A while back there was a discussion with Elon Musk and Jack Ma. Musk talks about living on Mars and Jack talking about making life better on Earth. I can’t believe now that back then I thought Musk was the smart one…
Big part of the reason why I left big tech to work in infrastructure. None of this Faceboot stuff is going to matter if we are drowning in sewage. That and the comfort that if/when things go to hell I will still have a job.
But hey I would like to point out that a bunch of the problems we are seeing are fixable with law changes. Housing is too expensive? Get rid of zoning. Global warming threatens to kill us all? Carbon tax and gradually increase it. Faceboot sucks but we are the ones that refuse to vote.
You said “Global warming threatens to kill us all? Carbon tax and gradually increase it” as if that will save us when the temp is +3° higher than the average in the 1800s
You are right. Nothing can be done. Smoke them if you got them.
Almost all of life is damage control. It is not about stopping horrible stuff from happening. It is about lessoning the horrible stuff and dealing with the day after. If we tax carbon output we will get less of it. That means the disaster won’t be as bad as it could have been. I apologize that life sucks and then you die is depressing to work with. You should ask the uncaring blind forces that put you here for a refund.
Meanwhile come monday morning I will be back at work making sure the sewage treatment plants in some city doesn’t flood.
(To be clear here, I’m not being accusatory or anything here, I’m genuinely curious) When you say that, what, exactly, do you mean? I feeling like I may be thinking something different from you, because when I picture getting rid of zoning, I see businesses/companies taking over everything and making neighborhoods a bleak nightmare. For example, we just recently had a Chinese group open up a smoke shop in a place not zoned for it. (skipped every single process required of new businesses to open) They got caught fast because the neighborhood they were in started having issues with the shop’s customers, so someone blew them in to permitting. Thats what I picture happening with no zoning, but without the ability to turn in the problematic businesses.
I only mentioned it because they were a foreign company from China that ignored all the rules and set up shop. They weren’t US citizens of Chinese decent. But if you immediately want to jump to racism, you do you.
It wasn’t me that jumped to it. The link between zoning, redlining, and segregation was established decades before I was born. Local governments find ways to zone out minorities that they do not want. Less low cost housing, refusing to allow single homes being converted into two family homes, strategically placing school busing limits, preventing religious buildings being built.
Just in my city, someone put up a sign in Arabic on their house and some Karen tried to pass an ordinance against signs on houses zoned for single family. She was at least honest about the why of it, “it is unamerican” according to her. Meanwhile we are surrounded by cities on all sides that have dispensaries as well as outdoor smoking cafes. Yet we don’t have them. All that lost revenue and an affront to equality just so some shitstain boomer doesn’t have to see a POC.
It’s great to latch on to ethnicity as the part of a statement to attack. But realistically reducing housing cost by eliminating zoning just turns neighborhoods into shitholes.
You move into an area and buy a house worth x amount of dollars, years later someone buys the house next to you and turns it into a junkyard. All of a sudden your property is worth dramatically less. You’re lowering housing prices by taking away the money from individuals buying their houses.
You say you’re in infrastructure, what happens when they build 27 apartment buildings, on a fringe property near the beginning of the service line and everyone downstream of them starts to get backups? Roadways, power, zoning and planning by zoning is the only thing that allows infrastructure to stay running.
But realistically reducing housing cost by eliminating zoning just turns neighborhoods into shitholes.
Citation needed. Keep in mind I have traveled and built stuff in countries that don’t have zoning. So good luck with that.
years later someone buys the house next to you and turns it into a junkyard.
Not sure why you would want to buy an expensive property with presumably bad electrical (residential stuff is shit) and not great highway access for something that makes very little money per unit land. Me personally if I was setting up a junkyard I would want to be on the outskirts where land is cheap and I didn’t have to worry about a school bus or a soccer mom SUV blocking me in.
All of a sudden your property is worth dramatically less.
Housing, I have been told, is an investment not an asset. That is how we justify a government credit system to keep it going complete with bailouts. Investments come with risk. We should go back to viewing residential property as an asset, something you just own.
You say you’re in infrastructure, what happens when they build 27 apartment buildings, on a fringe property near the beginning of the service line and everyone downstream of them starts to get backups?
