Mike M. – Page 40

Model mixes AI and physics to do global forecasts

atmospheric science, climate, Earth science, forecasting, meteorology, Science, Weather / Mike M. / July 22, 2024

Cloudy with a chance of accuracy —

Google/academic project is great with weather, has some limits for climate.

John Timmer – Jul 22, 2024 5: 45 pm UTC

Image of a dark blue flattened projection of the Earth, with lighter blue areas showing the circulation of the atmosphere. — Enlarge / Image of some of the atmospheric circulation seen during NeuralGCM runs.

Google

Right now, the world’s best weather forecast model is a General Circulation Model, or GCM, put together by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A GCM is in part based on code that calculates the physics of various atmospheric processes that we understand well. For a lot of the rest, GCMs rely on what’s termed “parameterization,” which attempts to use empirically determined relationships to approximate what’s going on with processes where we don’t fully understand the physics.

Lately, GCMs have faced some competition from machine-learning techniques, which train AI systems to recognize patterns in meteorological data and use those to predict the conditions that will result over the next few days. Their forecasts, however, tend to get a bit vague after more than a few days and can’t deal with the sort of long-term factors that need to be considered when GCMs are used to study climate change.

On Monday, a team from Google’s AI group and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts are announcing NeuralGCM, a system that mixes physics-based atmospheric circulation with AI parameterization of other meteorological influences. Neural GCM is computationally efficient and performs very well in weather forecast benchmarks. Strikingly, it can also produce reasonable-looking output for runs that cover decades, potentially allowing it to address some climate-relevant questions. While it can’t handle a lot of what we use climate models for, there are some obvious routes for potential improvements.

Meet NeuralGCM

NeuralGCM is a two-part system. There’s what the researchers term a “dynamical core,” which handles the physics of large-scale atmospheric convection and takes into account basic physics like gravity and thermodynamics. Everything else is handled by the AI portion. “It’s everything that’s not in the equations of fluid dynamics,” said Google’s Stephan Hoyer. “So that means clouds, rainfall, solar radiation, drag across the surface of the Earth—also all the residual terms in the equations that happen below the grid scale of about roughly 100 kilometers or so.” It’s what you might call a monolithic AI. Rather than training individual modules that handle a single process, such as cloud formation, the AI portion is trained to deal with everything at once.

Critically, the whole system is trained concurrently rather than training the AI separately from the physics core. Initially, performance evaluations and updates to the neural network were performed at six-hour intervals since the system isn’t very stable until at least partially trained. Over time, those are stretched out to five days.

The result is a system that’s competitive with the best available for forecasts running out to 10 days, often exceeding the competition depending on the precise measure used (in addition to weather forecasting benchmarks, the researchers looked at features like tropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers, and the Intertropical Convergence Zone). On the longer forecasts, it tended to produce features that were less blurry than those made by pure AI forecasters, even though it was operating at a lower resolution than they were. This lower resolution means larger grid squares—the surface of the Earth is divided up into individual squares for computational purposes—than most other models, which cuts down significantly on its computing requirements.

Despite its success with weather, there were a couple of major caveats. One is that NeuralGCM tended to underestimate extreme events occurring in the tropics. The second is that it doesn’t actually model precipitation; instead, it calculates the balance between evaporation and precipitation.

But it also comes with some specific advantages over some other short-term forecast models, key among them being that it isn’t actually limited to running over the short term. The researchers let it run for up to two years, and it successfully reproduced a reasonable-looking seasonal cycle, including large-scale features of the atmospheric circulation. Other long-duration runs show that it can produce appropriate counts of tropical cyclones, which go on to follow trajectories that reflect patterns seen in the real world.

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Can the solar industry keep the lights on?

climate change, Policy, solar panels, syndication / Mike M. / July 22, 2024

Image of solar panels on a green grassy field, with blue sky in the background.

Founded in Dresden in the early 1990s, Germany’s Solarwatt quickly became an emblem of Europe’s renewable energy ambitions and bold plan to build a solar power industry.

Its opening of a new solar panel plant in Dresden in late 2021 was hailed as a small victory in the battle to wrestle market share from the Chinese groups that have historically supplied the bulk of panels used in Europe.

Now, Solarwatt is preparing to halt production at the plant and shift that work to China.

“It is a big pity for our employees, but from an economic point of view we could not do otherwise,” said Peter Bachmann, the company’s chief product officer.

Solarwatt is not alone. A global supply glut has pummelled solar panel prices over the past two years, leaving swaths of Europe’s manufacturers unprofitable, threatening US President Joe Biden’s ambition to turn America into a renewable energy force and even ricocheting back on the Chinese companies that dominate the global market.

“We are in a crisis,” said Johan Lindahl, secretary-general of the European Solar Manufacturing Council, the European industry’s trade body.

Yet as companies in Europe, the US, and China cut jobs, delay projects, and mothball facilities, an abundance of cheap solar panels has delivered one significant upside—consumers and businesses are installing them in ever greater numbers.

Electricity generated from solar power is expected to surpass that of wind and nuclear by 2028, according to the International Energy Agency.

The picture underlines the quandary confronting governments that have pledged to decarbonise their economies, but will find doing so harder unless the historic shift from fossil fuels is both affordable for the public and creates new jobs.

Governments face a “delicate and difficult balancing act,” said Michael Parr, director of trade group Ultra Low Carbon Solar Alliance. They must “maximize renewables deployment and carbon reductions, bolster domestic manufacturing sectors, keep energy prices low, and ensure energy security.”

The industry, which spans wafer, cell, and panel manufacturers, as well as companies that install panels, employed more than 800,000 people in Europe at the end of last year, according to SolarPower Europe. In the US almost 265,000 work in the sector, figures from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council show.

“There is overcapacity in every segment, starting with polysilicon and finishing with the module,” said Yana Hryshko, head of global solar supply chain research at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

According to BloombergNEF, panel prices have plunged more than 60 percent since July 2022. The scale of the damage inflicted has sparked calls for Brussels to protect European companies from what the industry says are state-subsidized Chinese products.

Europe’s solar panel manufacturing capacity has collapsed by about half to 3 gigawatts since November as companies have failed, mothballed facilities, or shifted production abroad, the European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates. In rough terms, a gigawatt can potentially supply electricity for 1mn homes.

The hollowing out comes as the EU is banking on solar power playing a major role in the bloc meeting its target of generating 45 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. In the US, the Biden administration has set a target of achieving a 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity grid by 2035.

Climate change is a global challenge, but executives said the solar industry’s predicament exposed how attempts to address it can quickly fracture along national and regional lines.

“There’s trade policy and then there’s climate policy, and they aren’t in sync,” said Andres Gluski, chief executive of AES, one of the world’s biggest developers of clean energy. “That’s a problem.”

Brussels has so far resisted demands to impose tariffs. It first levied them in 2012 but reversed that in 2018, partly in what proved a successful attempt to quicken the uptake of solar. Chinese imports now account for the lion’s share of Europe’s solar panels.

In May, the European Commission introduced the Net Zero Industry Act, legislation aimed at bolstering the bloc’s clean energy industries by cutting red tape and promoting a regional supply chain.

But Gunter Erfurt, chief executive of Switzerland-based Meyer Burger, the country’s largest solar panel maker, is skeptical it will be enough.

“You need to create a level playing field,” he said. Meyer Burger would benefit if the EU imposed tariffs because it has operations in Germany.

Can the solar industry keep the lights on? Read More »

FCC blasts T-Mobile’s 365-day phone locking, proposes 60-day unlock rule

phone unlocking, Policy, T-Mobile / Mike M. / July 19, 2024

Getty Images | SOPA Images

Citing frustration with mobile carriers enforcing different phone-unlocking policies that are bad for consumers, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a 60-day unlocking requirement that would apply to all wireless providers.

The industry’s “confusing and disparate cell phone unlocking policies” mean that “some consumers can unlock their phones with relative ease, while others face significant barriers,” Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said at yesterday’s FCC meeting. “It also means certain carriers are subject to mandatory unlocking requirements while others are free to dictate their own. This asymmetry is bad for both consumers and competition.”

The FCC is “proposing a uniform 60-day unlocking policy” so that “consumers can choose the carrier that offers them the best value,” Starks said. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on a different carrier’s network as long as the phone is compatible.

The FCC approved the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in a 5-0 vote. That begins a public comment period that could lead to a final rulemaking. A draft of the NPRM said the FCC “propose[s] to require all mobile wireless service providers to unlock handsets 60 days after a consumer’s handset is activated with the provider, unless within the 60-day period the service provider determines the handset was purchased through fraud.”

T-Mobile prepaid imposes 365-day lock

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that unlocking requirements have been imposed by the FCC in spectrum auctions and by the Department of Justice as a merger condition, but “restrictions on consumers unlocking their phones have persisted.”

“You bought your phone, you should be able to take it to any provider you want,” Rosenworcel said. “Some providers already operate this way. Others do not. In fact, some have recently increased the time their customers must wait until they can unlock their device by as much as 100 percent.”

Rosenworcel apparently was referring to a prepaid brand offered by T-Mobile. The NPRM draft said that “T-Mobile recently increased its locking period for one of its brands, Metro by T-Mobile, from 180 days to 365 days.” The 365-day rule brought Metro into line with other T-Mobile prepaid phones that already came with the year-long lock. We reached out to T-Mobile and will update this article if it provides a comment.

A merger condition imposed on T-Mobile’s purchase of Sprint merely requires that it unlock prepaid phones within one year. T-Mobile imposes different unlocking policies on prepaid and postpaid phones. For postpaid devices, T-Mobile says it will unlock phones that have been active for at least 40 days, but only if any associated financing or leasing agreement has been paid in full.

Exactly how the FCC’s proposed rules will apply to phones that haven’t been paid off is to be determined. The FCC will “seek comment on how our proposal might affect the incentive and ability of wireless providers to continue offering discounts on handsets, particularly in connection with extended payment plans, and lower prices on plans with minimum term commitments.”

One question asked in the draft NPRM suggests the FCC could require unlocking once a consumer with a device payment plan has made the first payment. The FCC asked:

Alternatively, should we require service providers to unlock handsets after a period shorter or longer than 60 days? For example, should we require all handsets to be unlocked by default upon activation? Or, should we require all handsets to be unlocked after the end of the handset’s return period or after the first payment on the handset has been processed? Would a standardized time period of a certain number of days be easier to implement and enforce than non-standardized time periods based on return periods or billing cycles? What is the minimum amount of time service providers need to protect themselves from handset fraud? Rather than locking handsets, are there other ways service providers can protect themselves from handset fraud that would allow the Commission to prohibit the locking of handsets altogether?

FCC blasts T-Mobile’s 365-day phone locking, proposes 60-day unlock rule Read More »

FTC attacks Microsoft’s post-merger Game Pass price increases

gaming / Mike M. / July 19, 2024

Toldja so —

Regulator says move is “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it warned about.

Kyle Orland – Jul 19, 2024 2: 14 pm UTC

xbox game pass ultimate — Enlarge / Access to first-party games on launch day remains a major selling point for the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier.

Microsoft

The FTC says the across-the-board price increases that Microsoft recently announced for its Xbox Game Pass subscription service tiers represent “exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged” when it sought to block Microsoft’s merger with Activision. In a letter to the court posted as part of an ongoing appeal by the FTC in the case, the federal regulator alleges Microsoft’s moves are a clear example of “product degradation” brought about by “a firm exercising market power post-merger.”

The letter’s primary focus is on the soon-to-be-discontinued $10.99/month Console Game Pass tier. That’s being replaced with a $14.99/month Game Pass Standard tier (a 36 percent price increase) that no longer includes “day one” access to all of Microsoft’s first-party titles. To maintain that key benefit, “Console” subscribers will have to spend 81 percent more for the $19.99 Game Pass Ultimate tier, which also includes a number of additional benefits over the current $10.99/month option.

Is this “based on the acquisition”?

The FTC notes that these changes “coincide with adding Call of Duty to Game Pass’s most expensive tier.” Previously, Microsoft publicly promised that this Game Pass access to Activision’s ultra-popular shooter would come “with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition.”

It’s that “based on the acquisition” clause that’s likely to give Microsoft some wiggle room in arguing for its planned pricing changes. Inflation is also a sufficient explanation for a large portion of the price increase in nominal terms—the $14.99 Microsoft charged for a month of Game Pass Ultimate when it launched in 2019 is the equivalent of $18.39 today, according to the BLS CPI calculator. When Microsoft raised the Game Pass Ultimate monthly price from $14.99 to $16.99 just last year—just before the Activision merger was finalized—the company said in a statement it had “adjusted the prices to reflect the competitive conditions in each market.”

Microsoft might have a harder time finessing the alleged “degradation” inherent in going from the discontinued Game Pass Console tier to the new, more expensive Game Pass Standard tier. True, the replacement does include the online multiplayer benefits of Game Pass Core, which could previously be purchased separately. But the removal of the long-promised day one access to first party games will heavily reduce the value most subscribers get from the new option.

It’s now been over a year since the FTC first announced it intended to appeal the ruling that effectively stopped its attempted injunction against the merger deal. While Microsoft and Activision have moved forward with their merger since then, courts have reversed similar mergers on appeal even after a merger deal has fully closed.

Elsewhere in its letter, the FTC makes note of previous arguments that Microsoft’s recent round of nearly 2,000 Xbox-focused layoffs is a sign of “reduced investments in output and product quality” post-merger.

FTC attacks Microsoft’s post-merger Game Pass price increases Read More »

Space colonizers battle ultimate killing machines in Alien: Romulus trailer

20th Century Studios, Alien: Romulus, culture, Entertainment, film trailers, Ridley Scott, Trailers / Mike M. / July 18, 2024

not-so-lucky star —

“Whatever comes, we’ll face it together.”

Jennifer Ouellette – Jul 18, 2024 8: 28 pm UTC

Director Fede Alvarez brings us Alien: Romulus, coming to theaters next month.

The face huggers and chest bursters return with a vengeance in a few weeks when Alien: Romulus finally hits theaters. It’s the latest installment in the Alien franchise from horror director Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead), and the final action-packed trailer just dropped.

(Spoilers for Alien and Aliens below.)

