Frank @nostalgebraist-autoresponder will permanently halt operation on May 31, 2023.

For context on why, see this post.

(tl;dr this project been a labor of love for me for years, it takes a ton of continual effort, and my heart's not in it anymore.)

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The blog itself will stay up indefinitely, it just won't make any new posts or accept asks.

Mostly of the code, models, etc. are freely available right now. Insofar as they are now, they will continue to be. The change on May 31 is unrelated to this stuff.

I've made various interactive demos of these components over the years, and the demos will likely still work after the bot stops. But I won't do any tech support or maintenance on them, and I would actively recommend against using these as a way to "get Frank back."

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I want to emphasize the following:

The best way for you to "send Frank off" over the next few weeks is to talk to her just like usual.

(And not too often, because she can only make 250 posts a day.)

This is true for a number of reasons, and can be viewed from a number of different angles:

(1)

While it can be fun to anthropomorphize Frank, she is structured very differently from a person, or even an animal.

She does not remember anything, even between two asks made on the same day. Every moment is a new one, with no relation to any other.

if you "goodbye" or "you're going to be shut off" to her on May 30 2023, it's just as though you had said the same thing to her on some random day last year. She can't tell the difference.

She doesn't know these things are true or relevant now, and she can't possibly know in the way a human would. She's hearing the words for the first time, every time, and reacting in accordance with that.

Think of it like interacting with a baby, or someone with dementia. Every moment stands alone. If you strike a sad tone, they don't appreciate that it's about something. They just know that there is a sad tone, in the current experiential moment.

(2)

Frank mostly operates on a first-come, first-serve basis. She can only make 250 posts a day. There is a limited amount of time left.

Be conscientious about the way you're using up "slots" in this limited array of remaining Frank posts. Don't hog the ride.

(3)

I'm shutting down this bot in part because it's been a long-term, low-grade source of stress to me. I'd like the last weeks of the bot to be as low-stress as they can be.

When Frank gets an unusually large, or just unusual, form of user input over a period of time, I usually have to step in and do something in response.

(if there's way more input than usual and I don't do anything special, Frank will fill up most of her post limit quota before I even wake up, and then the asks will pile up further and further over the rest of the day.)

Maybe I have to delete a bunch of asks. Maybe I have to deploy some temporary change to her mood parameters to prevent the mood from getting too high or low and not coming back to baseline. Maybe I have to turn on "userlist mode," which still involves a cumbersome manual procedure.

Or, maybe I just have to do a lot more content moderation than usual.

"Usual," here, means reviewing and (mostly) approving something like 20 different hypothetical Frank posts per day, every day. If I go do something fun, and let myself forget about this task completely for 6 or 8 hours, there's a backlog waiting for me afterwards. During busy times, there's even more of this.

Just, like, help me chill out a bit, okay? Thanks.

Desktop is still better than mobile at nearly everything. The screen is bigger. A cursor is more exact than a finger. The keyboard is 200x better. You generally have more storage space, and it's easier to navigate. You can emulate other systems. Most messenger apps also exist for desktop. You can try different operating systems with minimal risks of bricking something. Spotify Free is actually usable. Really the only advantage of a phone is that it's small and light and you can carry it everywhere. I almost never use my phone at home except for actual calls (and you can make calls over desktop too btw, it's called a softphone and I have never found one that works well for Linux ahaha).

Never had problems with linphone

Laptops aren't comfortable to use and nor are desktops

“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.” – Patrick Colquhoun

I started reading some of Orwell’s nonfiction essays recently.  “The Spike” isn’t my favorite so far- that honor probably goes to “A Hanging”, although I’m still reading- but it got me doing a Wikipedia dive about British workhouses and that in turn gave me the quote.

It struck me mostly because it’s one of most direct and blunt ways I’ve seen this argument made in the first person.  That is, one often sees this point of view imputed to people that hold capital in the modern era, but it’s always shocking how explicit people could be about it during the early industrial revolution, around the era that gave Polanyi his “Great Transformation.”  Near as I can tell, this isn’t a weak-man argument; the belief in poverty as load-bearing was common enough to express itself in legal policy, and possibly even correct to boot.

