The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.
> That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.
Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
> Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?
And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?
Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable
I mean, I personally loathe the concept of HOAs so the government abolishing them sounds like a wonderful thing to me.
And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.
Real property is a bundle of rights in land and its fixtures – that's the standard definition in academic legal theory
If there was already a zoning or restrictive covenant, and you knew about that when you bought the land – then the ability to do with the land what that zoning or covenant prohibits is not part of the rights to the land you acquired, and the enforcement of that zoning/covenant isn't denying you any of the rights you paid for.
Besides that, private property is (almost always) a creation of the government. [0] I own a house. If I trace the chain of land titles, it ultimately ends in a government land grant; the government got it by stealing it from the Indigenous people. The government land grant was issued on the condition of obeying the government's laws as in force from time-to-time. You can't sell what you don't own; the original land grant recipient didn't own the land independent of that condition, so none of the subsequent purchasers could either. So the government restricting my ability to use the land I purchased isn't an infringement of any of the rights I actually paid for.
[0] I live in Australia; under Australian law, "native title" is considered to pre-exist Australia's current British-imposed system of governance, but all other land titles derive their legal existence from being created by that system; I don't think the situation in the US is fundamentally different, all non-Indigenous US land titles derive from action of the state or federal governments, or the colonial governments, or the Mexican or Spanish or French or Dutch or Russian or Hawaiian governments
Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?
> Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?
I'm not saying I oppose abolishing either racially restrictive covenants or single family zoning. On the contrary, I support the abolition of the former, and am open-minded about the abolition of the latter.
What I'm opposing is particular arguments to those conclusions – what one might call libertarian(-adjacent) arguments – not the conclusions themselves.
I think, a legal right to racially homogenous neighbours is a property right, and taking it away was an expropriation of property – but an expropriation I support. And I don't think one is always owed compensation for such expropriations either. Legally speaking, not all "regulatory takings" are entitled to compensation; and I'm unconvinced the answer is different if we look at that question through a moral lens rather than a legal one.
I agree. And really the Supreme Court ruling that racial zoning couldn’t be enforced and was an unlawful property taking is an even more direct analogy.
Was it ever an explicitly legal right, or just one that hadn't been explicitly illegal? I don't know offhand if there was any prior legal ruling that this sort of thing was legal or if it was just something that in practice the government never did anything about before 1968. I feel like there's a difference between a legal status quo and a legal right, and it's not clear to me that this was ever a right (although maybe you're aware of a specific case or something I'm not)
The US Supreme Court upheld racially restrictive covenants in the 1926 case Corrigan v. Buckley; they then overturned that decision in the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer.
So, between 1926 and 1948, there was a US Supreme Court case upholding racially restrictive covenants. There were also many state court cases reaching the same conclusion. So yes, the US courts had reviewed them and found them to be legally binding.
Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that for any given form of racial discrimination, there was some point in US history where a court directly ruled that it was legal.
> Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
Yeah, this is more what I was wondering about in my comment above. You had mentioned the idea of a "legal right to racially homogenous neighbours", and I was curious if that was actually an explicit legal right at any point rather than just something that in practice people did without getting into trouble. It sounds like there were a couple decades where it was explicitly a legal right, and then another couple decades after where it was in the "implicitly allowed despite not being considered legal" territory (and presumably for an indefinite period beforehand was also basically allowed, just without the definitive legal ruling on it).
To clarify, I didn't expect that you were wrong by using that phrasing earlier; I just had no clue either way, and it seemed like it might be useful context for the discussion either way.
Uh, no, that's not the case at this point in time. There were racist HOA compacts like that up to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Pretty few people alive today have bought houses where they were given an "explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people" as you said.
I live ten blocks from a neighborhood in Portland called Laurelhurst. Laurelhurst sits on a hill, about 30 blocks east of downtown, and contains the largest 100-year-old mansions east of the river. At each main entrance to Laurelhurst, there are massive stone archways. The arches were built to define the points where Black people were not allowed to enter after sundown.
This is not the case today.
Speaking as someone whose Dad grew up in segregated Baltimore, my grandfather was a bar owner who wasn't even allowed to own or work at a bar in the white neighborhoods. They couldn't rent or buy a house in the white neighborhoods.