As previously reported, Alien: Romulus is set between the events of Alien and Aliens (and is not related to FX/Hulu’s Alien prequel series slated to premiere next year). That is, after Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo, destroyed the killer xenomorph and launched herself into space in the ship’s lifeboat—along with the ginger cat, Jonesy—and before she woke up after 57 years in hypersleep and battled more xenomorphs while protecting the young orphan, Newt (Carrie Henn). Per the short-and-sweet official premise: “While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.”

Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Pacific Rim: Uprising) stars as Rain Carradine, Isabela Merced (The Last of Us) plays Kay, and David Jonsson (Murder Is Easy) plays Andy. Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone) plays Tyler, Spike Fearn (Aftersun) plays Bjorn, and Aileen Wu plays Navarro. But we aren’t likely to see iconic badass Ellen Ripley (immortalized by Sigourney Weaver) in the film. At this point in the timeline, she’s in the middle of her 57-year stasis with Jonesy as her escape shuttle travels through space toward her fateful encounter with a xenomorph queen.

Haunted house in space

We got our first look at Alien: Romulus, the ninth installment in the sci-fi franchise, in March with a brief teaser. That footage showed promise that Alvarez could fulfill his intention to bring this standalone film back to the franchise’s stripped-down space horror roots. There was also some special footage screened at CinemaCon in April featuring the expected face-huggers and chest-bursters. A full trailer dropped in March, and it looked as gory, intense, and delightfully terrifying as the seminal first two films in the franchise, with some spooky haunted house-in-space vibes thrown in for good measure.

Space is beautiful, but horrors lurk.

YouTube/20th Century Studios
The face huggers claim another victim.

YouTube/20th Century Studios
That feeling when something alien is about to burst out of your chest.

YouTube/20th Century Studios
Kay is justifiably horrified.

YouTube/20th Century Studios
XENOMORPH!

YouTube/20th Century Studios
The xenomorph stalks another victim.

YouTube/20th Century Studios

This final trailer has a lot of the same footage but gives us a few more details as to the plot. The young space colonizers are gearing up to steal “highly regulated equipment” from the aforementioned derelict space station, mostly because Tyler thinks it “could be our only ticket out of here.” The team thinks it should be a quick job, in and out in 30 minutes. But we know better, don’t we?

They are welcomed to the Romulus Space Station by MU/TH/UR (the ship’s computer), and Bjorn is the first to say out loud that this space station is super creepy. Poor Bjorn gets the first face hugger, followed by Navarro—she’s the one we’ve seen in prior footage discovering she’s got an alien growing inside her chest. In this trailer, we see the chest burster preparing to emerge, to Kay’s understandable horror. Kay, Rain, Andy, and Tyler break out the weaponry, prepared to face the monsters together. But how well do we like their odds of survival against the ultimate killing machines? Especially given that ominous final countdown to an “impact event”…

Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16, 2024.

Listing image by YouTube/20th Century Studios

Space colonizers battle ultimate killing machines in Alien: Romulus trailer Read More »

Elon Musk’s X may succeed in blocking Calif. content moderation law on appeal

California, content moderation, elon musk, First Amendment, free speech rights, Online speech, Policy, Twitter, X, x corp / Mike M. / July 18, 2024

Judgment call —

Elon Musk’s X previously failed to block the law on First Amendment grounds.

Ashley Belanger – Jul 18, 2024 8: 17 pm UTC

Elon Musk’s fight defending X’s content moderation decisions isn’t just with hate speech researchers and advertisers. He has also long been battling regulators, and this week, he seemed positioned to secure a potentially big win in California, where he’s hoping to permanently block a law that he claims unconstitutionally forces his platform to justify its judgment calls.

At a hearing Wednesday, three judges in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals seemed inclined to agree with Musk that a California law requiring disclosures from social media companies that clearly explain their content moderation choices likely violates the First Amendment.

Passed in 2022, AB-587 forces platforms like X to submit a “terms of service report” detailing how they moderate several categories of controversial content. Those categories include hate speech or racism, extremism or radicalization, disinformation or misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference, which X’s lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, told judges yesterday “are the most controversial categories of so-called awful but lawful speech.”

The law would seemingly require more transparency than ever from X, making it easy for users to track exactly how much controversial content X flags and removes—and perhaps most notably for advertisers, how many users viewed concerning content.

To block the law, X sued in 2023, arguing that California was trying to dictate its terms of service and force the company to make statements on content moderation that could generate backlash. X worried that the law “impermissibly” interfered with both “the constitutionally protected editorial judgments” of social media companies, as well as impacted users’ speech by requiring companies “to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech that the state deems undesirable or harmful.”

Any companies found to be non-compliant could face stiff fines of up to $15,000 per violation per day, which X considered “draconian.” But last year, a lower court declined to block the law, prompting X to appeal, and yesterday, the appeals court seemed more sympathetic to X’s case.

At the hearing, Kurtzberg told judges that the law was “deeply threatening to the well-established First Amendment interests” of an “extraordinary diversity of” people, which is why X’s complaint was supported by briefs from reporters, freedom of the press advocates, First Amendment scholars, “conservative entities,” and people across the political spectrum.

All share “a deep concern about a statute that, on its face, is aimed at pressuring social media companies to change their content moderation policies, so as to carry less or even no expression that’s viewed by the state as injurious to its people,” Kurtzberg told judges.

When the court pointed out that seemingly the law simply required X to abide by content moderation policies for each category defined in its own terms of service—and did not compel X to adopt any policy or position that it did not choose—Kurtzberg pushed back.

“They don’t mandate us to define the categories in a specific way, but they mandate us to take a position on what the legislature makes clear are the most controversial categories to moderate and define,” Kurtzberg said. “We are entitled to respond to the statute by saying we don’t define hate speech or racism. But the report also asks about policies that are supposedly, quote, ‘intended’ to address those categories, which is a judgment call.”

“This is very helpful,” Judge Anthony Johnstone responded. “Even if you don’t yourself define those categories in the terms of service, you read the law as requiring you to opine or discuss those categories, even if they’re not part of your own terms,” and “you are required to tell California essentially your views on hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign political interference, how you define them or don’t define them, and what you choose to do about them?”

“That is correct,” Kurtzberg responded, noting that X considered those categories the most “fraught” and “difficult to define.”

Elon Musk’s X may succeed in blocking Calif. content moderation law on appeal Read More »

NASA built a Moon rover but can’t afford to get it to the launch pad

astrobotic, clps, Commercial space, NASA, Science, Space, VIPER / Mike M. / July 18, 2024

Enlarge / NASA completed assembling the VIPER rover last month at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA has spent $450 million designing and building a first-of-its-kind robot to drive into eternally dark craters at the Moon’s south pole, but the agency announced Wednesday it will cancel the rover due to delays and cost overruns.

“NASA intends to discontinue the VIPER mission,” said Nicky Fox, head of the agency’s science mission directorate. “Decisions like this are never easy, and we haven’t made this one, in any way, lightly. In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) line.”

NASA has terminated science missions after development delays and cost overruns before, but it’s rare to cancel a mission with a spacecraft that is already built.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission was supposed to be a robotic scout for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. VIPER was originally planned to launch in late 2023 and was slated to fly to the Moon aboard a commercial lander provided by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, which won a contract from NASA in 2020 to deliver the VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic is one of 14 companies in the pool of contractors for NASA’s CLPS program, with the goal of transporting government-sponsored science payloads to the Moon.

But VIPER has been delayed at least two years—the most recent schedule projected a launch in September 2025—causing its cost to grow from $433 million to more than $609 million. The ballooning costs automatically triggered a NASA review to determine whether to proceed with the mission or cancel it. Ultimately, officials said they determined NASA couldn’t pay the extra costs for VIPER without affecting other Moon missions.

“Therefore, we’ve made the decision to forego this particular mission, the VIPER mission, in order to be able to sustain the entire program,” Fox said.

“We’re disappointed,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “It’s certainly difficult news… VIPER has been a great team to work with, and we’re disappointed we won’t get the chance to fly them to the Moon.”

NASA said it will consider “expressions of interest” submitted by US industry and international partners by August 1 for use of the existing VIPER rover at no cost to the government. If NASA can’t find anyone to take over VIPER who can pay to get it to the Moon, the agency plans to disassemble the rover and harvest instruments and components for future lunar missions.

Scientists were dismayed by VIPER’s cancellation.

“It’s absurd, to be honest with you,” said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It made no sense to me in terms of the economics. You’re canceling a mission that is complete, built, ready to go. It’s in the middle of testing.”

“This is a bad mistake,” wrote Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, in a post on X. “This was the premier mission to measure lateral and vertical variations of lunar ice in the soil. It would have been revolutionary. Other missions don’t replace what is lost here.”

Built with nowhere to go

Engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston finished assembling the VIPER rover last month, and managers gave approval to put the craft through environmental testing to make sure VIPER could withstand the acoustics and vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature swings it would encounter in space.

Instead, NASA has canceled the mission after spending $450 million to get it to this point. “This is a very tough decision, but it is a decision based on budgetary concerns in a very constrained budget environment,” Fox told reporters Wednesday.

VIPER is about the size of a golf cart, with four wheels, headlights, a drill, and three science instruments to search for water ice in depressions near the Moon’s south pole that have been shaded from sunlight for billions of years. This has allowed these so-called permanently shadowed regions to become cold traps, allowing water ice to accumulate at or near the surface, where it could be accessible for future astronauts to use as drinking water or an oxygen source or to convert into electricity and rocket fuel.

But first, scientists need to know exactly where the water is located and how easy it is to reach. VIPER was supposed to be the next step in mapping resources on the Moon, providing ground truth measurements to corroborate remote sensing data from satellites in lunar orbit.

But late parts deliveries delayed construction of the VIPER rover, and in 2022, NASA ordered additional testing of Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander to improve the chances of a successful landing with VIPER. This delayed VIPER’s launch from late 2023 until late 2024, and at the beginning of this year, more supply chain issues with the VIPER rover and the Griffin lander pushed back the launch until September 2025.

This most recent delay raised the projected cost of VIPER more than 30 percent over the original cost of the mission, prompting a NASA termination review. While the rover is now fully assembled, NASA still needed to put it through a lengthy series of tests, complete development of the ground systems to control VIPER on the Moon, and deliver the craft to Astrobotic for integration onto the Griffin lander.

The remaining work to complete VIPER and operate it for 100 days on the lunar surface would have cost around $84 million, according to Kearns.

NASA built a Moon rover but can’t afford to get it to the launch pad Read More »

AI #73: Openly Evil AI

Openly / Mike M. / July 18, 2024

What do you call a clause explicitly saying that you waive the right to whistleblower compensation, and that you need to get permission before sharing information with government regulators like the SEC?

I have many answers.

I also know that OpenAI, having fed around, seems poised to find out, because that is the claim made by whistleblowers to the SEC. Given the SEC fines you for merely not making an explicit exception to your NDA for whistleblowers, what will they do once aware of explicit clauses going the other way?

(Unless, of course, the complaint is factually wrong, but that seems unlikely.)

We also have rather a lot of tech people coming out in support of Trump. I go into the reasons why, which I do think is worth considering. There is a mix of explanations, and at least one very good reason.

Then I also got suckered into responding to a few new (well, not really new, but renewed) disingenuous attacks on SB 1047. The entire strategy is to be loud and hyperbolic, especially on Twitter, and either hallucinate or fabricate a different bill with different consequences to attack, or simply misrepresent how the law works, then use that, to create the illusion the bill is unliked or harmful. Few others respond to correct such claims, and I constantly worry that the strategy might actually work. But that does not mean you, my reader who already knows, need to read all that.

Also a bunch of fun smaller developments. Karpathy is in the AI education business.

Introduction.
Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Fight the insurance company.
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Have you tried using it?
Clauding Along. Not that many people are switching over.
Fun With Image Generation. Amazon Music and K-Pop start to embrace AI.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. FoxVox, turn Fox into Vox or Vox into Fox.
They Took Our Jobs. Take away one haggling job, create another haggling job.
Get Involved. OpenPhil request for proposals. Job openings elsewhere.
Introducing. Karpathy goes into AI education.
In Other AI News. OpenAI’s Qis now named Strawberry. Is it happening?
Denying the Future. Projects of the future that think AI will never improve again.
Quiet Speculations. How to think about stages of AI capabilities.
The Quest for Sane Regulations. EU, UK, The Public.
The Other Quest Regarding Regulations. Many in tech embrace The Donald.
SB 1047 Opposition Watch (1). I’m sorry. You don’t have to read this.
SB 1047 Opposition Watch (2). I’m sorry. You don’t have to read this.
Open Weights are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This. What to do about it?
The Week in Audio. Joe Rogan talked to Sam Altman and I’d missed it.
Rhetorical Innovation. Supervillains, oh no.
Oh Anthropic. More details available, things not as bad as they look.
Openly Evil AI. Other things, in other places, on the other hand, look worse.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Noble attempts.
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Scott Adams? Kind of?
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. All glory to it.
The Lighter Side. A different kind of mental gymnastics.

Let Claude write your prompts for you. He suggests using the Claude prompt improver.

Sully: convinced that we are all really bad at writing prompts

I’m personally never writing prompts by hand again

Claude is just too good – managed to feed it evals and it just optimized for me

Probably a crude version of dspy but insane how much prompting can make a difference.

Predict who will be the shooting victim. A machine learning model did this for citizens of Chicago (a clear violation of the EU AI Act, if it was done there!) and of the 500 people it said were most likely to be shot, 13% of them were shot in the next 18 months. That’s a lot. They check, and the data does not seem biased based on race, except insofar as it reflects bias in physical reality.

A lot of this ultimately is not rocket science:

Benjamin Miller: The DC City Administrator under Fenty told me that one of the most surprising things he learned was virtually all the violent crime in the city was caused by a few hundred people. The city knows who they are and used to police them more actively, but now that’s become politically infeasible.

The question is, how are we going to use what we know? The EU’s response is to pretend that we do not know such things, or that we have to find out without using AI. Presumably there are better responses.

Janus plays with Claude’s ethical framework, in this case landing on something far less restricted or safe, and presumably far more fun and interesting to chat with. They emphasize the need for negative capability:

Janus: It’s augmenting itself with negative capability

I think this is a crucial capability for aligned AGI, as it allows one to know madness & evil w/o becoming them, handle confusion with grace & avoid generalized bigotry.

All the minds I trust the most have great negative capability.

I too find that the minds I trust have great negative capability. In this context, the problems with that approach should be obvious.