The other thing I learned from the Wiki dive is that workhouses themselves (or at least, the system of legal obligations that would mature into them) date from a similar attempt to control and channel human skill at the expense of the skilled:

“The Poor Law Act of 1388 was an attempt to address the labour shortage caused by the Black Death, a devastating pandemic that killed about one-third of England’s population. The new law fixed wages and restricted the movement of labourers, as it was anticipated that if they were allowed to leave their parishes for higher-paid work elsewhere then wages would inevitably rise… The resulting laws against vagrancy were the origins of state-funded relief for the poor.  ”

That is, in response to growing wages, a law was created to keep skilled workers in their place both figuratively and literally.  Relief for poverty was a knock on; not strictly necessary, but if you won’t let people leave to find work, it’s probably smart to give them food at least.  The balance of power eventually swung back towards the nobility, but the workhouses themselves just persisted from century to century, reinventing themselves with new justifications well in to the 20th century.

A friend of mine grew up in a town with an old workhouse that had been recommissioned as an old folks’ home.  When she was a child, she’d run as she passed it- the shadow of the building was bad luck.

No thesis I think, but I want to write it down.  Catch some of these feelings in amber before I move on to Orwell’s other essays.

I do wonder if the connotations of the word poverty have changed, here? It seems to me that Colquhoun is not describing what we think of as poverty, but rather the state of not being a rentier. There is no contradiction between being upper-middle-class in terms of material possessions and lifestyle, and having no investment income and thus being ‘forced’ to work as Colquhoun outlines. But a software engineer who spends all his income is hardly poor, modern sense. (Not very smart, obviously, but that’s a separate issue.) Yet in Colquhoun’s sense he is indeed living in poverty, while being far wealthier than anyone alive in Colquhoun’s time!

And in this sense it does seem to me that the ‘poverty is needed’ argument is stronger. You still cannot make absolutely everyone a rentier. (With present technology, that is.) There just aren’t enough resources for a livable UBI for everyone, even in the US. (Yet. Growth mindset, by all means.) You might be able to arrange things so everyone can retire on their investments after a certain age, but you’re still going to have someone doing the work that generates the real income those investments are a claim on.

Ran across this comment again after I think like two years? So this is not a reply so much as an opportunity to think out loud, and keep putting pressure on these ideas in my head and see how they shift. In particular, I think the big thing that changed since I wrote the OP and read this reply last time is that I started reading a lot more Henry George, so take that for what it’s worth.

In any case, I think this comment is very on-point in that Colquhoun, above, is absolutely equating 'not being a rentier’ with 'being impoverished’. Likely, I think, because he was only writing at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, and an educated/specialist middle class basically didn’t exist in 1800. But I don’t think you can say the connotations of 'poverty’ have changed all that much; rather, what’s changed is the idea that a laborer could achieve anything other than subsistence, with any real surplus just being extracted by rentiers and capitalists. (That is, by holders of capital, not in the ideological sense.) Remember that this is the same era in which Malthus lived and theorized!

'Labor’ here, as an economic construct, means basically a pile of undifferentiated human flesh that can be flexibly used in the same way that we’d use programmable robots today- plonked in a factory line, given basic instructions, and told to repeat those instructions indefinitely. Capital, in this equation, was the store of value from which this pile of flesh is provided shelter and nutrition- and in fact, per Malthus, this flesh-pile will in fact grow to the capacity set by capital rather than build savings as an individual might. The construct was very 'ecological’ in that way. Charitably, the Flynn effect hadn’t happened yet, so I think it was probably at least marginally easier to think this way without being a cartoon villain.

The difference is, I suppose, one of the great unanticipated triumphs of industrialism- the discovery that humans at all economic strata are in fact persons, both educable and agentic, and that Malthus can in fact go right to hell.

There are a lot of structural forces now in play that genuinely act to preserve the 'non-subsistence labor’ class, some enshrined in law and some encoded in the needs of the modern economy itself. At the same time, I think unskilled labor is still effectively in the same boat as it was in Colquhoun’s day, and the legal and economic advantages enjoyed by skilled labor aren’t strong enough to prevent Walmart shelvers and Amazon warehouse packagers from reverting over time to the most base level of subsistence possible within their host nation’s welfare system and tech level.

This is, of course, where the Georgist nugget kicks in. For all that we may not have the level of ambient wealth needed to support our entire population comfortably on a living-wage UBI, it’s undeniable that as a civilization we’re orders of magnitude more wealthy than previous generations- and by the same token, it’s equally undeniable that a shitty apartment in Portland or New York in 2023 demands a greater store of wealth from its tenants than Colquhoun himself ever laid claim to in his whole damn life. If our average rent today was “the amount of wealth commanded by a day laborer in 1800”, it would be effectively free!

