> After finding out that the city council was considering a housing element that would have bowed to NIMBY pressure, we sent two letters to the city, reminding it of its legal obligations under state law to approve the upzoning — and that a failure to do so would open the city up to a lawsuit.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm grateful that a group like this exists.
But I'm a YIMBY, so of course. If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with, I can imagine feeling frustrated, conspiratorial, or disenfranchised.
Maintaining a consistent commitment to liberal democracy, the legal system and due process is one of life's great challenges!
If you live in California I can assure you beyond any doubt that people from some far-away place have had outrageous levels of influence on your local housing policy. Almost the entire body of CEQA jurisprudence has been developed by two lawyers and a handful of labor union executives.
If your local building code requires an elevator that can accommodate a hospital stretcher, which is almost certainly does, that was jotted down in the building code by literally one guy from Glendale, Arizona, on the basis of a whim.
My county eliminated code compliance checks (and building plan review) 2 decades ago for owner-builders and it's made things so much cheaper and easier to build. It is the only way I was able to afford a house.
We were warned by nay-sayers the county would burn down but that never came to fruition and meanwhile I've seen so many code-Nazi places in California burn down from wildfires.
It's hilarious watching the systematic destruction of the counter points when people tell me about the horrors
(1) "You wouldn't want to live in such a house, it would burn down." I already do, and have been.
(2) Your neighborhood would catch fire. I live in such a neighborhood, it didn't.
(3) Just wait long enough! It will happen eventually. Eventually you'll have bad luck! This has been going on for 20+ years.
I sympathize with your experience but the code situation for multifamily is so much worse. The original motivating reason for the multifamily code was to stop people from building them, so it's all cursed, even 100 years later. It is wall-to-wall vibes and the fixes are not coming fast enough. Recently my city decided to amend out the requirement for firefighter air replenishment systems on every floor of buildings higher than three stories because, it turns out, even though this requirement exists nationwide, literally nobody has ever needed or used the FARS. It was made up and codified by the guy who sells the system!
It's also important to consider what the code is, anywho decides it, and for what reasons.
Most cities adopt a mishmash, but they take them from large private organizations that publish big books of code, and how that whole process happens is far more opaque than most standards bodies because it's so obscure. Is there evidence backing the changes? Is it vibes? Is there financial benefit for the code writers for certain choices?
This mishmash of choices by local cities also greatly reduces building efficiency, because even if I learn the fine details of my city, that doesn't guarantee I can apply my hard won code knowledge a few miles away.
Building code is important and I wouldn't go as far as saying "if you own the house you don't have to follow anything" but our current situation is also not providing much safety in the US. Code mostly exists to justify checks, not improve safety. A simpler, more uniform code, with clearer motivations and evidence would go a long way to reducing unnecessary costs.
LMAO. I built the house for $60,000. Myself. And I have the construction heavy equipment to demolish it, so I can demolish it for next to nothing. It paid for itself in 3 years vs renting.
I couldn't give a shit if I have to sell it for land value (which has massively appreciated by my own development, since I did all the prospecting for water, electric, and septic -- the land was basically worthless when I bought it), on the off chance someone doesn't want a mega cheap house in cash for break even. I didn't build it as an investment, I built it to live in.
It's by escaping your mentality, which is what has poisoned the real estate problem writ large, is how I escaped the inflated property price conundrum.
I agree that local communities are best at determining their own line when disputes arise between protecting the freedoms of one party versus another, which is a stance also held by the supreme court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_standards
In this case though, it's not someone going to a non-local city council or school board meeting and arguing for or against some policy that is up to that local board, but it is someone pointing out a policy that has been set at the state level. Any arguments for or against that policy need to take place at the state level, because that is the only place where it can be changed.
> If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with
Hah, they most certainly are! To such an extreme extent that I figure you'd probably reword this to something like "If I was aware of all the ways that lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar". They are most certainly constantly and relentlessly influencing your municipality on every issue that is relevant to them.
To those downvoting, if you tell me your municipality I will provide you with evidence of corporate lobbying influencing decisions of governance at the municipal level.
