Author name: Shannon Garcia

as-california-faces-court-battles,-states-scramble-to-save-their-climate-goals

As California faces court battles, states scramble to save their climate goals

climate goals, electrification, EVs, Policy, Science, syndication / /

With or without authority to regulate heightened emissions, states plan to meet climate goals.

Traffic jam forms on Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. Credit: Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

When President Donald Trump signed legislation to revoke California’s authority to enforce stricter tailpipe emissions standards and to ban sales of gas-powered cars by 2035, the effects rippled far beyond the Golden State.

Seventeen states relied on California’s Clean Air Act waivers to adopt stronger vehicle pollution rules on their own, including New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington.

California, joined by several states, immediately sought a court injunction, calling the revocation illegal on the basis that the waivers are not subject to congressional review and that it violated decades of legal precedent and procedure. These same states recently launched an Affordable Clean Cars Coalition to coordinate legal action and policy to defend their rights to transition to cleaner vehicles.

As the legal battle plays out, states that have relied on the waivers are leaning into expanding multimillion-dollar ways to keep their EV transitions on track. Among their efforts: amping up rebates, tightening rules on the carbon intensity of fuels, and cracking down on pollution where trucks congregate.

“Climate change is still around, whether we have the waiver or not. So we have to figure out ways to make sure that we’re doing what we can to address the problem at hand,” said Michelle Miano, who heads the New Mexico environment protection division of the Environment Department.

According to data from the California Air Resources Board, the states that have passed tougher pollution rules account for about 40 percent of new light-duty vehicle registrations and 25 percent of new heavy-duty vehicle registrations in the United States, where the transportation sector is the highest source of greenhouse gas emissions as of 2022.

Among these stronger rules are the Advanced Clean Cars (ACC) I and II and Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT), which require automakers to sell a growing share of electric passenger cars and medium and heavy-duty trucks to reduce emissions from gasoline-powered counterparts.

The goal is for all new vehicles sold to be electric by 2035.

Bolstering incentives 

Without ACC and ACT, states are betting they can increase demand for EVs by reducing the costs of buying a vehicle with rebates, vouchers, and grants and boosting the number of charging stations in their states. These incentives can range from a few thousand dollars for individual EV purchases to hundreds of thousands for building charging infrastructure and fleet upgrades.

On June 18, New York announced a $53 million expansion to its voucher program for electrifying last-mile truck fleets, offering vouchers from $340,000 to $425,000 for each truck, depending on the model.

“Despite the current federal administration’s efforts to erode certainty in the ongoing transition to cleaner vehicles, New York State will continue to act to protect our air, lands, and waters,” said Amanda Lefton, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation.

In Oregon, where over a third of in-state emissions are from transportation use, the government this month opened applications for $34 million in grants toward the purchase of zero-emission trucks and developing charging stations for EVs or retrofitting diesel trucks. Lawmakers are considering expanding a popular rebate program through a bill introduced in February. The program so far has given car owners almost $100 million for EV purchases. (The program has been suspended twice after running out of money. It resumed as of May 2025.)

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey promised in May to announce “dedicated additional grant funding” for electric vehicles and vowed to increase “grant funding opportunities” for charging. Advocacy groups, including the Environmental League of Massachusetts, are counting on increased funding for its MOR-EV rebate program, which provides up to $3,500 for new EV purchases. This year, the rebate program has distributed $15.7 million in total incentives, according to the program’s statistics page.

In Washington state, lawmakers earmarked $126 million—a $16 million increase from 2024—to subsidize purchases of electric truck fleets and chargers. Many states are targeting trucks because they account for a huge share in emissions relative to their number on the road.

Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, credited state rebates and investments in charging infrastructure for helping Colorado reach a 20 percent electric vehicle market share in the first quarter of 2025. One in five new cars sold in the state was electric. Toor also credited the state agency’s EV buyer’s education campaign launched in late 2022, which promoted available rebates and incentives for prospective EV owners.

The scope and generosity of these programs vary widely depending on each state’s climate priorities, budget capacity, and access to federal or market-based funding streams.

“Those types of incentives can be expensive,” said Terrence Gray, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. “In Rhode Island, our budget is tight. There’s not a lot of funding available right now, so we would have to make a very strong argument that there’s a strong cost benefit to invest in these types of areas.”

With the Trump administration threatening to cut down federal funding for EV rebates through the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, states will have to increasingly rely on themselves to fund these programs.

“The federal government isn’t going to come save us,” said Alex Ambrose, an analyst with the nonpartisan think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective.

Some are already ahead on this. California and Washington state have devised carbon markets that charge major polluters—like oil refiners, power plants, large industrial facilities, and fuel suppliers—for each ton of carbon dioxide they release. California’s auctions bring in about $3 to $4 billion per year, which support programs such as public transit and EV rebates. Washington’s system, launched in 2023, covers around 97 major emitters and has raised over $3 billion in its first two years, funding clean transportation, air quality devices, and EV chargers.

The states of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and other Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states have signed up to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, which is a cooperative cap-and-invest program launched in 2009 that limits emissions from the power sector and reinvests proceeds into clean energy programs like EV rebates.

Making fuels greener

While many states focus on promoting electric vehicles, others are also targeting the fuel of gas-powered cars, by adopting or developing standards that lower the carbon intensity.

These policies require fuel producers and importers to blend cleaner alternatives like biofuels, renewable diesel, or electricity into the fuel mix.

Patterned after California, Washington has a clean fuel standard in effect since 2023, targeting a 20 percent reduction in carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 2034 compared to 2017 levels.

Oregon has a similar program in place that aims to reduce carbon intensity in fuels by 37 percent by 2035.

New Mexico approved its Clean Transportation Fuel Standard in March 2024. A formal adoption hearing before the Environmental Improvement Board is scheduled to begin in September.

“We know that those (electric) vehicles aren’t for everyone and so we are very respectful of folks that decide to not purchase them,” said Miano, New Mexico’s environment protection division head.

No East Coast states have enacted a clean fuel standard, but New York state legislators may change that.

There are bills in the State Senate and Assembly that, if passed, would require fuel providers to reduce the carbon intensity of their transportation fuels by at least 20 percent by 2030. (Legislation has passed the Senate but remains at the committee level in the Assembly as of June.)

Michigan also had bills introduced in its Senate and House in 2023, but neither passed before the 2024 session ended. Similar bills have not been introduced since then.

Some of these clean fuel standards have faced criticism from environmental advocates, who argue that they allow polluters to buy their way out of reducing emissions.

But Trisha DelloIacono, policy head at advocacy group CALSTART, said the fuel standards remain one of the few politically viable tools to gradually shift the transportation sector toward cleaner fuels.

“What we need to be looking at right now is incremental changes and incremental progress in a place where we’re fighting tooth and nail to hold on to what we have,” DelloIacono said.

Where trucks congregate

There’s also a policy tool called indirect source rules, or ISR.

The rules are called “indirect” because they don’t regulate the vehicles themselves, but the facilities that attract emissions-heavy traffic, like large warehouses, ports, or rail yards. The rules hold the facilities owners or operators responsible for reducing or offsetting the pollution from their profitable traffic.

Studies show that the pollution from these trucks often ends up in nearby neighborhoods, which are disproportionately lower-income and communities of color.

California is currently the only state enforcing ISRs.

In Southern California, large warehouses must take steps to reduce the pollution caused by truck visits, either by switching to electric vehicles, installing chargers, or paying into a clean air fund. It’s the first rule of its kind in the country and it survived a court challenge in 2023, paving the way for other states to consider similar action.

New York is one of them. Its lawmakers introduced a bill in January that could require warehouses with over 50,000 square feet to reduce emissions from trucks by meeting certain benchmarks, such as hosting electric deliveries or offering bike loading zones. New York City has its own version of the rule under deliberation in the Council. As of June 2025, the bill remains stalled in the environmental committee. City Council has until December to act before the bill expires.

In New Jersey, where warehouse growth has boomed, legislators in 2024 proposed a bill that would require “high-traffic facilities” to apply for air pollution permits and provide plans to reduce diesel truck pollution.

“This is really being pushed by the community groups and environmental justice communities, especially in North Jersey. But also, warehouses are starting to pop up even in very rural parts of South Jersey. So this is very quickly becoming a statewide issue in New Jersey,” said Ambrose of the New Jersey Policy Perspective.

In Colorado, its regional air quality council in April announced plans to ask its air quality control commission to use ISR for areas with the worst air quality.

Industry groups, especially in the logistics sector, are pushing back. The industry group Supply Chain Federation told The Wall Street Journal that the southern California ISR was a “backdoor approach [that] does little to cut emissions and instead raises costs, disrupts supply chains.”

Still, experts say this may be one of the few options left for states to cut emissions from traffic-heavy facilities. Because these rules don’t directly regulate the car companies or trucks themselves, they don’t need federal approval.

“We definitely have to be nimble and fluid and also understand the kind of landscape in the state,” DelloIacono said.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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Figuring out why a nap might help people see things in new ways

Biology, Insight, memory, naps, neurobiology, Science, sleep / /

An EEG signal of sleep is associated with better performance on a mental task.

The guy in the back may be doing a more useful activity. Credit: XAVIER GALIANA

Dmitri Mendeleev famously saw the complete arrangement of the periodic table after falling asleep on his desk. He claimed in his dream he saw a table where all the elements fell into place, and he wrote it all down when he woke up. By having a eureka moment right after a nap, he joined a club full of rather talented people: Mary Shelley, Thomas Edison, and Salvador Dali.

To figure out if there’s a grain of truth to all these anecdotes, a team of German scientists at the Hamburg University, led by cognitive science researcher Anika T. Löwe, conducted an experiment designed to trigger such nap-following strokes of genius—and catch them in the act with EEG brain monitoring gear. And they kind of succeeded.

Catching Edison’s cup

“Thomas Edison had this technique where he held a cup or something like that when he was napping in his chair,” says Nicolas Schuck, a professor of cognitive science at the Hamburg University and senior author of the study. “When he fell asleep too deeply, the cup falling from his hand would wake him up—he was convinced that was the way to trigger these eureka moments.” While dozing off in a chair with a book or a cup doesn’t seem particularly radical, a number of cognitive scientists got serious about re-creating Edison’s approach to insights and testing it in their experiments.

One of the recent such studies was done at Sorbonne University by Célia Lacaux, a cognitive neuroscientist, and her colleagues. Over 100 participants were presented with a mathematical problem and told it could be solved by applying two simple rules in a stepwise manner. However, there was also an undescribed shortcut that made reaching the solution much quicker. The goal was to see if participants would figure this shortcut out after an Edison-style nap. The scientists would check whether the eureka moment would show in EEG.

Lacaux’s team also experimented with different objects the participants should hold while napping: spoons, steel spheres, stress balls, etc. It turned out Edison was right, and a cup was by far the best choice. It also turned out that most participants recognized there was a hidden rule after the falling cup woke them up. The nap was brief, only long enough to enter the light, non-REM N1 phase of sleep.

Initially, Schuck’s team wanted to replicate the results of Lacaux’s study. They even bought the exact same make of cups, but the cups failed this time. “For us, it just didn’t work. People who fell asleep often didn’t drop these cups—I don’t know why,” Schuck says.

The bigger surprise, however, was that the N1 phase sleep didn’t work either.