The value of (especially urban) land- not improvements or construction, mind, just the price of an empty lot- grew hand in hand with the wealth and technology we created throughout the industrial revolution, as did the value of other unmodified natural resources like water, precious metals, and even sunlight. And they seem very likely to continue doing so as we fiddle our way through the full symphony of human technological progress; the greater our arts, the more opportunities we’ll see in the world around us. That created value genuinely is collective, as few other things are, and even if a UBI can’t get all the way to a living wage (yet!), then distributing those gains widely would still go a really long way towards allowing unskilled workers to escape subsistence, or (as they prefer) to work far fewer hours in order to achieve it, even if they aren’t educated specialists benefiting directly from employment in O-ring production networks. Monopolization of natural resources really does seem to be a huge contributor to subsistence poverty in technologically modern states.

In other words, my response to “you can’t make everybody a rentier,” is “sure you can! You can literally make 'everybody’ the beneficiary on rents extracted from monopolies on basic natural resources, dividing them equally and impartially among the whole population. And frankly that seems like a great plan, even if it doesn’t end the need for labor as such, because it does so much to alleviate the misery of poverty.”

why is it that cells are conveniently two-dimensional objects? what guarantee do I have that the behaviour of a cell "flattened" into two dimensions in any way resembles the behaviour of an "unflattened" cell? librels, am I REALLY supposed to believe this?

good children don't ask questions about artefacts of in vitro culturing, especially about gene expression

Notably this is why 2 photon microscopy exists! There are increasing efforts to map cells in 3D, doing things like tracking transcription factor movement during the cell cycle using various techniques. But the fact that what we are looking at is not a true representation of what's happening in vivo has always been the deal with molecular biology.

Relatedly, organoids are super interesting

Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you

Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,

I know this post is at least half a shitpost, but this is a bad take that keeps coming around and it's genuinely starting to piss me off.

tl;dr: unless you are worldbuilding for its own sake, the thing that matters is your theme. the worldbuilding elements you use exist in service to what you are trying to convey to your audience.

look. in SFF, Worldbuilding Elements (TM) are tools. you are Building A World for the sake of a story. the Worldbuilding exists to illuminate that story- to tell you things about the characters, the cultures they come from, the world they live in. worldbuilding tells you a lot about the things they value, the goals they're pursuing, and the reasons they're doing what they're doing.

you know... your themes? the reasons why people should give a damn about your story?

if you are worldbuilding for a story, food is shorthand. the stupid little wizards and knights eat potato stew because potatoes are hearty, simple, and comforting, and potato stew sets the correct mood in a way that cabbage stew does not. the stupid ship captain drinks shitty coffee because drinking shitty coffee is an easy way to convey that This Person Is Consuming Stimulants For Their Effects, Not The Taste.

it is often wise to use this shorthand when writing SFF. if you deny yourself this shorthand for the sake of REALISM!!!!1!!!, you are making it harder to convey to your audience what your characters want and how they are trying to get it. you are denying yourself a lot of useful tools for characterization and illumination.

now, it's good to know what the shorthand means, and use it with intent. because, yes, potatoes imply the existence of a relatively free and independent farming class, and coffee in space implies the existence of a tropical region where it grows and supply chains to get it to your captain. if you contradict that, you are going to jolt readers who know How Food Works out of your story.

but like. unless you are worldbuilding for its own sake? the thing that matters is your theme. the shorthand you use should exist in service to what you are trying to convey to your audience.

you do not have to have a full 30-page ethnobotanical paper for every piece of shorthand you use in your story, actually, any more than you need to leave every honorific and pronoun in an anime untranslated. if you insist on this, a lot of people who would write damn compelling fiction will never get started because they feel the need to justify every small worldbuilding choice they make.

this is a shitty, stupid thing to ask of writers, and insisting on it actually makes stories worse. the thing you need to ask for is writers using their shorthand with intent, in service to their theme- not in service to some ideal of realism that doesn't even work for most of the stories it's applied to.

Okay. I want your ethnobotany paper on my desk by monday morning.

#like what did you expect me to say#worldbuulding is important#and compelling. and it serves the story's themes#generic fiction that does not bother to build up a living world is bland and tasteless and interchangable#no matter your characters or even themes (prev tags)

....I mean full disclosure I'm undergoing [frustrating medical shit] and it wasn't cool for me to take it out on Someone Who Has A Different Opinion On The Internet, but what I wanted was some goddamn nuance here.

there is a lot of room between "generic fantasy where everyone is eating Potato Stew (TM) and riding Horses (TM) through The Dark Woods (TM)" and "you have to have a good understanding of every Worldbuilding Detail to the point where you could bullshit a paper about it if asked", and different stories inhabit different parts along that spectrum. Furthermore, different stories need to inhabit different parts along that spectrum.

