walter

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

And it's good to see: ADUs have already been taking off! Latest count: 107. Map shows proposed units. A map where Staten Island should definitely be included!

Good thing you formed that LLC for the $300 in sales the last three years.

👀 SNEAK PEAK We're diving into New York City's homeless crisis. NYC's spending on the unsheltered homeless hit $368M in FY2025, up 262% from $102M in FY2019. That's $81K per person. Meanwhile, the population of unsheltered homeless people grew by 26% in that same period. Nonprofits running this system have been caught paying executives $900K+ salaries, hiring their own family members, and funneling city contract money into companies they own. And Mayor Mamdani just quietly signed a $1.86 billion, three-year hotel contract to house the homeless. Full breakdown tomorrow.

Im generally pro more housing, including in Princeton, but I think it needs to be done in conjunction with other fiscal and service expansions. there are a few issues this story missed - it’s not just about historic preservation. One is that many of the new housing units get pilots so they don’t contribute property taxes for something like 10+ years. Adding ~ 1000 people to a small school zone and not increasing any tax revenue to pay for it causes genuine congestion problems. If the schools and staff got twice as big when the local pop doubles, that’d be fantastic. but they don’t, and people reasonably don’t like that the drop off line takes forever bc it’s not big enough to drop off 2x as many kids, their class sizes have ballooned, kids play areas don’t work bc the space wasn’t designed for that many kids, and most importantly, school quality falls as the educational inputs don’t scale with population. Practically it’s hard to expand schools and investments for young people in a town with a large share of elderly people, several of whom tend not to support higher property taxes or increased school spending. So adding more housing beyond the recent increases (which I think increased the overall population by like ten percent again with little new tax revenue) is more controversial for some of these reasons. Moreover, there are also other pressing fiscal issues for the town to deal with - it’s spent a lot on various projects and it’s unclear how much is paid for and how much prop taxes in a high prop tax place will have to go up already to cover deficits - so adding even more people without getting more tax revenue (bc of pilots and the way these things are implemented) creates additional reasons for opposition.