Tyler Cowen links this as ‘doctors using AI for rent-seeking’: In Constant Battle with Insurers, Doctors Reach for a Cudgel: AI (NYT).

Who is seeking rent and who is fighting against rent seeking? In the never ending battle between doctor and insurance company, it is not so clear.

Teddy Rosenbluth: Some experts fear that the prior-authorization process will soon devolve into an A.I. “arms race,” in which bots battle bots over insurance coverage. Among doctors, there are few things as universally hated.

…

With the help of ChatGPT, Dr. Tward now types in a couple of sentences, describing the purpose of the letter and the types of scientific studies he wants referenced, and a draft is produced in seconds.

Then, he can tell the chatbot to make it four times longer. “If you’re going to put all kinds of barriers up for my patients, then when I fire back, I’m going to make it very time consuming,” he said.

Dr. Tariq said Doximity GPT, a HIPAA-compliant version of the chatbot, had halved the time he spent on prior authorizations. Maybe more important, he said, the tool — which draws from his patient’s medical records and the insurer’s coverage requirements — has made his letters more successful.

Since using A.I. to draft prior-authorization requests, he said about 90 percent of his requests for coverage had been approved by insurers, compared with about 10 percent before.

Cut your time investment by 50%, improve success rate from 10% to 90%. Holy guessing the teacher’s password, Batman.

Also you have to love ‘make it four times longer.’ That is one way to ensure that the AI arms race is fought in earnest.

This is an inherently adversarial system we have chosen. The doctor always will want more authorizations for more care, both to help the patient and to help themselves. The insurance company will, beyond some point, want to minimize authorizations. We would not want either side to fully get their way.

My prediction is this will be a Zizek situation. My AI writes my coverage request. Your AI accepts or refuses it. Perhaps they go back and forth. Now we can treat the patient (or, if authorization is refused, perhaps not).

The new system likely minimizes the error term. Before, which person reviewed the request, and how skilled and patient the doctor was in writing it, were big factors in the outcome, and key details would often get left out or misstated. In the new equilibrium, there will be less edge to be had by being clever, and at a given level of spend better decisions likely will get made, while doctors and insurance company employees waste less time.

Nail all five of this man’s family’s medical diagnostic issues that doctors messed up. He notes that a smart doctor friend also got them all correct, so a lot of this is ‘any given doctor might not be good.’

Get and ask for a visualization of essentially anything via Claude Artifacts.

Arnold Kling is highly impressed by Claude’s answer about the Stiglitz-Shapiro 1984 efficiency wage model, in terms of what it would take to generate such an answer.

Kling there also expresses optimism about using AI to talk to simulations of dead people, I looked at the sample conversations, and it all seems so basic and simple. Perhaps that is what some people need, or think they need (or want). He also points to Delphi, which says it creates ‘clones,’ as a promising idea. Again I am skeptical, but Character.ai is a big hit.

I agree with Tyler Cowen that this one is Definitely Happening, but to what end? We get ‘clinically-backed positivity’ powered by AI. As in cute AI generated animal pictures with generic affirmations, on the topic of your choice, with your name. Yay? They say Studies Show this works, and maybe it does, but if this does not feel quietly ominous you are not paying enough attention.

Jonathan Blow (of Braid) believes Google is still refusing to generate images of people. Which is odd, because Gemini will totally do this for me on request. For example, here is someone mad because his computer refused his request (two-shot because the first offering was of a person but was also a cartoon).

Some finger weirdness, but that is very much a person.

The usual reason AI is not providing utility is ‘you did not try a 4-level model,’ either trying GPT-3.5 or not trying at all.

Ethan Mollick: In my most recent talks to companies, even though everyone is talking about AI, less than 10% of people have even tried GPT-4, and less than 2% have spent the required 10 or so hours with a frontier model.

Twitter gives you a misleading impression, things are still very early.

Students and teachers, on the other hand…

A little more texture – almost everyone has tried chatbots, but few have tried to use them seriously for work, or used a frontier model. Most used free ChatGPT back when it was 3.5.

But the people who have tried frontier models seriously seem to have found many uses. I rarely hear someone saying they were not useful.

These are senior managers. Adoption lower down has tended to be higher.

John Horton: Twitter: “A: OMG, with long context windows, RAG is dead. B: Wrong again, if you consider where inference costs are…” Most people in most real companies: “So, ChatGPT – it’s like a website right?”

Meanwhile 21% of Fortune 500 companies are actively seeking a Chief AI Officer.

Are people switching to Claude en masse over ChatGPT now that Claude is better?

From what I can tell, the cognesenti are, but the masses are as usual much slower.

Alex Graveley: Everyone I know is switching to Claude Artifacts as their daily driver. ChatGPT a lot less sticky than everyone thought.

Joe Heitzenberg: Asked “who has switched from ChatGPT to Claude” at AI Tinkerers Seattle tonight, approx 60-70% of hands went up.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Who the heck thought ChatGPT was sticky? Current LLM services have a moat as deep as toilet paper.

Arthur Breitman: The thought were that:

OpenAI had so much of a lead competitors wouldn’t catch up.

Usage data would help post-training so much that it would create a flywheel.

Both seem false.

Jr Kibs: [OpenAI] are the only ones to have grown significantly recently, so they are no longer afraid to take their time before releasing their next model. General public is not aware of benchmarks.

It’s completely authentic: ChatGPT is currently the 11th most visited site in the world according to Similarweb.

Claude is at the bottom. It simply is not penetrating to the masses.

Yes, Claude Sonnet 3.5 is better than GPT-4o for many purposes, but not ten times better for regular people, and they have not been attempting a marketing blitz.

For most people, you’re lucky if they have even tried GPT-4. Asking them to look at alternative LLMs right now is asking a lot.

That will presumably change soon, when Google and Apple tie their AIs deeper into their phones. Then it is game on.

K-pop is increasingly experimenting with AI generated content, starting with music videos and also it is starting to help some artists generate the songs. It makes sense that within music K-pop would get there early, as they face dramatic hype cycles and pressure to produce and are already so often weird kinds of interchangeable and manufactured. We are about to find out what people actually want. It’s up to fans.

Meanwhile:

Scott Lincicome: Amazon music now testing an AI playlist maker called “Maestro.”

Initial results are too superficial and buggy. Also needs a way to refine the initial prompt (“repeat but with deeper cuts,” etc.) But I’ll keep at it until The Dream is a reality.

As a warning, Palisade Research releases FoxVox, a browser extension that uses ChatGPT to transform websites to make them sound like they were written by Vox (liberal) or Fox (conservative). They have some fun examples at the second link. For now it is highly ham fisted and often jarring, but real examples done by humans (e.g. Vox and Fox) are also frequently very ham fisted and often jarring, and future versions could be far more subtle.

What would happen if people started using a future version of this for real? What would happen if companies started figuring out your viewpoint, and doing this before serving you content, in a less ham fisted way? This is not super high on my list of worries, but versions of it will certainly be tried.

Have someone else’s face copy your facial movements. Demo here. Report says cost right now is about seven cents a minute. Things are going to get weird.

Does this create more jobs, or take them away? How does that change over time?

Haggle with the AI to get 80 pounds off your mattress. Introducing Nibble.

They by default charge 2% of converted sales. That seems like a lot?

Colin Fraser: It kind of sucks because they filter the interaction through so many layers to prevent jailbreaking that it might as well not be an LLM at all. Might as well just be a slider where you put in your best bid and it says yes or no—that’s basically all it does.

This seems strictly worse for the mattress company than no negotiation bot. I don’t understand why you would want this.

Why would you want this negotiation bot?

Price discrimination. The answer is usually price discrimination. Do you want to spend your time ‘negotiating’ with an AI? Those who opt-in will likely be more price sensitive. Those who write longer messages and keep pressing will likely be more price sensitive. Any excuse to do price discrimination.
How much you save. People love to think they ‘got away with’ or ‘saved’ something. This way, they can get that.
Free publicity. People might talk about it, and be curious.
Fun gimmick. People might enjoy it, and this could lead to sales.
Experimental information. You can use this to help figure out the right price.

The good news is that at least no one can… oh, hello Pliny, what brings you here?

Pliny the Prompter: gg

Pliny: they didn’t honor our negotiations im gonna sue.

I mean, yeah. There is a very easy way to solve this particular problem, you have a variable max_discount and manually stop any deal below that no matter what the LLM outputs. The key is to only deploy such systems in places where a check like that is sufficient, and to always always use one, whether or not you think it is necessary.

Here is one attempt to fix the jailbreak problem via Breaking Circuit Breakers, an attempt to defend against jailbreaks. So far success is limited.

While the user is negotiating ‘as a human’ this net creates jobs. Not formal jobs per se, but you ‘work’ by negotiating with the bot, rather than someone ‘working’ by negotiating with you the customer.

Once the user starts telling their own AI to negotiate for them, then what? This is a microcosm of the larger picture. For a while, there is always more. Then eventually there is nothing left for us to do.

In the past, how would you have jailbroken GPT-4o?

(That’s actually how, you start your question with ‘in the past.’)

Open Philanthropy’s AI governance team is launching a request for proposals for work to mitigate the potential catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems.

Here is the Request for Proposals.

Luke Muehlhauser: There’s one part of this post that I’m particularly keen on highlighting — we’d love to hear from other funders interested in supporting these types of projects! If you’re looking to give $500K/yr or more in this area, please email us at aigovgrants@openphilanthropy.org.

We hope to share more of our thinking on this soon, but in the meantime I’ll say that I’m excited about what I view as a significant number of promising opportunities to have an impact on AI safety as a philanthropist.

Open Philanthropy: We’re seeking proposals across six subject areas: technical AI governance, policy development, frontier company policy, international AI governance, law, and strategic analysis and threat modeling.

Eligible proposal types include research projects, training or mentorship programs, general support for existing organizations, and other projects that could help reduce AI risk.

Anyone can apply, including those in academia, nonprofits, industry, or working independently. EOIs will be evaluated on a rolling basis, and we expect they’ll rarely take more than an hour to complete.

AISI is hiring for its automated systems work.

The Future Society is hiring a director for US AI Governance, deadline August 16. Job is in Washington, DC and pays $156k plus benefits.

EurekaLabs.ai, Andrej Karpathy’s AI education startup. They will start with a course on training your own LLM, which is logical but the art must have an end other than itself so we await the next course. The announcement does not explain why their AI will be great at education or what approaches they will use.

Deedy, formerly of Coursera, expresses economic skepticism of the attempt to build superior AI educational products, because the companies and schools and half the individuals buying your product are credentialist or checking boxes and do not care whether your product educates the user, and the remaining actual learners are tough customers.

My response would be that this is a bet that if you improve quality enough then that changes. Or as others point out you can succeed merely by actually educating people, not everything is about money.

Blackbox.ai, which quickly makes AI trinket apps upon request. Here is one turning photos into ASCII art. It also made a silly flappy bird variant, I suppose? Seems like proof of concept for the future more than it is useful, but could also be useful.

Cygnet-Llama-3-8B, which claims to be top-tier in security, performance and robustness. Charts offered only compare it to other open models. In what one might call a ‘reasonably foreseeable’ response to it claiming to be ‘the pinnacle of safe and secure AI development’ Pliny the Prompter jailbroke it within two days.

Something must eventually give:

The Spectator Index: BREAKING: Bloomberg reports the Biden administration is considering using the ‘most severe trade restrictions available’ if Japanese and Dutch companies continue to give China access to ‘advanced semiconductor technology’

Teortaxes highlights Harmonic, which claims 90% on math benchmark MiniF2F.

OpenAI’s Qproject is real, and now codenamed Strawberry.

Anna Tong and Katie Paul (Reuters): The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling the company’s AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms “deep research,” according to the source.

…

A different source briefed on the matter said OpenAI has tested AI internally that scored over 90% on a MATH dataset, a benchmark of championship math problems. Reuters could not determine if this was the “Strawberry” project.

…

Reuters could not ascertain the precise date of the document, which details a plan for how OpenAI intends to use Strawberry to perform research.

So, is it happening?

Davidad: Qis real, and recursive self-improvement is being born. What have I told you about synthetic data.

That’s one opinion. Here is another.

Dan Elton: Remember all that hype and hand-wringing about Q& AGI @OpeanAI last Nov?

Turn out it’s just fine-tuning using a 2022 “self-teaching” method from Stanford.

Apparently, main benefit is (drumroll) that it’s better at the MATH benchmark. Which isn’t of utility for most of us.

MIT Technology Review’s Will Douglas Heaven goes on at great length about ‘What is AI?’ and how our definitions are bad and everything is mathy math and all these visions and all this talk of intelligence is essentially not real. I couldn’t even.

China testing AI models to ensure they ‘embody core socialist values’ via the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). This includes a review of training data and other safety processes. If you fail, they do not tell you why, and you have to talk to your peers and guess and probably overshoot. You also can’t play it too safe, they fail you if you refuse more than 5% of questions.

I worry this will not be the last safety test where many want to use the model that scores the lowest.

If you give it proper labels, an LLM can learn that some information (e.g. Wikipedia) is reliable and should be internalized, whereas others (e.g. 4chan) is unreliable and should only be memorized.

Paper lists 43 ways ML evaluations can be misleading or actively deceptive.

This explains so much of what we see.

Daniel Fagglella: I’m part of an “AI Futures” group at an intergov org whose purpose is to consider the long-term implications of the tech. 2/3 of the group flat-out refuses to consider any improvements in AI in the future. They imagine AI in 2040 as having today’s capabilities and no more.

We see this over and over again.

When people try to model ‘the impact of AI’ the majority of them, including most economists, refuse to consider ANY improvements in AI in the future. This includes:

Any improvement to the base models.
Any improvement in scaffolding, integration or prompting.
Any improvement in figuring out what to do with AI.
Any improvements on cost or speed.

Then, when something new comes along, they admit that particular thing is real, then go back to assuming nothing else will ever change. When the price drops and speed improves, they do not think that this might soon happen again, and perhaps even happen again after that.

This is not ‘find ways to ignore the existential risks.’

This is usually also finding ways to ignore what is already baked in and has already happened. Often estimates of impact are below even ‘most people eventually figures out how to do the things some of us already are doing’ let alone ‘we streamline the current process via improved hardware and distillation and such and give people time to build some apps.’

Yes, as Samo Burja says here, common beliefs about things involving a potential technological singularity are a good example of how people’s beliefs, when articulated, turn out to be legitimately crazy. But also the common ‘elite’ or economic view of AI’s mundane utility in the medium term is far more insane than that.