Tracking the dots

Schuck’s team set up an experiment that involved asking 90 participants to track dots on a screen in a series of trials, with a 20-minute-long nap in between. The dots were rather small, colored either purple or orange, placed in a circle, and they moved in one of two directions. The task for the participants was to determine the direction the dots were moving. That could range from easy to really hard, depending on the amount of jitter the team introduced.

The insight the participants could discover was hidden in the color coding. After a few trials where the dots’ direction was random, the team introduced a change that tied the movement to the color: orange dots always moved in one direction, and the purple dots moved in the other. It was up to the participants to figure this out, either while awake or through a nap-induced insight.

Those dots were the first difference between Schuck’s experiment and the Sorbonne study. Lacaux had her participants cracking a mathematical problem that relied on analytical skills. Schuck’s task was more about perceptiveness and out-of-the-box thinking.

The second difference was that the cups failed to drop and wake participants up. Muscles usually relax more when sleep gets deeper, which is why most people drop whatever they’re holding either at the end of the N1 phase or at the onset of the N2 phase, when the body starts to lose voluntary motor control. “We didn’t really prevent people from reaching the N2 phase, and it turned out the participants who reached the N2 phase had eureka moments most often,” Schuck explains.

Over 80 percent of people who reached the deeper, N2 phase of sleep found the color-coding solution. Participants who fell into a light N1 sleep had a 61 percent success rate; that dropped to just 55 percent in a group that stayed awake during their 20-minute nap time. In a control group that did the same task without a nap break, only 49 percent of participants figured out the hidden trick.

The divergent results in Lacaux’s and Schuck’s experiments were puzzling, so the team looked at the EEG readouts, searching for features in the data that could predict eureka moments better than sleep phases alone. And they found something.

The slope of genius

The EEG signal in the human brain consists of low and high frequencies that can be plotted on a spectral slope. When we are awake, there are a lot of high-frequency signals, and this slope looks rather flat. During sleep, these high frequencies get muted, there are more low-frequency signals, and the slope gets steeper. Usually, the deeper we sleep, the steeper our EEG slope is.

The team noticed that eureka moments seemed to be highly correlated with a steep EEG spectral slope—the steeper the slope, the more likely people were to get a breakthrough. In fact, the models based on the EEG signal alone predicted eureka moments better than predictions made based on sleep phases and even based on the sleep phases and EEG readouts combined.

“Traditionally, people divided sleep EEG readouts down into discrete stages like N1 or N2, but as usual in biology, things in reality are not as discrete,” Schuck says. “They’re much more continuous, there’s kind of a gray zone.” He told Ars that looking specifically at the EEG trace may help us better understand what exactly happens in the brain when a sudden moments of insight arrives.

But Shuck wants to get even more data in the future. “We’re currently running a study that’s been years in the making: We want to use both EEG and [functional magnetic resonance imaging] at the same time to see what happens in the brain when people are sleeping,” Schuck says. The addition of the fMRI imaging will enable Schuck and his colleagues to see which areas of the brain get activated during sleep. What the team wants to learn from combining EEG and fMRI imagery is how sleep boosts memory consolidation.

“We also hope to get some insights, no pun intended, into the processes that play a role in generating insights,” Schuck adds.

PLOS Biology, 2025.  DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003185

Photo of Jacek Krywko

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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housing-roundup-#12

Housing Roundup #12

Housing / /

Abundance and YIMBY are on the march. Things are looking good. The wins are each small, but every little bit helps. There are lots of different little things you can do. In theory you have to worry about a homeostatic model where solving some problems causes locals to double down on other barriers, but this seems to not be what we see.

There are definitely important exceptions. Los Angeles is not so interested in rebuilding from the fires and backpaddled the moment developers started to actually build 100% affordable housing because somehow that was a bad thing. New York’s democratic party nominated who they nominated. Massachusetts wants to seal eviction records.

Overall, though, it’s hard not to be hopeful right now. Even when we see bad policies, they are couched increasingly in the rhetoric of good goals and policies. In the long term, that leads to wins.

I’ll start with general notes, then take a tour around the nation and world.

At some point a tenant with rent control effectively owns the apartment, but they and their family are forced to live there forever, including for two years before each time the apartment is passed down.

Matthew Zeitlin: classic landlord vs (fourth generational) rent stabilized tenant in nyc story. The interesting wrinkle is that even if the landlord can get the tenant evicted, they can’t raise the rent *unless it’s to a subsidized tenant.*

Christian Britschgi: A rent control law that lets family members pass down units to their children is very obviously a physical taking. SCOTUS had an opportunity to rule on this question last year but punted.

As I covered in my newsletter yesterday, there is chance they might take up a similar physical takings claim case challenging LA’s eviction moratorium. Not directly about NYC rent control but could make future challenges easier.

There’s also the crazy part where a subsidized tenant will pay triple the rent a non-subsidized tenant would if the apartment got freed up. And yes, they also put up enough barriers that selling the apartment also is not a practical option.

Thus you get stories like this rent controlled building selling at a 97% discount, or $9,827 per unit. The new buyer is presumably gambling on finding or being given some way to free the building, which I assume will operate at a loss and would be uneconomical to repair properly.

If you are a New York City voter in the coming general election, consider that one candidate in particular wants to double down on this strategy.

This term has done so, so much damage. Even if affordable housing was ‘a thing’ in that it was housing that was affordable, ‘non-affordable’ housing would still make all housing more affordable, and some affordable units is always better than no units.

Misha: It’s amazing how a simple phrase like “affordable housing” is actually a potent brain poison that renders society way worse

Dan Livingston: It’s a legally defined term. Not a general concept.

Misha: Yes that’s part of the process by which makes society worse off

Zac Hill: In addition to all the [obvious etc], even on the claim’s own terms, aren’t 17 ‘affordable’ units better than the previous state of 0 ‘affordable’ units?

samstod: This is sort of like how everyone seems to complain they are only building luxury apartment buildings, and then lobby for stuff like 800 sq feet minimum, full kitchen, and a parking spot for studios. “Why do they keep building 1200 sq ft 2 bedrooms?”

The thing is, it’s often so much worse than that.

Alex Tabarrok: Affordable Housing Is Almost Pointless

What is the most important feature of affordable housing? Simple! It’s right there in the name, right? Affordable. But no. When the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) evaluates housing projects for tax credits it gives out points for desirable projects. Quoting Richard Day:

Richard Day: For the general scoring track, 10% of points are awarded for extra accessibility features, 13% are awarded for additional energy efficiency criteria, 15% are awarded based on the makeup of the development team, and an extra 4% are headed out to non-profit developers. Only 3% of scorecard points are awarded based on project cost.

…

This is what Ezra Klein calls Everything Bagel Liberalism and what I called in one of my favorite posts the Happy Meal Fallacy.

The icing on the cake, by the way, is that Day argues that the IHDA is a better system than the even more convoluted and expensive system for affordable housing promoted by Chicago’s Department of Housing.

Arpit Gupta: I didn’t realize that a basic reason affordable housing costs so much is that the actual cost carries such a low weight in winning the bid.

Scott Lincicome: Incentives matter. And politicians’ incentives are often different from those of consumers, producers, & investors.

The job of affordable housing needs to be to make available housing at a low price point. Remarkably often, the projects do not even do that.

Seth Burn: Coase wept.

Max Dubler: A publicly funded affordable housing project came in at $800,000/unit [all one bedrooms]. The same developer built a mostly market rate building NEXT DOOR for $350,000/unit.

Alec Stapp: In a better world, spending $1 million per unit to build affordable housing would be the kind of scandal that causes public officials to resign from office.

That housing might be many things. It is not affordable. What is happening? Again, lots of different interest groups and demands to meet other goals drive up prices.

Meanwhile, even when you do go ‘100% affordable housing’ near a major transit stop you can still get progressive nonprofits opposing it because it might cast a bit of shadow on a nearby schoolyard, while at least two parents there say ‘our schoolyard nadly needs more shade.’

State Senator Scott Weiner: Certain activists fought market-rate housing in the Mission, arguing it had to be 100% affordable housing.

2 Mission orgs then proposed 100% affordable & the same activists are fighting it.

It’s never been about “affordable housing.” It’s always been about straight-up NIMBYism.

There’s always a reason to oppose new housing for these folks. It’s just a matter of finding the rationale of the day.

Even worse is ‘inclusionary zoning’ which as I understand it is purely a requirement that some percentage of new apartments have to be rented at loss. If you think of this as a tax and redistribution scheme, because that is exactly what it is, it is obvious that this makes absolutely no sense as a way of achieving any goal other than preventing housing construction or enabling corruption.

Max Dubler: So-called “Inclusionary Zoning”—the practice of requiring homebuilders to rent some percentage of new apartments at a loss—is bad policy that lets elected Democrats pretend to care about poor people while NIMBYing new housing, worsening the housing shortage, and raising rents.

John Wilthuis: When I explain IZ to folks who are new to the housing issue, I have to repeat the part about how it’s unsubsidized, because nobody believes it on first telling.

It does make sense to potentially tax new housing construction if and only if you have otherwise already restricted the ability to build in ways that mean that building is highly profitable but the ability to get permission to build is fixed. In that case, if you’re locked into the first half of that decision you might as well collect the fees I guess, but you should just charge them money.

Josh (370k views so fair game): abundance agenda urban planners have no capacity to understand that the profession cannot exist if development is deregulated. we literally maintain regulations, that’s what planning is. this is not the best era to advocate for your own unemployment.

YIMBY Martial Law Enforcer:

Why is it that the term ‘private equity’ makes people lose their minds? Admittedly this is an extreme case, but the less crazy versions aren’t conceptually different.

JMac: It doesn’t matter. Private Equity will buy them all up the moment they hit market. You could build a house for every man, woman, and child, and Private Equity would buy them all up and rent them out. House availability is not and never was the problem.

House gets built

House hits market

Private Equity buys house

Private Equity rents house out.

This is how it goes. This is how it’s gone ever since Trump repealed the Obama-era law barring companies from buying residential properties for the first year on market.

So let me get this straight. You build a house for every man, woman, and child, far more houses than people want to live in. Then mysterious ‘private equity’ buys them all, and then they charge what, exactly? They all form a conspiracy to set prices at a monopoly level and no one notices? One PE company buys all the nation’s housing stock? Something else?

Tyler Cowen brings us this job market paper from Felix Barbieri via Quan Le about the impact of institutional ownership on the rental market, with supply effects proving larger than concentration effects:

In the last decade, large financial institutions in the United States have purchased hundreds of thousands of homes and converted them to rentals. This paper studies the welfare consequences of institutional ownership of single-family housing.

We build an equilibrium model of the housing market with two sectors: rental and homeownership. The model captures two key forces from institutional purchases of homes: changes in rental concentration and reallocation of housing stock across sectors.

To estimate the model, we construct a novel dataset of individual homes in metropolitan Atlanta, identifying institutional owners of each house and scraping house-level daily prices, rents, vacancies, web page views, and customer contacts from Zillow.

We find that institutional acquisitions increase average renter welfare by $2,760 per year (with rents decreasing by 2.3%). This net benefit reflects two opposing effects: higher concentration raises rents by 3.8%, but higher rental supply lowers rents by 6.1%. On the other hand, the welfare of the average home buyer decreases by $49,950. On the supply side, institutional acquisitions benefit house sellers but harm the average landlord.

