Just a general question - I read about these multi-day agent runs and I'm a little confused as to how the agent continues to be productive when presumably it's context window is wiped out in minutes? Like, codex has a 256k context window last I checked and that gets used up in like 15-20 minutes when building a feature.
According to this some of these things were running 30+ days. Is context managed differently in these sorts of scenarios...?
Stay well diversified, keep investing each month, and take a nap.
There are almost surely severe bumps ahead for the AI space and that will likely spill over into the broader market. But unless you’re retiring in the next few years don’t worry about it. You can’t time the ups and downs and the only proven strategy is to just keep investing in a broad indexed portfolio and just ride out. You’ll take a short term hit but also end up buying on the dip because you don’t stop investing.
I suppose I'm just a little worried about a 10 year sideways market. The run-up has been absolutely insane the past year...some graphs are just a literal straight line up. I didn't get to participate in much of that and concerned the prevailing wisdom on these larger timescales may no longer hold true.
> I suppose I'm just a little worried about a 10 year sideways market.
In that case possibly go with something global; in the one recent period where S&P500 was pretty much sideways for 10 years, MSCI World, say, did somewhat better. If the wheels do fall off for the AI bubble, it'll probably hit the US market harder than others.
_Within reason_ (you probably don’t want an index that has literally every stock in the world, say), broader indexes are generally less volatile than narrower ones; must downturns are at least somewhat regional, and sectoral downturns hit some regions harder than others.
The S&P is through the roof because of the AI boom - it's bound to crash if the big players do. What's a better index?
It's hard to imagine a world in which these broad indexes don't crash too. It's the sector indexes I'd love to understand better from a cyclical point of view, so I can buy something that won't also crash.
It's worth adding that conventional wisdom says, you can't time the market. On average, people shifting between cash and stocks to time shocks lose out over just holding a fixed portfolio.
Sometimes conventional wisdom stops being wise. Also 90% of the people in charge of conventional wisdom have their personal wealth depend on retail investors not selling.
I moved 80% of my money out of Vanguard's Target Date Retirement funds and into a money market on June 1st. In the 1.5 months since, the remaining Target Date Retirement fund has fluctuated up and down by about 0.1%. It has basically plateaued. I don't think I am losing out on potential short term gains. I like the idea that I have cash available to buy in on the day of the crash.
Good luck dude! This kind of move can pay off big or not, clearly. I’ve personally talked to fable about this a lot, suggest everyone does.
There are a lot of failure modes. The dot-com bubble looked obvious in 1997; it popped in 2000. Anyone shorting in '97-'98 was carried out on a stretcher before being vindicated. In fact 2000-2002 fell in three brutal legs over two years, and anyone who leveraged up after the first 25% leg was destroyed by the next two.
My boss has already done this several times over the past couple years because of some impeding market crash. Then he goes back and buys a week or so later.
> I moved 80% of my money out of Vanguard's Target Date Retirement funds
which target date fund exactly? You can increase risk/reward buy choosing a target date fund far in the future or you can reduce risk/reward by choosing a target date fund closer to the present. The point of those funds is to gradually reduce your risk as you get closer to your planned retirement date. I moved my 401k into a target date fund about +10 years from my planned retirement (I'm 50). So a little bit on the risk++ side but not much.
What percentage drop do you need to consider it a 'crash' and to buy back in? Is it a drop from when you sold or the peak? What if the peak is another 20% higher and the crash is 10%? While you're sitting in cash, you're also losing to inflation each day.
I generally consider timing the market such as this to be a fools errand, but if you're going to do it you need to have a plan beforehand and follow it. A target date fund does exactly this with allocations.
I don't know, but they aren't really in the same category either. The pandemic didn't shut down everything. It didn't really shut down much, people worked from home and got deliveries instead of doing things in person. There were sectors that were hit bad, but certainly not everything.
The AI crash is about stock market indicator ratios matching those that preceded other major crashes. That's what got me spooked. I don't want to be heavily invested in those companies when/if something bad happens.
My point is that whether there will be a crash or not is incredibly hard to predict. COVID did not come with a stock market crash, but it affected employment much more than a possible AI crash will.
> The AI crash is about stock market indicator ratios matching those that preceded other major crashes.
The way to put faith in such indicators is not (only) by looking at prior crashes, but by forward testing them. Over the last decade, it's been common for me to hear a sentiment like yours: "Indicator X has always resulted in a serious downturn in the past, and we're in X territory now" - and no crash ensued. Over and over again.
