late stage capitalist

licensed for automobiles, motorcycles, sailboats, airplanes, firearms, fishing, marriage, and securities. 😷

[Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en]

When I was a child, my grandfather would sometimes solemnly intone at the dinner table: "The purpose of socialism is to organize scarcity."

As a kid it sort-of didn't register in my brain as meaning anything beyond "socialism bad", but eventually when I was 12 or something, I did ask what he meant by those specific words.

And he said: socialists establish control of valuable resources and then create an artificial scarcity of these resources, so that they can then use them as a tool of control by deciding who gets and doesn't get those resources.

And I thought that was wrong. I mean, are socialists misguided? Sure. But to claim that they deliberately create scarcity as a means of political control? That seemed far-fetched.

But, of course, he was entirely correct.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

It would only take about 20 of our Superpower small modular turbines to make enough electricity to reduce every thermostat in NYC from 78 degrees to a more human 72. We'd be happy to provide them.

[Hon. Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC]

Why doesn't New York have a stable energy grid when we pay the highest utility costs in the nation?

[Irrational Analysis @insane_analyst]

LOL

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Very, very important caveat:

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Yes

https://t.co/ddp5B3JOgc

[Yuchen Jin @Yuchenj_UW]

GLM-5.2 is the open-source Claude moment.

The demand we’re seeing at Databricks is astonishing. The world is going to see massive adoption of oss LLMs.

Also, more companies will shift toward post-training their own models on top of oss models and owning the weights.

[late stage capitalist @bentboolean]

2/2 for a good time look at the spending on tbr yellow busses. It comes out to spending like 60$ per kid/day/ride and they frequently drop 5 year olds of on the wrong corner.

The DOE might be bad but public housing is much worse. NYCHA admin overhead is 1200$ / unit / month.

[late stage capitalist @bentboolean]

The NYC public school budget is 43k / per student per year. It has doubled in the ten years my kids have been in NYC public school and outcomes have gotten worse. This is 2x the next highest spending school district in the country and more than some NYC private schools. 1/2

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Darializa Avila Chevalier: “What we need is a mentality of people over profit. You can’t tell me there is no money for schools, there’s no money to address childhood poverty, there’s no money to address this housing crisis, while voting time and time again to send billions to a war machine to a country that’s currently enacting a genocide”

[Daniel Golliher 🗽 @danielgolliher]

When I talk about the rent freeze in NYC, or someone asks me about it, my internal process often goes like this:

>> bracket the question of whether or not rental price controls are good or bad, which distracts people from realizing they don’t know how NYC’s system actually works, and that it is a bad system that wiser proponents of rental price controls do not endorse.
>> ask “is” questions we can readily get decent answers to: “What is the rent regulation system? What are the laws that allow it, and under which conditions? Who is in rent stabilized housing, with what family compositions, incomes, etc? What kinds of buildings are stabilized, and in which ways? Who owns them? Do we have access to any balance sheets?”
>> address the inevitable pedantic point about “rent stabilization” versus “rent control,” and what the definition of “market rate” means exactly.
>> remind interlocutors that we are not discussing “rent controls” generally, but those laws specifically in the context of NYC/S, which has a unique regime.
>> internally observe that: NYC’s system of using rent price controls is not what anyone thinks it is; it is a bad system, even if you want price controls on rents; it is hard for anyone to understand the system; the system as it exists is essentially a historically accreted accident, and not a deliberately engineered choice as a whole.

Finally: my points of strongest contention are not with people who are for or against price controls on rents (even though I am generally not for them). My largest contention is with people who: (1) speak about rent control generally without reference to the actual specifics of NYC’s system, (2) defend the system we have, which is kind of the worst of all worlds. It is the system you’d hope your city doesn’t have (no means testing, inheritability, no vacancy reset, applied across buildings of wildly different financial positions, etc). I could easily make my peace with a system that operates more sensibly, and has more reasonable trade-offs. That is not this one.

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

In the 1960s through 1970s, huge numbers of buildings in New York City were abandoned, because their owners could not make enough money to cover the expense of providing apartments to their tenants, could not legally get rid of their tenants so long as the building stood, and could not sell their buildings because no one wanted an “asset” that permanently lost money month after month. The only non-destructive recourse that they had available was to disappear, and so thousands of buildings eventually had their landlords vanish. A relatively small number of landlords hired arsonists to burn their buildings to the ground, because the destruction of the building was literally the only means by which a lease could be broken, leaving them at least with a vacant lot that didn’t cost them money. Large chunks of the city started to resemble a warzone.

[m. stanfield @resetbasis]

You’re gonna freeze the rent? On stolen land?

[Joseph Hernandez @hernandezforny]

Simple question: who actually benefits from @ZohranKMamdani’s rent-stabilized freeze?

Not the poor. Most covered tenants earn over $50,000 and 30% pull in $100,000 plus.

Not families. Just 23% are raising children; 41% live alone.

They’re disproportionately immigrants, 44% foreign-born, above the citywide average. Legal status, unknown.

And the rest? The poorest New Yorkers in public housing median income $20,600, get nothing. The 1.1 million market-rate renters get nothing. That’s 59% of all renters frozen out.

Worse, freezing rents chokes new construction and maintenance, shrinks supply, and drives everyone’s rents UP.

A handout for the few. Nothing for the needy. A deeper shortage for all of us.

The real solution isn’t a freeze. It’s supply.

Build, baby, build.

[Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 @Wilson__Valdez]

It's really sad because if we had elected a normal president, the 250th anniversary of our country would have been a really cool celebration of everything that makes this country great.

Instead, we get one miserable, unpopular asshole inserting himself into every little thing and making it about himself.

And it was entirely predictable if you had a pulse the past 10 years. Oh well...

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

In Argentina, rent freezes destroyed the housing market.

When Milei got rid of the price controls, supply rose by 300%, and rent prices decreased compared to inflation.

But communists are nothing if not absolute idiots who refuse to learn from history.

[m. stanfield @resetbasis]

Slugs voting for salt

[Ari Hoffman @thehoffather]

Democratic strategist James Carville on the DSA takeover of the party:

“There’s just some sh*t that I can’t be in the same tent with … I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist.”

[late stage capitalist @bentboolean]

These are both excellent!

[Arpit Gupta @arpitrage]

The Rent Guidelines Board recently voted for a two year rent freeze on NYC rent stabilized housing

I was the lone dissenting vote

I've written two pieces here; which highlight the challenges of a rent freeze and where to go next

https://t.co/IEtCz4dXZ6

https://t.co/P6tNyZ5YgS

[Arpit Gupta @arpitrage]

The Rent Guidelines Board recently voted for a two year rent freeze on NYC rent stabilized housing

I was the lone dissenting vote

I've written two pieces here; which highlight the challenges of a rent freeze and where to go next

https://t.co/IEtCz4dXZ6

https://t.co/P6tNyZ5YgS

[Jeff Flake @JeffFlake]

When considering a candidate for public office, character is a more important consideration than policy. Policies change. Character remains.