I noticed I was confused. o3 explained that the average annual rent was $28k but that reduced search frictions and greater choice meant that the overall benefit was ~10% of the rent. That seems like a lot, and reminds me of a lot of economist talk of ‘well you have greater product variety or are forced to buy more [X] so you’re actually fine and totally not poorer.’

It’s not totally impossible the benefits are this big, if the rent market was previously super thin, and before there would be highly slim pickings, especially in the exact right location and size. When I rented in Warwick, there was a clearly best house, and if I’d had to go with my second choice I do think I’d have faced a >10% welfare hit, as in if they’d asked for 10% more rent we’d cheerfully have taken it anyway.

10% still does seem like a lot in general.

By o3’s calculation there are about 30x times as many people renting in a given year as buying that year, so this is a clear net gain, even if you don’t count that often individual sellers pick up that extra $50k that the buyers pay (and they at least partly reclaim it when they sell). So this is good unless you strongly want more people to own on the margin instead of rent, and given mobility concerns my guess is we want more renting than we have in such areas.

Here’s another bizarre mind worm, mostly for fun this time:

Catholic Charm: Boomers are selling their houses for high prices and then downsizing and paying for starter homes with cash. So young families can’t afford the homes they’re putting for sale and then get outbid the houses they can afford. They’ve totally ruined the market it’s insane.

Well, the issue is the concept of a starter home is a common thing now because people can’t afford a house that meets their needs. They’re buying houses that they’ve already outgrown or know they will outgrow in a few years because they can’t afford a home they can grow into.

I have no issue with older people staying in their current homes, that’s what I plan to do.

You see, if the old people consume more house, then that’s good for everyone else’s ability to ‘afford’ houses because those houses are expensive. But if they downsize to less house, thus making more housing available for others, that’s bad, because they took away the cheap houses. Wowie.

The generalization of this is fascinating. There are a lot of people who think:

  1. Affordable housing is good.

  2. Making housing better makes it less affordable.

  3. Therefore make sure people don’t make housing better.

This covers renovations, and gentrification, and more.

There is actually a great instinct behind this, which is that it would be great if we could allow people on tight budgets to ‘buy less house’ and still have a house, in terms of both quality and quantity. Because those people would be better off buying smaller lower quality houses.

And that’s right about that! Improving houses obviously makes people on net better off, as willingness to pay goes up for a reason, but if quantity of units is fixed those particular people would benefit from the available housing stock staying worse.

The thing is, it would be very easy to give it to them. All you have to do is allow people to choose to build or rent out smaller housing, and crappier housing, if everyone involved wants to do that. Legalize smaller rooms, smaller apartments and single room occupancy. Create a new class of amenities so that some are ‘required’ but others currently required are ‘standard’ such that you have to disclose and put in the rental or sales contract that they’re missing and point this out verbally, but make it legal to waive them if the tenant or buyer wants that.

We could very easily create a world in which those struggling with expenses could make modest but manageable sacrifices and be able to live where they need to live. We choose not to do that.

This seems great.

Alexander Berger (CEO OpenPhil): Exciting update: @open_phil is doubling down on our YIMBY, innovation, and metascience success by launching a >$120m Abundance & Growth Fund to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific & technological progress. Funding from @GoodVentures, @patrickc, + others.

Scientific and technological progress drive long-run prosperity. @bfjo & @LHSummers estimate that *new ideasaccount for ~50% of US per-capita GDP growth, with social returns of $14 for each $1 invested in R&D.

…

Luckily, these challenges are tractable. Through our decade of funding YIMBY housing reform, we’ve seen that policy advocacy can make a real difference (so far, especially on ADUs).

Now is the time: across the political spectrum, there’s growing recognition of the need to address these constraints. Both parties have members advocating for housing abundance, energy abundance, and reduced bureaucratic barriers to innovation, presenting a unique opportunity.

Aaron Regunberg offered some substantive critiques of the general abundance agenda, Jordan Weissmann delivers continuous knockout blows in return, as the arguments amount to ‘there are various factors [X] and [Y] making things worse, you only deal with [X] not [Y]’ to which the answer is, ‘actually we also are working on [Y] and also [Y] often acts through [X], and also [X] alone would help what is the issue.’

I want to be clear that this is not me picking on Aaron. This is me picking out the best and most substantive critique, because the other critiques are worse.

As the results add up, the vibes are clearly shifting. I am here for it. Daniel’s comment here is Obvious Nonsense. Green New Deal and Socialist rhetoric in general says it is ‘abundance’ because they assert their policies will somehow lead to everyone having all the things except the bad people who shouldn’t have them, except no it is a shame but actually that’s not how the world works. The choice of rhetoric is telling and it is bizarre how everyone can suddenly shift into ‘abundance was always good politics’ mode. In which case, yes, happy to nod.

Daniel Cohen: The Ezra-Abundance discourse was a centrist co-optation of the Green New Deal’s original abundance politics. Now Zohran is taking it back for the left. Not sure why so many people are surprised… #Abundance: welcome home.

Derek Thompson: The rapid online shift from “abundance is obviously shit politics“ to “abundance is obviously great politics, and it was our idea first, and now we got it back!” is a nice reminder that people are just making up discourse on the fly, and the book is still just 13 weeks old and, like everything else in the world, nobody knows how this is going to turn out.

It is so funny that Zohran is presenting as an abundance candidate while trying to do so many obviously anti-abundance things, especially vast imposition of greater rent controls and other requirements on those who would actually build or rent housing but also many other socialist policies. It is still great progress. I want everyone to have to acknowledge that abundance is the goal, even if they have no intention of doing things that cause abundance. Then it’s on us to point this out.

David Mamandi: According to Mamadani, the city won’t “slow down” new private housing projects. All the developers need to do are meet his criteria for

  1. Affordability

  2. Rent-increase limitations

  3. Union labor

  4. Sustainability.

  5. At that point developers are free to …. wait, no, they still need to go through “land use review.” LOL!

Mamendani: That means when private developers come to me with a plan that meets our goals around affordability, rent-stabilization, union labor and sustainability, it will be fast tracked through land use review. The days of the city slowing projects down are over.

Yeah, if he gets to be mayor we’re not building all that housing.

It’s happening. No, I don’t think Austin will get tired of all this winning.

AURA: Austin City Council votes 10-1 to legalize 5-story single-stair apartments, making Austin the largest US city outside of NYC to legalize single-stair! 🎉🎉🎉

Many thanks to all the supporters and to @CMChitoVela for leading this exciting reform! We did it y’all! 🙌

It’s not happening in Colorado yet but the governor is calling for it.

Jared Polis (Governor of Colorado): In Colorado, we are laser-focused on cutting housing costs and increasing the supply of new housing that Coloradans can afford. In my State of the State address, I called for Smart Stair reform to increase the supply of housing people can afford in the neighborhoods where people want to live near transit and job centers.

This new study shows that smart stair buildings are less costly to build and are safer.

hek!: single stair midrises aren’t more dangerous!! Pew Research study looked at fire risk in single stair buildings. this matters because most US/Canadian cities require double stair: consuming ~10% additional space just for stairs and increasing costs up to 13%!

these costs + standard USA zoning issues means that it’s really hard to build these mid rises – even if they’re extremely desirable AND when we do build them, they are frequently suboptimal for humans + over priced

Paris is filled with Haussmannian 6 story complexes – surprisingly denser than NYC!

*liberal definition of metro vs city used here lmao

There’s also a bill that’s been introduced in DC, which also includes a single exit.

This change alone would solve so many problems. The second stair has never made physical sense, the Europeans and others around the world use single stair with no issues, and now we crunched the numbers and we now the second staircase takes up a huge percentage of the building without making anyone safer.

Put it another way. The second staircase reduces space by 10% and raises costs by 13%. How many people would pay an extra 10% in rent to have a second staircase? It’s hard for me to imagine many making that choice.

Why didn’t it happen sooner? This seems a little harsh, but only a little:

Alex Armlovich:

  1. Be careful when you find buried treasure out in the open. It could be a trap or an illusion

  2. Essentially nobody in the last century in the US checked if 2 staircases are necessary for apartment buildings until 2021. Now a dozen states have changed. Which is pretty insane

Before Single Stair Twitter, there was one lonely architect in Toronto who was like “uh you guys nobody else in the world does it like this” but his op-ed was completely ignored

He didn’t have a YIMBY movement around back then to help, he was just one lonely smart guy 🫡😭

This is good example of our anonymous Canadian hero from the replies!

I seem to also recall an oped in the Globe or the Toronto Star, or some paper of record in Toronto

It seems Ireland forces only 25% of net growth to go to Dublin and its suburbs, so up to 2040 Dublin is only permitted to grow at 20%-25% total. This is of course exactly the opposite of what would make everyone better off, as evidenced by everyone wanting to move to Dublin, instead its population was lower in 1991 than 1911.

Brian Botter asks what explains this graph, where housing in the West is super unaffordable relative to income.

He rules out lot sizes, and construction cost differences are only moderate. It is clearly supply and demand, people want to move West (and South), the amenity index explains part of why, and demand can’t keep up (the version of this map he has is interactive).

The West has grown in population 27% since 2000 versus 20% for America, despite California’s best efforts, and if not for lack of housing it would have grown a lot more. This is all about inability to build more housing where people want to live, in particular because we are not legally permitting people to do so. That’s it.

Ah yes, that time the Mayor of Los Angeles, who it seems can Just Do Things, issued an executive directive making it fast and easy to build 100% affordable housing with zero government subsidies, then furiously backpaddled when developers started building.

Meanwhile, LA is forcing Simpsons producer Rick Polizzi to demolish his 24-year-old Simpsons-inspired treehouse after LA demanded it be permitted like a ‘single-family dwelling.’ This happened after the fires.

Collin Rugg: Attorney Paige Gosney says they secured zoning permits in 2023 but can’t get building permits from the Department of Building and Safety. “Staff wanted soil reports, structural designs, Americans With Disabilities Act compliance and all this stuff that is just kind of absurd,” Gosney said.

Meanwhile, LA is making everyone suffer to even rebuild the exact same house that burned down, let alone build something new that is better. They’re torturing them less than they usually torture builders, but that isn’t saying much.

Cremieux: It’s almost unbelievable that California requires you to file for permits galore to rebuild the exact same home that was there before on a burned down plot.

It’s hard to find anyone who seriously thinks this is acceptable.

Garrett: I was just talking about this today with a builder who lost their home in the Palisades Fire. Not only do they have to file for the permits, they are making them pay for them after everything they’ve been through which is totally unacceptable imo.

Cremieux: Have been hearing similar. Friend is trying to just sell his plot and move on because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to rebuild for years.

Garrett: They did cut *someof the red tape for some who are affected, so they don’t have to go through the entire permitting process but it’s still a bit much. I understand why it’s required, but they are so slow and tbh, they should not be charging for it.

They’re not all getting the entire value of their homes and property back and rebuilding a home that one may have had for decades is going to be so much more expensive now. Paying $15-50k+ for permitting is ridiculous when you consider how much in property taxes these folks pay.

Want to Build Back Better? At least you’re not going with the Biden version, here’s Ezra Klein explaining the 14 steps to apply for that funding, and Jon Stewart slowly realizing how absurd it is, and screaming, among other things, ‘OMFG.’ Bharat Ramamurti claims this is a ‘deeply misleading’ clip, that the process was like this because of GOP sabotage and wasn’t the design intention. Even if fully true, I do not feel it makes things that much better.