Find me an indicator that someone back tested, and then also actually predicted a real crash (with zero false positives). The cost of even a single false positive can be huge. Ask the guys who pulled out (or sold their houses) when COVID struck.
Don't become the person who predicts 7 of the last 2 recessions.
> My point is that whether there will be a crash or not is incredibly hard to predict. COVID did not come with a stock market crash
As someone who had early PUTs against the obvious industries (travel, hospitality) - what I didn't foresee was the insane amounts of government liquidity poured into the markets.
> As someone who had early PUTs against the obvious industries (travel, hospitality) - what I didn't foresee was the insane amounts of government liquidity poured into the markets.
They did it in 2008 as well. Although the amount in COVID seems insanely high, back in 2008, $700B was insanely high. People couldn't believe the government would spend that much to keep the economy going.
Retail investors do not have access to systems that calculate risk, margins, pnl, etc... and generally also don't have the necessary knowledge and market data to price such instruments correctly.
Most ppl are better off KISSing and lowering risk by selling equity for fixed income.
You almost always lose a lot of money if you're seeking safety. Protection from downside risk on your S&P500 investments may cost 20-30% of your investment at which point you're better off just selling the investment and hoping it doesn't go up by that much.
Assuming you are the average person, and not a financial professional, using actual financial hedging instruments properly is unlikely, and far more likely to just increase risk and lower expected return.
A realistic way for an American citizen to reduce risk in the current market is to have a globally diversified portfolio that under-allocates to the US.
> What's the best way to hedge against this, considering many of us have significant savings in the market?
honestly, if you're >= 10 years away from needing that money (retirement or whatever) then the best hedge is to ignore the news and just keep contributing to your investment as always. I got caught up in a couple moments (tarif drama April before last was one) where i panicked and sold and then it only took a few months to get back to even meanwhile 18% of my capital gains were now due to the taxman. I wrote a check to the IRS for 10's of thousands for no reason except over reacting and ignoring every financial advisor's advice.
if you're going to need your investment money within 10 years then you need to get advice on how to start reducing risk (and therefore reward) because you don't have time to survive and repair from a crash.
I knew guys who panicked in Feb 2020, at the start of covid. They moved everything to cash, never got back into the market. Things recovered faster than they thought. The unfortunate truth is they would've more than doubled their money if they stayed invested.
#1: Great question, and I would love to hear the answers (And am learning from the ones posted)
#2: What I've done so far: Haven't bought stock in a year. Have moderate short positions on Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla. Have big short positions in the most popular Quantum computing companies. (Scams IMO). I have sold most of my positions ("profit taking"?) in stocks which have gone up a lot in the past year. (Nvidia, Broadcom etc), and am no longer using margin; about 1/3 of my brokerage value is now "cash", generating ~3% interest.
Wouldn't it be wiser to get out of the market into fixed rate assets like government bonds? Maybe have some into puts on SPY (or QQQ since tech would probably have bigger losses) too, but mainly getting out of long positions on what seems a really overvalued stock market
I just hope the companies aren't considered too big to fail. Bailing them out would be a bad idea.
They will be. When the SHTF, you'll see Rubio in the room^H^H^H^H circus tent, sitting right next to Bessent, arguing that propping up OpenAI is as much a national security interest as bailing out GM was.
Just sell all your ETFs and buy them again when the market goes up or down. You're very likely to lose money with options and you will definitely lose a lot of money if you buy enough options to hedge your full exposure.
You will definitely lose less in opportunity cost than the actual cost of hedging your position, because hedging is extremely expensive and cancels out almost all gains. If it was cheap, everyone would do it.
unless you're doing this in an IRA or your 401k remember the IRS wants its cut of any gains you may lock in. That's a painful check to write let me tell you.
Reminder: Serious people have been predicting a market crash "within the next 3 months" for 3 years now. In that time, the "market" has gone up around 70% (66%-86% depending on the what part you are looking at).
A friend of mine and I go out to lunch every 3 months and talk about, among other things, investing. We've made a trope of it, calling out the people who are predicting an imminent market crash every time we have lunch.
I'm not saying that it doesn't look like it's going to crash, but I'll also say that there's also a very sizeable downside potential for getting out of the market.
It's tempting to sell a bunch, but then you've got cash. What do you do with cash when the government keeps printing money and assets are all overpriced?
You think the hedge funds selling SPY options don't have this priced in already? Of course, you can still make money on this bet, just like you can win money at a roulette table, but unless you think have some special insight that hedge/quant funds don't have, buying options should be negative EV.
