Eric Brown

San Franciscan, sports fan, dad of twins. SEO at @Airwallex. Formerly @NerdWallet, @BleacherReport, @Yahoo, @FoxSports. Same handle at Bsky

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

So much of college sports seems like “Things have to get worse before they can get better”

[Darren Heitner @heitner]

Also, as I’ve pointed out in the past, I have many questions about how collective bargaining in college sports would work..

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@Birdyword lol good point

Maybe something around “human-created”, like Engineered Intelligence or Constructed Intelligence

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@humantransit

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@Birdyword Silicon Intelligence?

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@kamilkazani Former American college basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian often criticized the sport’s organizing body, the NCAA. He once said, paraphrasing, “The NCAA was so mad at [powerful team] Kentucky for cheating, that they gave [lowly team] Cleveland State an extra year of probation.”

[Jack Zhang @awxjack]

For the past several months, @Airwallex has been the subject of false allegations originating with a board member of a direct competitor that include wild conspiracy theories about me. Today I am responding directly with facts and an independent security assessment that speaks for itself.

I also want to use this moment to introduce Airwallex properly. We are a decade into building financial infrastructure that gives American businesses the ability to compete and win globally. That work continues.

I was born in China. I arrived in Melbourne at fifteen with little English and no safety net. Australia gave me the education, the opportunity, and the freedom to build something. The United States represents that same promise, perhaps more powerfully than anywhere else on earth. We plan to keep building here.

https://t.co/GCn5qvkWko

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@StatisticUrban Plus rocking around AZ in Dec/Jan/Feb is way more pleasant than freezing in NH or Iowa

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@credealjunkie How does the model estimate rents in areas without apartments, like St Francis Wood?

[Eastern Bloc Visuals @eastblocvisuals]

You're an East German border guard Harry

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

Oh hell yes

(This team would be very strange)

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@Luky_BB Chan voted to reopen the Great Highway; voters on the far west side may have been thanking her for that. It’s a big issue in SF https://t.co/l6zWffVndd

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@kimmaicutler Seems like a really good time for institutional investors to buy up these properties

[Andrew Jeffery @credealjunkie]

People are asking: "wait, SF rents are at record highs why are landlords leaving units vacant?"

Here's how it happens.

Despite the "greedy landlord" narrative, most apartment owners in SF are families.

They own one, maybe two or three buildings and often live off the cash flow, support their kids with it, etc.

These are not professional owners and many inherited the building, don't live locally, or both.

So when units come vacant, they're faced with the decision: invest money I probably don't have into renovations and deal with construction headaches I'm not good at handling, all for the privilege of having tenant who may never leave, where annual rent increase don't cover the increasing cost of ownership.

So they leave units vacant because its simpler.

These are not people maniacally rubbing their hands together, checking market rents daily to try and top tick the market.

And because of Prop 13 keeping their property taxes artificially low, the buildings support themselves with marginal occupancy.

At some point this strategy runs its course.

Roofs need to be replaced, parents die, kids inherit buildings they want nothing to do with, property tax basis gets stepped up and properties get sold.

To active managers who renovate the units, replace the roof, modernize sketchy electrical systems, fix plumbing leaks, seismically upgrade the building, and put apartments out into a rental market starved for inventory.

All for the privilege of being called a greedy landlord.

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@NStarPolitics @StatisticUrban Good point but I wonder which one would drive more R turnout

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

Very good Rhodium piece on the challenges facing the Chinese economy. The good news, Rhodium notes, is that there is pretty much a consensus among economic policy advisors (although, I would add, not necessarily among policymakers) on the urgent need to rebalance the economy away from investment and towards consumption.

The bad news is that there is no consensus on how the costs of this rebalancing are to be allocated within the economy – nor, I would also add, even an acknowledgement that this is the key issue in rebalancing. With, broadly speaking, three sectors in the economy, the transfers needed to raise consumption must be allocated either within the household sector or from the business or government sectors.

In the first case, the transfers would come from rich and middle class households (e.g. through higher income taxes, property taxes, or cuts in services) and go to migrant workers and the rural poor. But with the middle class already suffering from job uncertainty and the property decline, this might be socially and politically more disruptive than Beijing would want to consider. What is more, the main reason for low consumption in China is not income inequality within households but rather the low overall household share of income, so even if Beijing were willing to implement such policies, they wouldn't solve the deeper underlying problem.

Another way to raise the consumption share involves transfers from businesses to households (e.g. raise interest rates, revalue the currency, reduce subsidies to businesses, close down the weakest players in sectors with low profitability and excess capacity, cut spending on logistical infrastructure). The problem here is that after years of operating on massive direct and indirect subsidies, many Chinese manufacturers are incredibly competitive but not terrible efficient (in the sense of being able to create more economic value than they absorb directly and indirectly through subsidies and transfers).

Without these transfers, in other words, an awful lot of businesses would be forced either to cut capacity sharply or to close. If this were to happen quickly, it would be very disruptive for employment and the overall economy, but if this were to happen over at least a decade or more of careful restructuring, it would require a lot more foreign forbearance on trade and a lot more debt.

The third way to raise the consumption share of GDP is to allocate the costs to the central or local governments. The right way to do this, as Rhodium notes, might involve directly or indirectly transferring ownership of businesses and assets from local governments to households.

The wrong way to do this would be to increase China's debt burden even further. Unfortunately even though China has the second highest debt burden in the world (after Japan's) and the fastest-growing debt burden in history, increasing debt further would be politically easier in the short term than transferring government assets to households. The key point here is that local governments should not liquidate assets to fund additional spending, as they seem to be doing now, but rather either to pay down debt or to fund transfers to households. But this almost certainly involves a significant change in the distribution of income within China and, with it, a potentially disruptive redistribution of power.

So if it is so hard to rebalance, why not ignore rebalancing and just double down on the existing model? The problem here is that while certain aspects of the Chinese economy may seem in good shape, in fact the overall economy is struggling, and it is only massive increases in debt every year that allow Beijing to continue to achieve its growth targets. But as happened to every other country that followed this model, debt is always what causes the ultimate unraveling, and it is much better for China to begin the difficult adjustment while it still has fiscal space than to be forced into adjustment when it no longer has fiscal space.

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

Nah. Touchbar was a bad idea. Eyes should be on the screen, not on the keyboard

[Lucas Crespo 📧 @lucas__crespo]

The touchbar was too early and didn't deserve to die, it deserved an LLM.

Static shortcut buttons were the wrong bet.

Imagine buttons that rewrite themselves based on whatever you're doing, that's the keyboard that feels right for an AI-native Mac.

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

The top 2 is not a great system. CA should use Alaska-style RCV

[Alex Thompson @AlexThomp]

Most Dems don’t want Steyer v. Becerra because it means spending a ton more money on an ugly Dem on Dem fight through November.

[Rohin Dhar @rohindhar]

To my knowledge, today was the first instance a real estate listing in San Francisco said

“Anthropic or OpenAI stock will be considered as payments”

[Eric Brown @ebrohinho]

@MattZeitlin John Wall. Quick to the hoop. Would have been an all-time PG