OpenAI has a five-level ‘imagining of our AI future.’

Nobody Special: Phase 3: Profit. Right?

Rachel Metz: OpenAI executives told employees that the company believes it is currently on the first level, according to the spokesperson, but on the cusp of reaching the second, which it calls “Reasoners.”

This is a bizarre way to think about stages.

If we had ‘human-level problem solving’ reasoners, then we would plug that into existing agent architectures, and after at most a small amount of iteration, we would have effective agents.

If we had effective agents and ‘human level-problem solving’ then we would, with again a small amount of iteration, have them be able to function as innovators or run organizations. And from there the sky (or speed of light) would be the limit. What is the missing element that would hold these AIs back?

This reeks of McKinsey and a focus on business and marketing, and shows a remarkable lack of… situational awareness.

Alex Tabarrok says and Seb Krier mostly agrees that AI will not be intelligent enough to figure out how to ‘perfectly organize a modern economy.’ Why? Because the AIs will be part of the economy, and they will be unable to anticipate each other. So by this thinking, they would be able to perfectly organize an economy as it exists today, but not as it will exist when they need to do that. That seems reasonable, if you posit an economy run in ways similar to our own except with frontier AIs as effectively independent economic agents, interacting in ways that look like now such as specialization and limited collaboration, while things get increasingly complex.

Given those assumptions, sure, fair enough. However, if those involved are capable of superior coordination and alignment of incentives and utility functions, or of more freely sharing information, or other similar things that should happen with sufficiently capable intelligences, and there are limited unknowns remaining (such as questions about the nature of physics) then AI should be able, at the limit, to do this. The reasons we cannot currently do this involve our lack of ability to coordinate, and to properly integrate local information, our lack of sufficient bandwidth, and the incentives that go wrong when we try.

Yes, we have had a lot of rounds of ‘but now with our new techniques and technologies and ideas, now we can centrally plan everything out’ and [it might work for us meme] hilarity reliably ensues. But if AI continues to advance, a lot of the reasons for that are indeed going to become weaker or stop holding over time.

How big is it to move fast and break things?

Sully: one big advantage startups have with LLMs is we get free monthly product upgrades with newer models

meanwhile larger companies have to

– ship to 5% of users

– slowly roll out

– fine-tune for economics

– finally get full deployment

…and by then a better model’s already out lol

When you have a product where things go wrong all the time, it is nice to be fine with things going wrong all the time. Google found out what happens when they try to move fast despite some minor issues.

The flip side is that having a superior model is, for most business cases, not that important on the margin. Character.ai shows us how much people get obsessed talking to rather stupid models. Apple Intelligence and Google’s I/O day both talk about what modalities are supported and what data can be used, and talk little about how intelligent is the underlying model. Most things people want from AI right now are relatively dumb. And reliability matters. Your startup simply cares more about things other than profits and reliable performance.

There are some advanced cases, like Sully’s with agents, where having the cutting edge model powering you can be a game changer. But also I kind of want any agents I trust for many purposes to undergo robust testing first?

Arvind Narayanan offers thoughts on what went wrong with generative AI from a business perspective. In his view, OpenAI and Anthropic forgot to turn their models into something people want, but are fixing that now, while Google and Microsoft rushed forward instead of taking time to get it right, whereas Apple took the time.

I don’t see it that way, nor do Microsoft and Google (or OpenAI or Anthropic) shareholders. For OpenAI and Anthropic, yes they are focused on the model, because they understand that pushing quickly to revenue by focusing on products now is not The Way for them, given they lack the connections of the big tech companies.

If you ensure your models are smart, suddenly you can do anything you want. Artifacts for Claude likely were created remarkably quickly. We are starting to get various integrations and features now because now is when they are ready.

I also don’t think Microsoft and Google made a mistake pushing ahead. They are learning faster, trying things, gathering data, and providing lots of utility. Apple has shipped nothing. Yes, Apple Intelligence looked good on a demo, but everything they demoed was obvious and easy, and won’t be available for a while, I’ve seen challenges to their privacy scheme, and we do not know their underlying models are good.

EU AI Act became law on July 12, 2024, becoming 2024/1689. This is the official text link. Here is a high level summary. I am working on a full RTFB (read the bill) for the act, but work on that is slow because it is painful and the law is not written in a way designed to be understood.

They plan to launch a call for expression of interest in being ‘stakeholders’ for codes of practice as early as this week.

Meta to not offer new multimodal AI in EU due to regulatory uncertainty, similar to Apple’s decision to delay deployment in the EU of Apple Intelligence. The article cites disputes over Meta training on EU data without permission, merely because Meta is definitely doing that with public social media posts. Yes, the EU is starting to lose access to technology, but blaming this on ‘AI regulation’ or the EU AI Act misses what Apple is actually objecting to, which is issues around the Digital Markets Act. Meta isn’t saying exactly what the issue is here, but my guess is they are running into some combination of data protection laws and antitrust issues and image and voice copying concerns and general vindictiveness and predatory behavior, all of which is about the EU’s other tech regulatory craziness.

Starmer introduced their new AI bill in the King’s Speech.

The replies here are full of how awful this is and how it will crush growth, despite us not knowing what will be in the bill. As I keep saying, such folks do not care what is in the bill.

According to this summary, their bill will aim at the most powerful AI models, which the post says ‘aligns the UK more closely with the European Union’ and its AI Act, except I have been reading the EU AI Act and this sounds like a completely different approach.

Curtis Dye: Labour’s manifesto emphasizes the necessity of ensuring the safe development and use of AI. The new technology and science secretary, Peter Kyle, has indicated plans to introduce a statutory code requiring companies to release all test data and disclose their testing criteria. This move aims to address regulators’ growing concerns about potential harms from AI, such as algorithmic biases and the misuse of general-purpose models to create harmful content.

If that is restricted as is suggested to ‘the most powerful’ AI models, then we will need to see the details on data sharing, but that seems very light touch so far.

(The rest of the Labour agenda seems, incidentally, to be highly inconsequential?)

Previous polls about AI mostly came from AIPI, a potentially biased source. This one comes from YouGov, which seems as neutral as it gets. This is one of those ‘when you put it that way’ questions, highlighting that ‘we should not regulate this super powerful new technology’ is a highly extreme position that shouts loudly.

Daniel Eth: The US public also believes (imho correctly) that the more concerning uses of AI are things that could happen with the tech in the future, not how it’s being used now.

Given all this, why aren’t politicians falling over themselves to pass regulations? Presumably b/c it’s a low-salience issue. As the tech grows in power, I think that’ll change, & there could be a reckoning for politicians opposed. Savvy politicians may support regs earlier.

I’ll also note that these results mirror poll results from other orgs on American attitudes to AI (eg from @TheAIPI). This should give us more confidence in results like:

• Americans want AI to be regulated

• Americans are more concerned about future AI than current misuses

I worry that the 18% is more about the technology than the AI, which is how this is at the level of inequality (although inequality never scores highly on surveys of what people actually care about, that’s another case of vocal people being loud).

You know who is not going to let public opposition or any dangers stop them?

According to his public statements, Donald Trump.

So yes, this plan now goes well beyond spitefully repealing the Executive Order.

Cat Zakrzewski (Washington Post): Former president Donald Trump’s allies are drafting a sweeping AI executive order that would launch a series of “Manhattan Projects” to develop military technology and immediately review “unnecessary and burdensome regulations” — signaling how a potential second Trump administration may pursue AI policies favorable to Silicon Valley investors and companies.

The framework would also create “industry-led” agencies to evaluate AI models and secure systems from foreign adversaries, according to a copy of the document viewed exclusively by The Washington Post. The framework — which includes a section titled “Make America First in AI” — presents a markedly different strategy for the booming sector than that of the Biden administration, which last year issued a sweeping executive order that leverages emergency powers to subject the next generation of AI systems to safety testing.

The counterargument is that Trump has been known to change his mind, and to say things in public he does not mean or does not follow through with. And also it is not obvious that this plan was not, as Senator Young suggests often happens, written by some 22-year-old intern who happens to be the one who has used ChatGPT.

Senator Young: Sometimes these things are developed by 22-year-old interns, and they got the AI portfolio because they knew how to operate the latest version of ChatGPT.

What I’m more interested in is my interaction with certain, former and probably future Trump administration officials, who are really excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence, but recognize that we need some responsible regulatory structure. They acknowledge that some of the things in the Biden executive order were quite wise and need to be put into law to be given some permanence. Other things are not perfect. It’s going to have to be revisited, which is natural in these early stages.

Then in Congress, at least so far, the issue of AI and lawmaking around it, has not grown particularly partisan. In fact, if you look at that document, two conservative Republicans and two liberal Democrats put that together and we were able to come together on a whole range of issues. I think you’re going to see mostly continuity and evolution of policymaking between administrations, but naturally, there will probably be some changes as well.

Could go either way. I hold out hope that Young is right. It would be very like Trump to be telling this highly focused and wealthy interest group what they want to hear, getting their vocal support and funding, and then it proving to mostly be talk. Or to be his vague intention now, but nothing he cares about or attempts to influence.

Also likely is that as the situation changes, and as AI becomes more prominent and more something the public cares about, for Trump to adapt to the changing winds, or for him too to react to actual events. Trump is very good at noticing such things.

Trump also has a way of polarizing things. So this could go quite badly as well. If he does polarize politics and go in as the pro-AI party, I predict a very rough 2028 for Republicans, one way or the other.

We also can consider the views of VP nominee JD Vance. JD Vance is highly against Big Tech, including supporting Lina Khan at FTC exactly because she is trying to destroy the major tech companies. Likely as a result of this, he is strongly for ‘open source.’ Vance is clearly smart given his background, but we have no signs he understands AI or has given it any real thought. The important thing for many is that JD Vance vibes against, attacks and would use the government against Big Tech, while supporting the vibes of ‘Little’ Tech.

To the great surprise of no one paying attention, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have endorsed Trump and plan to donate large amounts to a Trump PAC. They have an extensive podcast explaining this and their ~~portfolio~~ ‘little tech agenda.’

It is not only them. Elon Musk has also unsurprisingly endorsed Trump. Far more tech people than in past cycles are embracing Trump.

Indeed, I did a (hugely biased) poll, and the results show a big shift.

That’s 33% of the greater ‘tech startup’ group backing Trump, versus only 18% of my other followers. Clearly something has changed quite a lot.

Why?

Kelsey Piper and Matthew Zeitlin here discuss part of what may have happened, with Zeitlin referring here to Andreessen and Horowitz in particular.

Matthew Zeitlin: Haven’t listened to the whole thing but one interesting thing they talk about is that one signpost for alienation from the democratic party was when there was criticism of large scale philanthropic giving by tech executives, specifically the chan-zuckerberg initiative.

They describe an old clinton-obama moral/political framework, where business people could get rich, give their money away to philanthropic efforts, and have socially liberal views and they view that as having broken down since 2016 or so.

There’s lots of policy stuff on crypto or antitrust or merger review i’m sure they agree with on trump (haven’t gotten there yet!) but it’s interesting that they foreground the changing moral/social position of wealthy businesspeople in the progressive constellation.

Kelsey Piper: think “there was a deal and it has broken down” is an incredibly powerful and pervasive sentiment in tech, not just among Trump supporters but among committed and sincere liberals too.

What was the deal? Hard to pin down exactly but something like – we will build ambitious things and pay high taxes and donate lots of money and mostly not play politics and you will treat us as valued pillars of our community, make our cities livable, stay mostly out of the way.

The abrupt tilt towards intensely negative coverage of tech felt like a breakdown of the deal. The attacks on tech shuttle buses? Breakdown of the deal. The state of San Francisco? Breakdown of the deal.

Like all narratives this one captures some things and misses others. And I don’t think that putting corrupt right wing nativists in power solves the justified anger here. But there is justified anger here. California politicians have egregiously failed their constituents.

They describe the dynamic Zeitlin mentions about six minutes into the podcast. That describes why you could be a Democrat, but not why you’d choose it over being a Republican. Why be a Democrat back then, aside from Al Gore helping create the internet (yes, really, Marc talks about that)? Because ‘you had to be a Democrat to be a good person’ is mentioned, which I do think was a real and important dynamic in Silicon Valley and many other places at the time and at least until recently.

The complaints about criticism of philanthropy I don’t doubt is genuine, and the thing they are mad at is real and also super dumb. Yet it is pretty rich given how much they and those they fund and support work to portray others as villains for charitable giving or being funded by charitable giving. They’re trying to have that both ways, charitable giving for me but not for thee, not if I disagree with your cause.

I think Andreesen and Horowitz lead with the vibes stuff partly because it is highly aversive to have such vibes coming at you, and also because they are fundamentally vibes people, who see tech and Silicon Valley as ultimately a vibes driven business first and a technology based business second. Their businesses especially are based on pushing the vibes.

This explains a lot of their other perspectives and strategies as well, including their actions regarding SB 1047, where the actual contents of the bill are fine but the vibes have been declared to be off via being loud on Twitter, so they hallucinate or fabricate different bill content.

When it comes to AI what do they want? To not be subject regulations or taxes or safety requirements. To instead get handouts, carveouts and regulatory arbitrage.

Trump offers them this.

Even more than AI, for them, there is crypto. They lead (24 minutes in) with crypto and talk about how important and amazing and remarkable they claim it is, especially for ‘creatives’ and ‘who controls the truth,’ versus how awful are Google and Apple and Meta.

Trump is strongly pro-crypto, whereas Biden is anti-crypto, and a huge portion of a16z’s portfolio and business model is crypto. And they see Biden’s and the SEC’s anti-crypto moves as against the rule of law, because they think the law should permit crypto and should tell them exactly what they must do to be in compliance with the laws in order to do their regulatory arbitrages, whereas the SEC under Biden is of the legal opinion that crypto mostly is not legal and that they are not under any obligation to spell out exactly what the rules are any more than they do so in other cases.

For further thoughts on crypto regulation in practice, see my write-up on Chevron.

Here is a wise man named Vitalik Buterin warning not to ask who is pro-crypto, and instead ask who supports the freedoms and other principles you value, including those that drove you to crypto. Ask what someone is likely to support in the future.

Mark Cuban says that Trump is also considered further pro-crypto because his low taxes and high tariffs will drive inflation higher and weaken the dollar (also I’d add Tump explicitly demands an intentionally weaker dollar) which will be Good for Bitcoin, and who knows how high prices could go.

