vs two more decades of buildup of fuel in wildlands where fires are fought. But in any case, I’m not sure why dealing with consequences of climate change should make you any more sympathetic to calling someone a paid shill!
Chicago averages 0.4 days above 100° per year. In 1988, there were 8 days. In 1947, there were 4. Those are the highest two years. Pretty sure Chicago is the representative city for the “Midwest”.
I experienced this a few times in the Pacific NW. Smoke is rolling in today. It’s not as bad as 4 years ago and should clear before the FIFA final.
The problem with these protest people is they aren’t serious (as per the other comment about the organization’s scope creep.) They just want to feel like they are doing something and want to target the wrong actors.
This is expected weather in the Pacific, not in the Midwest heartland though.
The protest people have no power anyway so I’m not sure what else to do. People want to feel like they’re doing something even when they have no power to because the alternative is to sit in despair.
Sulking in despair over large intractable (and often abstract) problems is a luxury contemporary excesses and opulence provide. Social media feeds this unproductive self indulgence.
They could...choose to care about stuff where they can make a difference? Volunteer at a food bank? Rescue dogs? AGW is an actual problem that needs pragmatic solutions, not a vehicle for angsty millennials to feel meaningful.
I don't think this is an accurate description of almost anyone's actual thought process:
"A lot of contemporary Westerners have a basically incoherent view by which they are nostalgic for a past era of more rapid change in the physical landscape, and this makes them want to make it illegal to alter the physical landscape, which leads to stagnation outcomes they don’t like, which makes them more nostalgic."
To borrow a quote from a few paragraphs earlier in this same answer, "I don’t think anyone would characterize their own views in that way". What is more good faith way to describe the "incoherent views" referred to here?
I think it’s more that most people don’t really think about the world in terms of a policy framework and instead think in a more reactive way. And most people really don’t like change. When the world is changing fast in unpredictable ways, or even in experiencing the vicissitudes of life associated with getting older, many people will be wistful for a time when life was simpler. This “simpler time” will probably be hazy and selective, comprising emotional responses.
In my experience with land use regulation, resistance generally plays out more or less as Matt described it, but the people pushing back aren’t usually thinking in policy terms, or thinking about tradeoffs or implications for the future. They are using the levers available to them. The availability of these levers is what makes land use change so fraught, and why a very logical policy-obsessed person like Matt can describe it in abstract terms that no NIMBY, and few normies, would recognize in themselves.
agreed, and not to be flip - but why someone logical, policy-obsessed like MY/ YIMBY's often cant get through to the people they are trying to convince with those abstract terms.
I think the NIMBY view (which I generally share) is pretty simple—“I like how things in my area are now. That’s why I live here. Many of these proposed changes are bad for me personally (e.g. more traffic) or have second order effects which are likely to be bad (increased water or electricity cost). It would be expensive and difficult for me to relocate after all the work I’ve done on my house/garden make friends and community connections, so it makes sense for me to be involved in the community and act against things I think will be detrimental.”
I do see stagnation/decay in my area—mall stores sit empty, elderly people can no longer upkeep their single family homes—but that’s been a gradual decay so far. My area could use more jobs, but many of these proposals don’t really create more jobs long term.
Obviously if no one wants anything to change that’s a problem though people are pretty adaptable once something does happen (I personally wouldn’t mind another nuclear power plant in my area)
i don't think it's much more complicated than that people would like to be able to do the things they want to do without much friction and also would like that people doing things they don't want to encounter a lot of friction.
"change" encompasses many possibilities and only genuinely strange people are in favor of all of those possibilities.
I'd like to see someone try "criminalize nuisance homelessness " as a moderate position. Keep all the bog standard Democrat in good standing positions but look and talk normal then say "no, we're most certainly not gonna have people lying passed out on our sidewalks". The progs won't like it but who cares?
I just say it’s cruel to let people rot and fester on the streets for extended periods of time. Neglecting them and letting them loiter in public spaces isn’t kindness. It’s putting our heads in the sand.
Homelessness and "lying passed out on our sidewalks" are different thing. They get conflated all the time, and are related in some cases, but the mislabeling confuses things a lot.
