I support an increase in housing development and cautious modifications to zoning regulations because I believe these changes will improve housing affordability for humans.
I support more development into renewable energy sources because I believe these changes will improve the environment that humans must live in.
I do not support a massive increase in data center development, resulting in situations like xAI poisoning parts of Memphis and Southaven with methane turbines.
Zoning is currently too restrictive in the US. I believe it should be less so.
"Cautious" as I mean it exists in the space between where we are now and just throwing zoning regulations out entirely and YOLOing it.
I support significant changes, but I don't support just eliminating all regulations with no replacements and expecting "the market" to do the right thing. IMO we'd be trading one problem with another likely much more destructive one.
The NIMBY argument is generally that the current zoning system is fine (and then hiding behind it to support their NIMBY-ism).
This kind of data center opposition is part of the NIMBY playbook though. A core part of NIMBY positions is that the built environment should be purely discretionary; every change to the neighborhood should have sufficient community approval to go forward. The idea being that current residents should have veto rights over what is built in their community. Highly restrictive zoning just happens to be the method by which this land use philosophy is exercised.
Regular zoning in most of the US already covers data centers. They're highly likely only being placed in medium or heavy industrial zones. Opposing a data center despite zoning allowance is being a NIMBY. It's saying that community members should have veto rights over what gets built in their community, despite zoning and code which restricts what can be built.
I'm fully willing to buy the author's assessment of Jeff Bezos' detachment from the reality that we normal folk live in by viewing his (Bezos') interaction with William Shatner post Blue Origin's NS-18 launch.
The clip humanizes Shatner and makes Bezos seem like a creepy narcissistic ghoul in comparison (which is quite a feat assuming stories told about Shatner by many of his former coworkers are accurate).
Given all of the events since then its a bit interesting that despite the thinly veiled not-quite-name-dropping (eg. Gaiman, Chabon, Andrés) he didn't mention the presence of Ghislaine Maxwell who has been to Campfire several times including in 2018.
I worked on a system to do train positioning for the NYC subway system using Ultra Wideband radio beacons using the same sort of multilateration that GPS uses to determine position, so it was basically a flat system (obviously not fully flat, elevations still existed, but the UWB radios were roughly on the same plane as the train tracks at least compared to satellites).
...but at the end of the day the ECEF coordinates we used for everything still require a roughly spherical earth, but I don't think flat earthism is a real thing for most people who talk about it. Most of it is joking/trolling. There are surely some conspiracy-minded people who believe it because they don't give any serious thought to how anything works, but the people that publicly push alternate theories (eg. GPS is balloons, not satellites) have got to just be trolls.
> We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
Unfortunately the United States is currently ruled by a death cult that sees any further push to renewables as capitulation to China and is dedicated to burning fossil fuels until they are fully gone.
And while this part is less explicitly stated, I'm convinced they aren't ignorant of the devastating results of this policy, they just intend to profit off it rather than mitigate the harms, thus the stated interest in taking Greenland, Canada, etc.
They know things are going to get really bad, but they also know their own wealth will at least in the short term shield them from much personal exposure to the harm that will increasingly immiserate everyone else.
But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.
> I still think the American people want the government to pay their bills.
Not a comment on you, as I don't know you, but in my life experience all of the conservative-minded people I've known who bought into and parroted variations of the "welfare queen" myth were always the first in line for corporate welfare like subsidies, PPP/EIDL loans, and ZIRP benefits.
And actual American people I know who are not part of the top 10% work extremely hard and just want essential safety nets (of the type that nearly all other first-world countries manage to offer) so they don't have to worry about being homeless if they get an unexpected medical bill.
So I've always seen the idea that the non-well-off are just looking for handouts to do nothing as pure projection of the well-off as to what their mindset would be if they were less fortunate in their life circumstances.
Is there some small set of people who abuse the system (any system)? Yes, but I'm absolutely convinced a lot more people abuse the system at the high-end (for far greater overall cost) than at the low-end. And only people on one side of the scale are likely to ever face legal consequences for systemic abuse.
Yeah, there are tons of examples, some more direct than others.
Likewise the index averaged stock market is now basically free money forever for people who already have enough to make significant investments.
Yeah, sure, it could crash down in theory, but we've all seen how much effort will go into protecting the money if that actually happens, primarily at the expense of the less-well-off (who are far more impacted by inflation than the wealthy, and will suffer the most as we continue to cut safety nets rather than raise taxes on the wealthy to deal with the debt created by the financial engineering involved).
Unfortunately it has been dormant for some time but there are years worth of useful information there and he is an uncommonly good presenter of technical knowledge through the written word.
> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
I support an increase in housing development and cautious modifications to zoning regulations because I believe these changes will improve housing affordability for humans.
I support more development into renewable energy sources because I believe these changes will improve the environment that humans must live in.
I do not support a massive increase in data center development, resulting in situations like xAI poisoning parts of Memphis and Southaven with methane turbines.
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