The situation today has nothing in common with that. We own homes and businesses wherever we want to. Fold up your manufactured guilt and sympathy and take it elsewhere, we didn't need your help and we still don't.
The more fair reading of the parent comment is that some people bought homes prior to 1968 with racial covenants attached that were subsequently made illegal. Those homes built in that regime still exist. So we have precedent within the lifetime of the _homes_ for this sort of change.
Also just as an interesting historical oddity, here is a map of home deeds in Chicago that still have (obviously illegal and unenforceable) racial covenants. Including tons in the Washington park neighborhood made famous by Raisin in the Sun!
I think you’re missing the point. It’s not you gaining more freedom with the land that’s the problem. It’s that all your neighbors now have the same freedom.
I bought my house with a close neighbor because I know the neighbor can’t build a steel mill in their backyard. If the government comes in and says we’re all free now to build steel mills, that gain in freedom is a loss in value for me.
No, that’s not expropriation. There’s a really important difference between a restrictive covenant on the title and a zoning regulation. The former is part of what you bought. The latter is something that happened to exist, and nothing about your purchase carried any sort of promise, express or implied, that this would continue forever.
It’s no different from buying a house with a great tree in the neighbor’s yard, and then they cut it down. Was that part of the value of the house to you? Yep. Was there a promise that it would stay there forever? Nope. Is cutting it down expropriation? Nope. Should you have assumed it would be there forever? Absolutely not.
Like, that's a clever response, but it's not describing expropriation, and you know that. Expropriation literally means taking away property, so it's not a matter of degree: It's saying we are taking your property and redistributing it.
Here's where Georgism gets clever: The initial Georgism says that land should be taxed up to the value of its land-rent. Some progressive people said, well, that means the landlord wouldn't make any money anyway, so the government should just take (expropriate) the land. George said, basically, no. Let the landlord decide if it's worth it for them to keep the freehold.
Then, there are varieties of Georgism that disagree about whether the government should be allowed to tell you anything at all about what to do with your property. Some say you should be able to do anything on it. Others say not.
When I bought my house, across from an elementary school, I knew I didn't have a right to drill oil on it, or to build a factory making solid rocket boosters and dumping perchlorates in the basement.
That's all written into the code governing the land before you buy it. The Georgist question is: If I'm paying 100% tax on this land's rent value, does that mean I get to despoil it any way I want? Or do some rules apply?
That's a separate and more nuanced question; the answer is probably that the same rules would apply as do now, but that doesn't equate with expropriation.
So IIUC your argument is that what do you do as a landholder when actually land development is forbidden/restricted because the absence of certain developments actually what provide the value ?
I have no idea what georgists would say about that. My guess is that being a the holder of such land would work as luxury/status-signal because you are only incurring the cost of the land and no/low revenues from it
> I'd love to see some source for this [proceeds to throw out a bunch of source-free numbers]
I looked up the source for these numbers.
It's the Center for Immigration Studies, and they are notorious for being a right-wing think tank used to dress up up anti-immigration policy using misleading statistics.
How notorious are they? Well, they are listed as a hate group with the Southern Poverty Law Center[1].
The numbers you're citing aren't 'welfare,' the biggest thing is using the education system. The thing that, long term, makes they into productive taxpayers. CIS doesn't figure the long-term benefits into their numbers because that would destroy their thesis.
The HUD secretary mentioned the number, and the number was also included in a Congressional report, though it ended up being through testimony, also from that same source, which I hadn't realized. I'd been under the impression the one claim was independently sourced from actual federal data, rather being from CIS.
In any case, none of this amounts to immigrants using less welfare than native born residents, which is what I was asking sources for.
Tutoring is another situation where it can succeed wildly or fail miserably, and it will depend more on the harness than the model.
Tutoring is a process, and the end result is that the student gains a demonstrable new capability. The how isn't as important as the end result. If we end up with a bunch of people with increased personal capabilities, it's a win. If we're lazy and we end up with a bunch of people leaning on crutches, we failed.
Time will tell, I guess. Could be a surprise answer to Bloom's 2 sigma problem or a very stunted generation, or a mix of both.