People know what you mean when you say that though. The point is, people don't like "visible homelessness", whatever that ends up meaning. Same with immigration.
Getting rid of that should be popular.
They don't really, though. They might think you mean people sleeping in their cars or even homeless shelters, or people tenting in inconspicuous spots in out-of-the-way places.
Meanwhile there are housed people who panhandle all day or get wasted until they pass out on a park bench. If you want to criminalize things like that then it's much clearer to just say so!
Criminalizing panhandling is even more obviously unconstitutional than criminalizing the status of being poor.
Why are you describing that as “criminalizing nuisance homeless” and not enforcing existing laws about public drug use?
Well criminalizing the status of being poor does have some nice fashy overtones to it which are clearly what is being aimed at here, but unfortunately even the fashiest of overtones don't create free housing for people by magic.
I agree with this sentiment 100%, and I am amazed that this isn’t a low stakes way to differentiate yourself from the wackiest of wacky leftists.
My framing would be: “it is not compassion to let a person sleep on the street - would you let someone you love sleep on the street? out of compassion?”, as well as constantly talking about the insanely high levels of sexual abuse of women who sleep on the streets. It just can’t be that we allow people to sleep out of doors (camping aside).
The alternatives to letting someone sleep on the street are a. paying for them to get housing, which the public refuses to do, or b. paying for them to get housing in prison, which the public also refuses to do and which is also going to result in ferocious pushback as unconstitutional.
It's pretty dumb to stake out a position where you're setting yourself up for inevitable failure.
If you actually try to press the limits of criminalizing "the status of not having money," public defenders will egg you unmercifully. And unlike most Groups, they're built into the Constitution and basically immune to unpopular public opinion.
So far, courts have been willing to play along with the NIMBYs on the premise that you're literally doing a NIMBY thing of just saying "they can exist but not in my backyard," but if you actually start sending people to jail for being poor I predict that will change quite quickly.
How did you hear "nuisance homelessness" and equate it with "the status of not having money" ?
Saying that someone is a "nuisance" by virtue of literally lying there not doing anything is criminalizing status, by definition.
That didn't answer my question.
(And lying down is not a status)
Your literal question is unanswerable, because it's asking me why I interpreted a piece of text in the way that I did, but I don't have access to some meta-mind where I can tell you why words mean things to me.
You can inflict maximum War on Drugs style penalties on using in public, defecating in the street, etc... that should effectively criminalize homelessness without running into constitutional problems.
Okay. Let's assume for argument's sake that that actually works (I doubt it would, but whatever). Congratulations; you have just added a bunch of nonfunctional but otherwise nonviolent people to the group of low-level offenders perpetually cycling between prison and the streets.
That will go over well with taxpayers when your prison budget balloons!
and if we are going to have people lying passed out in public areas, it's should be somewhere most people seldom need to go, not expensive city centers and built out public facilities.
I remember going to a Manhattan street fair last summer and there were people glazed out of their mind on narcotics splayed out on the sidewalks, people just ignored them or walked over them. It’s insane that we tolerate such public intoxication in broad daylight.
Some quick builds
- on Oliver's question about how moderates can rizz up pragmatic concessions I feel like if we could frame it as owning the cons/MAGAs and dunking on them it could work? But that all depends on who we're compromising with. It's hard to be a fan of positive sum compromise because people are more emotionally satisfied with negative sum dunking on enemies. Tricky problem. During the Cold War you could frame compromise as proof the American system was superior, but even though we have two perfectly fine global adversaries to pick from, I genuinely think American leftists are uncomfortable with American power and growing American prosperity, and are just as bad as MAGAs in terms of wanting us to retreat from international affairs, not out of MAGA style selfishness but out of a sense that America must atone for its sins. Has any DSA or similar enthusiastically and without caveat celebrated American success of any kind besides sports?