Only for 12 out of the last 15 years. It would depend on the site but I would start with sewage grinders on each of the buildings, diesel backup, and a small wetwell at the lowest point in the area. Since presumably it is a dense area I would put a building over the wetwell. Pull all the methane thru an odor scrubber (city water would be okay for this) and make sure all the windows can be open in case of an emergency, since I fucking hate dealing with class 1 division 2.
However I am not a civil engineer I am in the electrical/software/network guy so yeah take that with a grain of salt.
About two years ago I had a site like that and that’s what we ended up with. Not exactly the same since they couldn’t get into the main sewage lines directly so had to use the bucket method. Basically process the waste to the point where all you have is shit bricks. Shit bricks are conveyed up by buckets (think ski lift) then rehydrated and allowed to enter the main line. It’s sounds kludgy but it could survive a multiple week power outage and the preprocessing meant only a percent of what went down the drain ended up hitting the system.
None of this has to do with zoning btw.
Roadways, power, zoning and planning by zoning is the only thing that allows infrastructure to stay running.
Really? So how come the last meeting of my city zoning department was involved in them yelling at a local motel because the cops caught some Johns? How come they have passed rules that satellite dishes can’t be street visible? How come they had a full meeting to discuss banning signs in Arabic because they were “unamerican”? How come they zoned out dispensaries when it is legal for rec in my state? I do follow them and I don’t see them meeting with engineers planning our sewage systems. I see a bunch of bigots trying to keep POC out.
Citation needed. I have traveled and built stuff Why should I, you’re not. That’s not a citation. That’s a clear call out that you have no idea how planning and city utility networks work.
Not sure why you would want to buy an expensive property with presumably bad electrical (residential stuff is shit)
Most Junk yards require no serious power outside of lighting AND who says there’s not three phase on the pole already, even industrial power has to get from point A to point B AND your own assumptions bite you in the backside, IF YOU DON’T HAVE ZONING, they’d have to put three phase everywhere because you don’t know where someone might need it. That’ll make power costs a few times more expensive. For the record, “residential stuff” isn’t shit, it’s just 2/3 of the nominal commercial stuff. If you pick up the third phase and use a different transformer you’ve got three phase 208v assuming the current network isn’t already oversubscribed. If you wanted to upgrade house service to run a car crusher, that’s just a new transformer and service line. When I built my house, I could have had three phase for another 10k.
Housing, I have been told, is an investment not an asset. That is how we justify
Great idea, but your asset is still worth 10% of what you paid. And that mortgage you got to but the house? it’s underwater now. Want to move? Tough crap. What can you do about that? Nothing, no zoning. They can put whatever they want next door. Cemetery? Industrial waste storage? No problem folks. Come on in! Without zoning to protect properly value, even the banks would baulk at giving you a loan.
Only for 12 out of the last 15 years.
You’re a plant engineer. Not a civil architect. You’re not educated sufficiently to design or build large scale distribution and delivery systems and honestly you have almost no idea how any of that works outside of your plant even though you’ve “been places” and “built things” You are insufficiently trained to comment on the necessity or apparently even the uses of zoning.
What about all the sewers that are overflowing because you have six tons of excrement at the end of the line? They don’t install gigantic mains ever where. Who’s going to pay for that rework? You can’t stop them from building there, there’s no zoning. You can’t plan for it, there’s no zoning. A bigger plant doesn’t help with every piece of hardware in the field is underspecced to bring the waste to you.
When you properly employ zoning. You don’t grant licenses to places you can’t service. When a place REALLY wants to put in a new residential area, a study is done to find the price to upgrade all the necessary infrastructure to support the new community. That price is then either pay for by the developer or passed on as a large amortized payment to each of the residents. If the price is too high, the community won’t be be built. But you can’t just openly design water delivery and waste removal that way. You can play looser and faster with power, but there are still limits.
Really? So how come the last meeting of my city zoning department was involved in them yelling at a local motel because the cops caught some Johns?
That has ZERO to do with my statement you quoted. I don’t really care if your zoning meeting sat around with hookers and blow while you all look on. That’s not what zoning is about, the meeting are there to give you a voice in where crap does or does not go, if they run your zoning meetings like a circus start leaning on your administration as a collective. Somewhere there us a mayor, governor or councilperson where that buck stops.