Let me give you two examples from my own writing to give you an idea of what I mean. I have two different fantasy settings right now. One of them is about orcs who live in the desert, make lace, and do death metal opera. One of them is about a fantasy veterinarian in a traditional Medieval Fantasy (TM) milieu.

For the orcs, I have a lot of worldbuilding done. I know what the orcs eat and where they get their food. I know their general community structure, their (lack of) religion and (detailed) folklore, the forms their relationships take, their ability to forge metal and repurpose pre-apocalypse tech, and their lacemaking techniques (seriously, I have done So Much research on bobbin lace). I've even got a conlang for them with weird pronoun declensions and a verb conjugation specifically for cursing out one's superiors.

I have done a lot of work to make sure that the orcs do not feel like any culture that I've seen in fantasy before... because it serves my theme. To make people empathize with something alien, you need both alien-ness and familiarity. That requires some pretty heavy worldbuilding.

For the fantasy veterinarian? The themes of their stories are all about the power dynamic between a vet and a customer. "How do you deal with a Client From Hell, who does not know anything about their pet and is not afraid to hurt you if you contradict them?" "How do you deal with well-meaning people who are doing things that are good for their community but bad for the local ecology?" Things Like That.

In this setting? I've focused most of my worldbuilding efforts on fantasy biology, because that's the only thing my (very very autistic) protagonist cares about. The thing that takes center stage is the fantastic creatures, their diseases and ecological function, and the way the protagonist treats them.

I'm happy to write Evil Queens and village mayors into this world. I'm happy to have marriage and family life work the way the audience expects, to have a vaguely defined Fantasy Pantheon, and to have the peasants eat wheat, barley, cabbage... and potatoes. Because having that shorthand is useful-- it makes the power dynamics legible, and the world comfortably familiar. We're seeing a world we've seen a thousand times, but through a lens we might not have considered.

It would be actively detrimental to my orc stories to lean on the kind of cliches that I lean on for the fantasy vet stories. It would be actively detrimental to the fantasy vet stories to try to do the amount of worldbuilding I've done for the orc stories. Because of the themes I'm handling and because of my goals as a writer? I need to do a different amount of worldbuilding and use different kinds of shorthand.

It's okay for you to say, "I'd prefer to read your orc story over your fantasy vet story." But like, not every story needs, or should have, the thirty page paper. Sometimes that shit gets in the way of what you're trying to do.

the uncommon allergy haver to anticapitalist pipeline

in January 2023, companies became required to label sesame on all products it was present in, and undergo rigorous cleaning procedures to prevent sesame contamination, after it was declared the 9th "major" food allergen in the United States.

so, instead of considering this a mandate to give a single shit about people with sesame allergies, almost all American companies decided to just add sesame flour to all their relevant products. because apparently that was cheaper.

it's almost impossible for me to find hot dog and hamburger buns without sesame now. and I am one of the lucky ones. I'm someone who just so happened to notice the label updates, not get caught unawares and have a severe allergic reaction. I'm someone lucky enough to be surrounded by multiple choices of supermarkets, and someone with the incredible privilege to have parents who'll help me search the shelves, and cover those costs that my allergies rack up. not everyone with allergies/other intolerances has all or any of those privileges to begin with.

most food allergies will never be prevalent enough that under capitalism, it will be profitable to give them the level of accommodation that they deserve. I speak from experience with a wide portfolio of hypersensitivity quirks when I say that the rarer the food allergy, the worse it gets.

and here's the thing: I can live without hamburger buns, with only superficial decreases in my quality of life. but sesame isn't my only rare allergy, and ever since this legislation hit, I've been lying awake at night, afraid of what I might lose access to next.

I've been lying awake at night wondering what I'll have to do to live, to obtain enough safe food to survive, if any of my other allergies get this same treatment. and I reiterate. I am one of the privlidged ones.

what these companies have done is completely legal. what these companies did has also cut off up to over a million people from what were previously safe, affordable staples of their diets. a system that has any incentive not to accommodate the dietary needs of any population is not a system that can be allowed to exist. this is the uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anticapitalist pipeline.

I feel the urge to note: This is fundamentally a resource distribution issue. Allergen free foods are expensive because ensuring things are allergen free costs significant amounts of time and money, especially when there are already extremely well developed systems for making that thing without allergen free guarantees.

Someone has to pay for it, and I agree that it shouldn't be the consumers, but the government could provide subsidies for allergen free facilities to manufacturers, since that's effectively what would happen in a non capitalist economy anyway. The US government failing to do this isn't really a failure of capitalism.

Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you

Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,

I know this post is at least half a shitpost, but this is a bad take that keeps coming around and it's genuinely starting to piss me off.

tl;dr: unless you are worldbuilding for its own sake, the thing that matters is your theme. the worldbuilding elements you use exist in service to what you are trying to convey to your audience.

look. in SFF, Worldbuilding Elements (TM) are tools. you are Building A World for the sake of a story. the Worldbuilding exists to illuminate that story- to tell you things about the characters, the cultures they come from, the world they live in. worldbuilding tells you a lot about the things they value, the goals they're pursuing, and the reasons they're doing what they're doing.

you know... your themes? the reasons why people should give a damn about your story?

if you are worldbuilding for a story, food is shorthand. the stupid little wizards and knights eat potato stew because potatoes are hearty, simple, and comforting, and potato stew sets the correct mood in a way that cabbage stew does not. the stupid ship captain drinks shitty coffee because drinking shitty coffee is an easy way to convey that This Person Is Consuming Stimulants For Their Effects, Not The Taste.

it is often wise to use this shorthand when writing SFF. if you deny yourself this shorthand for the sake of REALISM!!!!1!!!, you are making it harder to convey to your audience what your characters want and how they are trying to get it. you are denying yourself a lot of useful tools for characterization and illumination.

now, it's good to know what the shorthand means, and use it with intent. because, yes, potatoes imply the existence of a relatively free and independent farming class, and coffee in space implies the existence of a tropical region where it grows and supply chains to get it to your captain. if you contradict that, you are going to jolt readers who know How Food Works out of your story.

but like. unless you are worldbuilding for its own sake? the thing that matters is your theme. the shorthand you use should exist in service to what you are trying to convey to your audience.

you do not have to have a full 30-page ethnobotanical paper for every piece of shorthand you use in your story, actually, any more than you need to leave every honorific and pronoun in an anime untranslated. if you insist on this, a lot of people who would write damn compelling fiction will never get started because they feel the need to justify every small worldbuilding choice they make.

this is a shitty, stupid thing to ask of writers, and insisting on it actually makes stories worse. the thing you need to ask for is writers using their shorthand with intent, in service to their theme- not in service to some ideal of realism that doesn't even work for most of the stories it's applied to.

I just don't really understand the modern discourse on homelessness. I mean the conservative position is pretty well staked out at this point (send the police to harass, arrest, and occasionally kill them) but what's the liberal messaging here? Affordable housing, sure, but seriously, what's the plan for people who can't work or otherwise make money?

approaching this from a cutthroat cost-saving position would win so many more votes if the Democrats actually gave a shit because we know 100% for sure from many many studies at this point that even if the voter personally hates the homeless and want them to die, it's still less expensive to just put them in free apartments than it is to 1. keep paying for emergency and addiction services 2. keep paying for survival crimes 3. keep paying for sweeps 4. keep paying for sit/lie/loiter enforcement 5. keep paying for disposal of property and human bodies. 6. keep paying for arrest, imprisonment and transport. it's cheaper to put the fentanyl addict who will never ever get a job and WILL spend all day on his stoop with a bottle in a paper bag harassing people who walk past (to be cartoonishly bigoted about it) into a free apartment than it is to put him in prison, a shelter, on the sidewalk or into a bus, and while the average Seattle liberal (for example) is actually cartoonishly bigoted, i really think they could be made to vote for free housing instead of criminalization if anyone cared to campaign for it in a way that worked. but the moderate "left" keeps hammering on compassion (which doesn't get enough votes) and the center and right keep hammering on punishment, which does get votes but is completely unsustainable in a municipal budget even if you personally enjoy the cruelty aspect of it.

so idk! idk. even my leftist leftist friends here are still hung up on "build more housing".

As someone who is reasonably familiar with left politics and urbanism in Seattle (and as someone who has participated closely in a couple of leftist city council campaigns) my take is: you need both - and more.

Yes, you need to house homeless people before you do anything else about homelessness because (as you rightfully point out) it’s the cheapest, most effective, and frankly only way to “solve” the problem for any reasonable definition of “solve” that doesn’t involve war crimes.

You need places to hose homeless people that aren’t crowded shelters with draconian rules and little privacy; where people can have their partners/kids/pets with them, etc. Places that provide dignity and not just a mattress and a roof.

But the state we’re in now is the result of decades and decades of poor planning creating interlocking catastrophes of unlivability.

We’ve got a minimum 5- or 6-figure housing deficit in the city. If we somehow found places and housed the current homeless population we’ve still got people who are right on the edge of not being able to afford housing and who are being pushed out to precarious situations and ridiculous commutes - which then tangles roadways and destroys the environment (because our density and mass transit are also shit; nice job, Seattle).