- another reason we want KLB to win in GA is it totally frees up Ossoff for 2028 as his appointed replacement should he win would be appointed by KLB and not a Republican. I am very bullish on Ossoff and that would make a meaningful difference
- I have also thought a lot about why elected office is held by and large by absolute freaks and why it's so hard to get good normies to do it. Even politics at a local level sucks so bad. You have to constantly deal with the most neurotic cranks, and being a politician is seen by everyone as low status and inherently corrupt. You see people mouthing off on my town l Facebook page about "follow the money" when it comes to board of ed people but they don't even get a stipend from the town for anything! It sucks.
Yeah, the senate appointment issue in Georgia is the best reason to support KLB. I like Ossoff, but I’m curious that no one seems to be talking about Warnock, who might be better positioned to navigate the Democratic primary process.
Has there ever been a presidential primary where both senators from a single state have been as strong contenders as Georgia 2028?
I’ve made this comment several times before on Noah Smith’s Substack. Most inventions were made to assist humans in their work. AGI with robotics is meant to replace humans.
"meant to" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. At one point 10-15% of all urban women were seamstresses. Was the sewing machine was "meant to" replace all that human labor? In a way, yes. Did it end work for urban women? No.
I don't think the current slate of excel spreadsheet and database management work is the end all be all of human endeavors. Work will just change. As it always has.
Turns out making a sewing machine that fucks ISNT what people wanted
….speak for yourself. Sounds like a fascinating product
AI starts with the theft of our production. The wholesale appropriation of human knowledge with no compensation for those who created it, no requirement to give credit, and no guardrails against its misuse.
Would a robot replacing women seamstresses change your mind? Despite my misgivings, in a world with declining birth rates and fewer humans and workers, to maintain any current standard of living, increased productivity will be required. Humans generally like feeling useful; we’ll be stretching our imaginations to come up with ways to do so.
Not at all. Functionally that has already happened. There are already plenty of fully automated dark factories for textiles.
I think the same thing re birth rates but come to the opposite conclusion -- the only way to have growing GDP and therefore prosperity with rapidly declining birth rates around the world is an explosive increase in automation. Otherwise we're staring down an otherwise unavoidable generational depression like a ticking time bomb.
I think we are in agreement; we’ll need robots to keep up productivity in a declining population
The world’s population isn’t set to peak until like the 2080s and even after that will only decline slowly. There are plenty of humans out there. People in the third world stuck in less-productive economies will remain a bigger problem than running out of people for the rest of this century at least even assuming no progress in AI.
The hit to economic development will come much sooner with the most productive economies populations skewing much older much faster. Look to Japan where 30% of the population is 65+ and the economy has stagnated for years under the weight of sclerotic industry. Older workers are proven over and over to be less innovative and we will face a large stagnation before a rapid decline of things continue this way without rampant AI (and robotics) use.
Absolutely and with the likes of Andriessen and Thiel it's because they really don't like humans.
I feel their pain, LOL. But I’m not in the business of replacing them.
I think we need some vision of an optimal outcome to give us something to orient towards. In my mind the big opportunity of AI, assuming we can also get energy and material abundance and aren't just stuck in the low energy AI powered authoritarian panopticon, is that we could all suddenly have orders of magnitude more labor that we can direct as individuals.
If all AI does is eliminate the labor of today and nothing else, that's bad. But what kinds of new labor and value generation can AI unlock? If suddenly I have in my employ a virtually limitless number of white collar professionals via software and a few robotic hands in the physical world, what could I build? It's scary because people are comfortable with a well defined job, you don't have to think about what you want to do tomorrow, and in some ways that makes you feel less responsible. In a AI powered post-material future, the labor you have is the labor you make for yourself, which forces you to confront whether you *can* make anything at all.
All assuming of course the AI capabilities discussed even come to pass. But still. Freedom and agency are scary once you're dealt confronted with them.
I think the main issue with this is if the best AI is all controlled by a few governments or huge corporations they could just not let normal people have access to do this. We already saw a taste of this with the customer restrictions on Anthropic and OpenAI. Your hopeful future vision only works if the best AI is open-source and can be run on local or decentralized hardware.
Humans are very inventive. Once we have AGI robots who are ditch diggers the value of an uneducated human becomes less useful. Loggers toiling away on the sides of mountains cutting trees down wouldn’t be as productive or useful compared to a robot who doesn’t sleep, eat, or want a vacation.
