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Atomic Semi?

> San Francisco led the nation in annual rent growth this month, with both one and two-bedroom prices hitting new all-time highs, marking the highest levels in over a decade of Zumper data. One-bedroom rent climbed 18.4% to $3,790, surpassing its previous peak of $3,720 set in June 2019, while two-bedrooms rose 22.6% to $5,270, exceeding the prior high of $5,120 recorded in September 2025.

From the Zumper report. 22% gain on SF 2B is just insane to me.


San Francisco is notoriously the most anti-new-housing city in the country.

Frisco (come at me) rent and housing prices have way more to do with the valuation of the latest startup darling than with much else.

SF (only acceptable abbreviation) is 7x7 miles square surrounded by water on three sides—the only way to grow is up, right after you knock down the 100 yro Victorian homes and historic buildings, and gut the neighborhood charms. This from someone who once paid rent 1300/mo for a two bedroom in Potrero Hill.

>right after you knock down the 100 yro Victorian homes and historic buildings

BS, there's ~400K housing units in SF, and only ~10k of those would be considered victorian. These units couldn't (And shouldn't!) be destroyed for new housing because they're protected, and that's not what NIMBY's or YIMBY's are arguing about anyway since almost everyone loves victorian homes.

More than half of the city's housing was built after 1940, mostly on the west side, and it's where NIMBYism is at its worst. There's little reason someone or even a developer shouldn't be able to build up there.


> “west side”

Build around Golden Gate Park just like NYC’s Central Park! Great idea.


Ah yes, Golden Gate Park, famously the only option for building new housing on the west side of SF!

Nah, Frisco has a long history of use

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/rappers-poets-activists...

as does 'the City'.


hehe. Frisco seems derisive to me. And The City? All major cities can be called that when in their vicinity (NYC?). But SF? It's right there on the Giant's caps!

What are you talking about? It's clearly Cisco - the bridge is right there in the logo!

SF was founded by a joint effort between Cisco and Salesforce, that's why it's called Cisco and SF, right?


Just turn SOMA into Hong Kong

At the density of Kowloon Walled City SOMA could house 2.2 million!

And we could probably do it comfortably with what we've spent on AI datacenters.


Source?

It paid in influence, not dollars. Billionaires don't buy newspapers or social media platforms because they think they are good businesses.

Another verge paywall.

Did SV ever know what normal people want?


Epic

I don’t really understand this. We already run KYC / AML. Is that not good enough for some reason?

People seriously underestimate how much easier it is to open a bank account in the US compared to most other countries. Especially with how many states give out government-issued IDs to non-residents/non-citizens (16 states + Washington DC).

It's estimated that between $250 billion and 500 billion is laundered through US banks every year, though some portion of that is via correspondent banking and not just individual account money muleing.

And this just collects that information. It doesn't actually stop people from opening these accounts or shut them down.


> It's estimated that between $250 billion and 500 billion is laundered through US banks every year, though some portion of that is via correspondent banking and not just individual account money muleing.

The money laundering is not happening through consumer deposit accounts (I've never heard your term money mueling and it's almost definitely not people moving $10,000 at a time if that's what you are suggesting).

It is wanton disingenuity to think that the goal of this rule is prevention of money laundering.


I didn't say that was the goal. I explicitly said that it wouldn't do anything about it. Just that it happens.

And absolutely it happens, particularly with networks of accounts connected to China. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. FinCEN has been publicly chasing this down for years. Although hawala networks are also a big source of that not mainly personal banking.

Also you're missing the forest for the trees here. Money laundering will most often happen through business bank accounts but a large number of business account holders also have personal accounts at the same bank and link them out of convenience.

Personal ID is also required to open a business bank account. This requirement will likely apply to those as well.


> Also you're missing the forest for the trees here

I see what you're saying - I am just trying to convey that the $250 billion dollars being laundered is commercial. It's hard to imagine how anyone can come close to those figures by using consumer accounts, linked or not.


So why doesn’t existing AML catch this? You also mention FinCen which Trump paused so why not just reinstate that?

He didn't "pause FinCEN", he stopped the reporting requirement of BOI for US Citizens/Companies.

Ok agreed. So why? If there is an issue with foreigners then why is anyone exempted from reporting BOI? I have foreigners in my entities, surely the gov wants to know about them?

The money laundering won't go away. It'll just move to administrations-approved money laundering vehicles like crypto. And needlessly disrupt or ruin the lives of millions. Neat.

What's the solution, no laws? Since laws just shift the venue for the crime in your view?

Banks are to be ICE now.

Basically this. Banks are already deputized into being de facto law enforcement by some of the KYC/AML checks they are mandated to do, and anti-immigrationists want this remit to include checking if someone is in the US illegally trying to use a bank.

The goal is to de-bank any opposition to the government. It starts with an easy out group like immigrants. Then more and more groups will get de-banked or otherwise disenfranchised.

>The goal is to de-bank any opposition to the government. It starts with an easy out group like immigrants.

Or an easy out group like the Freedom Convoy protest truckers.


I did not realize that the number of Freedom Convoy truckers was roughly the same as number of immigrants. That is a big issue!

I did not realize that the number of Romani was roughly the same as number of Jews. That is a big issue!

[flagged]


Holy crap, it's been a long time since I saw that dopey Obama/tea-party line. Fox News bullshit from the past seems down right quaint by today's standards

It's a fact though, so label it how you like but it happened.