Kelsey Piper: ‘We’ve taken action to cut red tape’. ‘Did the action you took….work?’

Kane: Los Angeles has only issued 11 building permits for rebuilding after the fire, but the mayor is claiming with a straight face that “homes are under construction throughout the Palisades”

LA Mayor Karen Bass: Homes are under construction throughout the Palisades — ahead of expectations.

We’ve taken action to cut red tape and expedite the permitting process to get families home.

Kane: It gets worse lmao

Rachel Keuler: Only 1 of those permits is in the Palisades, where Karen Bass says that homes (plural) are under construction.

Zac Hill: “High School Zac Has Taken Action To Get Avril Lavigne’s Phone Number: News At Eleven”

It’s amazing that the claim of ‘homes under constructions’ isn’t even obviously literally true, as in it is not clear there are two of them.

The good news is that by all reports San Francisco is turning itself around on crime and quality of life, such as this report of spending a week seeing few homeless and no broken car windows, feeling fully safe.

Except that means:

Hunter: > SF turns itself around

> Still doesn’t build housing

> $5,000 median rent for a one-bedroom incoming

Armand Domalewski: Call me crazy but the fact that you need experience navigating San Francisco’s choppy political waters in order to build a small office building does not exactly make our city seem like a welcoming place for investment at a time where we very much need it.

Instead, they’re taking a bold stance that phone booths require sprinkler systems. Anyone with a rudimentary ability to think about the physical world understands that this is not motivated by worried about fire.

Last year, a Caltrain official built himself an illegal apartment inside a train station for $42k, and now we have pictures. The building already existed, so no even without legal issues you cannot simply build more of these, but yes we want a full explanation.

Sheel Mohnot: We finally have images of this apartment! A Caltrain official secretly built himself a hidden unit inside Burlingame station using $42k of public funds. It looks like a dorm room / a startup founders 1st office.

Armand Domalewski: I am genuinely curious why he was able to build this for $42k a unit. What costs did he avoid that he couldn’t avoid if he did this legally? If CA could build $42k unit studios we’d end homelessness in a year.

Debra Cleaver: for starters, the building itself already existed, and presumably was plumbed and wired for electricity. So I imagine he added furniture, appliances and made some sheetrock to divide the space?

Armand Domalewski: That is true for all modern office buildings yet office to apartment conversions are notoriously expensive.

Joe Cohen: Everyone’s response: “it’s impressive what he was able to do with $42k. Maybe he should be put in charge of CA housing.”

Each little requirement for apartments seems like a good idea, but add them all up and the costs involved escalate quickly. I wonder if what we should do is actively have a two-class housing structure (yes I know, young adult dystopian writers, eat your hearts out), where you can choose to be in either conforming or non-conforming housing.

Berkeley legalizes middle-housing city-wide, eliminating single-family housing, legalizing duplexes, quadplexes and small apartments.

YIMBY and abundance are scoring some impressive wins in California, including making CEQA (their version of NEPA) not apply to a broad range of housing.

This bill passed the Senate by 62-2. I’ve learned that such votes are remarkably not indicative of how close things were, but it still indicates no one is worried to vote yes.

Gavin Newsom is not holding back. On this issue he’s actually been impressive.

Gavin Newsom (Governor of California): To the NIMBY movement that’s now being replaced by the YIMBY movement, go YIMBYs. Thank you for your abundant mindset. That’s a plug for @ezraklein.

Yimbyland: ITS HAPPENING!!!

All new housing projects under 50 units in the state of California will be exempt from CEQA!! The state is finally coming to its senses!

Jerusalem: I honestly can barely believe this happened. Total YIMBY victory in California today. After Newsom signs this bill; CEQA will no longer apply to *anyinfill housing under 85’. No inclusionary zoning or labor provisions.

Armand Domalewski:

  1. Except for SF projects over 50 units

  2. Except for 100% affordable projects

(Both subject to prevailing wage still)

But otherwise yes!!!! 🙂

Alex Armlovich: It’s a huge deal but I want to manage national expectations of instant Austin-style outcomes until SB79 joins it

Partially rolling back CEQA for housing will make California *almost normal*…but still probably ranked ~44th in the US for enviro review

Elon’s My Hero: Now every building is going to be exactly 84.9 feet tall. That’s going to look… wonderful…

(I notice again how absurd the term ‘prevailing wage’ is, if it’s so prevailing why would you need a law to stop them hiring people for less money? Call the thing by its name, and it’s unclear how big a tax this is on projects or how much it will matter.)

I notice that you don’t actually get ‘every building is 84.9 feet tall’ style outcomes. People don’t actually push zoning options to their limits, people don’t optimize as much as they should.

Having CEQA apply to infill housing, or really almost any residential housing, was always a terrible idea. There are neighbors who can sue, so this interferes with ability to build almost anything. But very obviously, the ‘environmental’ impact of infill housing replacing existing low-value construction is mostly a fake concern. Instead, you drive sprawl, with construction going out into places you can actually do environmental damage, plus you discourage density when density helps a lot with carbon emissions as well, even disregarding the economic impacts.

About SB 79, that was introduced by Scott Weiner. It would legalize apartments near mass transit. The standard argument against this is that those new apartments would not be ‘affordable,’ and instead by ‘luxury’ homes. They would be too valuable to the people who live there, who would pay too high a price to reside in them. Oh no.

In the linked thread, Max Dubler makes the argument that they will still be cheaper than buying existing houses. That’s true enough, and if it convinces people, great. But it’s beside the point. The point is that we can build more housing where people want to live, that will be valuable to the people living there, creating lots of value and in turn will drive down rents elsewhere. More housing is good, let people build housing, in the places people want to live, especially where they’ll have access to mass transit.

I do have one worry with such bills. If you say that mass transit causes upzoning, will that cause cities to avoid building mass transit? Given how little mass transit gets built at this point, that’s a risk I am willing to take.

Is 2025 the last chance for California to build housing that lets it retain population for the 2030 redistricting, where it is projected to lose five house seats and thus electoral votes, importantly altering what maps win the presidency? Darrell Owens argues building a house takes five years. My presumption is that actually building by that time won’t have much effect on this scale.

But planning to build future housing does already help. Prices are forward looking and rational. So if more housing is coming, current prices should fall in anticipation, or demand should rise knowing it will be easier to stay in the future, in some combination.

On its face, this seems like a very big deal once the rules work their way through?

Michael Andersen: This Oregon bill, the first of its kind in the country that I’m aware of, just passed: 50-2 in the House, 28-2 in the Senate. A lot will depend on rulemaking, but this opens the door to a Japan-like system where the state defines its own version of lower-density zoning codes.

It’d pre-approve zoning & building permits for a state-defined catalog of 1-11 unit buildings on standard urban lots. two great laws that go great together.

Andrew Damito: Oregon’s legislature just passed HB 2258, which enables the state land use planning agency to preapprove a series of housing designs for structures up to 12 units, and require that cities auto-approve the structures anywhere, with very few exceptions.

WOW!

My thoughts?

  1. The law falls into the same trap as other blue-state YIMBY laws as it relies heavily on rulemaking instead of simply vacating local restrictions, meaning we won’t see any regulatory changes for at least a year, and will take longer to see housing emerge from it.

  2. There’s potential for homebuilding productivity increases through industrial scaling. If the state pre-approves prefab & modular housing designs, builders could lower costs through mass production. America’s disparate codes have prevented that.

  3. The Oregon LCDC is very YIMBY, even using its rulemaking powers to end parking minimums in all Oregon cities through its Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities rulemaking in 2023. You can bet that they will be ambitious in pre-approving housing.

  4. @andersem’s optimism that this opens the door to a Japanese-style state abrogation of lower density zoning isn’t unfounded.

    This bill doesn’t just require approval of specific housing designs, the state can also set rules requiring approval of variances to the designs.

This all looks like it will add up to a pretty big deal (within Montana).

Michael Anderson (April 25): Last week, Montana voted to:

– legalize 6-story apartments on most commercial land

– sharply cut parking mandates

– limit excess impact fees

– cut condo defect liability

– require equal treatment for manufactured homes

– legalize single-stair buildings up to 6 stories statewide

headline we rejected for this article: “Montana is so YIMBY, it’s getting embarrassing”

A recent study found that eliminating parking minimums alone can boost new home construction by 40–70 percent.

Several narrower bills tackle other obstacles to housing construction.

  • SB 133, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Greg Hertz (R-Polson), limits the impact fees that cities charge developers, which increase the cost of construction. Specifically, it eliminates administrative fees, caps fees growth to inflation, and limits the imposition of fees to infrastructure projects that are directly linked to a proposed development.

  • Hertz also successfully ran bills to limit construction defect litigation (SB 143) and transfer decision-making on historical preservation permits from volunteer-run boards to professional city staff (SB 214).

  • SB 252, introduced by Sen. Dave Fern (D-Whitefish), requires cities to treat manufactured homes on equal footing as stick-built construction.

  • SB 532, introduced by Sen. Forrest Mandeville (R-Columbus), allows one ADU by right on parcels outside cities. (Hertz’s SB 528 from the prior session legalized ADUs within cities.)

  • Finally, SB 213, introduced by Sen. Daniel Zolnikov (R-Billings), puts Montana among states such as Connecticut and Washington that are re-legalizing single-stair residential buildings. SB 213 orders new rules for the state building code to allow for the construction of single-stair buildings up to six stories when they meet fire safety standards.

I too had no idea this one was in the works:

Matthew Yglesias: It seems like Maine quietly passed one of the most dramatic statewide upzoning bills I’ve ever heard of without anyone paying much attention.

Here’s what they changed, the big one is up front but the ADU help is great too:

  1. At least three dwelling units allowed on any residential use lot.

  2. Up to four units where served with water and sewer.

  3. No more sprinkler requirements for most ADUs.

  4. ADUs no longer limited to single family lots or conforming lots, and no longer require owner occupancy.

  5. Subdivision review threshold raised from three units to five.

It still needs to get through the Senate and governor, but North Carolina State House unanimously (107-0) passed HB 369, a ban on parking minimums in new developments statewide. You can just prevent people from stopping you from doing things.

In new ‘who could have predicted it news,’ it turns out if you change how people pay the market clearing price doesn’t move and maybe the old system had its advantages? Maybe it was actually a stroke of genius to normalize the renter paying the agents, and we didn’t notice because New York City rent is too damn high despite this?

Gabrielle Fahmy: Rents jumping shocking 15% after NYC ditches broker fees: ‘It’s discouraging’

Rents shot up a shocking 15% in the week since the controversial FARE Act took effect, with the average rental in the Big Apple jumping from $4,750 to $5,500, according to an analysis by real estate analytics firm UrbanDigs.

The FARE Act, which prohibits agents representing property owners from charging renters a “broker fee,” also requires that all fees a tenant owes be included in rental agreements and real estate listings.

The law change has created what insiders tell The Post is a “shadow market” — apartments that aren’t listed so landlords can still get tenants to cover the fee.

“We’re going to be looking for apartments again like it’s 1999 … where you have to know who to call and when to call,” said Jason Haber, co-founder of the American Real Estate Association and a broker at Compass. “It’s going to be an odyssey.”

Renters meanwhile have been sharing horror stories online, with receipts — like screenshots of conversations with brokers flat out telling them they get one price if they pay the broker fee and another, much higher rate, if they don’t.