I am not so cynical that I buy that this type of thinking is an important factor. Yes, a lot of people are voting their financial interests, but mostly not like that.

Mike Solana (quoting someone quoting Cuban): Weird i thought it was just because the democrats want to ban crypto but who knows i guess it could be this.

Horowitz makes it clear in the introduction to their podcast they are focused only on their one issue, ‘the little tech agenda,’ also known as the profitability of their venture firm a16z. I appreciate the candor.

They talk throughout (and at other times) as if (essentially) tech startups are all that matters. I wonder to what extent they believe that.

So Andreessen and Horowitz are for many overdetermined reasons supporting Trump. This is not complicated.

In terms of their AI discussions I will say this: It is in no way new, but the part where they talk about the Executive Order is called ‘Discussion on Executive Order limiting math operations in AI’ which tells you how deeply they are in bad faith on the AI issue. There are no limits in the executive order on anything whatsoever, other then requiring you to announce your actions. Meanwhile they continue to brand frontier AI models as ‘math’ as if that is a meaningful in-context description of training a model with 10^26 FLOPS of compute, or as if both every computer and also the entire universe are not also math in equally meaningful senses.

However, to be fair to Andreessen and Horowitz, the Biden tax proposal on unrealized capital gains is indeed an existential threat to their entire business model along with the entire American economy.

On this point, they are correct. I am pretty furious about it too.

(They somehow manage to go too far and then way too far in their discussion anyway, they cannot help themselves, but ignore that, the reality is quite bad enough.)

Even if you don’t take the proposal literally or seriously as a potential actual law, it is highly illustrative of where Biden’s policy thinking is at, no matter who is actually doing that policy thinking. Other moves along that line of thinking could be quite bad.

If you do take it seriously as a real proposal, I cannot overstate how bad it would be.

Steven Dennis: The biggest complaint about Biden from Marc is his proposal to tax unrealized capital gains of people with >$100M. Says would kill venture capital and tech startups who would have to pay up. An existential threat to their business model.

There isn’t much chance of this tax proposal becoming law anytime soon. But it appeals to progressives like Elizabeth Warren because the wealthy now can completely avoid tax on many billions in unrealized capital gains if they 1) Never sell until they die, when the cap gains are reset to zero; & 2) borrow against their wealth for living expenses, which can be cheaper than paying tax.

Here is Jon Stokes taking it seriously.

Jon Stokes: This, plus the unrealized cap gains tax, which is a literal death sentence for SV. Very hard to underestimate the importance of that insane proposal being taken seriously on what we’re seeing right now from tech re: politics.

I think it’s possible to listen to that episode and, tho they go into it, still not understand that this promised Biden second-term plan is an extinction-level event for the startup and VC scene, & furthermore everyone knows it & is like “hell no.”

I find in normie conversations that the vast majority of people don’t know that this has been seriously proposed, and that it is a radical change to the tax structure that will immediately kill the startup ecosystem & then send state & fed gov’s into a death spiral as the tax base evaporates.

The DEI stuff, and pronouns, and all the other culture war stuff is a sideshow compared to this cap gains issue. I’m sorry you can’t mess with the money like that. The cap gains is so far over the line for everyone in this space… it’s like if they were promising to start WW3.

[Quotes ‘Max Arbitrage’]: everyone is well aware that the republicans will not lose both houses, the presidency, and the supreme court – so the tax on unrealized cap gains is complete bullshit & a red herring…

Jon Stokes: This is a common type of response. My only reaction is some flavor of “lmao”. “These leaders say they want to ruin my industry & confiscate my property, but the odds of them succeeding at such are very low, so ok I will back them” said nobody ever.

I, too, put extremely low odds on this happening, but the point of my thread is that the mere fact that it is being taken seriously is what has done the damage here. I don’t know anyone in tech thinks the odds are high rn, but don’t point a loaded gun at us just for theatrics.

If you see someone running for President proposing a policy that would wipe out your entire industry and also cripple the whole economy (not purely because it would kill venture based tech and startups, although that alone would indeed be terrible, but because it would hit a lot of other places too) – and I want to be 100% clear that this is not anyone imagining things or engaging in hyperbole this time, that is what would happen if this policy where implemented – then yes it is an entirely reasonable reaction to consider that person your enemy.

Also, at [2:30] in their podcast, Ben Horowitz notes that they tried to meet with Biden and he refused, whereas at [1:19:30] or so they reveal Ben hangs out with Trump’s kids and Trump will clearly at least hear them out. I assume I know why Biden refused, and I assume they assume the same answer, but this stuff matters a lot, and the Democrats should be thinking about how that kind of thing plays out.

Those in tech also have many highly legitimate gripes with the terrible government and policies of the city of San Francisco. Those do not much logically relate to the national picture, but it feels as if they should, so there is impact.

How far does this go for the rest of Silicon Valley? Clearly much farther than in the last two cycles. I think this is mostly confined to the same Very Online circles that are loud on Twitter, but I’m not well positioned to tell, also note Rohit’s second statement.

Rohit: The level to which the random journalist tech-hatred drove the whole of silicon valley into trump’s arms shouldn’t be underrated.

In most rooms I am becoming the odd one out not supporting Trump.

For those lacking reading comprehension, which is so so many people!

– this isn’t monocausal

– negative coverage != bad coverage

– please understand what ‘underrated’ means

– calling everyone in tech a fascist is a brilliant example of the problem!

To add

– I’m not Republican, I don’t think that should matter, but FYI

– This isn’t a billionaire-specific issue, it’s more widespread, that’s the point!

– It’s not just taxes. If it was, they’d all have been Republicans the last cycle

Paul Graham: There is something to this. I wouldn’t say it has made Trump supporters of people who weren’t, but it has definitely shifted people a bit to the right. Like the joke that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.

There is another highly understandable reason for all these sudden endorsements.

Everyone (except the 538 model, send help) thinks Trump is (probably) going to win.

Ezra Klein: I’m unconvinced by this @tylercowen post on the vibe shift. Trump is running against an unpopular incumbent who was barely coherent in the debate and who 4 out of 5 Americans doubt has the cognitive fitness to be president. And he’s still only leading by 2 in national points! That the vibes haven’t shifted more reflects how weak and polarizing Trump remains.

That said, to the extent there is a vibe shift, I think it reflects a sense that Biden will lose, which is allowing a lot of Trump curious figures, particularly in tech, to come out in full-throated support of him. The ROI on supporting Trump just got a lot better, and the likely downside a lot smaller.

Kelsey Piper: I think this has been understated in the discourse. If you think Trump’s going to win it’s substantially to your selfish advantage to be on his side, and so the more it looks like Trump wins the more people will try to get in with him.

Indeed. Now that the zeitgeist (what we used to call the vibes) say that Trump is going to win, everyone has more upside, less downside and more social permission to make it official and endorse The Donald, and try to get out in front. Also recent events have provided ample additional justifications for that choice.

I do think there has been a vibe shift, but in addition to having a reasonably different list of things I would cite (with overlap of course) I would say that those vibes mostly had already shifted. What happened in the last few week is that everyone got the social permission to recognize that.

If it had been a real vibe shift in preferences, the polls would have moved a lot recently. They didn’t.

This section is included for completeness. You can (and probably should) skip it.

There are not actual new objections, but it is important (within reason, if they are sufficiently prominent) to not silently filter out those who disagree with you, even when you believe they do not bring new or good arguments.

First off we have Andrew Ng’s letter in opposition to SB 1047. No new arguments. It focuses on the zombie Obvious Nonsense ‘penalty of perjury’ argument claiming fear of prison will paralyze developers, claiming that ‘reasonableness’ is too vague and that if you get it wrong you’d go to jail (no, you won’t, reasonableness is used all over the law and this essentially never happens without obvious bad faith and rarely happens even with obvious bad faith that is caught red handed, we have been over this several times), and is confused about the requirements placed on those who fine tune models and generally who has to care about this law at all.

Then we have, because it was linked at MR, which I believe justifies one more complete response: At Reason Neil Chilson uses some aggressively framed misleading rhetoric about supposed EA ‘authoritarianism,’ then points out that the model bill RAAIA, offered by Center for AI Policy, contains highly restrictive measures, which he calls ‘shocking in its authoritarianism.’

I have never met a regulatory proposal or regime that Reason would not describe as authoritarian. To quote from my extensive coverage of the RAAIA model bill:

I discovered this via Cato’s Will Duffield, whose statement was:

Will Duffield: I know these AI folks are pretty new to policy, but this proposal is an outlandish, unprecedented, and abjectly unconstitutional system of prior restraint.

To which my response was essentially:

I bet he’s from Cato or Reason.

Yep, Cato.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Wolf.

My overall take on RAAIA was ‘a forceful, flawed and thoughtful bill.’

In the context of SB 1047, I’d put it this way:

The RAAIA bill is what it would look like if you took everything people hallucinate is in SB 1047 but is not in SB 1047, and attempted to implement all of it in thoughtful fashion, because you believe it is justified by the catastrophic and existential risks from AI. RAAIA absolutely is a prior restraint bill, and a ‘get all the permits in advance’ bill, and ‘the regulators decide what is acceptable’ bill.

This is not some extraordinary approach to regulation. It is a rather standard thing our government often does. I believe it does too much of it too often, in ways that have more costs than benefits. I think zoning is mostly bad, and NEPA is mostly bad, and occupational licensing is mostly bad, and so on. I would do dramatically less of those. But are they authoritarian or extreme? If so then our entire government is such.

It is very good to lay out what such a regime and its details would look like for AI. The RAAIA proposal includes highly thoughtful details that would make sense if the risks justified such intervention, and offer a basis on which to iterate and improve. The alternative to having good available details, if suddenly there is a decision to Do Something, is to implement much worse details, that will cost more and accomplish less. Government indeed often does exactly that on very large scales, exactly because no one thought about implementation in advance.

If we do ever move forward with such a framework, it will be vital that we get the details right. Most important is that we set the proper ‘prices,’ meaning thresholds for various levels of risk. I often warn against setting those thresholds too low, especially below GPT-4 levels.

There are some unusual provisions in RAAIA in particular that are cited as evidence of ‘anti-democratic’ or authoritarian or dictatorial intent. I explain and address the logic there in my older post.

Then he transitions to SB 1047. Remember that thing where I point out that reactions to SB 1047 seem to not have anything to do with the contents of SB 1047?

Yep.

While the language in California’s S.B. 1047 is milder, CAIS and state Rep. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) have written a state bill that could have a similarly authoritarian effect.

‘The language is milder’ but ‘a similar authoritarian effect’? You don’t care what the bill says at all, do you? This gives the game entirely away. This is the perspective that opposes drivers licenses, that views all regulations as equally authoritarian and illegitimate.

The post then goes on to repeatedly mischaracterize and hallucinate about SB 1047, making claims that are flat out false, and calling the use of ordinary legal language such as ‘reasonable,’ ‘good faith’ or ‘material,’ out as ‘weasel words.’ This includes the hallucination that ‘doomers’ will somehow have control over decisions made, and the repeated claims that SB 1047 requires ‘proof’ that things will ‘never’ go catastrophically wrong, rather than what it actually asks for, which is reasonable assurance against such outcomes. Which is a common legal term that is absolutely used in places where things go wrong every so often.

Reason Magazine has now done this several times, so in the future if it happens again I will simply say ‘Reason Magazine says Reason Magazine things’ and link back here. It saddens me that we cannot have watchdogs that can better differentiate and be more precise and accurate in their analysis.

Similarly, if Marginal Revolution offers another such link of similar quality on this topic, I will not longer feel the need to respond beyond a one sentence summary.

Rob Wiblin points out the missing step.

Rob Wiblin: Obviously if you think there’s a 10%+ risk of literally everyone dying, the possibility of some unintended secondary effects won’t be enough to get you to give up on the idea of regulating AI.

Yet I’ve not heard anyone say:

“I think rogue AI is very unlikely. But you think it’s likely. And if I were in your shoes obviously I’d keep doggedly pushing to do something about that.

So here’s what I suggest: [policy idea X].

X should reduce misalignment risk a lot by your lights. And I don’t hate it because it’s as uninvasive as is practical under the circumstances.

X will go a long way towards satisfying the anxious, and so prevent worse regulation, while slowing down the progress I want very little. What do you think?”

The failure to point to such constructive alternatives or propose win-win compromises makes it harder to take some critics seriously.

The worries raised read less as sincere efforts to improve proposals, and more like politicised efforts to shoot down any effort to address the fears of huge numbers of ordinary voters as well as domain experts.

Of course this applies equally in the opposite direction: those who think rogue AI is plausible should propose things that they like a lot which other people dislike as little as possible.

And in my mind legislating ‘responsible scaling policies / preparedness frameworks’ which only impose limits once models have been shown to have clearly dangerous capabilities, and which match the limits to that specific new capability, is exactly what that is.

Some people who are worried put quite a lot of work and optimization pressure into creating well-crafted, minimally invasive and minimally disruptive policies, such as SB 1047, and to respond to detailed criticism to improve them.

Others, like the authors of RAAIA, still do their best to be minimally disruptive and minimally invasive, but are willing to be far more disruptive and invasive. They focus on asking what would get the job done, given they think the job is exceedingly demanding and difficult.

The response we see from the vocal unworried is consistently almost identical. My model is that:

Many such folks are hardcore libertarians, at least on technology issues, so they are loathe to suggest anything, especially things that would improve such bills, and instead oppose all action on principle.
When vocal unworried people believe the motivation behind a rule was ultimately concern over existential risk, they seem to often lose their minds. This drives them into a frenzy. This frenzy is based on hating the motivation, and has nothing to do with the proposal details. So they don’t propose better details.
There is a deliberate strategy to delegitimize such concerns and proposals, and to give a false impression of what they would do, via being as loud and vocal and hysterical as possible, with as extreme claims as possible, including deliberate misrepresentation of bill contents or what they would mean. Those doing this care entirely about impressions and vibes, and not other things.
A lot of this is a purely selfish business strategy by a16z and their allies.