> Tutoring is a process, and the end result is that the student gains a demonstrable new capability. The how isn't as important as the end result.
I disagree. If, after you have been tutored, you perform well, but still need tutoring for the next year's exam in that subject, then you haven't been "tutored", you've been given a similar enough copy of the exam questions to train on.
As I keep telling my kids, good results is a side-effect of good habits. If you're half-assing things, it shows up in your results. If you studious and methodical, it also shows up in your results, just in a different direction.
AI is used primarily to half-ass things, do things without checking, getting good vibes by that sycophantic tone.
Get your kids into a rut of good habits, and they'll run in that groove forever, regardless of tutors or AI. Half-ass your way through life, then sure, they'll get fucked over by AI tutors too.
I think you are doing a lot of assuming on how AI can be used for tutoring. I'm currently augmenting Chinese in person tutoring with a pi harness that helps me out with drills, lets me explore what things mean, get similar words or context related words and so on. It's not perfect, def not good enough to be a standalone thing, def has barrier of entry of being motivated to do honest self work but it's a massive value add into the process for me.
One huge issue IMO is that right now, around the world, most people are not taught at all how to learn for themselves nor how to critically think on their own. And that will indeed result in using it as a crutch and not a good tutoring tool.
> I think you are doing a lot of assuming on how AI can be used for tutoring.
I don't think so. In fact, I'll go one further: I don't think we're in disagreement, just that I've been communicating poorly.
Allow me retry: My point is NOT "AI makes tutoring worse". My point is that AI tutoring is irrelevant to sustained academic performance.
1. Academic success is a side-effect of good habits (high correlation, not all the way to `1`).
2. A good tutor will instill the good habits for a specific subject (IME, different subjects require different habits, but all require the student to be diligent and consistent at least)
3. Half-assing things, as a habit, will not materially improve outcomes.
4. Most AI use is for half-assing things.
I did not mean to imply that AI in tutoring cannot be successful, only that AI-use tends to result in half-assing things.
Your anecdote is almost the opposite of half-assing things.
> One huge issue IMO is that right now, around the world, most people are not taught at all how to learn for themselves nor how to critically think on their own.
That's a different problem, I think. As I am learning with my two boys, you don't need to teach critical thinking specifically. Critical thinking naturally arises out of being diligent and thorough.
It drives me crazy that California voters will wave through every single regressive sales tax hike that is placed in front of them, yet they will crawl through broken glass to vote against a property tax hike on corporations.
This is great, but I can't help but wonder if we're going to have another post next week with a lab complaining that they were about to publish this same finding, and they had Claude proofread their paper, and whoops how'd that get into Anthropic's training data?
I wonder how long it will take for the damage Alpöge and Buckmaster have done to the perception of these AI-driven scientific developments to fade.
Not saying that they were right or wrong, but that single moment sullied all AI-driven breakthroughs that came after it, and I don't think it was ever particularly relevant, at least not nearly to the degree that it was presented in the media. But I guess it ended up being a convenient outlet for AI anxiety in the end.
I don't think of this stuff in terms of AI anxiety, I just think that the AI labs should be falling all over themselves to display deference and humility to those who made it possible.
The LLMs that make this stuff possible weren't created by the AI labs from whole cloth. They crept up and jumped onto the shoulders of giants, basically the collected (non-consensually, of course, but jingles keys look at this pelican riding a bicycle!) works of humanity. Every discovery LLMs enumerate in this fashion rightfully needs to have a billboard-sized asterisk regarding the provenance of the discovery. "Claude" didn't discover this, everyone who worked to produce the internet that Anthropic siphoned into their dataset belongs on the credits.
It's great that it happened, and I wish them the best of luck in using our work to make the world a better place. Just don't forget who the rightful owners are.
The AI labs did that to themselves. All those billions and their marketing and communication skills are like those of a local street vendor selling fake knockoffs.
I am going to assume that life science researchers are less egotistic and less prone to anti-tech hysteria (i.e., more exposed/accustomed to the benefits of tech) unlike mathematicians who thought pen and paper was all they needed because their incredible 2-3 SD IQs was all the processing they needed and any evidence of a stochastic parrot pattern-matching aggressively faster than they could was simply cheating.