Options market makers have no idea where the S&P will be in one year, options are priced on the current implied volatility. The bid and ask will be slightly lower and higher than the true current option price so the MM can make their nut on the spread and then hedge so they’re delta neutral.
If you buy a put you are making a bet that realized volatility will exceed implied volatility. This may or may not happen and there’s no way to predict the future.
Condos may, and quite often do, have enormously expensive maintenance issues that the condo owners are quite unaware of until the last moment and will have to shell out for via special assessment from the condo association. Example from personal experience: very soon after moving into my condo, cracks were discovered on the other side of the building. They were investigated and it turned out that the building was made from substandard concrete. All exterior facing concrete needed to be replaced or the building would fall down. To pay for the fix, there was a special assessment that I needed to pay into, and to add insult to injury, for 2 years I could not use my theoretically beautiful view from the balcony and windows - it was all jackhammering and concrete dust.
Which ones? Mortgage, real estate costs, repairs, maintenance are all still there with a condo.
My gut feeling is that repairs and maintenance cost more with condos than if you own a home and you're handy to fix minor stuff and know how to find good contractors for bigger jobs. I imagine condo jobs becomes more difficult and contractors charge more for those jobs. But I don't have data to back my hunch. Condo has extra issues in dealing with neighbor problems (issues with garbage, pets, unpaid fees, noise, etc...) and you have to maintain shared spaces (hallways, elevators, etc...) and you end up paying for that via your condo fees.
"Finding good contractors" can be pretty challenging, especially finding good contractors at a good price.
Condos can also benefit from efficiencies of scale - e.g. there are plenty of small jobs on myself that I do myself, but between the time spent on research, and expenses/trips to pick up supplies and tools, I'm spending multiple hours of my time/money on things that someone experienced/equipped could bang out in 20 minutes - but any decent handyman is going to charge their call out rate of $100 + materials for a 20 minute job. vs at appropriate scale a condo corp can effectively just have/share a full-time handyman and save a pile of overhead.
A condo will have an HOA which is responsible for things like fixing the roof.
However, not all HOAs are actually financially responsible. So they might raise monthly fees, issue “special assessments” (lump-sum charges that can be $10k+) or take on loans. And they decide when they will do that.
Condos basically just force you to pay for the ongoing maintenance that the author mentioned, but with the downside of not actually having any control over the quality of the work or the decision making process at all unless you're on the condo board.
Condos are generally the worst of both worlds, because you have almost all the responsibilities of homeownership combined with nearly all of the restrictions of renting an apartment.
There's a reason they appreciate significantly less than other types of property.
You can always go join your condo board meetings though. In my experience most HOA boards are filled with people who have seen horror stories of HOAs and don't want to live in a place with a bad one.
Sure sometimes they do make bad decisions, but you're welcome to just show up to their board meeting and give them some advice.
Owning a condo can be quite scary financially. If the building itself needs expensive repairs, the condo board can pass those costs down to the tenants.
You may own your condo, but the condo board can also hit you with a 6-figure bill for building repairs and aggregate maintenance. Enough to force you to get a new loan, even when you might still be paying your mortgage.
And if the tenants take issue with these kinds of bills (they frequently do), they can tie things up while things get worse and more expensive to repair.
This was actively a problem for the tenants at the center of the Surfside condominium collapse, with maintenance needs directly related to the problems that resulted in the collapse.
Condos come with another problem: you don't own the land. The condo itself is a depreciating asset unless maintained and money is put into the unit and the building. You're also exposed to the risk of the area becoming less desirable, newer condos being built nearby, general economic trends, mismanagment of the property, etc.
Right, owning a condo has many of the downsides of owning a home without the upside of owning the land, which is the primary thing that appreciates. Not saying it's never a good idea to buy a condo, but it's not as dependable an investment vehicle.
Yes, but so are some of the advantages (e.g. "More space and a quieter environment"). It's somewhere in between home ownership and apartment renting on the spectrum of living situations.
I ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full.
But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models.
I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
> I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off...
1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?).
2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI.
> Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
"grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
This might be the worst idea I've ever seen. I'm glad they are so interested in reducing the effects of global warming - that's fantastic - but they are literally purposefully releasing a toxic, major air pollutant into the air to create in their own words "clouds of dust" for the purposes of reflecting sunlight. Sure, there might be a slight cooling effect but who in their right mind could possibly think this is a good idea?!
I understand they are deploying to the stratosphere and not the troposphere but I can't imagine there aren't any negative second-order effects.