You're gonna want to look into the context and framing. Elements connected to what you claimed are "fact". The framing is very much not.

If you still believe that nonsense after all these years nothing I can say that'll change your mind.

This is one of the all time greatest examples of "lying with facts". It's technically correct, the IRS absolutely singled out a bunch of non-profits due to administrative fowl ups, but trying to say Obama "targeted" the Tea Party intentionally was so hilariously stupid I'm amazed anyone bought it.


It starts with an even easier out group like "actual criminals or other groups that are fairly strongly hated by a lot of people".

The groundwork for this crap was laid in the 1870s when they were going after the klan, the 1920s bootleggers, then the 1940s-50s mobsters, 1980s drug traffickers, 2000s terrorists, etc, etc. Every step of the way people cheered.

Of course some people looked at the "hurricane cone" of public policy at the time and said that we were not on a good path. Of course they were ignored.


That's covered in the article

Is it really though?

> But that doesn’t satisfy Bessent. “Why can unknown foreign nationals come and open a bank account?”

To do business obviously. Are you seriously telling me the government, armed with Palantir, can’t already flag money laundering? Why is an “unknown” in the country in the first place given this admin’s extremely hostile view towards immigrants?


It's because certain banks like Bank of America will explicitly take business from undocumented immigrants, knowingly so.

As a quick example, I know for a fact they accept expired visas as ID proof to open an account.


I have zero respect for All In. It’s a shame people pay those guys any mind.

An echo in the sounding chamber? Say it isn't so...

Exciting stuff especially on the photo realism aspect.

Paywall.

I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee?

I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.


All of the software is to expensive for hobbyists.

How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?


Most of us start off as pirates and then go legitimate once we're big enough to work with others. Everybody knows someone who has a cracked version of some ancient version of Corel Draw, but we all know getting contracted under a big company means they want us using the latest file type standards because they'll only have access to the newest version of the file's publishing program. I know some people who still animate in Flash MX and go through all of the trouble of porting it forward to Animator CC 2025. Thought with Adobe killing Animator last month maybe they'll end up with some even more convoluted upconversion chain to get it into Toonboom.

Student discounts, piracy. Mostly piracy.

Paywall at the Verge? I have them in my RSS feeds and load articles most days and have never seen that. I definitely don't subscribe to their site. Either way, here's a link:

https://archive.is/WCDgq


Yeah, theverge is subscription now.

Their articles seem to load fine in my reader (Fluent) if I fetch them as they're published. Beyond that though, if I try to fetch the full content or open the article in my browser, I hit the paywall. It seems like either their paywall takes a few minutes to apply to their new articles or they deliberately make them accessible to RSS users fee-free.

It's a good thing to reward RSS use.

Try DxO Photolab if you have a mac

Better than Darktable?

Only you can decide that for yourself, I use both

acdsee is another one worth exploring.

acdsee, at least a few years ago when I was using it for large volume jpg commercial work, is fast and often good enough. The trickier stuff went for a spin in Photoshop.

Lots of photo editing workflows could be done in something like digital fusion which is free. You just have to use roto instead of painting masks, but the procedural graph workflow is more precise. It would also handle anything in a numbered sequence automatically so batch processing is trivial.

now , that's a name I haven't heard in... decades.

Haha, when I saw 30 years, I went to go read about it and its really impressive.

China’s robotics lead holy cow.

That's the lead in industrial robot installed. That lead is understandable because of manufacturing concentration in China. Here are 10 top robot makers, none of them are Chinese (*), and five are Japanese:

https://manufacturingdigital.com/top10/top-10-industrial-rob...

(*) Kuka was a top German maker who got acquired by Chinese company Midea recently


The graph says "new industrial robots installed", which is a bit misleading. For example the newest BYD factories are still stuffed with German/Japanese robots.

They also lead the world in EV production on paper, but in practice a large portion of those numbers might be driven by government pressure, not actual demand [1].

I’d personally take this data with a big grain of Goodhart’s law.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/


What's worse is that this the predictable result of a choice that America made decades ago and continues to make.

Outsourcing manufacturing capacity to China and letting domestic manufacturing skills atrophy and institutional knowledge die out was a choice that many people opposed but were ultimately helpless to stop because the people making the decisions ignored them and did it anyways for personal gain is how we got here.

You'd think that the supply chain shocks that we saw during COVID would be a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

You'd think that Ukraine-Russia war would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

You'd think that the recent failures by the US military in Iran and the depletion of years of missile stockpiles would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

I'm at a loss to explain it. It's like the American oligarchs want to weaken America, or at least are willing to do so if it means that they have greater control over it. Maybe they don't care about manufacturing capacity because they know that America is ultimately a nuclear protected island and that even if things continue to decline they'll be safe to rule it like a king?


> It's like the American oligarchs want to weaken America, or at least are willing to do so if it means that they have greater control over it.

The capital holders want it under their control. The fact that it harms the state is a consequence they ignore, or worse, believe that other people will deal with. There is not thought given to how much harm will be caused, because the harm is seen as part of the process used to acquire that control. It's the sort of thinking that aligns with beating a dog to teach it not to bark and then ignoring the cataracts that form from the repeated blows.


Plus that graph is the first derivative of industrial robots. the actual # of new robots since 2012 is the area under the respective curves, so a very big lead.

China’s manufacturing lead in a graph

Don't they have ten times more people than the next highest country (Japan) though?

It striking, but says nothing about AI.

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