ClimateCal

Be a better ancestor.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

This is worth pinning

[Edgar McGregor @edgarrmcgregor]

The Outback, where it is currently summer, versus the Sonoran, where it is currently winter.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@ElectrekCo @EVPeteJohnson I had to ask Grok if these were to be in the U.S., & when it said no. I told my news display to stop showing content from Electrek. Stop it with the misdirection, you lose readers.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@TomSteyer Public sector unions?
https://t.co/V3P2DeDhns

[Sandeep Kaushik @skaushik100]

"If blue state governors and mayors want to get serious about delivering excellent public services... They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers.”

That's not an argument you typically hear from left-of-center commentators, even reform-minded, abundance-pilled ones, but that's the provocative argument that @nicholas_bagley and @robertmgordon made in a recent, much discussed NYT op ed titled, "Mamdani Will Need to Change How he Governs."

Both Bagley and Gordon are prominent Dems: Nicholas, now at the Univ of Michigan Law School, recently served as Chief Legal Counsel for Gov Gretchen Whitmer, while Gordon, now a Harvard fellow, served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on Biden's Domestic Policy Council.

So @hyded and I invited them on Blue City Blues (link in next tweet) to dig into why they believe Democratic politicians need to reset their relationship with public sector organized labor if they hope to reverse the loss of public confidence in blue governance that fed into Trump's ascendency.

"If we want blue cities to achieve their promise, and if we want to have a viable and effective alternative to what the Trump administration is giving us, this is a conversation we need to have,” Bagley told us over the course of our conversation about what really is a semi-verboten subject on the left.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

I see so many more typos in tweets I've hit Post on...someday I want le universe to offer a convincing (and true) explanation.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@jigarshahd?

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

I should state for the record that even through the Biden IRA green new deal period, my start up @TerraformIndies, which literally builds its own solar to make carbon neutral synthetic fuel, was awarded zero dollars, of the tens of billions handed out for energy transition projects.

We are fortunate to have deep pocketed private investors but we did spend a lot of time on grant applications for, eg, US based electrolyzer manufacturing (which we are doing) and low carbon fuel production (which we are doing) and solar following synthetic fuel processes (which we are doing), and never got so much as a "thanks for your interest". It was like talking to a wall. It was very clear that there was a club and we were not welcome.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@Ben_Reinhardt Kickstarter, or is that for-profit? Meetup?

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@Ben_Reinhardt I think creating problem-solving templates (that work well and are easy for others to follow) is quite high-ROI.
https://t.co/sHBEcHGU6G

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@Ben_Reinhardt Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons license.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@Ben_Reinhardt What could you do to attract the best possible answers to this question?

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@Ben_Reinhardt Would Carnegie Libraries have counted, or are they under "normal charity"?

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@Ben_Reinhardt Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons license.

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@Ben_Reinhardt Contributing the initial endowment for new Prizes.

https://t.co/1txLt9Mp3n

[Ben Reinhardt @Ben_Reinhardt]

A request:

What are your favorite examples of people (yourself or others) spending money to make the world more awesome that don't look like normal charity or profit-maximizing investment?

(Spending money on a personal project can count)

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@moseskagan "If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it."

[Moses Kagan @moseskagan]

What every voter and apparently, the NY Times Editorial Board, should know about housing policy:

1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand. Or you can add supply.

2. There is no amount of money that any big city government could feasibly spend that would add materially to supply. This is because, depending on the location, new apartments cost $250,000-1,000,000 to develop… building even a few hundred of those starts to stress any city budget, and many big cities need tens or hundreds of thousands.

3. On the other hand, investors (including pension funds and endowments, insurance companies, rich families, etc.) can collectively **easily** provide enough capital to build as much housing as we need **so long as they are confident they can get a reasonable return**.

To get those investors to fund the creation of the housing our society needs, we must do two things:

1. Dramatically reduce the time & complexity associated with securing governmental permission to develop housing. This means reviewing and simplifying the overlapping regulations that constrain housing production: zoning codes, building codes, parking, ADA, etc. But it also means changing the cultures within the relevant governmental agencies from “default no” to “how can we help you?”.

2. Provide certainty around on-going regulation of apartment operations.

The way investors get a return from building rentals is as follows: They hire managers to lease the apartments, collect the rents, pay operating expenses and any mortgage payments, and then send the investors the cashflow that remains.

But governments all over the country have been restricting the manner in which apartment buildings can be operated in all kinds of ways.

For example: Cities have been making it harder to screen tenants, while also making it much harder to evict tenants who don’t pay. You can see why both of those measures are politically popular. After all, who doesn’t want people to get second chances? And who wants anyone to get evicted? But, as a manager, the combination of those two regulations makes it much harder to predict, with any certainty, that the rent will get paid… and that makes it very difficult to get investors to provide capital to create more housing.