As someone who lives in a city with a major PM2.5 problem that effects the millions here on the daily (near an active stratovolcano no less!), reading about what they are doing was somewhat infuriating.
I appreciate the link, however it should be noted that piece was written by the co-founder of that same company. They do seem to be evidence driven but let's not pretend there's not some degree of bias towards the solutions his company is proposing.
Additionally, that article focuses almost solely on the chances of producing acid rain, which actually is another issue and not the one I was first concerned with. That piece talks about "redistributing" SO2 from the troposphere to the stratosphere which is a neat concept but a.) that's purely theoretical, and b.) that's not what they are doing or trying to do anyway.
It could be argued that air pollution has a greater and more devastating effect on the everyday lives of people alive today then global warming does now or will in the foreseeable future. In my city it was estimated that more than 1 in every ~16 deaths is related to air pollution, and the air here isn't nearly as bad as it is in other cities. Worldwide, UNICEF estimates nearly 2,000 deaths under 5 years of age per day from air pollution [0]. Annual deaths worldwide are estimated at 8+ million yearly across all age groups. Making that problem worse by any measure in the hope of producing a cooling effect that is a fraction of a fraction of a degree is not worth it at all and at least in my opinion is a net-negative.
English can be read in a different order than the normal order when the sentences contain words for which it is easy to guess whether they are agents or patients, e.g. when the agents are animate nouns and the patients are inanimate nouns, or when pronouns are used for the agents or patients.
Otherwise, the non-standard order can be understood incorrectly. While the distinction between agents and patients is the most important that depends on word order in English, there are also other order-dependent distinctions, e.g. between beneficiary and patient, when the beneficiary is not marked by a preposition, or between a noun and its attribute, e.g. "police dog" is not the same as "dog police" and unless there is a detailed context you cannot know what is meant when the word order is wrong.
English is one of the languages with the most rigid word order. There are languages, especially among older languages, where almost any word order can be used without causing ambiguities, because all the possible roles of the words are marked by prepositions, postpositions or affixes (or sometimes by accentuation shifts).
The deterministic part (calculations) is done by Excel.
The non-deterministic part is turning human instructions ("calculate the NPV over 10 years for X given Y") into Excel.
This is already a non-deterministic process (humans are non-deterministic!). The question is if an AI model can be more reliable than humans, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.
The correct path is pretty clear, so the logits for following that path are going to be a long way from off-path.
For something like this the real problem is training the model to use Excel (which will show up by it being confused which sheet it is on or trying to use the wrong window or things like that), not the non-determinism.
so basically what you're saying is that: it doesn't do the math, it tells the math-doing-thing what math to do. Basically, instead of humans using Excel, imagine AI using Excel?
Yet I don't understand the aha moment here? It might save analyst time but aren't there already enough automation that you don't really need to tell the AI to tell the math-doing-thing to do the math because the math-doing-thing is already optimized for most general functions? What are we gaining from adding the non-deterministic process here when the real non-deterministic process is still the human being prompting what to do?
Seems like a solution to a non-problem from my pov.
Sure in the sense that you're setting up a program that has inputs and outputs etc. But then all math is programming. All language is too, even speaking can be considered programming if you're stretching the definition enough. But I will disagree that setting up spreadsheets = basically software engineering.
The LLM just needs to make sure it uses it appropriately. Doing that bit is the non-deterministic part, but the NPV calculation itself is completely deterministic.
When you setup a spreadsheet, you choose a column or cell to show the NPV. You use the npv formula on this cell and apply it to inputs from other columns or cells.
This process of deciding what data to put in what column and how to apply NPV to it is non-deterministic. You could choose to put it in column A, or column B or maybe even row 3 - it depends!
Do you really think you come off as a good person posting things like this? This place is to satisfy intellectual curiosity, not to lord your supposed intelligence over others, without even proving it exists in the first place.
I read something at some point that it's more expensive to convert these into residential buildings than it is to literally demolish and rebuild.
I'm not entirely sure how that math works out, or why, because one would think it couldn't be that complicated. Maybe someone here knows more about this.
Another thing about a lot of commercial buildings is the floorplate size and layout. Office buildings often don't care if there's a lot of interior spaces without any windows, but people need outside light. So if you've got a massive floorplate it can be kind of a pain chopping it up into good sized units that meet the demand of the residential market in the area. This definitely varies from building to building though.
There's also a lot of work that probably needs to go in to the ventilation and fire code changes. An office building isn't designed for people having ovens and stoves. It also often just assumes its OK to have less isolation between units for the ventilation, or previously entire floors were considered to be one space ventilation-wise but now you might be trying to split it into 2-3 units that require separation. This separation can also complicate things like AC and heat.
