Also, all publicity is good publicity when you only care about getting attention and then parlaying that into fame/income in whatever way is most expedient

We have to remember that this person is an entertainer, not some Jane Jacobs prodigy with insights into housing, economics, and urban planning

I mean yes, I would rather people get to live in those places over Texas and Georgia, but that difference is more marginal with the possible exception of Sacramento

I would much rather see the inner Bay Area become an American Tokyo with 40 million people enjoying an almost impossibly good climate

I don't necessarily have great short term solutions for southern cities where auto dependence and sprawl are so completely baked in.

mostly I just want Northern and coastal cities to build a lot more housing, both to lower their housing costs and decrease pressure on people to move to the South

It's complicated because the inner part of Houston may have a surprisingly good bus system, but there is so much sprawl that does not have access. Overall transit mode share remains low

Then you have other considerations like Houston's armpit climate that vastly increases the appeal of cars

If y'all needed click bait, you could have just gone with "This man's actions have already killed multiple children, and yours could be next"

But no, you decided to go with the "he's a crackpot but a strangely sexy crackpot!" angle

Et tu, Mother Jones?

Is there no publication in this country that won't normalize and whitewash this dangerous madman?

Everyone involved in this story down to the social media person who posted it should be ashamed of themselves and lie awake at night imagining an infant dying of whooping cough

Interestingly, if you look at housing plus transportation costs the red state affordability advantage decreases significantly

But this makes me all the more crazy, because if we could just get blue state big city transportation costs with red state big city housing costs, we'd be killing it

2022 was still pandemic. I didn't even get COVID until spring 22.

I'll decide to freak out wheni see the trend from 2023 through 2025

I'm sure people are still spending more time at home, but I'm not sure it deserves a moral panic yet

She realized that farming outrage among ideologues was an easier way to get attention than her comedy

I'm only one quarter joking

Even the people who run AI companies are probably eager for folks to pin everything on AI because it both inflates the sense of AI's importance (and thus earning potential) and distracts people from blaming the very political economy that allows them to defeat even the most reasonable of regulations

Also remarkably similar to the Iraq War and look how that turned out.

Most "professional thinkers" are professionals first and thinkers second

They will think and say whatever they believe must be thought and said to keep them in the profession and handsomely remunerated

Dear @theatlantic.com social media person. It's not too late for you. You don't need to be complicit in promoting the whitewashing of this man and his deadly beliefs

People will die of preventable disease because of the normalization of this man, and you need not contribute to their deaths

As I said, I don't agree with everything in the piece I shared. One key point of disagreement is that I think siting considerations are actually important for local water supplies. And the author of the piece I linked agrees that the electricity use issue is a much bigger deal.

I know this is an extremely lukewarm take, but I think the usefulness lies somewhere between the "useless" that anti-AI folks insist it is, and the "mind-bendingly world altering" that the AI hype boys think it is

Example: I made these with a combo of AI, photoshop, and digital painting touchups

Of course! There are just a lot folks out there who have been led to believe that AI is worse for water use than, say, beef consumption or golf courses. I want to make sure folks have accurate information because people's perspectives shape their policy positions and consumer choices

I don't agree with everything in this article, but I think it provides a very important perspective on the AI water use issue. Namely, it's vastly overstated

andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-wat...

There's a vastly stronger argument for being concerned about its electricity use

It makes a lot more sense when you realize that these exams are not really about ensuring that people have the skills necessary to be a planner and all about making sure that the people who write and administer the tests make money

The SAT is like a gold standard compared to these cert tests