Ben Kleinbaum

Nobody knows anything.

@gonglei89 @Birdyword Yes, I have less money after I buy something and my net worth goes down as my car depreciates. But I understand that as part of the trade and didn’t expect to maintain the original value of my car or the food I eat. Did people buy homes in China expecting the value to decline?

@BKleinbaum @Birdyword I dunno are you losing money when you buy a car and it depreciates?

@Birdyword The “waste” is only in virtual financial quantities, abstract yet unrealized claims to future production denoted monetarily. Price collapse now means lots of people getting housing upgrades. Besides someone is ultimately still a net beneficiary accumulator of those higher prices.

@gonglei89 @Birdyword Yes

@gonglei89 @Birdyword If they didn’t take on much debt, they paid cash? So didn’t they still lose money if they price fell since when they bought it?

@BKleinbaum @Birdyword Redo your financial analysis without the assumption that people have been buying houses with 30 year mortgages that make up 80%+ of the property value.

@aechlin @lionel_trolling The Hasidic community has nothing to do with why the subways are designed this way. The subways were designed to get people to Manhattan where the jobs were. It’s now too expensive to build new subway lines, sadly.

@lionel_trolling Obviously it’s not a social justice issue. But is the Hasidic neighborhood within their rights to basically keep public transit out to disenfranchise an underreported number of people? 2nd Ave “opened up” the UES. Why not Williamsburg?

This is because I said it wasn't that big of a deal to transfer in the city since the trip took about 30 minutes, which is how long it takes to go anywhere in New York, but I guess that's offensive if you're a transplant loser who thinks that Brooklyn is the center of the world

@Scholars_Stage @IridentDefender Kissinger’s argument is that he was also severely constrained by what domestic politics would allow due to Vietnam and the aftermath.

@IridentDefender Both

There is a Kissinger revival because Kissinger was trying to answer the same question many people believe we face today: “what should American diplomacy look like in an age when America is in decline?”

@dieworkwear Could you explain the difference (if there is one) between chinos and khakis?

Someone asked if I could tell them where to buy a pair of good chinos. In this thread, I will tell you, but my answer is not simple. On the upside, I think this is a better approach when shopping for clothes and you can apply it to any kind of item. 🧵

@urbenschneider Most of the homes in that chart were not built in places that were upzoned with a MIH requirement. MIH does not apply to every new development in the City.

This doesn't seem right. NYC housing production surged after Mandatory Inclusionary Housing went into effect in 2016. Upzoning+IZ+tax abatements has been a successful formula in lots of neighborhoods. It's not a perfect policy but it's certainly not a failure.

@nicolegelinas @arpitrage Ride hail apps were a step change difference in terms of the time it took to get a ride and price compared to the pre-uber days—especially if you were outside Manhattan south of 96th street.

I agree with the ideas outlined in Sam and Kelly's piece! I don't see why Uber is a massive win. It's fine; it's there; I use it sometimes, just as I used to use Carmel cars when I needed a car. Which isn't often, because I live in the most transit-saturated city in the U.S. We've always had for-hire black cars. And we've always known we can't have too man of them.

This is what makes NYC different from any other place in the US, including SF: the majority of our people get around (into and within the city) on transit. Our approach to AVs must incorporate the experience that before the city properly regulated UberLyft, UberLyft was encroaching into transit trips (2015-2019) by underpricing the true cost of a for-hire ride and helping cause record congestion. We can't let that happen again. Observing the obvious here spurs hysterical comments of "you want to ban all new technology forever!!!" to "you don't care if babies die!!!," hardly harbingers of a fact-based sober discussion on a complex transportation *systems* matter. (Hint: the *systems* part means you can't fix it by saying, "you will really like riding in a Waymo!!!")

@fredstaffordcs The NYISO has started to plead for new gas generation but no one seems interested in what they are saying. nyiso.com/-/video-new-yo…

A NYISO interconnection queue posted in March 2004 reveals the quick work NYISO (and Con Ed, as transmission owner) made of the study process for NYPA's emergency peaker fleet: submitted Dec 2000, finished in April 2001. Imagine such a turnaround today! You can't, because interconnection procedure has evolved to prioritize more participants, more competition, more small renewables projects. Were the NYPA peakers also, all the way back in 2001, the only time an identified NYISO reliability need was met via a new generation project, rather than new transmission or reliability-must-run declarations? web.archive.org/web/2004070818…