The ventilation issue comes up a good bit with a lot of these poorly done conversions. You end up with units that just don't get nearly enough airflow, and all the windows are sealed so its not like one can just open the window to get more air.
The plumbing systems in commercial buildings are not big enough to handle residents usage. Residents use more water and the outbound sewage systems need to be larger.
There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office.
History favors the bold, and code inspectors blabbering about "written in blood" don't see all the homeless people they kill via reduced access to housing.
I've seen plenty of artist collectives that manage it; on paper they are office/industrial but actually everyone lives there. Every once in awhile one burns down but the mortality rate isn't as high as living on the streets which is ultimately what happens to those on the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid when the ones higher up push the ones under them down a rung to snag housing.
For a lot of the office buildings I've been in, there aren't that many toilets per floor. Its also different when you've got some toilets that are often unused compared to people running laundry, cooking, bathing, etc. Very different demands on the plumbing system.
You also then had everything pretty much isolated to two rooms for an entire floor meanwhile now every unit is going to have a separate kitchen, a bathroom (or two, or three), a laundry room, etc.
And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
Ok, but some extra plumbing (and whatever sorts of engineering studies referred to) and electrical work surely can't as expensive as demolishing and rebuilding a whole building.
If it was just the plumbing, then maybe. But its not just the plumbing. Its the plumbing, the electrical, the AC/ventilation, fire codes, and so much more.
Not saying it can't ever be done, it really depends on the building. But its not necessarily a good assumption it can be done well in a cost-effective fashion.
But do you really have to cram in as many residents as you could with a purpose-built tenement? There must be ways to keep headcount in the range the infrastructure can support and still provide a lot more housing than just leaving them as empty decaying offices owned by the last one holding the bag. Intersperse flats with windowless storage units (you have a depth problem anyways), low density commercial use like workshops with live-by flats and so on. Large units designed to attract high squarefeet/low headcount tenants, not bunk bed families. Add regulation only as a fallback limiter. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> There must be ways to keep headcount in the range the infrastructure can support and still provide a lot more housing than just leaving them as empty decaying offices owned by the last one holding the bag.
Demolishing the office building and building a residential building is more profitable often.
I mean, sure, you can just sell it as a unit for each floor. You then need to recoup all the costs of rebuilding against fewer people, so all the main area renovations and what not get more expensive and the monthly cost of building maintenance get spread across fewer and fewer tenants. But you've still got a problem of most of the rooms of your very expensive condo have zero natural light, its all practically ancient built stuff in terms of planned structure life, and you've got a very expensive monthly maintenance bill. Meanwhile your massive and dark unit with odd plumbing and low ceilings is competing in the market against units that were actually built for the purpose of people living in them, so while your unit is big and expensive to maintain they're some of the least desirable spots.
The economics just often work out a lot better to tear down the old structure and rebuild a new one more fit for purpose.
Sorry, I either totally misread your comment or was mentally replying to someone else when I wrote this.
Sure, you could just cram the residences to the edges and try to recoup the cost of the rest of the square footage for places that don't need natural light. But once again you've got issues with original designs and intents for the building. None of the plumbing is designed to be pushed to the edges, so you'll need to make massive changes to the structural integrity by drilling a bunch of new floor cores to do all the new plumbing work. You could rent the interior spaces as storage, but you'll probably quickly flood the market of storage units with the massive amount of square footage you'll be bringing.
Trying to have industrial in there as well is asking for problems. Trying to rent some 15th story small/medium interior unit as some kind of industrial workshop would be quite weird. What kind of industry would want a smaller interior space that probably can't support heavy equipment, has a limit to ceilings of ~10 or so feet, can't require odd ventilation or strange/additional fire suppression/separation requirements, probably has significant power limitations (in terms of industrial capacity, at least), noise limitations, difficulty getting much product in and out, etc? Stuff that the city is going to be OK zoning literally across the hall from people trying to live? And that you're going to find a number of these willing to pay a good bit for such a space to cover the maintenance costs? These buildings weren't built for industrial usages, they were built for office desks and couches. Maybe a few floors have been upgraded to handle additional weight to have datacenter kind of spaces, but definitely not most of the floors.
So then you're trying to spread the maintenance costs of this massive and old building across higher value residences and a lot of very low value storage/weird industrial tenants.