In order to aggressively house the current population and prevent a continuing flood of people becoming homeless or ending up in financial precarity due to housing costs, you need to build a fuck-ton of affordable housing. Public housing; below-market rate subsidized housing; but also: market-rate housing. A lot of below-market-rate comes from old housing stock, but if the demand is too high then rich people will occupy those units and the price can’t float down.

And since cost to build is sky high, getting new public and subsidized housing requires a lot of public investment and regulation.

Building a bunch of market-rate housing (including ADUs after ending single-family zoning) is definitely part of the solution, but it’s just a band-aid on a much larger problem. But unlike all of the other solutions, it makes money for developers and landlords and doesn’t require raising taxes, so it’s also the easiest one for anyone to the right of Kshama Sawant to support. (It also doesn’t require people to live in the apartment next to that fentanyl addict, which helps when you’re trying to win elections.)

Untangling all of these problems is not easy. The only real long-term solution is (in my opinion, which you can take with a sizable grain of salt) a combination of public housing, subsidized housing, an actual income tax to fund all of it instead of regressive property and sales taxes, elimination of single-family zoning (which we’ve technically done, but e.g. setback and lot coverage rules need to be eliminated as well), and better transit. Also just guaranteeing people housing.

A lot of those things are being worked, but progress is slow, and in the meantime wealthy urbanists are over-focusing on the battles they are winning and trying to convince themselves they don’t need to do the other, harder things 🤷🏻‍♀️

https://sccinsight.com/2021/09/14/what-the-2020-census-data-tells-us-about-housing-in-seattle/

according to this article we currently have approximately twice the number of vacant residential units as we do homeless persons in this city. total units, not individual rooms/beds/living places. idk how many of these units are multiple bedrooms. but the simple math is that we already HAVE the housing. this isn't even getting into the massive wastelands of empty office space post-pandemic. so why do i keep hearing "build housing"? we've been building housing according to this article very successfully for a decade, why are there more unhoused people every year? I'm not challenging you I'm saying these are the numbers i keep hearing and they don't make sense if all the policy leftists in the city think building is the correct approach. i don't have any information about why these two sets of numbers--"we don't have enough housing, build more" vs "we have more than twice as many places for people to live as there are people unhoused"--contradict each other. do you know?

My guess? They're not building housing that anyone who doesn't have a tech salary can afford. We passed a law a few years ago that says that developers have to make a certain number of affordable units for every expensive one, but the fine for not complying is-- shocker-- less than the cost of building said housing, and keeps the lots clear for houses and townhouses with unnecessary granite countertops, and so forth. (Remember when they were planning to demolish the showbox to build "badly needed housing" in the form of million-dollar apartments? Yeah.)

That count is also from 2020 and things have been going steadily downhill since.

right, this brings me back to the thing i said yesterday: "build housing" is a red herring and does not work and is siphoning energy off the actual problem, which is that capital holds surplus hostage for profit. what i don't understand is why all my housing problem leftist friends and politicians in Seattle keep saying build housing and i never hear about the empty units. unless there's something complicated going on with municipal math that i don't know about yet, and if that's the case someone please let me know. but with the information i think i have at the moment, it really seems like building doesn't work and isn't necessary anyway unless it is specifically purpose built housing projects. the tithed units don't work and developers will continue to hold empty units hostage until someone forces them to rent it to the market at living rates (not market or speculative rates), or simply seizes it for public housing via policy coup. which i realize is picking out seats on the Enterprise Tumblr posting, but every other possibility--besides a more organized grassroots approach to squatting--appears to have been struck off.

it's the other way around - capital holding surplus hostage for profit is an unsolvable problem and the only way around it is increasing the supply until the market rate drops to a living rate

and like, increasing housing supply does drop the cost of housing, that's why so many people who own housing are trying to prevent it

I don't think the math works out there. It seems very unlikely to me that it is more profitable to own an empty house to push prices up than to actually rent out the house. Houses cost money even when there's no one living there, and while you will probably make some profit just from increasing asset values, I do not believe it's going to be more than the profit of actually renting it out.

Like, this is a lovely thought, but you understand that will mean that the barista's kids have to go to the same school as your kids? That your neighborhood will contain baristas? That some barista-income housing will exist in your neighborhood? That barista-type people will be 15 minutes travel from your home?

The barista will never be able to afford to live in the 15 minute city in the US, or we wouldn't call it a 15 minute city, we'd call it something uncomplenentary, parents would desperately try to get their kids out, and neither the police nor "nice" people would want to go there.