Zoning doesn’t make crap more expensive for the sake of price, it makes planning and intelligent utility design possible. It keeps greedy companies from installing toxic, putrid and noisy things right next to residential areas because a company doesn’t give any fucks about your property value or making you or your children sick. The don’t care about ground water or runoff.
It’s not zoning that’s making housing expensive, It’s not a lack of houses because they can’t build anywhere. It’s the people profiting off building houses. It’s the landlords, the slumlords, the ridiculously rich that need to make as much as possible on the properties. You’re being lied to. They’ll tell you it’s the zoning, because the less restrictions they have, the easier it is for them to put whatever business they want wherever they want it. It’s cheaper for them to make money. Then they’ll tell you that it’s the taxes they have to pay and how they need to have them lower. It’s all a sham so they can buy another boat or buy up another block or two of row homes and charge the people there top dollar while providing them minimal product.
Most Junk yards require no serious power outside of lighting AND who says there’s not three phase on the pole already, even industrial power has to get from point A to point B AND your own assumptions bite you in the backside, IF YOU DON’T HAVE ZONING, they’d have to put three phase everywhere because you don’t know where someone might need it. That’ll make power costs a few times more expensive. For the record, “residential stuff” isn’t shit, it’s just 2/3 of the nominal commercial stuff. If you pick up the third phase and use a different transformer you’ve got three phase 208v assuming the current network isn’t already oversubscribed. If you wanted to upgrade house service to run a car crusher, that’s just a new transformer and service line. When I built my house, I could have had three phase for another 10k.
208V 3-phase is shit. I know you don’t know what you are talking about now. You never get true 208 it is always always closer to 200. Which means hotter motors, more faults, more problems, less lifespan. And come summer when everyone is running the ACs your motor is running at 195V and about to melt. 4 incidents alone this month and this month is just starting. 4 separate customers called up because their motor is running hot. 3 of them on 208, the other one are Arizona idiots.
You’re a plant engineer. Not a civil architect. You’re not educated sufficiently to design or build large scale distribution and delivery systems and honestly you have almost no idea how any of that works outside of your plant even though you’ve “been places” and “built things” You are insufficiently trained to comment on the necessity or apparently even the uses of zoning.
Not a fucking plant engineer. Controls. Hundreds of sites all across the planet. Industrial, sewage, scrubbers, recycling, garbage, conveyors for waste, plus RO, and food. Let me guess, you got a P.E. you know one of those water damage inspection certificates. Maybe learn that there is more to engineering than recycling an old spec made by a better mind in the 80s and punching stuff into excel. Yeah I got your number, I know exactly what people like you are about. What towns have you been conning for years?
When you properly employ zoning.
And unicorns would probably eat grass.
It keeps greedy companies from installing toxic, putrid and noisy things right next to residential areas because a company doesn’t give any fucks about your property value or making you or your children sick. The don’t care about ground water or runoff.
Odor scrubbers, deeper wetwells, burn off, environmental surveys, DEP. Yeah we don’t care. Sure buddy. I have designed well over a 100 scrubbers but we don’t care about what goes in the air. Scrubbing everything from porcelain dust, to partial solvent recovery, to boron, to sulfur (of course), to freaken coffee beans roasting fumes, to sawdust, to chorine.
Here is what you don’t get, guess they don’t teach this stuff at your CEUs, everyone is subcontracting to everyone else. Eventually it gets to the few engineers who do the real work, not the ones that have meetings. Or lie about doing site surveys.
Zoning is as full of it as you are. Why don’t you call me a plant engineer again and that will convince me. Enjoy your shit 208 volts don’t call me when your motor dies. Not that you would actually call me, you are off conning another town. It is the plant operators who call me.
Rather than getting rid of zoning we simple need common sense rules set statewide designed to encourage sufficient multi family dwellings in urban settings instead of glorifying the single family home. For instance the country of Japan has for the entire nation one set of zoning rules.
the specific people are all (with the exception of Sam Altmann) grifters. they are
guy whose sub imploded at the titanic
2 Sam Altman, head of OpenAI (which went from charity to a wing of Microsoft).
Sam Bankman Freid's brother, who was talking about buying an island to carry "effective altruists" through an extinction-level event.