You can run drains out the side of the structure without drilling holes in the floor, same with electric, and even if by some insanity we say "whutabout the holes in the side" then you could even use a damn lift pump/macerator pump to pump it up and out through where a window was. For vents you can also use AAV instead of a traditional vent. If the residences are at the edges they should be able to pop right out and worse case you elevate the floor in the bathroom/kitchen under the plumbing appliances for the slope on the pipe as it exits. A vertical drain pipe isn't going to freeze (and even if it were, could be insulated and heated), and supply lines are such small holes as to not threaten structural integrity.
> And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
You can Swiss-cheese a pan and deck concrete floor with core-drilled holes, the important thing is GPDR scanning before coring to avoid the pre- or post-tension cables embedded in the concrete.
Artists are a shrinking population, I wonder if having most of the top floors (20 out of 30) converted to extremely large luxury apartments (5000sqft+) and only 'adding capacity'to plumbing and what not for the lower 10 floors, which would house smaller units, would be economically viable. Although actual luxury market requires high ceiling so probably wouldn't work out.
I'm sure many many people have thought of all sort of solutions as the value for finding some sort of solution is extremely high.
> There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office.
A 20,000 sq ft office tower floor will usually have a single set of restrooms and a couple of kitchen sinks, maybe a dishwasher, plus a couple 6-gallon or instahot water heaters. If you subdivide that floor into a dozen units, that’s 12 showers, 12 washers, 12 dishwashers, 12 toilets, 24 sinks, and 12 water heaters.
The riser and drain pipes aren’t big enough to handle residential needs.
That's not how the 'black market' ones I've seen operate. And I've seen a lot from when I visited the circuit of underground artist-related events when I lived in chicago. They are shockingly common in areas with extremely high rents and an oversupply of unused commercial space.
They might subdivide it 12 ways, but there is one shared kitchen for a whole floor and maybe 2 toilets, 2 sinks and the residents are going to the laundromats. They tend to put the shared amenities on the ground floor as much as possible because it is easiest to expand them there. It beats being homeless by a long shot.
For reference, when I hauled water, we used about 60 gallons a week for a family, or about 0.05% utilization of a 3" drain pipe for a single family. You do not need much water in order to be way way better off than being homeless; 5/gal a day of non-potable water and you're pretty much in luxury comparatively and a shit-ton of people can be putting that down a 3" or even 2" drain pipe before it causes problems. A 3" pipe is the minimum that would be serving a typical floor of a warehouse, so plenty enough for a constantly used couple of shared bathrooms with a shared kitchen. Honestly even splitting it 12 ways could be overcome with some technical ingenuity (electric lock-outs to prevent more than a few in use at once, and AAVs to prevent needing a bunch of new vents).
These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).
> These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).
It didn’t work out so great in Oakland at the Ghost Ship, 36 people died in a similar arrangement.
Building code is written in blood, things are done a certain way for a reason. You may be morally or ethically against them but following code saves lives.
36 people dead is a rounding error compared to mortality from people on the streets due to lack of access to housing. Every time I bring up this topic, someone trots out the Ghost Ship like a broken record, ignoring what I said about the mortality rate of people on the streets because shit rolls downhill when people higher up the socio-economic pyramid go the next rung down in available housing. Bastiat has an excellent writing on this fallacious logic you use, titled "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen."
Not having housing didn't work out great for 700+ dead homeless people per year that are estimated to die of hypothermia.
The code inspectors have blood in their hands. You may be morally or ethically against bypassing the codes, but bypassing it can save lives.
Black market housing is done for a reason, a very good one, and one that saves lives. Fortunately where I live, I built a house without any inspections whatsoever, so none of the code psychopaths were even around to make their absurd case about the ghost ship, and that is the only reason why I was even able to afford to own a house.
This is an issue that got brought up in Portland, OR during Covid IIRC. The city was looking at buying up vacant offices and converting them to living space but it just didn't make any sense financially and the city concluded it was cheaper to demolish and rebuild than convert.
I assume it's because they would need to re-wire electrical and retrofit plumbing on a massive scale to accommodate kitchens and bathrooms for separate units. They end up needing to gut the entire building and cut through floors and ceilings without damaging any structural and load-bearing parts. It doesn't sound easy nor cheap.
>at some point that it's more expensive to convert these into residential buildings than it is to literally demolish and rebuild.
Yep, and that's fine. It's literally a tangible instance of 'creative destruction'. I see people arguing that oh, we have to RTO to save the current model and it seems so backwards to me.
According to this some of these things were running 30+ days. Is context managed differently in these sorts of scenarios...?