…

Another said a landlord was asking $6,800 for a 3-bedroom with a broker fee — or $8,000 with no fee, which is illegal to advertise under the new law.

Karol Makowicz: Who could have seen this coming.

Typical broker fee is 15% of rent, getting rid of that fee on a one year least meant rent went up 15%, wow, who could have predicted this. The average lease lasts 3-4 years, in theory the price should drop back down for future years.

I presume it mostly won’t and tenants are in general a lot worse off now. There is some value in getting that up front payment up front, but it’s clearly not worth the marginal price that has attached. So we had this great trick, and it is gone now. Damn.

Meanwhile, we’ve managed to get rid of parking requirements in the full core, but they alas live on in much of the city, so this is a chart of where you want to live in New York City, be in the blue area, or at least be in yellow. Red doesn’t even count, that’s suburbs.

Also, yes it would help if New York didn’t require all elevators be large enough to let a wheelchair turn around. I get that it’s nice to be able to do that but this actually substantially raises construction costs, and wheelchairs can go backwards.

No, you fools!

Bernard Stanford: This is the equivalent of taxing everyone who pays their rent to fund a subsidy program for people who decide they’d rather not.

Gintautas Dumcius: Eviction records can now be sealed in Massachusetts.

Bernard Stanford: If “one tough chapter” doesn’t bare on a person’s future, but landlords are sub-optimally biased, then the state could step on with an insurance scheme and provide benefit while profiting.

…

Even cases of actual misconduct, not simply failure to pay, are eligible to be sealed! Landlords don’t have the right to know whether a prospective tenant was violent or threatening towards a past landlord? Note that criminal records are also sealable in Massachusetts.

The ultimate consequence is quite simple:

  1. The added costs and dangers of being a landlord increase

  2. At the margin, landlords will sell rental properties to become SFH, or opt not to purchase new construction to rent, or opt not to buy buildings and convert them to rentals

  3. The availability of rentals decreases

  4. Due to scarcity, average rent rises

Hence everybody pays more and is worse off, except those who welch on their rent or break the terms of their lease and get evicted, who are now relieved of some of the consequences of their past actions.

Adam Rezabek: There is also another consequence: landlords will have to use all stereotypes known to men to try and guess which prospective tenant will be an issue and which will be not. Ofc this isn’t legal, but I think it will happen regardless

Do not underestimate the effect Rezabek refers to. I remember that ‘ban the box’ rules that prevented checking job applicants for criminal records similarly ended up hurting exactly the groups with criminal records, because of updates on (lack of) evidence. A similar pattern will no doubt happen here, on all correlations, legal or otherwise.

This also likely decreases new constructions outright.

Mostly it increases rents and moves a lot of rental stock off the market. I do expect a substantial impact here. A bad renter is expensive. Now, not only can you not filter out past bad renters, renters know that if they defect they can have their records sealed. So not only do you get negative selection, everyone will behave way worse.

There’s some great bills passing that would be awesome as national standards.

YIMBYLAND: SMALL LOT STARTER HOMES PASSES IN TEXAS AFTER NEARLY DYING

– 3,000 sf lots

– 31 units/acre by-right in SF zones

– 5′ max setbacks

– Limits parking mandates to 1 space/unit, no carport mandates

– Developers can sue for delays, cities pay damages

– 5 acres required for development

This is a neutered version of the bill, but it’s still a great start.

YIMBYLAND: TEXAS PASSES 6-STORY SINGLE-STAIR BILL! 🤠

– Legalizes 6-stories, 4-units/floor, in TX state building code

– Cities that adopt standard amendments to state building code would by-default legalize 6-story single-stair apartments

– Paves way for streamlined adoption by cities

I feel like I’m getting annoying at this point, but this could be you if your state had the courage. It is 100% possible to make real, impactful, housing reforms and Texas is leading the way.

It gets better:

Alex Armlovich: Texas SB840 is ending single-use commercial zoning, allowing apartments on top of habitable commercial uses statewide

This is by far the most muscular “Residential in Commercial Zoning” preemption bill I’ve ever seen

All the loopholes closed + a right of private action (!)

This bill is a bullseye painted on Dallas’s dogshit terrible zoning code & weak permitting process

Even after Austin’s recent reformist turn, I think this bill will have a measurable impact. And Houston too!

But Dallas is the biggest baddest NIMBY. And they got rolled 😂👏

YIMBYLAND: This law legalizes development & preempts cities over 150k from imposing

– Density limits below 36 unit/acre

– Heigh restrictions below 45ft

– Setbacks over 25ft

– Parking reqs over 1/unit

Poland is the latest story of building more houses and housing costs going down.

Acts Maniac: nobody in Europe is talking about the polish housing supply miracle.

The median household in polish cities (!) now only spends 13% of their income on housing.

They build about 200k units a year for a 36 million people country.

Michal Mynarski: why so? The difference of quantity and quality of shelter you can get for the same percentage of min/avg pay within last 15 years is outstanding. When I get to Wroclaw in 2011 usual price for a room was 2/3 min salary. Right now you can easily find a studio in that range.

As usual note the y-axis starts around 12 on the first chart, but this is still a huge decline. The second chart is space per person.

Discussion about this post

Housing Roundup #12 Read More »

new-evidence-that-some-supernovae-may-be-a-“double-detonation”

New evidence that some supernovae may be a “double detonation”

astronomy, astrophysics, Science, supernova, Type Ia supernova, white dwarf / /

Type Ia supernovae are critical tools in astronomy, since they all appear to explode with the same intensity, allowing us to use their brightness as a measure of distance. The distance measures they’ve given us have been critical to tracking the expansion of the Universe, which led to the recognition that there’s some sort of dark energy hastening the Universe’s expansion. Yet there are ongoing arguments over exactly how these events are triggered.

There’s widespread agreement that type Ia supernovae are the explosions of white dwarf stars. Normally, these stars are composed primarily of moderately heavy elements like carbon and oxygen, and lack the mass to trigger additional fusion. But if some additional material is added, the white dwarf can reach a critical mass and reignite a runaway fusion reaction, blowing the star apart. But the source of the additional mass has been somewhat controversial.

But there’s an additional hypothesis that doesn’t require as much mass: a relatively small explosion on a white dwarf’s surface can compress the interior enough to restart fusion in stars that haven’t yet reached a critical mass. Now, observations of the remains of a supernova provide some evidence of the existence of these so-called “double detonation” supernovae.

Deconstructing white dwarfs

White dwarfs are the remains of stars with a similar mass to our Sun. After having gone through periods during which hydrogen and helium were fused, these tend to end up as carbon and oxygen-rich embers: hot due to their history, but incapable of reaching the densities needed to fuse these elements. Left on their own, these stellar remnants will gradually cool.

But many stars are not left on their own; they exist in binary systems with a companion, or even larger systems. These companions can provide the material needed to boost white dwarfs to the masses that can restart fusion. There are two potential pathways for this to happen. Many stars go through periods where they are so large that their gravitational pull is barely enough to hold on to their outer layers. If the white dwarf orbits closely enough, it can pull in material from the other star, boosting its mass until it passes a critical threshold, at which point fusion can restart.

New evidence that some supernovae may be a “double detonation” Read More »

from-le-mans-to-driven—where-does-f1:-the-movie-rank?

From Le Mans to Driven—where does F1: The Movie rank?

Cars, culture, F1 the movie, movie review / /

How well does the world of F1 translate into the tropes of a sporting movie?

Damson Idris and Brad Pitt seen in F1 the movie

Damson Idris (left) and Brad Pitt (right) star in F1 The Movie, directed by Joseph Kozinski. Credit: Apple

Damson Idris (left) and Brad Pitt (right) star in F1 The Movie, directed by Joseph Kozinski. Credit: Apple

It may not have escaped your attention that there’s a new film about motorsport called F1: The Movie. It’s a return-to-racing story with elements you’ll have seen before, just maybe with other sports. A driver has been looking to slay his personal demons. There’s a wise veteran, an impatient rookie, and an underdog team with its back to the wall. Except this time, the backdrop is the multicolored circus of Formula 1, seen close up at 200 mph.

Backed by Apple and made by people responsible for high-energy productions like the recent Top Gun: Maverick, the film takes advantage of some of those same ingredients. For one, the filmmakers got an all-access pass from the powers that be, filming on the actual Formula 1 grid during 2023 and some of 2024. Having seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton as a producer helped with that. And the filmmakers were able to capture remarkable footage in the process thanks to powerful cameras that are now much smaller than the versions they strapped to some US Navy fighter jets.

The movie comes with a prebuilt audience, one that’s grown enormously in recent years. The Drive to Survive effect is real: Motorsport, particularly F1, hasn’t been this popular in decades. More and more young people follow the sport, and it’s not just among the guys, either.

NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - JULY 04: The cars of the upcoming F1 based movie are seen driving on track during previews ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 04, 2024 in Northampton, England.

Spot the camera car. Credit: Joe Portlock – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

I’m not a new fan, but I only started really paying attention to the series at the end of 1993. I’d have reviewed the film sooner, but the screenings occurred while I was on vacation, and the 24-hour races on consecutive weekends at the Nurburgring in Germany and Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium were not to be missed.

The setup of F1 sees Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt) brought back to the world of F1 30 years after a crash ended his rookie season. We find Hayes racing in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, filmed at the actual race last year. He’s lured back to F1 by his old friend, who now owns APXGP, in a Hail Mary attempt to score some points before the end of the half-completed season, thus saving the team.

An F1 driver’s most immediate rival is always their teammate—they both have to drive the same car, after all, so comparisons are immediate. (Pedants: please no long arguments about different setups or upgrades—you know what I mean.) And thus Hayes’ rival is Joshua Pearce (played by Damson Idris), a young driver in his first season who sees no reason to trust a driver whose arrival in his team mid-season seems more like a practical joke. That’s as much of the plot as I’ll reveal, but the writing is so formulaic that you can probably construct the rest for yourself quite easily.

What works, what doesn’t?

That’s not to say it’s a bad film. Yes, it requires some suspension of disbelief if you know enough about racing, but the issues are pretty small. The racing scenarios seem outlandish, but all of them have happened at one time or another—just perhaps not all to one team in nine races. Mostly, it’s a very close look at some parts of the sport most of us would never see—an actual F1 wind tunnel test filmed at Williams’ facility, which required assurances to the sport that this wasn’t just a way for that team to gain some more wind tunnel hours. McLaren’s impressive MTC shows up, too, though I’m quite sure you can’t park either a car or a bike by that particular door and expect to find either there when you return.

Brad Pitt, an actor playing Sonny Hayes, and Idris Damson, a driver for the fictional APX GP team in the Apex F1 movie by Apple Studios and Bruckheimer Films, pose for a portrait during the F1 Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi at Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on December 5 to 8, 2024.

Pitt and Idris filming on-track at the Yas Marina circuit during the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Credit: Gongora/NurPhoto via Getty Images

That’s the level of detail you can expect to trip you up. You may notice that a sequence that’s supposed to be in Spain or Belgium looks a little too much like Brands Hatch, an hour outside of London. Or that a seat fitting should take at least some amount of time.

Among the film’s biggest successes is what we don’t see. The cars don’t have an endless sequence of gears for the driver to punch their way through. No one suddenly remembers to accelerate all the way halfway down the straight rather than out of the apex like in real life. No race cars are driven out of tracks into high-speed pursuits, and no drivers have conversations with their rivals mid-race at 8,000 rpm.