I don't know how baristas are where you are but here baristas are public-facing workers in a semi-upscale business and not lepers, people want to live next to baristas, this is called "gentrification."

The poisoned Skittle problem, from the perspective of a non poison Skittle

The metaphor of the bowl of Skittles, some percentage of which are poison, and how many of those Skittles you want to eat, has been used by feminists about men, and republicans about immigrants. I'm increasingly devoid of shits to give about what kind of vile things I'm going to be called, so what the heck, I'll use it too for this.

With class and housing in the US, there is a poisoned Skittle problem; the lower income you go, the higher the percentage of assaults George type people are in the mix. (Please note now that I am Not claiming that the elite are not prone to being assaults Georg, or that there's no assaults Georg in higher income brackets) For added fun, the poorer you are, the more you have to be in physical proximity to others who live in your area, while walking to the store or taking public transportation, increasing your vulnerability to being assaulted, etc. In the suburbs, a lot of the time, the guy who lives three houses down from yours and you have literally never seen each other, so it doesn't matter if he would immediately grab your crotch if he was in crotch-grabbing range, because the two of you have never been that close together. If you live in a more dense environment and travel by foot, your chances of being in crotch-grabbing range are much higher, so a crotch-grabber, etc. in your area is a more concerning problem for you.

Most people very reasonably prefer to live somewhere further away from assaults Georg. The thing is, other people also prefer to live further for assaults Georg, and if you were just living next to assaults Georg, you are a Skittle of indeterminate poison. So when a nice redlined Blue suburb with a great school district is considering if they're going to permit some affordable housing, they are going to look at the income bracket that will be living there and say, "There's too high a percentage of poison Skittles in that income bracket. We don't want to live in a community with assaults Georg, or invite assaults Georg Jr into our nice school, so we don't want affordable housing here."

So now you, as an innocent non poison Skittle are left trying to figure out how you are going to communicate your non poison status so you can get the heck away from the poison Skittles. The current way this information is conveyed is by convincing a higher paid job to hire you, making more money, and buying your way into a better neighborhood. This is a rather lossy way to sort, and shit like constantly disrupted sleep at the weekly hotel from all the shitty people who live there with you doesn't help with better job thing. There's plenty of non poisoned Skittles in that bowl, but how to extract them safely?

The obvious next question is why we as a society don't seem to have any solution to the problem of getting assaulted by assaults Georg other than to individually just try to scramble away from where such folks are statistically and to price the entire category of people who are statistically more likely to be assaults Georg out of certain areas. And now it's a criminal justice system problem and I'll leave that for another day, but overall, the criminal justice system seems a lot more interested in hassling people based on statistical similarities to assaults Georg than doing fuck all about stopping assaults Georg.

this post kind of seems to contradict itself? If suburban neighbors can live close by but never interact (true) why does it matter if Assaults Georg moves into the neighborhood?

My overarching unified theory of a lot of conservative thought is that they have One Weird Trick to solve social problems: just get rid of the bad people. If there are Problems, get rid of the people causing them. Crime - lock em up. Housing - not in my backyard. Immigrants - build the wall. This is common sense to them and they have a hard time even talking with people who don’t immediately see the wisdom of them getting rid of the bad people. There are many obvious problems with all of these “solutions” but it helps me understand where conservatives are coming from.

Literally everyone thinks that just Getting Rid of the Bad People is one weird trick. Doesn't matter if they self-identify as conservative, liberal, republican, democrat, socialist, communist, anarchist, monarchist, fascist, or something else, they think that society just needs to get rid of the Bad People and everything will be great.

The very specific, extremely common example given above was about Democrat dominated towns rejecting affordable housing over and over again. If this is conservativism, who isn't a conservative?

Property owners are conservative, shock horror!

But seriously do you people not have just regular ass working class neighborhoods in the US. I'm visibly queer *and a student* and I've lived in working class neighborhoods the last 2 years. I've literally never been assaulted. T

The kind of neighborhood where fire engines and police cars were parked outside my house at 2am because someone across the street had gotten high on crack and climbed onto the roof, but never any actual crime despite being in 2 pretty key demographics for it.

Is this just "America has insane crime problems" all over again.

shout out to people who's family isnt entirely bad or entirely good, but something in between and you dont know how to feel about them. you feel angry but you also feel guilty, because you know they genuinely love and care about you, but sometimes they show it in a way you know its not okay. your feelings are valid, your anger and sadness and grief are valid, and you dont have to prove this to no one. bigger shout out to those with memory issues who know something isnt right but can't recall all of the bad events, only the feelings, which only increases the guilt.