Another example: Rent control. Again, I understand why renters love rent control and why politicians want to give it to them. But, if, as has been the case in NY, LA and San Francisco, city governments hold annual rent increases below the rate of growth in the operating expenses of the buildings, the cashflow payable to the investors shrinks… making them much less likely to invest capital in building more apartments.

In conclusion: For ~every other good or service in the economy, we allow the market to function, and the result is that we have a surplus of choice at all price points (think of food or clothes or cars), which is spectacular for the consumer. If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it.

And that means allowing investors to build rental apartments *and* allowing them to operate those apartments in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit.

Remember: Every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@TomSteyer Attention @TomSteyer,
https://t.co/09q5zriggT

[Moses Kagan @moseskagan]

What every voter and apparently, the NY Times Editorial Board, should know about housing policy:

1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand. Or you can add supply.

2. There is no amount of money that any big city government could feasibly spend that would add materially to supply. This is because, depending on the location, new apartments cost $250,000-1,000,000 to develop… building even a few hundred of those starts to stress any city budget, and many big cities need tens or hundreds of thousands.

3. On the other hand, investors (including pension funds and endowments, insurance companies, rich families, etc.) can collectively **easily** provide enough capital to build as much housing as we need **so long as they are confident they can get a reasonable return**.

To get those investors to fund the creation of the housing our society needs, we must do two things:

1. Dramatically reduce the time & complexity associated with securing governmental permission to develop housing. This means reviewing and simplifying the overlapping regulations that constrain housing production: zoning codes, building codes, parking, ADA, etc. But it also means changing the cultures within the relevant governmental agencies from “default no” to “how can we help you?”.

2. Provide certainty around on-going regulation of apartment operations.

The way investors get a return from building rentals is as follows: They hire managers to lease the apartments, collect the rents, pay operating expenses and any mortgage payments, and then send the investors the cashflow that remains.

But governments all over the country have been restricting the manner in which apartment buildings can be operated in all kinds of ways.

For example: Cities have been making it harder to screen tenants, while also making it much harder to evict tenants who don’t pay. You can see why both of those measures are politically popular. After all, who doesn’t want people to get second chances? And who wants anyone to get evicted? But, as a manager, the combination of those two regulations makes it much harder to predict, with any certainty, that the rent will get paid… and that makes it very difficult to get investors to provide capital to create more housing.

Another example: Rent control. Again, I understand why renters love rent control and why politicians want to give it to them. But, if, as has been the case in NY, LA and San Francisco, city governments hold annual rent increases below the rate of growth in the operating expenses of the buildings, the cashflow payable to the investors shrinks… making them much less likely to invest capital in building more apartments.

In conclusion: For ~every other good or service in the economy, we allow the market to function, and the result is that we have a surplus of choice at all price points (think of food or clothes or cars), which is spectacular for the consumer. If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it.

And that means allowing investors to build rental apartments *and* allowing them to operate those apartments in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit.

Remember: Every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@antoniogm "If we want a market economy to allocate goods fairly we can't have orders of magnitude difference in wealth. It just stops working, and we can see signs of this happening everywhere around us." - mtobis on bsky

[Greg Koenig @gak_pdx]

We all love Japan, don’t we folks?
But eventually, we need to discuss how feudalism transmogrified into a soul crushing corporate structure inside Japanese businesses that absolutely stifle innovation, motivation, and anything approaching efficiency.
Boomer god-bosses at 10 person businesses, 5 of whom are basically human calculators doing the work of a single Excel table. Basically zero startup culture, almost no entrepreneurial spirit.
That’s not to say you find zero startups or entrepreneurs in Japan, but they are the rare exception.
We have a new Japanese executive on his 3 year stint in America as a Director. Took him to some of our customers- he was shocked - guys in garages with 2
or 3 of our machines pumping out $1M+ in revenue. “You just get this L L C on a computer and can start business?” He had an aneurism when he saw my home shop. These things simply do not exist in Japan…
Imagine if they did?
My point is; based, old-school Japan is awesome, but there are hidden costs.

[ClimateCal @climatecal]

@ApoStructura Sounds like we need more cities.

[ApoStructura @ApoStructura]

Average voter: housing here became too expensive, we can’t afford it anymore

Economists: your city needs to build more housing to increase supply

Average voter: I don’t want more housing, I want housing to be more affordable

That’s basically the state of the discourse

[Costa Kapothanasis @CostaKapo]

“We’re facing the largest supply shortage of lubricating fluids in the modern history of America. Realistic, middle-of-the-road estimates are for our average available supply in this product category to drop by 40%.”

Internal AutoZone Memo

[Carl Raymond 🌞🌞🔋 @CarlSparre]

Get your act together USA
🌞🌞🔋