All of that qualifies F1 for a podium position among racing movies. Neither the recent Rush nor Ford v Ferrari could resist some of those dumber tropes, and even the most desperate racing junkie will admit that neither Driven nor Michel Vaillant are really worth the time it takes to watch them unless the intention is to Statler-and-Waldorf your way through it with a friend.

And of course, there’s Days of Thunder, which was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who also produced F1. The NASCAR movie loses what was third place in my personal pantheon of racing movies to the carbon-fiber newcomer. There’s little distance between them; I’m just much more interested in F1 than stock cars.

Only 3rd place?

The only problem is that all this has been done before. The last time F1 was this big, the same combination of fast cars and good-looking drivers captured Hollywood’s attention just the same. John Frankenheimer was the man who got to make the movie, and 1966’s Grand Prix broke new ground at the time, starring James Garner, who I’m told turned out to be rather fast behind the wheel in filming. Its story is sentimental, and some of the acting is a little wooden, but it’s visually exciting and features spectacular footage of the 1966 F1 season.

James Garner and Toshiro Mifune starred in Grand Prix. FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images

The fact that Grand Prix broke so much more new ground than F1 means that Frankenheimer’s film finishes just ahead for me. But neither can quite supplant the magic of Le Mans, the 1971 film starring Steve McQueen, which was recently remastered on Blu-ray.

McQueen might have been one of the world’s biggest movie stars at the time, but he mostly wanted to be a racing driver. He wasn’t bad at it, either—in 1970, he almost won the 12 hours of Sebring in a Porsche 908 despite having broken his foot in six places a couple of weeks earlier. The actor was originally up for Garner’s role in Grand Prix and never gave up on a motorsports movie, capitalizing on his success in the late 1960s to get his own project underway.

Objectively, as a movie, Le Mans can be considered a failure. There is no dialogue for the first half-hour, just the occasional narration from a trackside announcer that contextualizes the scale of the annual 24-hour race. There was no script for months during filming, and the film went through directors John Sturges and Alan Trustman before Lee H. Katzin finished the job.

Even so, there was an assortment of many of the actual race cars that competed in the 1970 race at Le Mans. And the town had graciously allowed McQueen’s production company to close some of the roads used by the track for more filming. The cars were mostly piloted by the elite racing drivers of the time, but McQueen drove his own character’s Porsche 917K—at racing speeds but with heavy film cameras rigged onto it—as did Siegfried Rauch in the Ferrari 512.

This is what happens when you let a frustrated racing driver make a movie. CBS via Getty Images

Other footage had been shot in the actual 1970 race, both trackside and onboard, thanks to the same Porsche 908 that McQueen drove earlier that year in Florida, which was used as a camera car. At times, it’s more like a documentary. But only at times. With Le Mans, there was no CGI, and no other tracks were standing in for filming.

F1 can’t quite make that claim. At times, the cars seemed to be at slightly different scales on track—a product of Pitt and Idris being filmed driving slightly smaller, slightly slower F2 cars. Perhaps my biggest issue was with some of the unsporting behavior you see on screen. Those antics work better in a comedy like Major League; in a serious drama, it feels a little like disrepute.

None of that will stop me watching F1 again, however.

Photo of Jonathan M. Gitlin

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

From Le Mans to Driven—where does F1: The Movie rank? Read More »

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Paramount accused of bribery as it settles Trump lawsuit for $16 million

cbs 60 minutes, kamala harris interview, paramount, Policy, Trump / /

Payout to future presidential library

Paramount told us that the settlement terms were proposed by a mediator and that it will pay $16 million, including plaintiffs’ fees and costs. That amount, minus the fees and costs, will be allocated to Trump’s future presidential library, Paramount said. Trump’s complaint sought at least $20 billion in damages.

Paramount also said that “no amount will be paid directly or indirectly to President Trump or Rep. Jackson personally” and that the settlement will release Paramount from “all claims regarding any CBS reporting through the date of the settlement, including the Texas action and the threatened defamation action.”

Warren’s statement said the “settlement exposes a glaring need for rules to restrict donations to sitting presidents’ libraries,” and that she will “introduce new legislation to rein in corruption through presidential library donations. The Trump administration’s level of sheer corruption is appalling and Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism.”

Trump previously obtained settlements from ABC, Meta, and X Corp.

Paramount said the settlement “does not include a statement of apology or regret.” It “agreed that in the future, 60 Minutes will release transcripts of interviews with eligible US presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns.”

FCC’s news distortion investigation

Trump and Paramount previously told the court that they were in advanced settlement negotiations and are scheduled to file a joint status report on Thursday.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been probing CBS over the Harris interview and holding up Paramount’s merger with Skydance. Carr revived a complaint that was previously dismissed by the FCC and which alleges that CBS intentionally distorted the news by airing two different answers given by Harris to the same question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Paramount accused of bribery as it settles Trump lawsuit for $16 million Read More »

medical-groups-warn-senate-budget-bill-will-create-dystopian-health-care-system

Medical groups warn Senate budget bill will create dystopian health care system

aap, ama, health, health care, hospitals, medicaid / /

Medical organizations are blasting the Senate’s budget bill in the wake of its narrow passage Tuesday, warning of the dystopian health care system that will arise from the $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other federal health programs if it is passed into law. The bill has moved back to the House for a vote on the Senate’s changes.

Over the weekend, an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 11.8 million people would lose their health insurance over the next decade due to the cuts to Medicaid and other programs. Those cuts, which are deeper than the House’s version of the bill, were maintained in the Senate’s final version of the bill after amendments, with few concessions.

Organizations representing physicians, pediatricians, medical schools, and hospitals were quick to highlight the damage the proposal could cause.

The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Susan Kressly, released a stark statement saying the legislation “will harm the health of children, families, and communities.” The cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will mean that “many children will not have healthy food to eat. When they are sick, they will not have health insurance to cover their medical bills—which means some children will simply forgo essential health care.” And the cuts are so deep that they will also have “devastating consequences that reach far beyond even those who rely on the program,” Kressly added.

Medical groups warn Senate budget bill will create dystopian health care system Read More »

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Drug cartel hacked FBI official’s phone to track and kill informants, report says

Biz & IT, cartel, fbi, mexico, Security / /

The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico hacked the phone of an FBI official investigating kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as part of a surveillance campaign “to intimidate and/or kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses,” according to a recently published report by the Justice Department.

The report, which cited an “individual connected to the cartel,” said a hacker hired by its top brass “offered a menu of services related to exploiting mobile phones and other electronic devices.” The hired hacker observed “’people of interest’ for the cartel, including the FBI Assistant Legal Attache, and then was able to use the [attache’s] mobile phone number to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data, associated with the [attache’s] phone.”

“According to the FBI, the hacker also used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the [attache] through the city and identify people the [attache] met with,” the heavily redacted report stated. “According to the case agent, the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

The report didn’t explain what technical means the hacker used.

Existential threat

The report said the 2018 incident was one of many examples of “ubiquitous technical surveillance” threats the FBI has faced in recent decades. UTS, as the term is abbreviated, is defined as the “widespread collection of data and application of analytic methodologies for the purpose of connecting people to things, events, or locations.” The report identified five UTS vectors, including visual and physical, electronic signals, financial, travel, and online.

Credit: Justice Department

While the UTS threat has been longstanding, the report authors said, recent advances in commercially available hacking and surveillance tools are making such surveillance easier for less sophisticated nations and criminal enterprises. Sources within the FBI and CIA have called the threat “existential,” the report authors said

A second example of UTS threatening FBI investigations occurred when the leader of an organized crime family suspected an employee of being an informant. In an attempt to confirm the suspicion, the leader searched call logs of the suspected employee’s cell phone for phone numbers that might be connected to law enforcement.

Drug cartel hacked FBI official’s phone to track and kill informants, report says Read More »

substack-and-other-blog-recommendations

Substack and Other Blog Recommendations

Substack / /

Substack recommendations are remarkably important, and the actual best reason to write here instead of elsewhere.

As in, even though I have never made an active attempt to seek recommendations, approximately half of my subscribers come from recommendations from other blogs. And for every two subscribers I have, my recommendations have generated approximately one subscription elsewhere. I am very thankful to all those who have recommended this blog, either through substack or otherwise.

As the blog has grown, I’ve gotten a number of offers for reciprocal recommendations. So far I have turned all of these down, because I have yet to feel any are both sufficiently high quality and a good match for me and my readers.

Instead, I’m going to do the following:

  1. This post will go through the 16 blogs I do currently recommend, and explain what I think is awesome about each of them.

  2. I will also go over the top other non-substack blogs and sources I read regularly.

  3. Then I will briefly review the 10 other substacks that sent me the most readers.

  4. I will plan on doing something similar periodically in the future, each time looking at at least 10 previously uncovered substacks, and each time evaluating which blogs I should add or remove from the recommendation list. In the future I will skip any inactive substacks.

  5. The comments section will be an opportunity to pitch your blog, or pitch someone else’s blog. Please aggressively like comments to vote for blogs.

  1. Note on Paywalls.

  2. The Substacks I Recommend (Not Centrally AI).

  3. Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander).

  4. Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson).

  5. Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver).

  6. Rough Diamonds (Sarah Constantin).

  7. Construction Physics (Brian Potter).

  8. In My Tribe (Arnold Kling).

  9. Dominic Cummings Substack (Dominic Cummings).

  10. Bet On It (Bryan Caplan).

  11. Slow Boring (Matthew Yglesias).

  12. Useful Fictions (Cate Hall).

  13. The Substacks I Recommend (Centrally AI).

  14. AI Futures Project (Group Blog, Including Scott Alexander).

  15. The Power Law (Peter Wildeford).

  16. China Talk (Jordan Schneider).

  17. Musings On the Alignment Problem (Jan Leike).

  18. Gwern Newsletter (Gwern).

  19. Some Additional Substacks That Are Good And Aren’t Otherwise Covered But That I Am Not Ready to Recommend At This Time.

  20. The 10 Top Other Substack Subscription Blog Sources.

  21. Other Blogs And News Sources In Heavy Rotation.

  22. Twitter.

  23. Wrapping Up.

I have a very high bar for being willing to go behind a paywall, the same way I have decided not to have one of my own. If something is behind a unique paywall, then almost all of my readers can’t read it, and the post is effectively outside of the broader conversation. So not only do I have to be excited enough about the content to initiate a subscription, I have to be excited enough despite it being unavailable to others.

I am of course happy to accept and respond to gift subscriptions for various content, including other blogs and newspapers, which substantially increase the chance I read, discuss or ultimately recommend the content in question.

Going over this list, I notice that I highly value a unique focus and perspective, a way of thinking and a set of tools that I want to have available, that is compatible with the rationalist-style perspective of thinking with gears and figuring out what will actually work versus not work. I want to be offered a part of that elephant I would otherwise miss, a different reality-tunnel to incorporate into my own.

What I do not need to do is agree with the person about most things. I have profound and increasing important disagreements with most of the people on this list. When I recommend the substack, I am absolutely not endorsing the opinions or worldview contained therein.

I also reminded myself, doing this, that there is a lot of great content I simply don’t have the time to check out properly, especially recently with several things creating big temporary additional time commitments, that will continue for a few more weeks.