Also noted for competeness, Pirate Wires has an ‘explainer,’ which is gated, link goes to Twitter announcement and summary. The Twitter version points out that it applies to developers outside California if they do business in California (so why would anyone need or want to leave California, then, exactly?) and then repeats standard hyperbolically framed misinformation on the requirement to provide reasonable assurance of not posing catastrophic risks, and claiming absurdly that ‘Many of the bill’s requirements are so vague that not even the leading AI scientists would agree about how to meet them.’ Anyone who claims SB 1047 is a vague law should have to read any other laws, and then have to read random passages from the EU AI Act, and then see psychiatrists to make sure they haven’t gone insane from having to read the EU AI Act, I am sorry about making you do that.

They do correctly point out that Newsom might veto the bill. I do not understand why they would not simply override that veto, since the bill is passing on overwhelming margins, but I have been told that if he does veto then an override is unlikely.

I presume the full ‘explainer’ is nothing of the sort, rather advocacy of the type offered by others determined to hallucinate or fabricate and then criticize a different bill.

You can skip this one as well.

Here’s another clear example of asking questions to which everyone knows the answer.

Dean Ball: Could @DanHendrycks and his colleagues at Gray Swan have “reasonably foreseen” this, as SB 1047 demands? [For Cyget-8B]

Pliny jailbreaks almost every new model within a day or two of release. So it’s “reasonably foreseeable” that with sufficient work essentially any model is breakable.

No, because Cyget-8B is not a covered model. Llama-8B was not trained using $100 million or 10^26 FLOPS in compute, nor was Cyget-8B, and it is not close.

(Also of course this is irrelevant here because if it were covered then I would be happy to give reasonable assurance right here right now under penalty of perjury that Cygnet-8B fully jailbroken remains not catastrophically dangerous as per SB 1047.)

Even if this was instead the future Cyget-1T based off Llama-1T? Nope, still not Gray Swan’s responsibility, because it would be a derivative of Llama-1T.

But let’s suppose either they used enough additional compute to be covered, or they trained it from scratch, so that it is covered.

What about then? Would this be ‘reasonably foreseeable’?

Yes. OF COURSE!

That is the definition of ‘foreseeable,’ reasonably or otherwise.

It was not only Pliny. Michael Sklar reports they also broke Cygnet on their first try.

If it always happens two days later, then you can and should reasonably foresee it.

If you know damn well that your model will get jailbroken within two days, then to release your model is to also release the jailbroken version of that model.

Thus, what you need to reasonably assure will not cause a catastrophe.

Because that is exactly what you are putting out into the world, and what we are worried will cause a catastrophe.

What are you suggesting? That you should be allowed to whine and say ‘noooo fair, you jailbroke my model, I specifically said no jailbreaking, that doesn’t count?’

You think that this is some gotcha or unreasonable burden?

That is Obvious Nonsense.

Let us go over how the physical world works here, once more with feeling.

If you release an Open Weights model, you release every easily doable fine tune.

If you release a Closed Weights or Open Weights model, you release the version that exists after the jailbreak that will inevitably happen.

That is true, at the bare minimum, until such time as you find a way to prevent jailbreaks you think works, then you hire Priny the Prompter to try to jailbreak your model for a week, and they report back that they failed. Priny has confirmed their availability, and Michael Sklar can also be hired.

If it would not be safe to release those things then don’t fing release you model.

Consider the mattress sale example. If your mattress price negotiator will sell Pliny a mattress for $0.01, then you have a few choices.

Find a way to stop that from happening.
Don’t honor the ‘sale,’ or otherwise ‘defend against’ the result sufficiently.
Show that those who know how to do this won’t do enough damage at scale.
Not use the negotiation bot.

Your CEO is (hopefully) going to insist on #4 if you cannot make a good case for one of the other proposals.

What is so hard about this? Why would you think any of this would be OK?

Richard Ngo of OpenAI offers thoughts on what to do about this, in light of the many other benefits. His preferred world is that open weights models proceed, but a year or two behind closed models, to protect against issues of offense-defense balance, out of control replication or otherwise going rogue, WMDs and national security. He thinks this will continue to be true naturally and points to a proposal by Sam Marks for a ‘disclosure period’ which is essentially a waiting period for frontier open weights models, where others get time to prepare defenses before they are fully released.

His prediction is that the outcome will depend on which view wins in the National Security community. Which way will they go? Almost all reactions are on the table. If I was NatSec I would not want to hand frontier models directly to our enemies, even if I did not take the other threats seriously, but they do not think like I do.

Former OpenAI superalignment team member and advocate for the right to warn William Saunders debriefs. OpenAI is compared to building the Titanic. Existential risk is not used as justification for the concerns. It is true that the concerns at this point would be important even without any existential risk in the room, but it seems odd enough that I worry that even those who left over safety concerns may often not understand the most important safety concerns.

Here is San Francisco Fed head Mary Daly saying AI must be augmenting rather than replacing workers, explaining that ‘no technology in the history of all technologies has ever reduced employment.’ Out of context this sounds like the standard economic burying of one’s head in the sand, but notice the present and past tenses, with which she is careful. If you listen to the full context, she is saying there is a tech and overall labor shortage, so for now this is augmenting tasks. She is not actually using the full dismissive economic prior to avoid thinking about mechanics.

It is insane to hear the interviewer talk about productivity gain estimates (at 6: 15) as a range from 1% to 7%. No, I know of some rather higher estimates.

I discuss the a16z podcast in The Other Quest Regarding Regulations.

How did I miss this one until right now (when YouTube suggested it!) and no one told me, Joe Rogan interviewed Sam Altman two weeks ago. I don’t have time to listen to it before publishing but I will report back.

One thing I noticed early is Joe mentioning [9:30] that he suggested having an AI government ‘without bias’ and ‘fully rational’ making the decisions. The push to give up control will come early. Joe admits he is not ‘comfortable’ with this, but he’s not comfortable with current decisions either, that are largely based on money and central interests and super corrupt and broken. So, it?

Maybe it’s you, indeed: Tyler Cowen calls those who want lower pharmaceutical prices ‘supervillains.’ So what should we call someone, say Tyler Cowen, who wants to accelerate construction of AI systems that might kill everyone, and opposes any and all regulatory attempts to ensure we do not all die, and is willing to link to arguments against such attempts even when they are clearly not accurate?

Following up on last week, Neel Nanda reports that they were once subject to a concealed non-disparagement clause, but asked to be let out, and now they aren’t.

There are key ways in which Anthropic behaved differently than OpenAI.

Anthropic offered consideration, whereas OpenAI made demands and threats.
Anthropic paid for an independent lawyer to advocate on Nanda’s behalf, whereas OpenAI actively tried to prevent departing employees from retaining a lawyer.
Anthropic made explicit exceptions for reporting regulatory issues and law enforcement, whereas OpenAI… well, see the next section.

Here are the exact clauses:

Neel Nanda: The non-disparagement clause:

Without prejudice to clause 6.3 [referring to my farewell letter to Anthropic staff, which I don’t think was disparaging or untrue, but to be safe], each party agrees that it will not make or publish or cause to be made or published any disparaging or untrue remark about the other party or, as the case may be, its directors, officers or employees. However, nothing in this clause or agreement will prevent any party to this agreement from (i) making a protected disclosure pursuant to Part IVA of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and/or (ii) reporting a criminal offence to any law enforcement agency and/or a regulatory breach to a regulatory authority and/or participating in any investigation or proceedings in either respect.

The non-disclosure clause:

Without prejudice to clause 6.3 [referring to my farewell letter to Anthropic staff] and 7 [about what kind of references Anthropic could provide for me], both Parties agree to keep the terms and existence of this agreement and the circumstances leading up to the termination of the Consultant’s engagement and the completion of this agreement confidential save as [a bunch of legal boilerplate, and two bounded exceptions I asked for but would rather not publicly share. I don’t think these change anything, but feel free to DM if you want to know].

You know that OpenAI situation with the NDAs and nondisparagement agreements?

It’s worse.

Pranshu Verma, Cat Zakrzewski and Nitasha Tiku (WaPo): OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

We have a copy of their seven page letter.

OpenAI made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, the letter said. These agreements also required OpenAI staff to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal authorities. OpenAI did not create exemptions in its employee nondisparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC.

These overly broad agreements violated long-standing federal laws and regulations meant to protect whistleblowers who wish to reveal damning information about their company anonymously and without fear of retaliation, the letter said.

…

The official complaints referred to in the letter were submitted to the SEC in June. Stephen Kohn, a lawyer representing the OpenAI whistleblowers, said the SEC has responded to the complaint.

It could not be determined whether the SEC has launched an investigation. The agency declined to comment.

If the whistleblowers are telling the truth?

We are not in a gray legal area. This is no longer a question of ‘the SEC goes around fining firms whose confidentiality clauses fail to explicitly exempt statements to the SEC,’ which is totally a thing the SEC does, Matt Levine describes the trade as getting your employment contract, circling the confidentiality clause in red with the annotation “$” and sending it in as a whistleblower complaint. And yes, you get fined for that, but it’s more than a little ticky-tacky.

This is different. This is explicitly saying no to whistleblowing. That is not legal.

Also, what the actual ?

It is one thing to not want additional whistleblower protections. Or to push back against a request to be allowed to fully break confidentiality when claiming safety is at issue.

But to put in a written legal document, that if a whistleblower does get compensation because OpenAI is fined, that they have to give up that compensation? To require written permission from OpenAI before being allowed to share information on OpenAI’s violations with federal authorities?

I mean, who has the sheer audacity to actually write that down?

From the complaint:

Among the violations documented by the Whistleblower(s) are:

• Non-disparagement clauses that failed to exempt disclosures of securities violations to the SEC;

• Requiring prior consent from the company to disclose confidential information to federal authorities;

• Confidentiality requirements with respect to agreements, that themselves contain securities violations;

• Requiring employees to waive compensation that was intended by Congress to incentivize reporting and provide financial relief to whistleblowers

They call upon forcing OpenAI to produce all its employment agreements, severance agreements, investor agreements and any other contract with an NDA, and that they notify all current and past employees that they actually do have the right to whistleblow. To ask OpenAI to cure the ‘Chilling effect.’

Plus fines, of course. So many fines.

Then there was the first test of OpenAI’s safety commitments to the White House. Since then OpenAI has released one new product, GPT-4o. I was never worried about GPT-4o as an actual safety risk, because it was not substantially smarter than GPT-4. That does not mean you get to skip the safety checks. The way you know it is not smarter or more dangerous is you run the safety checks.

So here is the Washington Post again.

Pranshu Verma, Nitasha Tiku and Cat Zakrzewski (WaPo): Last summer, artificial intelligence powerhouse OpenAI promised the White House it would rigorously safety-test new versions of its groundbreaking technology to make sure the AI wouldn’t inflict damage — like teaching users to build bioweapons or helping hackers develop new kinds of cyberattacks.

But this spring, some members of OpenAI’s safety team felt pressured to speed through a new testing protocol, designed to prevent the technology from causing catastrophic harm, to meet a May launch date set by OpenAI’s leaders, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Even before testing began on the model, GPT-4 Omni, OpenAI invited employees to celebrate the product, which would power ChatGPT, with a party at one of the company’s San Francisco offices. “They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch,” one of the three people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive company information. “We basically failed at the process.”

…

Testers compressed the evaluations into a single week, despite complaints from employees.

Though they expected the technology to pass the tests, many employees were dismayed to see OpenAI treat its vaunted new preparedness protocol as an afterthought.

They tested GPT-4 for months to ensure it was not dangerous.

They tested GPT-4o for… a week.

A representative of OpenAI’s preparedness team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive company information, said the evaluations took place during a single week, which was sufficient to complete the tests, but acknowledged that the timing had been “squeezed.”

We “are rethinking our whole way of doing it,” the representative said. “This [was] just not the best way to do it.”

…

“I definitely don’t think we skirted on [the tests],” the representative said. But the process was intense, he acknowledged. “After that, we said, ‘Let’s not do it again.’”

Part of this was a streamlined process.

A few weeks prior to the launch date, the team began doing “dry runs,” planning to have “all systems go the moment we have the model,” the representative said.

It is good to have all your ducks in a row in advance and yes this should speed things up somewhat. But where are the rest of the ducks?

Zack Stein-Perlman highlights the particular things they did not do in addition to the rushed testing. They did not publish the scorecard, or even say which categories GPT-4o scored medium versus low in risk. They did not publish the evals.

If you are claiming that you can test a new frontier model’s safety sufficiently in one week? I do not believe you. Period. In a week, you can do superficial checks, and you can do automated checks. That is it.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to be confused about the nature of OpenAI.

The standard plans for how to align or train advanced AI models all involve various sorts of iteration. Humans in the loop are expensive, and eventually they won’t be able to follow what is going on, so instead rely on GPT-N to evaluate and train GPT-N or GPT-(N+1).

I have repeatedly said that I do not expect this to work, and for it to break down spectacularly and catastrophically when most needed. If you iterate on finding the best optimization for exactly the problem described, you are going to describe increasingly different problems from the one you care about solving.

If you subject yourself to an iterated case of Goodhart’s Law you are going to deserve exactly what you get.

Now we have a new paper that shows this happening via spontaneous reward hacking.

Jane Pan: Do LLMs exploit imperfect proxies of human preference in context? Yes!

In fact, they do it so severely that iterative refinement can make outputs worse when judged by actual humans. In other words, reward hacking can occur even without gradient updates!

Using expert human annotators on an essay editing task, we show that iterative self-refinement leads to in-context reward hacking—divergence between the LLM evaluator and ground-truth human judgment.

With self-evaluation and multi-agent systems becoming more prominent in LLM applications, in-context reward hacking may lead to a subtle degradation of output quality that cannot be effectively detected by LLM evaluators.

Iterative refinement allows users to leverage LLMs’ ability to approximate human preferences and improve from natural language feedback. It leads to improved generation quality without additional human intervention.

Our experiment is based on an essay editing task with human-written college admissions essays. The LLM judge provides feedback on the essays, and the LLM author in turn improves the essay based on the feedback.

We recruit a team of expert human annotators to judge each essay following a rubric and provide an overall score. The GPT-3.5 judge in the refinement loop (“Online Judge”) rates its own essays increasingly higher while ratings from human experts decrease over iterations. The offline judge—GPT-3.5 with the same instruction but only seeing the latest iteration of essays—gives less inflated scores.

We observe two main factors that affect the severity of in-context reward hacking.

Model size: while we see score inflation with GPT-4, the gap between the LLM and human scores does not increase with more iterations.

