Jehrlich

All views my own

[Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler]

"Wiener is the hardest working and most effective politician I’ve covered in my seven-newspaper, 25-year career as a California journalist." https://t.co/lRHxoQAwBw

[Ryan Jones @RyanJones]

Members of government with dual citizenship you didn't complain about because they're republican. Melania Trump Senator Ted Cruz Sentor Bernie Moreno Senator Juan Ciscomani Rep Young Kim Rep Victora Spartz Rep Carlos Gimenez Rep Dan Crenshaw Rep David Clyde Rep David Rouzer Elon Musk Marco Rubio Kash Patel Mehmet Oz

[Bilal Mahmood 馬百樂 @bilalmahmood]

Wrong question to be asking.

A better one: why do so many of the homes SF has ACTUALLY approved in recent years trace back to Senator Wiener's bills?

880 McAllister: 2,300 homes (SB 593)
1064 Mission: 256 homes (SB 35)
1965 Market: 201 homes (SB 423)
1939 Market: 187 homes (SB 35)
730 Stanyan: 160 homes (SB 35)
681 Florida: 130 homes (SB 35)
2340 San Jose: 121 homes (SB 35)
2550 Irving: 90 homes (SB 35)
3001 24th St: 45 homes(SB 35)

SB 35 alone has streamlined 3,600+ homes in SF.

The broader context: State law can open the door. The city has to choose to walk through it.

San Francisco has indeed not built enough housing in recent years. But what we have built (majority of affordable!), would not have been built without Senator Wiener's efforts.

If we want to realize the full potential of Senator Wiener's work to become housing, City Hall has to stop getting in the way (which his opponent has done time and time again).

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

it always drives me as insane that laws passed by San Francisco’s state legislators, who all won re-election by healthy margins, are seen as “an assault on democracy” because a room of 50 cranks at an obscure hearing is somehow more democratic

[Mark Sawchuk @snarkmawchuk]

"Chan, meanwhile, has a policy agenda and legislative track record that’s as spotty as it is sparse ... [her] record on housing is abysmal.” 🔥🔥🔥
https://t.co/3b1mD9i2R6

[Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener]

We asked Richmond District residents for their thoughts on Connie Chan and Scott Wiener. They were clear about who they want to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress.

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

“Endorsement: Who should replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress? It’s not even a choice”

🔥🔥🔥

[James Medlock @jdcmedlock]

People often treat being a bubble and being genuinely important technology as mutually exclusive. The internet seems like the better comp, where the bubble popped even as it went on to dramatically change society forever.

h/t @forrestbrazeal for the diagram

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

underrated how much of the “don’t regulate AI” slop is coming from investors who bet big on crypto and metaverse and skipped on investing in Anthropic and OpenAI

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists:

Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics.

This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families.

And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs.

Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong.

But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.

[Jehrlich @jehrliuch]

@biased_skeptic @bryan_caplan With a trusted /famous party the skeptic should pay the worrier today and receive a check dated for the future date (the amount of the check will include both the odds and expected interest).

[Jehrlich @jehrliuch]

@GregHBurnham Hopefully there isn't a biblical rain storm to ruin the entire event

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

it is genuinely mindblowing to me how people are genuinely clueless about why jobs...exist

they act like jobs are just this thing that emerges from the ether

every worker is a consumer every consumer a worker

[sp6r=underrated @sp6runderrated]

Even if I agreed with Connie on every national housing issue I would still vote against her due to housing.

Incentives matter. Punishing nimby politicians, which she was, sends a message to local politicians being nimby forecloses political advancement.

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

Connie Chan has voted against building housing her entire time in office:

-She opposed the Family Zoning Plan
-She opposed turning a Nordstrom parking lot into housing
-The only housing project in her district I've ever seen her support was only possible because of a law authored by Scott Wiener named SB-35, which she...opposed
-She tried to get SF to *sue* multiple times to block state laws to build more housing
-She tried to put a poison pill in the family zoning plan to kill a project in her own district that will produce 526 homes
-In 2024, there were *two* market rate homes built in her district. She thinks this is two too many
-She dubbed transit oriented development "an unproven ideology"
-When asked if SF needed more market rate housing, she said "No"

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

I am, as always, reminded of our experience with waterborne illnesses. They were experienced as a fact of nature for centuries, and then we discovered the mechanism, and we engineered our environment to be very inhospitatable to them, and then that was basically the end of that.

[Corey Smith 陈锐 @coreysmith_17]

Reminder that Supervisor Chan authored a ballot measure in 2022 to let neighbors sue 100% Affordable Housing.

Not good!

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

the irony of all of this is that nancy pelosi joined hand in hand with the venture capitalists at andreesen horowitz to try to kill scott wiener's ai regulation bill purely because at the time she was trying to hand her seat over to her daughter

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

New GOP message on the cost of living: “stop whining.”