Scott Alexander is one of the great ones. If you haven’t dived into the Slate Star Codex archives, you should do that sometime. In My Culture, many of those posts are foundational, and I link back to a number of them periodically.

There was a period of years during the SSC era when Scott Alexander had very obviously the best blog by a wide margin, and everyone I knew would drop what they were doing and read posts whenever they came out.

I do think that golden age has passed for now, and things have slipped somewhat. I can get frustrated, especially when he focuses on Effective Altruist content. I usually skip the guest posts unless something catches my eye.

That still leaves this as my top Substack or personal blog.

Robin Hanson is unique. I hope he never changes, and never stops Robin Hansoning.

Most of the time, when I read one of his posts, I disagree with it. But it is almost always interesting, and valuable to think about exactly what I disagree with and why. The questions are always big. I could happily write an expanded response to most of his posts, as I have done a number of times in the past. I would do this more if AI wasn’t taking up so much attention.

I find Hanson frustrating on AI in particular, especially on Twitter where he discusses this more often and more freely. We strongly disagree on all aspects of AI, including over its economic value and pace of progress, and whether we should welcome it causing human extinction. That part I actually like, that’s him Robin Hansoning.

What I do not like, but also find valuable in its own way, is that he often seems willing, especially on Twitter, to amplify essentially anything related to AI that makes one of his points, highlight pull quotes supporting those points, and otherwise act in a way that I see as compromising his otherwise very strong epistemic standards.

The reason I find this valuable is that this then acts as a forcing function to ensure I consider and am aware of opposing rhetoric and arguments, and retain balance.

Before we first met up so he could interview me for his book On the Edge, I knew I had a lot in common with Nate Silver. I’ve been following him since Baseball Prospectus. Only when we talked more, and when I read the final book, did I realize quite how much we matched up in interests and ways of thinking. I hope to do a collaboration at some point if the time can be found.

His politics model will probably always be what we most remember him for, but Silver Bulletin is Nate Silver’s best non-modeling work, and it also comes with the modern version of the politics model that remains the best game in town when properly understood in context. He offers a unique form of grounding on political, sports and other issues, and a way of bridging my kinds of ideas into mainstream discourse. I almost never regret reading.

Sarah is one of my closest friends, and at one point was one of my best employees.

In her blog she covers opportunities in science and technology, and also in society, and offers a mix of doing the research and explaining it in ways few others can, pointing our attention in places it would not otherwise go but that are often worth going to, and offering her unique perspectives on many questions.

If these topics are relevant to your interests, you should absolutely jump on this. If there’s one blog that deserves more of my attention than it gets, if only I had more time to actually dig deep, this would be it.

No one drills down into the practical, detail level in an accessible way as well as Brian Potter. One needs grounding in these kinds of physical details. When AI was going less crazy, and I was spending a lot more time on diverse topics especially housing and energy, I was always excited to dive into one of this posts. They very much help distinguish what is and is not important, and where to put your focus, helping you build models made of gears.

I noticed compiling this list that I haven’t been reading these posts for a while due to lack of time, but the moment I went there I was excited to dive back in, and the most recent post is definitely going directly into the queue. My current plan is to do a full catching up before my next housing roundup.

There is something highly refreshing about the way Kling offers his own consistent old school economic libertarian perspective, takes his time responding to anything, and generally tries to understand everything including developments in AI from that perspective. He knows a few important things and it is good to get reminders of them. He often offers links, the curation of which is good enough that they are worth considering.

Perhaps never has a man more simultaneously given both all and none of the fs.

Dominic writes with a combination of urgency, deep intellectual curiosity and desire to explain things across a huge variety of topics, and utter contempt for all those idiots trying to run our civilization and especially its governments, or for what anyone else thinks, or for the organizing principles of writing.

He screams into the void, warning that so many things are going wrong, that all of politics is incompetent to either achieve outcomes or even win elections, and for us to all wake up and stop acting like utter idiots. What he cares about is what actually works and would work, and what actually happened or will happen.

His posts are collections of snippets even more than mine, jumping from one thing to another, trying to weave them together over time to explain various important things about today and from history that people almost never notice.

I find a dose of these perspectives highly valuable. One needs to learn from people, even when you disagree with them on quite a lot of things, and to be clear I disagree with Dominic on many big things. I feel I understand the world substantially better than I would have without Dominic. One does not need to in any way approve of his politics or preferences, starting of course with Brexit, to benefit from these insights.

Similar to Dominic Cummings and Robin Hanson, I think most people who read this would benefit from a healthy dose, at least once, of Bryan Caplan and the way he views the world, offering us a different reality tunnel where things you don’t consider are emphasized and things you often emphasize are dismissed rather than considered.

Bryan expresses himself as if he is supremely confident he is right about everything, that everyone else is simply obviously wrong about them, and that the reasoning is very simple, if only you would listen. You want this voice as part of the chorus in your head.

I found The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids both extremely valuable.

However, I do notice that I feel like I already have enough of this voice on the issues he emphasizes most often, especially calls for free markets including open borders. So I notice that I am increasingly skipping more of his posts on these subjects.

This blog is of course primarily about politics, in particular how much better he thinks everything would be if normie Democrats were moderate, and supported policies that were both good and popular and did the things that win elections and improved outcomes, and how to go about doing that. He takes a very proto-rationalist, practical approach to this, that I very much appreciate, complete with yearly predictions. The writing is consistently enjoyable and clear.

It is important to think carefully about exactly how much politics one wants to engage with, and in which ways, and with what balance of incoming perspectives. Many of us should minimize such exposure most of the time.

Cate Hall is a super awesome person and her blog is all about taking that and then saying ‘and so can you.’ She shares various tricks and tactics she has used to be more agentic and happier and make her life better. They definitely won’t all work for you or be good ideas for you, but the rate of return on considering them, why they might work and what you might want to do with them is fantastic, and it’s a joy to read about it.

I have to be extremely stingy recommending AI blogs, because the whole point of my AI blog is that you shouldn’t need to read either AI Twitter or the other AI blogs, because I hope to consistently flag such things.

There are still a few that made the list.

This is the blog for AI Futures Project which includes AI 2027. A lot of the posts explain the thinking behind how they model the AI future, aimed at a broader audience. Others include advocacy, consistently for modest common sense proposals. All of it is written with a much lower barrier to entry than my work, and I find the writing consistently strong and interesting.

This is very much a case of someone largely doing a subset of what I am doing, finding, summarizing and responding to key news events with an emphasis on AI. So I would hope that if you read my AI posts, you don’t also need to directly read Peter. But he has a remarkably high hit rate of finding things I would have otherwise overlooked or offering useful new perspective. If you are looking for something shorter and sweeter, and easier to process, or to compare multiple sources, this is one of the best choices.

China Talk focuses on China, as the name suggests, and also largely on Chinese AI and other Chinese tech. When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.

It is highly plausible that I should be focusing way more on these topics.

He hasn’t posted since January, but I hope he gets back to it. We need more musings, especially musings I strongly disagree with so I can think about and explain why I disagree with them. I still would like to give better arguments in response to his thoughts.

Once a month you used to get a collection of notes and links, without my emphasis on the new hotness. The curation level was consistently excellent.

I save these, so that if I ever have need of more good content. But at this point it’s been four years.

Without loss of generality, all of these would be highly reasonable for me to include in my recommendation list, might well do so in the future after more consideration, and for which I would be happy to offer reciprocity:

The Pursuit of Happiness (Scott Sumner) about things Sumner, including economics, culture and movies.

Knowingness (Aella) about Aella things, often sexual.

Second Person (Jacob Falkovich) about dating.

Derek Thompson (Derek Thompson) about things in general.

Works In Progress (Various) about progress studies.

The Grumpy Economist (John Cochrane) about free markets and economics.

Dwarkesh Podcast (Dwarkesh Patel) mostly hosts the podcast. I highly recommend the podcast and watch him on YouTube.

Rising Tide (Helen Toner) about AI policy.

Understanding AI (Timothy Lee) about AI and tech.

One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) about AI.

Import AI (Jack Clark) about AI.

My review process for each blog by default is to look at two to four posts, depending on how it is going, with a mix of best-of posts or what catches my eye, and at least one most recent post to avoid cherry-picking.

  1. ControlAI advocates for, well, controlling AI, making the case for why we need to avoid extinction risks from AI, how we might go about doing that, and covering related news items. They are out there in the field making real efforts, so they often report back useful information about that. This is very much an advocacy blog rather than an explanation blog, if you want that then it is pretty good.

  2. Applied Psychology = Communication appears to be a dead blog at this point, with the tagline ‘psychology that is immensely useful to your everyday life.’ These appear to be writeups of very simple points where You Should Know This Already, but there is a decent chance you don’t, and the benefits of finding one you didn’t know are plausibly high, so it is not crazy to quickly look, but I failed to learn anything new.

  3. Get Down and Shruti by Shruti Rajagopalan is about Indian culture and politics and hasn’t been updated since January. I very much appreciate the recommendation, since our interests and worlds seem so disjointed. I found her posts interesting and full of facts I did not know. The issue is that this is mostly not relevant to my core interests, but if you have the interest or bandwidth, and don’t mind that it’s a bit dry, go for it, there’s lots of good stuff here.

  4. Meaningness by David Chapman is a philosophy blog. I’ve extensively read Chapman previously via his previous online incarnation of his work, which is a book in slightly odd, hyperlinked form that you can jump around in, that is still in progress. That book is refreshingly accessible as such things go, if you don’t mind a tone of superiority and authority and claims of understanding it all that appear throughout, which passes through to the blog. I suspect what it takes to benefit from such things is the ability to look at such a system that is refreshingly made of gears, figure out which gears seem right for your situation and are doing the relevant work, which ones don’t work or are overreaching, and take the parts that you need. It is an excellent sign that the most recent post is one I could easily write quite a lot about in response, if I had more time. I’m glad I looked here.

  5. The Roots of Progress by Jason Crawford is what you would expect from the name, if you are familiar with progress studies. The problem here is that Jason is writing an excellent book, but it is a book trying to present a case that most people reading this will already take for granted. Which is a good thing, but also means most of you don’t need to read the blog. The important progress questions are soon largely going to be about AI, where Jason is better at taking the differences seriously than most similar others, although there is still much work to do there, and again that is not the topic here. The question is, who both is going to sit for this length of progress message, and also needs it? For those people this should be a great fit.

  6. Homo Economicus by Nicholas Decker. Decker is certainly not afraid to touch third rails, I will give him that, including his most popular post (way more popular than anything I’ve posted, life is like that) entitled ‘When Must We Kill Them?’ and subtitled ‘evil has come to America.’ He has a post asking, Should We Take Everything From The Old To Give To The Young? He seems at his best when making brief particular points in ways others wouldn’t dare, especially on Twitter where Icarus has some real bangers, whereas the longform writing, in my brief survey, needs work.

  7. Marketing BS with Edward Nevraumont, dormant since 2023. Not my cup of tea, and the posts are very of-the-moment, with much less value now 18 months later.

  8. Doom Debates by Liron Shapira, essentially a YouTube channel as a Substack. Debates about AI Doom, I tell you, doom! Recent debate partners for Liron are Richard Hanania, Emmett Shear and Scott Sumner. Would benefit from transcripts, these are strong guests but my barrier to consuming audio AI content is high and for debates it is even higher. I do love that he is doing this.