At the start of summer 2000, NYISO issued a warning about the following summer's peak demand of 30.2 GW statewide, 10.5 GW in NYC. More generation was urgently needed, for reliability and to keep prices from skyrocketing. The state public power authority, NYPA, swooped in with an emergency peaker plant deployment of 500+ MW deployed within a year. These days NYISO is still warning about peak demand, now slightly higher at 31.6 GW statewide, 11.1 GW in NYC. Amazing how similar the problem sounds too. Except instead of slow generator interconnection it's slow and politically disastrous project siting. From NYISO in 2000: "Higher prices should ultimately elicit investment in new generation; however, licensing new generators is not a smooth process. The peak demand is growing with New York's robust economy, while the building of new generation has remained stagnant. One outcome of those conditions could be a degree of volatility in wholesale electric prices this summer. In order to meet increasing demand, the NYISO encourages electric generation developers, electric customers and government to work together to gain approval of some of the growing number of generation facilities under study or proposed in New York, and to identify incentives to encourage expanded transmission capability."

@MetacriticCap @TheStalwart China had a catastrophic famine because they focused on steel production targets regardless of the quality. There is a difference between setting goals for creation/use of a tool (steel/token) vs a target for something that stands in for overall goal (gdp/profit)

Very early in its development, the Party would set GDP growth goals for each province in China. As you know, you can do lots of silly things to boost GDP growth and the Party officials certainly did. But the opportunities for China's development were so vast, that simply putting a GDP growth target was enough. It took decades for the Goodhart's Law to catch up with them. Same are tokens. Meta is spending 90 million tokens per developer per day. At Opus 4.6 rates, Meta would be spending in the zip code of $4-5B dollars per year. I think all but 5 corporations on earth can spend that much on AI. It's a massive feat of engineering, from wall to wall, to be capable of spending that many tokens. Marco Argenti is a serious east coast executive. He isn't a silly man that would suggest that Goldman should be tokenmaxxing. But in reality, when she brags about combating token anxiety, that AI spending should be comparable to compensation spending, and centralizing consumption, is exactly because he cares a whole lot whether Goldman is tokenmaxxing or not. Were Meta to grow headcount in the high-single-digits, it wouldn't be newsworthy at all, and everyone would even think that Mark is now a wise capitalist that grows headcount diligently. tl,dr: the cost of tokenmaxxing is small because tokenmaxxing is extremely hard. You can safely expect that over the next 18 months, 98% of corporations would be better off tokenmaxxing.

How does measuring productivity by total token consumption make any sense at all?

Salina is not the first person to realize how valuable the vacants are

@MosesNYC Yeah—when hipsters were a distinct group who stood out but not yet part of the mainstream.

NYers who've been here for a minute... when was peak "transplants" discourse? I think mid-2000s?

@MattZeitlin Great book about this.

I find the “architects have weird taste” explanation for why buildings look like that to only be so convincing. Artists and intellectuals can have non-standard taste but buildings are bought by developers and governments and big companies and indirectly by non-artist people

@TheStalwart It’s like that in cycling as well. They started with much lower cost wheels then US/EU brands. Then they moved up to full bikes. Now they have started sponsoring pro teams.

On r/runningshoegeeks, 1-out-of-18 posts mention a major Chinese running shoe brand. Just last quarter it was 1/40. Li Ning is the big one

@AlexAlmeida2020 That question seems tied to what Trump thought the consequences would be of the decapitation strike. So I’m not sure you can treat it as distinct from Trump’s choices.

and seemingly didn't plan for the obvious contingency of Iran moving to shut down traffic through the Strait immediately at the start of hostilities, and the impact that would have on overall timelines for the operation.

Truly. Going beyond le orange man bad takes, what I don't fully understand, and where I would like to see some hard questions asked, is why CENTCOM and DoD apparently thought they could do this campaign sequentially, Iran first, then Hormuz...

@aarmlovi It’s not the creation of the carbon tax that’s challenging—the problem is how high it needs to be to get to the emission limits set out in CLCPA.

NY's Petroleum Business Tax is already the core of a wholesale carbon tax Convert the PBT from $/gallon to $/ton of CO2, expand it to all fossil fuels instead of just petroleum, and NY has a carbon tax with very low admin costs! Use the revenue to cut general sales taxes

@KKriegeBlog Thank you!

Christopher Duffy’s thoughts on those who just realized Iran was a mountainous country.

@nicolegelinas The meat packing business is centrally planned! The only reason it still exists there is because it was preserved and subsidized by government.

This is, in fact, neighborhood character ... functional urban industry. With a high-rise hotel near it and many different buildings of many different sizes and architectural character all around it. Radical Yimby wants a centrally planned monoculture, the opposite of urbanity ...