Right, but I suppose one issue is that, depending on how concentrated the AI agent market becomes, the rent seeking could eventually potentially just shift to these agents instead.
Maybe these are incompatible desires, but I would really like some kind of system that allows me to own and present my own music listening data while also allowing me to interoperate with a broader music listening culture.
Newsletters and blogs are great for discovery, but I also really value the way my last.fm has allowed me to recall a band I used to listen to a decade ago because I can remember a few of their contemporaries that are neighbours in the Similar Artists graph.
Do you spend that kind of money on it now using humans? Talk is cheap. I'm not saying I'd buy one given unknown capabilities and price, but $10k isn't that much for a robot, G1 is currently selling one for $16k and it doesn't do anything.
The first buyers are going to be the mid-wealthy. Live-in maid service is expensive. If the robot actually works, $50k for a live-in maid that you don't need to have space for an apartment in your mansion for them to live in is cheap.
This is a bit like saying "Buy a commodore 64 to store recipes? I'd rather have a recipe book," in 1985.
The home robot most likely will do much more than those things. It'll clean, but also be a guard dog, accept packages, garden, clean your car, reads stories to the baby, play catch with the dog, etc. Or at least in theory if the technology catches up.
How often do you hire people? And work with things like this? There's a real mental load and privacy and scheduling load here that robots solve. It can be very hard to find someone, then the time/investment of being home when they are available, etc. I'd rather have a substandard cleaning that's easy and convenient than getting these deep cleans and working with people, cleaning services, scheduling, the social and mental load of a stranger in your house, the issues about your own privacy, etc.
I think the success of the roomba shows that people will settle for less, and pay a lot for it. My robot vacuum is the worst vacuum and mop I've ever seen but it does it automatically and that means a lot to me. I just press a button and things are clean-ish. That has a lot of value. More complex robots will benefit from that kind of dynamic I imagine.
The lesson of that is that you should wait at least 20 years before getting a device that purports to do the thing well, and maybe 40. And even then, people will still publish recipe books and cooking technique books.
Right now, people who have flat floors, not too much pile on rugs and carpets, no pets or pets that don't shed much, no stairs, and don't have much in the way of mess are quite happy with their robot vacuum cleaners. Mostly. But vacuuming is pretty much the least annoying and tedious part of cleaning your house, and modern bagless upright convertible cleaners are cheap and lightweight.
People with medium sized flat boring lawns seem happy with their robot lawnmowers.
But its faster to get a service with the big mowers to do it, and the job gets done better by the humans, especially if you need to consider edges or have bushes to trim or leaves to move.
I have a job as a cleaner. We have clients who spend about that hiring us to do regular weekly cleaning.
But they still own a robotic vacuum, which they can deploy the other six days a week we aren’t there.
Initially the people who buy home robots can afford humans and robots.
Still so far away from being able to replace humans for all tasks, the difference between low hanging fruit (vacuum hardwood floors) and difficult tasks (dusting fragile art) is vast.
That’s 100 weeks at $100 per week. So, what, 5 hours per week, at most, for over-the-table and legit options, right?
That could be an interesting option, but realistically you’ll have to fold your laundry, do your own dishwasher, put away your/your kids’ toys, etc, unless you just want to have a clean house for one day per week.
Isn't the plan of automation to let humans free at any cost? Like it happened with computers and relief from bureaucracy. First printers costed 20k, still there are 20k printers but way more powerful, the first series now are in homes under $100. It will take time to get cheap.
I hadn't seen these before, but they're working because of the limitations of the technology.
The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.
Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.
what's unclear to me is how you identify the Real Units.
needing-to-breathe-ness is (probably) a gimme, but what are the units that will explain which route i take on my walk today? and how do you avoid defining units that aren't impressionistic once you need to rely on language and testimony to understand your research subject's mental state?
my understanding of psychological constructs is that they're earnest attempts to try and resolve this problem, even if they've led us to the tautological confusion we're in now.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm grateful that a group like this exists.
But I'm a YIMBY, so of course. If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with, I can imagine feeling frustrated, conspiratorial, or disenfranchised.
Maintaining a consistent commitment to liberal democracy, the legal system and due process is one of life's great challenges!
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