  9. Donkeyspace by Frank Lantz. There’s an interesting core to these posts, a lot of the writing is fun, but there’s definitely ‘could have been a Tweet’ vibes to a lot of it. As in, there’s a core point that Lantz is making. It’s a good point, but we don’t need this much explanation to get to it. I don’t feel like I’m thinking along with him, so much as I wish he’d just share the one sentence already. Yes, I know who is typing this.

  10. State of the Future by Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, examining questions about AI, mundane AI impacts and They Took Our Jobs. I noticed it failing to hold my interest, despite the topic being something I often focus on.

It is remarkable how few blogs are left that are not Substack, that I still want to read.

Most of the remaining alpha in blogs is in Marginal Revolution and LessWrong. Without either of those this blog would be a lot worse.

  1. LessWrong is a community blog, which obviously one would not want to read in full. That’s what the karma system, curation and other filters are for, including remembering which authors are worthwhile. Karma is very far from a perfect system, and it will sometimes miss very good posts, and the curated post selection is also very good. But I find it to be very good at positive selection. For recent posts, if you set a threshold of 200 and check out those plus the curated posts, and then filter by whether you are interested in the topic, you should do very well. For quick takes and comments, a threshold around 50-75 should be similar. There is also always tons of alpha in the archives, especially the sequences.

    1. Note that my posts are cross-posted there, if you want to check out additional comments, or prefer the way they do formatting.

    2. Reading the comments is often not a mistake on LessWrong.

  2. Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok). A large percentage of interesting links and ideas I find come from Marginal Revolution, many of which I would have otherwise missed, by far the richest vein if you don’t count Twitter as a source. Alex often makes good points very cleanly. Tyler is constantly bringing unique and spicy takes. I have great fun sparring with Tyler Cowen on a variety of topics, and his support growing the blog via links and emergent ventures has been invaluable, he really makes an effort to assist thinkers and talent. Tyler in particular often plays his actual views very close to his chest, only gesturing at what one might think about or how to frame looking at something, or offering declarations without explaining. In many cases this is great, since it helps you think for yourself. You can tell that Tyler has a purpose behind every word he writes, and he should be read as such.

    1. Alas, I have become increasingly frustrated with Tyler recently, especially in the AI realm, and not only because I don’t understand how he can hold the views he expresses given what he gets correct elsewhere. He seems to increasingly aggressively be placing his rhetorical thumb on the scale in ways I would not have expected him to previously. He also seems willing to amplify voices and points where I assume he must know better. It reads as if a strategic decision has been made. This also seems to be happening in other ways with respect to the current administration. So one must adjust, but MR is still a highly valuable and irreplaceable source of ideas and information.

  3. Shtetl-Optimized (Scott Aaronson). It rarely ends up being relevant to my work but I find the perspective valuable, and it’s good to keep up with different forms of science like quantum computing and get Scott’s unique perspective on various other events as well.

  4. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Yes, this is an online comic, but it is full of actual ideas often enough I’m going to list it here anyway, also xkcd of course.

  5. Meteuphoric (Katja Grace) is a series of simple points put bluntly and well, that I find worth considering.

  6. Luke Muehlhauser is mostly tracking his media consumption. I do find this a worthwhile data point to periodically scan.

  7. Stratechery (Ben Thompson). It is mostly paywalled. There was sufficient relevance that I paid up. Ben deals with AI and tech from a pure business perspective of profit maximization, and believes that this perspective is the important one and should carry the day, and is dismissive of downside concerns. Within that framework, he gets a lot of things right, and provides a lot of strong information and insight that I would otherwise miss. But this does cause me to strongly disagree with a lot of the points he emphasizes most often.

  8. Bloomberg. This is my most expensive subscription, and it is money well spent. If I had to choose one mainstream news source to rely upon, this would be it. It is very much not perfect, but I find I can trust Bloomberg’s bounded distrust principles far more than I trust those of other mainstream sources, and also for them to focus on what matters more often and in more depth.

  9. Wall Street Journal. This is my go to newspaper, and they often have articles that are important coverage of events in AI.

  10. Washington Post. This also often has good unique coverage, and offers a counterweight to the Wall Street Journal. For conventional news stories I’ll often expand to a number of additional news websites.

And of course, there is always there is Twitter.

I always check all posts from my followers and the Rationalist and AI lists.

In total that is on the order of 500 unique accounts.

This effectively is the majority of my consumption, if you include things I find via Twitter.

I write this guide back in March 2022 on how to best use Twitter to follow events in real time. Using Twitter to follow AI is somewhat different since it is less about real time developments and more about catching all the important stories, but most of the advice there still applies today.

If I had to make one change to the ‘beware’ list it would be that I did not emphasize enough the need to aggressively block people whose posts make your life worse, especially in the sense of making you emotionally worse off without compensation, or that draw you into topics you want to avoid, or that indicate general toxicity. A block is now even more than before only a small mistake, as they can still see your posts. If someone has not provided value before, a hair trigger is appropriate. This includes blocking people whose posts are shown to you via someone’s retweet.

The other note is that I take care to cultivate a mix of perspectives. I keep a number of accounts around so that I know what the other half is thinking, in various ways, especially legacy accounts that I was already following for another reason, many of which pivoted to AI in one way or another. I also count on them to ‘bubble up’ the key posts from the accounts that are truly obnoxious, too much so to put on the lists. One as to protect one’s own mental health. The rule is then that I can’t simply dismiss what those sources have to say out of hand, although of course sometimes what they say is not newsworthy.

I consume writing and write about it as a full time job. Most people of course cannot do this, plus you hopefully want to read this blog too, so you’ll have to be a lot more picky than this. If I was primarily working on something else, I’d be consuming vastly less content than I am now, and even now I don’t fully read a lot of these.

What am I potentially missing here, and should consider including? I encourage sharing in the comments, especially in the Substack comments. You are free to pitch your own work, but do say you are doing so.

Discussion about this post

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The second launch of New Glenn will aim for Mars

blue origin, new glenn, Space / /

Notably, the company plans to launch each new rocket as soon as it is ready to fly to gather data about the vehicle’s performance, attempt to catch and reuse first stages, and move closer to a rapid launch cadence. Therefore, if a customer payload is not ready, the company has also developed an inspirational mission called “Cube for the Future,” which appears to be part of the company’s initiative to inspire future generations to pursue careers in science. This may also fly as a rideshare on one of the launches listed above.

All eyes on the Moon

Among these missions, the payload likely to spark the most interest is the Blue Moon MK1 lander, which is part of the company’s plans to develop a large, reusable lander capable of landing humans on the Moon.

Blue Origin shared a snippet of video last week on social media showing the mid-section of the MK1 lander arriving at the company’s assembly facilities in Rocket Park, Florida. This will be the tallest vehicle ever to land on the Moon. It is 8 meters (26.4 feet) tall, which is 1 meter taller than the Lunar Module NASA used to land humans during the Apollo Program.

MK1 is a cargo version of a larger vehicle, MK2, that Blue Origin is developing for humans. The cargo version is rated to carry about 3 metric tons to the surface, about 10 times the capacity of currently available commercial landers available to NASA.

Barring a major setback, it now appears highly likely that Blue Origin will beat SpaceX in landing a vehicle on the lunar surface. Due to the struggles with development of the Starship vehicle—whether on the ground or in space, the last four Starship upper stages have been lost before achieving a nominal success—some industry officials believe Blue Origin now has a realistic chance to compete with SpaceX in the effort to land NASA astronauts on the Moon as part of the Artemis Program.

Both companies are developing large, ambitious vehicles—SpaceX with Starship, and Blue Origin with its MK2 lander—but Blue Origin’s vehicle is somewhat less technically challenging. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is also far more committed to a lunar program than SpaceX founder Elon Musk, sources said, and if he sees an opportunity to finally best his rival in space, he may go for it.

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Robotic sucker can adapt to surroundings like an actual octopus

Biology, octopus, robotics, Science / /

This isn’t the first time suction cups were inspired by highly adaptive octopus suckers. Some models have used pressurized chambers meant to push against a surface and conform to it. Others have focused more on matching the morphology of a biological sucker. This has included giving the suckers microdenticles, the tiny tooth-like projections on octopus suckers that give them a stronger grip.

Previous methods of artificial conformation have had some success, but they could be prone to leakage from gaps between the sucker and the surface it is trying to stick to, and they often needed vacuum pumps to operate. Yue and his team created a sucker that was morphologically and mechanically similar to that of an octopus.

Suckers are muscular structures with an extreme flexibility that helps them conform to objects without leakage, contract when gripping objects, and release tension when letting them go. This inspired the researchers to create suckers from a silicone sponge material on the inside and a soft silicone pad on the outside.

For the ultimate biomimicry, Yue thought that the answer to the problems experienced with previous models was to come up with a sucker that simulated the mucus secretion of octopus suckers.

This really sucks

Cephalopod suction was previously thought to be a product of these creatures’ soft, flexible bodies, which can deform easily to adapt to whatever surface it needs to grip. Mucus secretion was mostly overlooked until Yue decided to incorporate it into his robo-suckers.

Mollusk mucus is known to be five times more viscous than water. For Yue’s suckers, an artificial fluidic system, designed to mimic the secretions released by glands on a biological sucker, creates a liquid seal between the sucker and the surface it is adhering to, just about eliminating gaps. It might not have the strength of octopus slime, but water is the next best option for a robot that is going to be immersed in water when it goes exploring, possibly in underwater caves or at the bottom of the ocean.

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after-27-years,-engineer-discovers-how-to-display-secret-photo-in-power-mac-rom

After 27 years, engineer discovers how to display secret photo in Power Mac ROM

Apple History, classic mac, easter egg, easter eggs, Mac OS, Macintosh, PowerPC, Retro computing, retrotech, Reverse-engineering, rom hacking, Tech, Vintage computing / /

“If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it,” Brown explains on his blog just before displaying the hidden team photo that emerges after following the steps.

The discovery represents one of the last undocumented Easter eggs from the pre-Steve Jobs return era at Apple. The Easter egg works through Mac OS 9.0.4 but appears to have been disabled by version 9.1, Brown notes. The timing aligns with Jobs’ reported ban on Easter eggs when he returned to Apple in 1997, though Brown wonders whether Jobs ever knew about this particular secret.

The G3 All-in-One is often nicknamed the

The ungainly G3 All-in-One set the stage for the smaller and much bluer iMac soon after. Credit: Jonathan Zufi

In his post, Brown expressed hope that he might connect with the Apple employees featured in the photo—a hope that was quickly fulfilled. In the comments, a man named Bill Saperstein identified himself as the leader of the G3 team (pictured fourth from left in the second row) in the hidden image.

“We all knew about the Easter egg, but as you mention; the technique to extract it changed from previous Macs (although the location was the same),” Saperstein wrote in the comment. “This resulted from an Easter egg in the original PowerMac that contained Paula Abdul (without permissions, of course). So the G3 team wanted to still have our pictures in the ROM, but we had to keep it very secret.”

He also shared behind-the-scenes details in another comment, noting that his “bunch of ragtag engineers” developed the successful G3 line as a skunk works project, with hardware that Jobs later turned into the groundbreaking iMac series of computers. “The team was really a group of talented people (both hw and sw) that were believers in the architecture I presented,” Saperstein wrote, “and executed the design behind the scenes for a year until Jon Rubenstein got wind of it and presented it to Steve and the rest is ‘history.'”

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