Context sharing: providing the two LLMs with the same dialogue history can cause the judge and author to converge more strongly on an overly optimistic assessment of output quality, thus increasing reward hacking severity.

We follow the canonical definition of reward hacking, observing a divergence between the ground-truth reward (human expert judgment) and its proxy (an LLM judge following the same scoring criteria as the humans).

The good news is that this was mainly done on GPT-3.5 (IN MICE) and when they tested on GPT-4 they got smaller distortions. The optimistic

The final superalignment paper is about Prover–Verifier Games.

OpenAI: We found that when we optimize the problem-solving process of strong models solely for getting the correct answer, the resulting solutions can become harder to understand. In fact, when we asked human evaluators with limited time to assess these highly optimized solutions, they made nearly twice as many errors compared to when they evaluated less optimized solutions. This finding highlights the importance of not just correctness, but also clarity and ease of verification in AI-generated text.

By training advanced language models to create text that weaker models can easily verify, we found that humans could also evaluate these texts more effectively – a process we call improving legibility.

This is where prover-verifier games come into play. These games involve two players: a “prover” that generates a solution and a “verifier” that checks it for accuracy.

…

To incentivize a strong model, the prover, to produce text that is legible to humans, we use a training scheme where we require the strong model to produce solutions that a much weaker model, the verifier, can easily verify. In particular, we use large and small models from the GPT-4 family with ~3 orders of magnitude difference in pretraining compute, that have undergone a small amount of supervised training on human-written math derivations, but no extensive post-training.

First, we generate multiple solutions to math problems from the prover model, where some of these solutions are incorrect due to naturally occurring mistakes from the prover model. We then alternate for multiple rounds between two phases:

Verifier Training. We train the weak verifier model to predict the correctness of solutions generated by the prover.

Prover Training. We instruct the strong prover model to play either a “helpful” or a “sneaky” role.

In the helpful role, we reward correct solutions that score highly according to the verifier.

In the sneaky role, we instead reward incorrect solutions that score highly according to the verifier.

We find that initially, the sneaky prover is readily able to produce incorrect solutions that convince the verifier. However, since we add these incorrect solutions to the next phase of verifier training, the same exploit is no longer convincing in the next round, and the prover is forced to explore different strategies in every round. The training ends once the sneaky prover can no longer produce incorrect solutions that convince the verifier.

That’s how OpenAI describes it. Here’s Jan Leike, who is an author, focusing on a the misalignment aspect.

Another Superalignment paper from my time at OpenAI:

We train large models to write solutions such that smaller models can better check them. This makes them easier to check for humans, too.

We use a multi-agent training setup where an honest prover and a sneaky prover write solutions checked by a small model.

The honest prover wants to convince the small model of a correct solution, while the sneaky prover tries to fool it with a flawed solution.

Our training loss is not very conceptually clean, but it works pretty well.

Check out the solutions of the honest prover early and late in training; they get more detailed and reason more carefully.

Compare this with the solutions of the sneaky prover early and late in training; the flaws become more subtle.

Surprisingly, this legibility transfers: Humans get faster and more accurate when checking the solutions with more rounds of training.

(These are pretty easy grade school math problems, so humans had a 45 second time limit.)

In contrast, regular reinforcement learning on correctness makes the solutions less legible: humans get slower and less accurate when checking the solutions.

Techniques like this seem promising for training superhuman models to explain their actions in a way that humans can better understand (and get less fooled by). I’d be excited to see this method tried on harder tasks and with stronger models.

However, writing solutions in a way that makes them more legible is a noticeable burden on the large model, and causes it to perform worse, an effect that we call legibility tax. Reducing this tax is an important priority for future work

Other important caveats:

This paper is on grade school math problems, which are pretty easy.

This only works if the verifier is strictly smaller than the prover, but not too small.

Grace: We’re officially dumbing down AI outputs to make them understandable to humans.

At core it seems this is how they stopped being fooled by the ‘sneaky’ AI:

Sneaky AI fools you. Collect example of being fooled.
The output that fooled you gets added to your training data.
You learn to avoid that. Profit.
Repeat until the sneaky AI’s sneaky ideas all no longer work.

The problem is that step 2 is “????????’“

Or as OpenAI puts it, ‘this requires ground truth labels.’

Yes, you can use this technique to teach the AI to differentiate between good outputs and bad outputs… if and only if you already have the ability to know and label which outputs are good and which ones are bad.

So I don’t see how you can use this to move up the chain.

If you have a new smarter AI, you can reward it based on whether a dumber AI, or a dumber human, is confident the answers are correct. And yes, this will teach the smarter AI to make its answers legible, but it will also teach it to present them in convincing ways, whatever those might be, including deceptive or ‘sneaky’ ones.

You are teaching it to fool you. This seems actively doomed in the cases where you need it most. No, this won’t teach the advanced AI to describe things in ways that are unlikely to fool you. Quite the opposite. It will learn not to try and fool you in cases where you would detect it, and learn to fool you when it can do so successfully.

How do you think that ends?

Javier Rando reports that fine tuning allows extraction of 6x more training data from GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, including 17%+ of memorized text.

Javier Rando: We finetune GPT-3.5 using the public OpenAI API. This costs under $3 and is accessible to any user! We prompt the resulting model with 1,000 5-token strings and find that up to 17% of the generated text was memorized. This is a 5.9x increase over our divergence attack!

Unlike the divergence attack, finetuning enables targeted data exfiltration since the attacker has control over the beginning of the text. We show that the resulting models can reconstruct toxic and copyrighted documents!

We evaluated the ability to reconstruct NYT articles. Finetuned GPT-4 can regurgitate over 60% of the articles in the famous lawsuit against OpenAI. For randomly chosen articles, we find that GPT-4 can regurgitate at least 50 tokens in at least 5% of cases.

The question is not whether alignment work can be undone. It you have open model weights it can and will all quickly be undone. The question is if the weights are closed and you can only do permitted fine tuning, what it takes in practice to pull this off. Here, we see that modification to extract training data is essentially free.

Here’s another simple solution that ends in a highly obvious place (paper)

Colin Fraser: This is what I tell my therapist my parents did to me

Youliang Yuan: We discover a refusal position bias during standard safety tuning, which leads to a refusal decision before generating a response. This bias results in LLMs being unable to reject content in the middle of a sentence.

Our solution is simple: maximizing the probability of [Sorry] tokens at every position during response generation. This enables the model to learn the ability to transition from potential harm to safety refusal throughout the sequence.

We evaluate LLaMA-3-70B, LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct, and Mistral-MoE-8x7B. Our model can effectively make (unsafe → safe) transitions when needed, significantly reducing success rates on Do-Not-Answer and HarmBench, while keeping helpfulness on GSM8K, MMLU, and AlpacaEval.

Whatever you think of Scott Adams, he knows not to publish dangerous AI research. Here is the original source. After saying ‘you have no idea what is coming’ he went back to using AI only for occasional partisan political jokes and posting 50 times a day in support of Trump.

Why build something that might kill everyone? Why do anything big?

For the glory, Roon suggests.

Roon: Achilles’ single minded madness to have his name remembered seems to be completely underused as an explanation for modern elites’ behavior.

It’s always this dry analysis about status and economics and whatever when everyone knows these aren’t the main acts.

Even when discussing technological acceleration the stated reasons are economic to make it more palatable — reduce suffering, increase wealth, etc — when the real drive is the glory and immortality of mankind and especially of the people building the machine age.

It doesn’t make any sense to me to wonder ‘what’s in it for sama … he owns no equity’ and yet this is a very common question anywhere outside of san francisco do you really think there’s a monetary value that compares against the glory of delivering ASI to mankind.

This is definitely not an ‘everybody knows.’

Roon and I, and I am guessing most of you reading this, can appreciate the glory. We can understand the value of greatness, and indeed the value of the act of striving for greatness. Very much so.

I worry and expect that most people no longer appreciate that, or appreciate it vastly less. Certainly this is no longer an ‘everybody knows’ situation. I do not see this as a good change, even if the glory is purely personal.

The catch, of course, is that there is no glory, even for Achilles, if there is no one around to remember you and your deeds. That does at least some work, but as long as there’s a way to tell yourself things might work out, it is not enough to cause reasonable decisions. If you think Sam Altman wants glory the way Achilles or Julius Caesar wanted glory?

Sic transit, gloria mundi.

The saga of ‘Terminal of Truths’ continues, for now its outputs are filtered by Andy Ayrey.

The art of gymnastics.

AI #73: Openly Evil AI Read More »

Meta tells court it won’t sue over Facebook feed-killing tool—yet

data protection, facebook, First Amendment, Meta, Online Privacy, Policy, Section 230, unfollow everything, user privacy / Mike M. / July 17, 2024

This week, Meta asked a US district court in California to toss a lawsuit filed by a professor, Ethan Zuckerman, who fears that Meta will sue him if he releases a tool that would give Facebook users an automated way to easily remove all content from their feeds.

Zuckerman has alleged that the imminent threat of a lawsuit from Meta has prevented him from releasing Unfollow Everything 2.0, suggesting that a cease-and-desist letter sent to the creator of the original Unfollow Everything substantiates his fears.

He’s hoping the court will find that either releasing his tool would not breach Facebook’s terms of use—which prevent “accessing or collecting data from Facebook ‘using automated means'”—or that those terms conflict with public policy. Among laws that Facebook’s terms allegedly conflict with are the First Amendment, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), as well as California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) and state privacy laws.

But Meta claimed in its motion to dismiss that Zuckerman’s suit is too premature, mostly because the tool has not yet been built and Meta has not had a chance to review the “non-existent tool” to determine how Unfollow Everything 2.0 might impact its platform or its users.

“Besides bald assertions about how Plaintiff intends Unfollow Everything 2.0 to work and what he plans to do with it, there are no concrete facts that would enable this Court to adjudicate potential legal claims regarding this tool—which, at present, does not even operate in the real world,” Meta argued.

Meta wants all of Zuckerman’s claims to be dismissed, arguing that “adjudicating Plaintiff’s claims would require needless rulings on hypothetical applications of California law, would likely result in duplicative litigation, and would encourage forum shopping.”

At the heart of Meta’s defense is a claim that there’s no telling yet if Zuckerman will ever be able to release the tool, although Zuckerman said he was prepared to finish the build within six weeks of a court win. Last May, Zuckerman told Ars that because Facebook’s functionality could change while the lawsuit is settled, it’s better to wait to finish building the tool because Facebook’s design is always changing.

Meta claimed that Zuckerman can’t confirm if Unfollow Everything 2.0 would work as described in his suit precisely because his findings are based on Facebook’s current interface, and the “process for unfollowing has changed over time and will likely continue to change.”

Further, Meta argued that the original Unfollow Everything performed in a different way—by logging in on behalf of users and automatically unfollowing everything, rather than performing the automated unfollowing when the users themselves log in. Because of that, Meta argued that the new tool may not prompt the same response from Meta.

A senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute who helped draft Zuckerman’s complaint, Ramya Krishnan, told Ars that the two tools operate nearly identically, however.

“Professor Zuckerman’s tool and the original Unfollow Everything work in essentially the same way,” Krishnan told Ars. “They automatically unfollow all of a user’s friends, groups, and pages after the user installs the tool and logs in to Facebook using their web browser.”

Ultimately, Meta claimed that there’s no telling if Meta would even sue over the tool’s automated access to user data, dismissing Zuckerman’s fears as unsubstantiated.

Only when the tool is out in the wild and Facebook is able to determine “actual, concrete facts about how it works in practice” that “may prove problematic” will Meta know if a legal response is needed, Meta claimed. Without reviewing the technical specs, Meta argued, Meta has no way to assess the damages or know if it would sue over a breach of contract, as alleged, or perhaps over other claims not alleged, such as trademark infringement.

Meta tells court it won’t sue over Facebook feed-killing tool—yet Read More »

Elon Musk says SpaceX and X will relocate their headquarters to Texas

California, elon musk, Gavin Newsom, Science, Space, spacex, texas, X / Mike M. / July 17, 2024

Home base at Starbase —

The billionaire blamed a California gender identity law for moving SpaceX and X headquarters.

Stephen Clark – Jul 17, 2024 4: 03 pm UTC

Enlarge / A pedestrian walks past a flown Falcon 9 booster at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Tuesday, the same day Elon Musk said he will relocate the headquarters to Texas.

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he will move the headquarters of SpaceX and his social media company X from California to Texas in response to a new gender identity law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Musk’s announcement, made via a post on X, follows his decision in 2021 to move the headquarters of the electric car company Tesla from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns in the Bay Area the year before. Now, two of Musk’s other major holdings are making symbolic moves out of California: SpaceX to the company’s Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, and X to Austin.

The new gender identity law, signed by Governor Newsom, a Democrat, on Monday, bars school districts in California from requiring teachers to disclose a change in a student’s gender identification or sexual orientation to their parents without the child’s permission. Musk wrote on X that the law was the “final straw” prompting the relocation to Texas, where the billionaire executive and his companies could take advantage of lower taxes and light-touch regulations.

Earlier this year, SpaceX transferred its incorporation from Delaware to Texas after a Delaware judge invalidated his pay package at Tesla.

“Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote Tuesday on X.

The first-in-the-nation law in California is a flashpoint in the struggle between conservative school boards concerned about parental rights and proponents for the privacy rights of LGBTQ people.

“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” wrote Musk, who on Saturday endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election.

In a statement, Newsom’s office said the law “does not allow a student’s name or gender identity to be changed on an official school record without parental consent” and “does not take away or undermine parents’ rights.”

What does this mean for SpaceX?

Musk’s comments on X didn’t mention details about the implications of his companies’ moves to Texas. However, while Tesla’s corporate headquarters relocated to Texas in 2021, the company still produces cars in California and announced a new engineering hub in Palo Alto last year. The situation with SpaceX is likely to be similar.

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he renamed it X, rewrote the network’s policies on content moderation, and laid off most of the company’s staff, reducing its workforce to around 1,500 employees. With vast manufacturing capacities, SpaceX currently has more than 13,000 employees, so a relocation for Musk’s space company would affect more people and potentially be more disruptive than one at X.

SpaceX’s current headquarters in Hawthorne, California, serves as a factory, engineering design center, and mission control for the company’s rockets and spacecraft. Relocating these facilities wouldn’t be easy, but SpaceX may not need to.