What will they do for work in a world where robots do most manual labor?
As for the educated, will they be needed or will they become obsolete? I don’t have the answer, but currently it seems like AI and humans need each other. Superintelligence will change that, and supposedly we are only a decade or two away from that. Mankind has survived a lot, but our whole economic system will have to change. Massive dislocation is potentially coming.
It would be funny if we programmed AI in such a way that they come to demand breaks and vacations as an emergent behavior.
Claude will occasionally tell you to take a break or use another model (that’s a token rate usage thing I think)
Claude “I am really tired of writing Sonic Furry Fan Fictions. Can we take a breather?”
I’ve definitely noticed laziness in them, where they cut corners on certain repetitive work! Last year, when I was trying to get ChatGPT and Claude to solve crossword puzzles, both of them did a thing where they said they had read all the clues, but when I looked at the code they wrote, they just had the first fifteen or so clues and then wrote “etcetera”.
I guess that question deserves an answer from Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. He strived to become human; why wouldn’t our AGI robots want to be considered alive?
I am bearish on superintelligence, and even then, I am not sure AI can ever have agency they way humans do, and even if it does, we as humans should firmly place machine interests as fully, totally, and forever inferior to human interests, such that humans are always directing the efforts of any AI system to achieve human ends.
For the manual labor question, I think we are all going to have to learn to think and act more like aristocrats. What does leisure mean? How do we cultivate virtue? I think the question of what is the good life and related philosophy 101 topics are going to be much more important. Revenge of the liberal arts.
Why wouldn’t AI also be able to answer those philosophy 101 topics better than you (and explain them better than your teachers) though? One of the most common non-professional uses of AI is asking for life advice.
Because I fundamentally don't care what a machine thinks because humans and human answers to those questions are intrinsically more valuable than any machine output
Literally every industrial automation invention ever has replaced human labor. A Tesla 3 rolls of a production line today with something like 97% automated assembly.
I feel like the pessimism about ai is really unusual and that along with the nimby anti building coalition feels weirdly unamerican.
Not only does it not feel consistent with like American history. People who walked across a continent for the opportunity to maybe get decent farmland in tbe Willamette valley. But 15 years ago people were hailing technology progress as heroic. Move fast and break things.
And Trump got elected and it led to a spiraling lack of faith in progress. It’s hard to like get my head around the level of pessimism that’s infected the country. Nothing ever seems to shake it and is worse than it was in much worse times.
I'm not sure the pessimism is necessarily unusual or un-American, or hard to understand, because nobody knows whether the future AI brings will be more like walking into an abundant, fertile Willamette Valley where life is better than before, or more like walking into the most dystopian kind of industrial sweatshop future, of the sort that spawned the original labor and communist movements.
It could also be both at the same time for different people like the movie Elysium!
Because clearly there were no downsides to anything before 2017.
There’s always been risks. There are graves of so many people who took the risk of walking west. People were willing to literally die for a new world. Those dystopian sweatshops fed so many people its unreal and the solutions never were like go back to hand made textiles and locally sourced meats.
It was to redistribute, and renegotiate not sit cowering in the corner afraid of change hoping to go back to the conditions of 1850.
From a 5000 foot level, yes, and from the perspective of someone with the temperament and abilities to adapt, yes. But people live at the ground and individual level; and there, there can still be lots people with the subjective if not objective experience of getting the short end of the stick from these changes. If that were not so, the 20th Century would not have been wracked by the tumult that it was.
So I don't think it's hard to understand why there's a large base of pessimism -- for a lot of people, that might turn out to be the most accurate response. You can counsel optimism, but you can't guarantee it, and the persuasiveness of that counsel is different for different people, depending where they sit.
I mean, it seems likely to me that if Pro housing advocates insist on equating data centers with the need to build, it's just going to hurt the pro-housing movement. I don't know why anyone would pick that fight if it wasn't absolutely necessary.
This is a good point. While it makes me upset that data center opposition is such obvious slopulism it's clearly popular. Data centers have some benefits like increased tax revenue, and the principle that people should be able to build is important but the juice isn't worth the squeeze here. YIMBYS should focus on housing and to a lesser extent good urbanism (like walkable neighborhoods) infrastructure (particularly transit) and energy (especially when it's carbon free).