Cigarettes are ridiculously more addictive. I know this from experience, but also from a study that found that MAOIs (in cigarettes, but not found in vapes) "dramatically increase the motivation to self-administer nicotine in rats."[1]
I had a wickedly difficult time quitting cigarettes, many failed attempts over the course of years. Vaping made quitting tobacco comically easy, and quitting vaping was also comically easy compared to cold turkey. To quit my all-day vaping habit I just...got rid of the vapes and stopped doing it. I thought about it a few times a day for the first few days, and that was it.
People saying to avoid vapes as a cessation tool are committing actual harm, imo. It's like the difference in difficulty between just jumping off a roof versus using a ladder to descend. Yes, ladders are risky, but not as risky as jumping off a roof.
Part of the problem is that vapes easily let you ingest a lot more nicotine than cigarettes. Researchers in the Netherlands found that some teens are vaping so much they effectively have the nicotine intake of a three pack a day tobacco addiction. This is due to a combination of (illegal) vapes being available in all sorts of fruity and hip child-friendly flavours, illegal vapes simply containing more nicotine, and vapes coming in reservoirs good for 9000 or so 'puffs'.
If you stuck with plain vapes bought through a legal channel, that risk factor would have been absent.
Is nicotine a problem, though? I'm not a cigarette or vaping guy. I do like a nicotine pouch, and I love an evening pipe. My understanding is that nicotine is not much of a problem, but the smoke / vape contaminants are where the real hazard lies.
For many demographics nicotine by itself poses a clear health risk. Basically that's pregnant women and anyone under 25 whose brains are still developing, according to the CDC. The WHO further states that nicotine use also increases cardiovascular risk, and that's for everyone. This last one was new to me too until a while ago (although fortunately I never take nicotine in any form).
That is what is left if you ignore the big one, which is its addictiveness. By itself that is probably not directly harmful, but the ways of consuming nicotine mostly are. Nicotine pouches carry some health risks, but are obviously not nearly as bad as snus and other crap like that containing tobacco.
I feel like the addictiveness isn't the big one? Playing with fidget spinners can be addictive, but there's no push to put warning labels on them.
As for the nicotine: yes, it's not great for your cardiovascular system. One Juul pod per day probably twice as bad as drinking three Starbucks grande drip coffees. However, the harm reduction of vaping is profound. Smoked tobacco is just devastatingly worse: smoke has carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, acrolein, and these are on top of the radioactive polonium and lead isotopes.
It's crazy seeing a lot of fearmongering (not saying that's what you're doing, but it is certainly a prevailing narrative) about vaping when, per the data, it's the strongest smoking cessation tool available outside prescription drugs and a massive harm reduction even if it's just a permanent substitute.
I have to confirm the article. After switching from cigarettes to vaping and vaping for several years, I decided to go back to cigarettes precisely to get rid of the monstrous vaping addiction.
While never a heavy smoker I absolutely loved vaping: it was the first thing my hand reached for in the morning and the last it let go falling asleep. I went into panics when I couldn't remember where I had left my vape.
I've now managed to further reduce my smoking to only very few cigarettes per day. This might well still be more harmful than vaping all day long, but at least I got rid of my sixth finger (as a friend used to call it) and I can forget about smoking or vaping for many hours a day.
I'm not sure the damage from vaping is even close to that of smoking, especially if you smoke a lot. Nevertheless, at some point I decided I was way too attached to it- though I only had a small vape with low nicotine and rather neutral taste as opposed to those things that produce entire cumulonimbi of cherry-flavoured vapour. At least with cigarettes I am acutely aware of the harm, constantly try to keep it in check, and to smoke I need at least to reach an open place.
Btw, one thing that helped me a lot are nicotine patches. I've used them for years and helped me reduce smoking down to ~3 cigs/ day, and even stop it for some period.
Same goes for pre-WWII Germany and the rise of Hitler. He takes the blame but the German electorate was toxic, bloodthirsty and humiliated. They would’ve elevated the next monster in line if Hitler hadn’t been available.
only 31-40% of the german electorate was that. And it was on the decline, which is why Von Papen convinced himself he would be easy to negociate cabinet postition with Hitler.
The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.
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