It pisses me off that these are the first EA adjacent people that are broadly well-known, rather than Givewell and 80,000 hours, who are actually doing good work.
EA is primarily advice for people with moderate amounts of disposable income (i.e. middle class), or people trying to figure out their career trajectory. Earn to give is very much a minority position, and that's pretty much the only one that at all involves aiming to be rich.
Longtermism is mostly a weird set of academics. the recent folks using it as a pretext to buy houses in the Caribbean are almost purely a group of cryptobros using it as a way to ethics-wash their pump and dump.
Yes we could if the rich paid their fair share in taxes and didn’t hog all the wealth. All they do is drizzle some tiny amount to the public here and there to appear generous and get tax benefits.
The vast majority of their money just gets wasted for their egomaniacal projects in an attempt to be remembered forever.
None of the shit they are developing is going to safe us from extreme climate change. In fact those same people are a heavy driving force behind climate change.
Comic could have had the rich cunts behind oil companies withholding climate data, car manufacturers lying about the safety of their products, housing companies kicking out a poor family, etc.
Instead they chose to go after the technology instead of the people or their evil choices.
No, because I don’t want to live in a world where one guy can roam the oceans on his superyacht while children starve and people die because they do not have “money”.
No, because the only reason this wealth exist is because people who make close to the median income put hours of their life into their project (and some gave their health and life for them). Take these people off the equation and the rich are nothing, yet they have more money than all the people who’ve accomplished all the work will make in their lifetime… combined!
Do you think destroying the planet is progress? These are jackasses doing more harm than good and they’re labeling their stupid visions as progress. Central planning is filled with issues, right? Well a few rich people shaping the world to their liking is pretty damn centralized.
You actually think some programmers and scientists creating a language model is destroying the world?
I’d say that belongs to the large investment firms, and the billionaires who decide to do things like bury climate data and push propaganda that climate change isn’t a thing for the last 100 years.
So you decided to focus on the chatbot mention in the comic while ignoring the entire overarching point of the comic? Someone who thinks as robotically as you should fear for their job.
Lets' chalk it up to you missing my original point of target the system and the people behind it not the technology.
What's next, we shouldn't create life saving medicine because rich people could use it to charge more and get rich? Fuck off out of here with your luddite nonsense.
You can be passionate about technological advancement and also be concerned about rent prices, funding for schools, and climate change. Let people solve the problems they're able to solve.
Yes but when you have billions at your disposal you have a much greater moral responsability than a fresh out of uni geek. He could greatly contribute to our urgent problems.
Sure, but the point of the comic is that while technological advances for “cool” things get all kinds of attention and development, actual social problems that continue to impact billions of people hardly get any focus.
They aren’t solving any actual issues. They are just hogging resources and wasting them on their dream projects. They are taking away resources that others need to survive.
It really doesn’t matter what we do on the earth – as long as people and industry exists, we will heat the planet. Either faster (greenhouse gasses), or slower (increasing albedo to capture more sunlight, adding energy with nuclear reactors, etc.).
There are effectively three very long term solutions: (1) kill all humans, and let nature recover – at least until the output of the sun crosses some threshold in about 250 million years where the Earth fries. (2) Large scale geoengineering, like solar shades between the earth and the sun, or similar means of reducing incoming sunlight. (3) Move all industry off the earth.
Now, these are all very long term scenarios. The problem is, if we don’t work towards the technology required to do one of three, all of humanity is doomed eventually. Space tech may seem like a vanity project by the rich, and honestly it often is, but it is also advancing civilization in the direction required to turn Earth into Eden in the far future.
If you look at the planet from far enough away, you stop seeing individuals, their triumphs or their suffering. You just see “solar energy capture cross section”.
Bullshit answer (troy). Of course there are thermo limits. We can live within them. Change is required. The current industrial system is ruinous. Stop apologizing for it as if it were natural.
Humans are natural, therefore our industry is natural. There's nothing wrong with industry (as long as it's mindful of pollution), we just need cleaner power generation.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think absolutely any value came from Jeff and Elon going to space in penis shaped rockets.
Dreams are great, but we need those with means to give back more to society. We don’t need mars colonies, we need common sense solutions to corporate greed, stagnating wages, and the growing threat of unchecked, privately-owned AI.
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