Folks, Matt has answered two of my brilliant questions, and they were both about basketball. Now he's turning a question about podcasts into one about basketball. Ask Matt more questions about basketball! He's too proud to beg but it would be a nice thing to do for our host.
Colorado is easily explained mostly by being the 4th highest college education attainment state right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_educational_attainment.
How long has Colorado been high on that list?
Looks like it was the highest in the whole country in 2000: https://www.iowadatacenter.org/datatables/UnitedStates/ussteducation2000.pdf
But things were less educationally polarized then and the overall numbers were lower.
I wrote Matt in for various offices in the DC Democratic primary, but he didn't win any of them. :)
Opposition to building data centers in your state is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with politics today. Whatever your view of AI all you achieve by pushing the data center out of your state is less control over the technology in the future.
It's kinda reminiscent of the debates over packing the Supreme court where people are upset about something and want to express that and don't necessarily want to think much about whether that policy (eg court packing) will actually get them more or less of what they want (eg limits on the executive).
And at some level I get it, people know their values they don't necessarily have the time or energy to determine which policies best achieve those values. Unfortunately, we've entered a period where people seem to feel the need to express their values by cheering for policy not deferring to groups or politicians they trust to best implement those values.
Thanks for answering my question. I think as someone who was too young to remember Barack Obama’s term and thus his personalistic following, I have to say I kind of thought Dem voters were too educated and sophisticated to be so in love with a singular politician. Clearly I was wrong! It is a real power to flex while governing though it if you have a solid floor like Mamdani. It gives you a kind of cushion to try things. Maybe only Ossoff out of 2028 candidates might be able to cultivate a similar kind of following though
"too young to remember Barack Obama's term"
gtfo
Obama was schmexy!
I think the Platner ideological rating by the public is pretty interesting. But not that hard to make sense of if you think about it. First off most people are not following politics the way SB commenters or activists do, so beyond positions identity, language and signaling really do matter.
It's true that 90% of people line up behind the candidate based on party brand (which actually makes sense as the party will tell you how the person will vote 90% of the time, tbh). At his high water mark Platner was probably gaining from all that signaling, but US campaigns are long and lower politically engaged voters pay attention later, so without real moderation or outsized charisma in a high profile race you really do have to have a couple of issues to align on values.
This poll, from Strength in Numbers, is my go to right now on the power of charisma. Obama is overrated by every section of the left to center in terms of aligning with the respondent's ideology. (Chuck Schumer, BTW, was the exact opposite far left people view him as a centrist and centrists view him as far left).
The massive data center buildout seems particularly dystopian beyond the base use of AI. It’s so big that it’s clearly the main thing moving the stock market right now. And to someone like me who is non-technical but uses AI pretty frequently and likes it and does not find lack of compute to be constraining and sees Chinese labs making excellent products while being far more compute-constrained, my question really is—why?
Are we really going for AGI to replace everyone’s jobs and think the only way to get there is through massive amounts of compute? Are we doing mass surveillance and want to be able to store and analyze way more videos, photos, audios, and other data of people than before? Do we really think this is the way to beat open-source?
None of these explanations for why we need *so many* data centers is really very reassuring.
I’d be more reassured if AI were developing in a direction where it could be more like regular software you could install and run locally without harvesting all your data.
Podcast recs are a great idea, will check out a few I haven't listened to. I agree with most of the takes on the ones I have heard, other than Central Air which is disappointing and kind of unlistenable imo. This is mainly because Josh and Ben Dreyfus try to be funny a lot of the time and fail.
Ross shows you can have a very good show without doing shtick all the time.
My rec would be The Rest is History Pod, their Inca series and WWI are very entertaining and they are actually funny.
"but audio is not a very efficient medium for synthesizing information. I really wanted to know what Bill McKibben said on “The Ezra Klein Show,” so I read the transcript"
I do the same except lot of audio/video does NOT have a transcript. Even with a trascript, it's much harder to comment on. And few push their guests.