None of this is to say that adding zoned capacity or even clearing regulatory deadwood aren't necessary but they're sold as transformative changes when they're just just lubricants to independently determined profit driven investment decisions

YIMBYs will say that its a necessary but insufficient step but that is blind to political economy. But YIMBYism's ideology of deregulation to chase IRRs coupled w failure to achieve stated goal of more homes & lower prices just means leaning in further to argue we haven't deregulated enough

At the most basic level YIMBYism gets the order of operations of the for-profit housing production system wrong and puts zoning in a principal position, ahead of the things that truly drive whether an investor seeking high returns will choose housing vs. something else.

And underneath that statewide flatness is a massive variability among MSAs that shows how independent development is of that wildly successful legislative program

It's a convenient cope to a wildly successful legislative program failing to work as advertised. A developer can drop a fairly streamlined ministerial application across wide swathes of the state. They don't because it's not profitable enough. Cities are effectively passive bystanders

Licensing is mainly a consumer protection & public safety regulation and I guess the Feds figure they have that under control. Or did at one point...

IIRC there's an entire layer of contractors that exclusively do military construction & many aren't licensed to work in particular jurisdictions - which they don't have to be to work on military projects.

The military contracts out its construction

Believe me...I have. But it might also be nice to see the group that talked about doing that as an ideological project made that suggestion in response to a very legit concern rather than mocking the people expressing that concern.

My 18yo freshman says he doesn't use the LLMs but knows of plenty of peers who do. One LLMd his way through HS and had to change majors

I have no idea whether it would actually work in a pedagogical sense but at first blush it seems to force the student to confront the LLM output while also removing the basis for cheating

My clever non-punitive idea, at least for a humanities type class, is to have the student use a given prompt then annotate the output - showing all the corrections, and actually engage with both the topic on its own terms and the chaff that the LLMs spit out