Scott Olson

Ohio State grad, helped build the Alexa, raised three kids in San Francisco, wrote Zero Day Ghost.

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

Milton Friedman: “We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect... it protects the consumer against low prices.”

There's a reason both Donald Trump and JD Vance hate Milton Friedman.

Basic economics is the mortal enemy of the MAGA right.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

@NateSilver538 We can dream.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

@v63sfx I don't know anything about those companies and I'm not "caping" for them. I do think it's interesting how people become sanctimonious about financing home construction but don't utter a peep when private equity opens, say, PetSmart in Laurel Heights.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

This isn't the California these people moved to, or grew up in, 40-60 years ago. It's a land where the young can't survive and thrive because housing is out of reach. In today's California, their concerns about height/shadows are irrelevant, and their claims of "developer greed" are laughable in the face of their own greedy desire to cast the city in amber.

[Laura Waxmann @laura_waxee]

Hundreds of #SanFrancisco Marina residents turned out this evening for townhall on controversial @Safeway housing plan, which would place what for many is an uncomfortably tall, 22 & 18 story project at the low-slung neighborhood’s waterfront.
@sfchronicle

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

Louise, they are free to raise their concerns and I am free to be skeptical of them. Also, I'm a year shy of being a boomer myself, so I don't think I'm being ageist. I simply have a different point of view about allowing the city to change, and it comes from 30 years of listening to these types of arguments.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

I agree with the senator that California still needs high-speed rail, and I agree that the state's performance has been pitiful so far. We shouldn't fund it further until a politician steps up with a credible plan to finish it for 3X Morocco's cost per mile instead of 10X.

[Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener]

Where there’s a will there’s a way. Morocco built high speed rail faster & cheaper than what California is doing. Morocco didn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It now has faster rail.

We can do this in California. If we reform our broken permitting system, allow a public-private partnership & truly rethink how we deliver this and other major infrastructure projects, we’ll get it done. https://t.co/leCU3zGtL2

[andrew sy @androo_sy]

ah yes the great debate about building housing on the historically significant, victorian era architectural wonder of san francisco

*checks notes...* the marina safeway???

[tomie @tomieinlove]

Looking for SF housing has radicalized me to levels of YIMBYism hitherto unknown to man. Level the Castro and replace it with The Cube. Plop seven AP1000 reactors atop The Painted Ladies. Convert Chinatown into a kazillion thin skyscrapers, which is what they’d do in China anyway

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

I don't blame them for buying a house in the old timey days. I blame them for trying to pull up the ladder after themselves. I blame them for not allowing change that would permit a new generation to live a similar, though not identical, dream in one of America's most incredible cities.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

@maiab I agree, but we really really need people to distinguish between the bolinas lagoon and the marina safeway. One is in a low density natural area and the other is in a city with nearly a million people and a high-capacity transit system. We need the city folk to accept city life.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

@Teri5hty I've heard so many versions of this story during my years living here. Now it's my own children who are struggling to find a place. We need to build housing in the places people want to live, even if it's different housing than what was there before. The alternative is exile.

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

This was the dominant cohort when I moved to SF 28 years ago. At the time conventional wisdom was: "Developers greedy, preservation righteous." Roll the clock forward to 2026 and my adult children have nowhere to live, but these folks are still stuck in that mindset.

[Kane 謝凱堯 @kane]

This is like the Delta Force of San Francisco nimbys

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

@JellyBeanNight They aren't protesting housing, they're protesting (fill in plausible excuse to not build housing here).

Poor soil is a sovlable engineering problem and if these people are so concerned about liquefaction, why are they living in the marina at all?

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

You knew it was coming. Yes, what we need is more "balanced" housing (read: no new housing).

[The San Francisco Standard @sfstandard]

A coalition fighting a controversial Marina apartment tower is now pushing a statewide ballot measure to curb housing growth mandates.

📝: @leahygarrett https://t.co/6YI9oUsb0x

[Jon 👾👾👾💥👾👾 @vjon]

Hundreds of people with $3-5 million homes in the second most expensive city in the hemisphere gather to put a stop to “greedy developers” building a tower with hundreds of $1.5 million “luxury condos” that will each pay 5x more property tax than them.

[Todd Davis 帅猛男 @96hoya]

Imagine people who make a conscious choice to live in a city thinking that this is too tall.

There are taller buildings in suburban Virginia.

[clara the urbanist @SlopHq]

every floor the height act removes from downtown gets rebuilt as sprawl in loudoun county with a 45 minute commute attached. the height act didn’t cap the buildings, it relocated them to a cornfield

[Sachin Agarwal @agarwal]

San Francisco's 33 speed cameras caused a 79% drop in dangerous speeding, preventing 40,000 speeding incidents every day and saving lives.

Why are we even debating this? Put them everywhere. Now.

https://t.co/tHD09oLPpq

[Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler]

Guess what happened to SF permitting and production after Jane Kim and Aaron Peskin raised inclusionary rates to 25%+ in 2017?

[Scott Olson @racerdogjack]

Americans should seriously quit saying 'we're the most powerful country in the world.' We can't build competitive weapons cheaply or at scale. We'll remain vulnerable until we learn to manufacture again and this should be our focus, rather than starting new wars, building outdated battleships or whatever.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Why did POTUS suddenly pivot from "unconditional surrender" to a deal at any cost in Iran?

TL/DR it's the interceptors, stupid.

- it takes Lockheed >two years and $5-15m to make a missile interceptor
- i.e., $10k drones take a $5m missile to defeat
- our forecast was that a) the population was going to rebel and b) we’d quickly take out the missile launchers
- But: Iran murdered 50k protesting citizens before our forces were in place; we didn’t defeat the launch capability as fast as expected
- we were facing down dwindling interceptor supplies
- 50% of patriots are gone and 80% of Thaad interceptors are gone. They cannot be replaced in a relevant timeframe
- if we actually ran out of defenses, US and allies in the region would be slaughtered— and the US would be facing a historic defeat
- we're already rationing interceptors, which is why our soldiers died in Jordan last night and why there are no more Patriots in Ukraine.
- in this context we try to make any deal you can — regardless of cost. Pretend it’s about gas prices if we must.

So we are losing this war. Badly. And what really lost the war was the fucked up defense supply chain that can’t make munitions in a relevant cost or timeframe — and we have no technology that defeats the enemy in an economically sustainable way.

This is why advanced anti drone and advanced missile defense is so critical. Personally I am bullish on directed energy intercept, particularly space-based directed energy.

Regardless of specific technology, we must be able to build interceptors faster and cheaper than any enemy can build offensive weapons.

Against China right now we lose. Badly. It isn’t even close.

Fortunately we are learning this lesson against Iran not against China—and there is still time to pivot and fix the US industrial base, but only barely.