rachel bonsignore

The Blank Street takeover in NYC is real, I’ve seen like 4 new locations popping up in the last week alone

Non-residents of NYC are going to be amazed by how popular the luxury pied-a-terre surcharge idea is going to be with high earning residents who normally complain about the all-in 50+% tax bracket Especially when current property tax + common charge/maintenance on a $5mm place runs >$200k/yr (after tax dollars as well to be clear) which means a non tax resident staying 1-180 days in the city each year could spend $1.1k-$200k/night on a luxury hotel room or suite And if you are doing that Florida 200 days NYC 165 days tax arbitrage, this sort of policy reduces the value of it and perhaps drives the marginal person to not try it and just stay in NYC PS - that $200k/yr being paid by a Gulf prince or Monaco resident billionaire with an effective tax rate close to 0% is actually $200k versus it’s more like the first $400k pre-tax an NYC resident makes per year (and top 1% income threshold in NYC starts at ~$900k from memory) Hate to say this as a marsupial that’s now a property owner, but a big reason tier 0 cities globally are so expensive is the global ultra wealthy and merely wealthy like having real estate footprints It incentives the build of luxury housing but then it’s a housing unit that sits dark most of the year like a Picasso kept in storage Of all the things for a global tier 0 city to tax, this isn’t the worst idea at all

hiring is impossible BECAUSE it's so easy to apply finding a relationship is impossible BECAUSE new dates are a swipe away getting into university is hard BECAUSE you can CommonApp apply to 50 at once convenience is washing away friction that actually carried a lot of signal

High school classes that Gen X took that no longer exist. I really think they should bring these classes back. We also had a class called Daily Living that taught real-world skills. Too many young adults today don’t know how to do basic things to get by in the world. What classes do you think they should bring back into classrooms today that would help young adults?

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT. What they found should concern every single person reading this. ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months. Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months. The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time. Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there. It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed. Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch. The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own. MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back. The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

it took 10 min to cook most of the dinners i ate this week. if that’s too hard, just buy ready-made stuff at the grocery store, it’s still 1/4 the cost of delivery. the convenience economy is life-ruining for people with a certain combination of incompetence and impulsivity.