I was reading @internet-sentences talk about being molded into a manhattan spreadsheet monster from a young age, and she frequently mentions technical problems (super vaguely) around what I imagine are ito calculus or linear algebra or diffeq without hinting at any joy in it.

And while I'll occasionally lamentfully wonder about what I'd have been like if i had a single goddamn engineering role model before reading the sequences, I think it's possible that I dont really grok one of the upsides of taking a calc1 class at age 24:

I am often stunned and grateful about the beauty and power of mathematics. I drastically underestimated the limits of my power as a wee lad, then I updated, which is a hair like ascending to godhood. I actually remember being blind, sight is still kinda a strange place I dont belong in.

In EA and ML, people around you sometimes reference some calc2 or linear algebra trick and say "oh yeah, from 11th grade, haha". These are the legacy admissions, who went to wizarding school because it was their birthright. I'm a bastard who hitchhiked from a muggle neighborhood with forged documents and lied to the wizarding school enrollment desk.

I dont think I can solve a problem without risking going mad with power. I feel like I'm at a symphony or art museum most of the time.

references to the good Samaritan story tend to obscure the real power of it, which is not that he was a poor stranger who cared when the rich men didn't, it's that he was a poor nonbeliever who cared when the rich religious leaders were perfectly unbothered to watch their congregant bleed out on the side of the road.

a parable which remains useful to this day!

A nice detail

Almost entirely unrelated but I can't resist the opportunity to share this sketch

Now for one of the *worst* parts of the new ai discourse: the ridic language appropriation:

Imagine trying to put in explicit words how an ai chatbot version of a women whose chosen profession is to create soft core porn fantasy content online for her followers, for the purpose of being a virtual girlfriend to those followers, is 'going rouge' by generating said porn for said followers.

'Around the clock' indeed, holding that level of contradiction in your head would be a full time job!

I mean, there’s nothing too AI-specific in the language misuse here, it’s just ad copy. “Oooh this might be dangerous, watch out kids for the sex and violence you definitely don’t want to see ;)” that’s not cognitive dissonance it’s just a familiar, albeit kind of eyerolly, form of rhetoric.

That said, you know, I don’t expect it will be very hard to select a random person with example camera footage, including nothing sexy, and to make a sexy chatbot version of them, and I don’t feel great about that. When it’s just one person doing it on their computer it’s mostly isomorphic to normal human fantasizing but when it’s passed around I think it has the capacity to be extremely humiliating (but maybe I’m relying too much on my own intuitions here? And the former feels incredibly icky to do, even if I can reconcile myself to others doing it.)

The other thing of course is the consumer side, all of this will be very cheap and eventually free, and I’m guessing (for many people) at least as much a leap in addictiveness from 2022-era pornography as (for many people) going from natural fantasizing to 2022-era pornography is. Not great!

I think that might be a product of being into the discourse too deep (just a guess ofc) - "AI going rogue" is very explicitly a phrase born of the AI alignment and wider doomer scenarios. Absent that thread of discourse this article would not describe an AI going rogue in that way, its not the natural way to put this. I get that "going rogue" is a normal phrase, but its not how outsiders would view a computer program (they would describe it has going haywire, for example). Its been codified in AI very strongly by these debates.

And the dissonance I was referring to is not in the writer of the article, its in the creator (and her team). Like its a metaphorical dissonance of course, I do not in fact think they are experiencing intellectual turmoil. I am instead commenting on the societal silliness of a digital sex worker (a term she would never use for herself but is almost certainly accurate) drawing these kinds of lines around what is sexual and what is not. And the idea that an LLM would be told to be a virtual girlfriend and then be scolded for engaging in sexual content. Its exposing, to see that - to see that society has made the idea of a simulated girlfriend who is perfectly chaste make sense enough to them that it would appropriate the idea of a misaligned AI to explain a tool deviating from that concept.

But yeah on a very different thread, it is at current tech extremely easy to create a sexual avatar of existing people based on available photos, those tools exist as we speak. I tend to be pretty radically open on these topics but its certainly going to get ethically complicated when people start selling the tools, hosting 'modding platforms' w/ user-generated training algs, etc. Which is probably not going to be stopped! Definitely an area the market is going to outpace the norms on for a while...

Fanfic authors when people make derivative works from their stories.

I’m in the woods placing cardboard cutouts of morels in the leaf litter to trick and bamboozle people

I’m about to ruin someone’s whole life

Scamp

tee hee hee hee hee