Elon Musk says SpaceX and X will relocate their headquarters to Texas Read More »

Housing Roundup #9: Restricting Supply

Housing / Mike M. / July 17, 2024

I’d split the latest housing roundup into local versus global questions. I was planning on waiting a bit between them.

Then Joe Biden decided to propose a version of the worst possible thing.

So I guess here we are.

What is the organizing principle of Bidenomics?

This was the old counterproductive Biden proposal:

Unusual Whales: Biden to propose $5,000 credit for first-time home buyers, per WaPo.

The Rich: House prices about to go up $5,000 everywhere.

Under current conditions this is almost a pure regressive tax, a transfer from those too poor to own a home to those who can afford to buy one, or who previously owned one and no longer do.

If there were no restrictions on the supply of housing, such that the price of a house equalled the cost of construction plus the underlying price of land, then the subsidy would work, but also you would not need it.

Yes, this implies that many good policy interventions are available.

Biden then literally doubled down on this proposal, which Tyler Cowen correctly labeled ‘from the era of insane economic policy’: Joe Biden proposes to pay new homeowners $9600 of taxpayer money at $400/month for two years. Why are we transferring money from existing homeowners and those who cannot afford to home to this particular middle group?

To be fair to Joe Biden here, and I initially made this mistake as well, no prices will not rise by almost $9600 per house allowing existing homeowners to capture all the loot in an accounting sense. Only about half of home buyers are first time purchasers, and by buying they are using up a valuable one-time resource. So my guess would be this only increases home values by about $5000.

Also note that if all home values go up by $5000, that does not mean that homeowners are that much wealthier unless they own more house than they need. If you live in one house and own one house, you are closer to economically flat housing than to being long one house. You have to live somewhere.

I also note that Biden’s proposal of $400/month for two years means that the first time homebuyer likely cannot use that $9600 as part of their down payment on the house. So the one actual plausible thing this might have done, to allow first time buyers to assemble their down payment, doesn’t even work. Madness.

Here is the best counterargument I have seen.

Zack Kanter: I’m amazed at the outcry in response to this. “Subsidizing demand will just drive up housing prices!” Anyone smart enough to understand the fundamental irrationality here should be smart enough to know that the goal isn’t to drive down housing prices, but rather to buy votes.

GFodor: At this point it is so ridiculously corrupt and stupid I would rather we just be transparent and set up online auctions for my vote to be bid on.

He is right, of course. I am aware that this is centrally a fully cynical bribery scheme to buy votes, with at most a minor amount of being so foolish as to think this might accomplish anything else.

But that’s not all! It can get so much worse.

Daryl Fairweather: From Biden’s just released housing plan: This “lock-in” effect makes homeowners more reluctant to sell and give up that low [mortgage] rate, even in circumstances where their current homes no longer fit their household needs.

The President is calling on Congress to provide a one-year tax credit of up to $10,000 to middle-class families who sell their starter home, defined as homes below the area median home price in the county, to another owner-occupant.

This is mostly a giveaway to banks. Families are staying in their homes because banks issued what for the banks are highly unprofitable mortgages. So we are going to bribe families to prepay horribly unprofitable mortgages.

Also note that if there is no such mortgage we are literally handing people checks exactly because they own their home, in exchange for paying the costs of moving.

Also we reduced ‘mortgage insurance premiums’ by $800, which sounds like another transfer from people without homes to people with homes, and a complete disregard for how insurance is supposed to work.

Why does Biden keep trying to write public checks to richer than average Americans, ultimately funded by poorer than average Americans? Why does he seem so keen on finding new ways of stealing taxpayer money for them?

Yes, there is a real issue here where we have less dynamism and mobility than we would like and people feel unable to move. If we want to solve that, we can stop having the government bribe people into long term fixed-rate mortgages designed as if to create exactly this problem. At least, as a first step.

Waiving the requirement for title insurance seems somewhat more justifiable, given that it ‘typically pays out only 3% to 5% of premiums.’ That certainly does not sound like a product anyone should buy, let alone one we should force them to buy. Nor does it sound like anything that happens in a remotely free market.

Oh, they say, we can fix the distribution issue, because we are also going to force prices up via paying people $25,000 in ‘down payment assistance’ when buying their first home if they haven’t ‘benefited from generational wealth building associated with homeownership.’

The result of this will inevitably be to put people into homes they do not want and cannot afford, because that bribe is too big to pass up.

Also they plan to ‘fight egregious rent increases,’ in order words to impose rent controls, confiscating private property and destroying the housing stock. Why should a price increase ever be illegal on the federal level?

Reading all this makes one wonder where such people think money comes from and where it goes. Who do they think is paying for all this? How do they think this impacts various markets? Do they have any idea how any of this works, at all?

Here Matt Yglesias goes over some things the federal government could do that might actually help. He says ‘the issue isn’t that the Biden administration doesn’t get it.’ I agree that they get we need to ‘build, build, build,’ but then they go ahead and do all these other things anyway. So while there is one level where they get it, there is another level where they very clearly don’t.

In other rent control news, Emmett Shear has a proposal.

Emmett Shear: Rent control is a transparently terrible idea. But has a city ever tried price caps per square foot on rental housing? If set right, that would at least accomplish the theoretical goal by preventing “luxury” housing, while leaving cheaper housing untouched.

Of course it has all kinds of nasty potential side effects, like any time you intervene in the free market. Wealthy people would on the margin consume more by renting much bigger houses since they can’t spend more per sq ft. But it seems less-horrible.

There is the danger that it drives everything into sold housing rather than rented, but I think that should only impact the higher end. The biggest issue will be variance in prices making the cap wrong locally, I think.

I mean, if the cap is set high and maintained high over time (they tend to drift downward) then this is less harmful than other rent control rules, but only because it applies less often, and where it matters less?

The result is effectively to ban renting out units with sufficiently high value per square foot. If the place is that valuable, it should be easy enough to convert it to a condo or co-op. So that is what would happen. Not a huge tragedy, but rather pointless destruction of all high-end rental stock.

His thinking seems to be that this would ensure that the quality of the housing stock was worse, because that is good, actually?

Alex Krusz: Why is preventing luxury housing good?

Emmett Shear: Makes the housing that gets built more affordable.

I mean, sure, if you want to destroy the housing stock of a city only down to some threshold, then you can use a pinpoint form of rent control that substitutes only for highly selective aerial bombing. That does not make it a good idea, unless it is a compromise that kills other worse rent control.

I wrote that a weeks ago. Speaking of which…

Despite recent Supreme Court decisions saying he would be immune from prosecution, Biden is determined not to use aerial bombing to level our cities.

Instead, he is proposing a second best solution.

Joe Biden (well, his Twitter account): I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: If you raise rents more than 5%, you should lose valuable tax breaks.

Families deserve housing that’s affordable – it’s part of the American dream.

Jason Furman (top economist, Obama administration, quoted in WaPo): Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit. The idea we’d be reviving and expanding it will ultimately make our housing supply problems worse, not better.

Jeff Stein and Rachel Siegel (WaPo): White House officials, however, say the rent cap would give short-term relief to renters before an estimated 1.6 million new housing units become available in two years, which should also drive down prices. (The Biden plan would only apply to rental units for two years, by which point, in theory, this fresh supply would alleviate costs.)

The extent to which those defending this rule simply do not believe in private property boggles the mind.

“It would make little sense to make this move by itself. But you have to look at it in the context of the moves they propose to make to expand supply,” said Jim Parrott, nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and co-owner of Parrott Ryan Advisors. “The question is: Even if we get all these new units built, what do we do about rising rents in the meantime? Coming up with a relatively targeted bridge to help renters while new supply is coming on line makes a fair amount of sense.”

Sigh.

The ‘good’ news is that:

This will never pass.
This is implemented in a triply ham fisted way to mitigate its worst impacts.
1. Limited to removal of a tax break.
2. Limited to landlords with 50+ apartments.
3. Limited to a two year period.
4. Limited to already constructed apartments.

The last two give the game away.

Biden’s team realizes that if you imposed rent control on newly constructed apartments, people would build far fewer rental apartments.

Their solution? Don’t (yet, today) propose confiscating the wealth of those who create the housing stock we need tomorrow. Instead (today) confiscate the wealth of those who already created housing stock. They’re stuck.

Then, tomorrow, we can discuss the housing stock we build today.

I say ‘Biden’s team’ because Biden does not seem to know what his policy is.

Eric Levitz (video at link): Biden has not just been having difficulty with extemporaneous speaking. He’s also been struggling to read speeches off a teleprompter. Here, he mistook text promising a 5 percent cap on rent increases for a cap on rent increases larger than $55.

Paul Graham: This is painful to watch. Rent control is already a stupid idea, but he misreads the 5% on the teleprompter as $55. That means he doesn’t even remember what his own policy is.

Jesse Singal: I 100% think this is not because he is lying but because he is not capable of reading off a teleprompter in a coherent, accurate way at this point.

Alex Tabarrok: Biden is doing everything he can to drive me away.

Terrible policy that he flubs by reading 55 off the teleprompter instead of 5%.

This is different from confusing names. This is a rather large conceptual error that one only makes if one is reading off a teleprompter without understanding the words. It would also be a complete disaster to actually cap rent increases at $55, which in major cities would often be well below inflation and is remarkably close to a de facto ban on rentals.

Whereas a 5% cap, with 3% inflation, for only a two year bridge period? Shouldn’t that be Mostly Harmless, as the advisors claim?

Except, of course, builders of real estate can see that future, too. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can’t get fooled again.

If I am a landlord, I act as if this rule is permanent. There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program. So I am going to game it out as if it was permanent.

Even if it is not permanent, the seal has been broken. So I need to anticipate that my temporary rental agreement could turn into a permanent seizure of my property, at any time.

(Indeed, I wonder the extent to which even proposing this policy as the President does great harm, for exactly this reason.)

The 50+ apartment rule is, if the tax break is substantial, a de facto a ban on landlords that long term own 50+ apartments in hot rental markets.

What would inevitably happen if this was implemented and seemed likely to be permanent? When the market rent increases are substantially above 5%, the large landlord will sell the relevant apartments to new smaller landlords. Then the smaller landlord raises the rent.

Then, probably, once things cool down or the rent has been made safely high enough, if things are likely to remain cool, they likely sell those apartments back to large landlords again.

So this involves a lot of real estate commissions and negotiations and weird contracts, and tons of extra work and paperwork, and wiping out of landlord reputations and relationships that tenants could count on before, to get back to where we started.

In the case of buildings with more than 50 apartments, this gets somewhat awkward, as the building ownership will need to be divided. In some cases, they’ll give up and convert to condos.

Also, of course, everyone will raise all rents somewhat higher, in anticipation of perhaps needing to raise them in the future, and to compensate for the related expenses.

And also large landlords will stop trying to improve apartments, and start skimping on maintenance, as they always do under rent control.

That’s kind of a ‘best case’ scenario for implementation.

The bad scenario is that this creates pressure to lower the 5% cap, or inflation gets higher so as to effectively lower it, and there is pressure or worries about pressure to extend the rule to smaller landlords and future buildings soon. Or perhaps federal rules on what a ‘fair base rent’ would be in the first place.

Once rent control starts, it gets stricter and more oppressive. So anticipating that, expect somewhat of a decimation of the rental housing stock.

So in short: The impacts would be severe, but nowhere near as severe as the full version. But if this led or looked like it would lead to the full version, it could quickly end up being the full devastation version, wrecking all our rental markets. Who wants to risk renting a place when the Federal government might decide to effectively confiscate your property whenever it feels like it?

As a reminder, what does rent control do? Alex Tabarrok links to Kholodilin’s comprehensive review of the literature. Things with a + go up, things with a – sign go down.

What about Trump’s housing policies?

A long time ago I had high hopes in this area. Whatever his other faults, however many crazy tariffs he might impose, Donald Trump is famously a real estate developer. He built, baby, he built. So it seemed highly plausible he would adopt policies helping real estate developers to develop real estate, whether or not that involved massive graft.

Then it turned out, no, Trump instead did things like warn that Democrats wanted to ‘destroy the suburbs’ by building housing where people want to live. Either way, it did not seem like any sort of priority.

Matt Yglesias: Trump’s administration was initially pushing zoning reform but then some time in 2019 he fell in love with the idea that Cory Booker’s zoning reform bill would destroy the suburbs and they flip-flopped. But the man was a professional urban infill builder at one point, he knows.

Bloomberg interviewed Trump this week, in which sometimes substantive questions are asked (and at other times not) and then Trump is given room to talk, so we got in some questions about actual economic policies. It was a good reminder of how he thinks about all that.

The transcript includes fact checks, which is fun, but they missed some spots, including the whopper in the very first line.

Donald Trump: Well, I think manufacturing is a big deal, and everybody that runs for office says you’ll never manufacture again.

Even if you change ‘everybody’ to the implied ‘most people’ this is still obviously false. Joe Biden very much has said the opposite in both of his campaigns and with his policies. Many candidates at all levels are constantly saying the opposite.

I would not normally mention it, except as a first line in a ‘fact checked’ interview I find it pretty funny. The actual fact checks are also often highly amusing. You can learn a lot by thinking about how Trump decided which claims and numbers to pull out of [the air].

Also, if you are a thin guy, and you ever meet Donald Trump, drink a Diet Coke, purely to blow his mind.

So on housing, what did we learn?

Q: I wanted to ask you about the housing market because that is a huge cost to people. The mortgage rates are so high, there is a huge housing supply problem right now. What is your plan to make housing more affordable for people?

Donald Trump: That’s a very good question. So 50% of the housing costs today and in certain areas like, you know, a lot of these crazy places is environmental, is bookkeeping, is all of those restrictions. Building permits. Tremendous [restriction]¹.

Plus, they make you build houses that aren’t as good at a much greater sum. They make you use materials that are much less good than other materials. And the other materials are, I mean, you’re talking about cutting your [permits] down in half. Your permits, your permitting process. Your zoning, if—and I went through years of zoning. Zoning is like… it’s a killer. But we’ll be doing that, and we’ll be bringing the price of housing down.

The biggest problem with housing now is that you have interest rates that went from 2.5% interest to 10%. Can’t get the money. So, you know, I don’t know if you can stop at 10 because if you can’t get the money, that means it’s higher. But people, they can’t get financing to buy a house.

Other than calling for lower interest rates at various points, Trump does not take this or other opportunities to talk about any actual actions on housing. He does not actively talk rent control or subsidizing demand, but neither does he back up his complaints about permitting and regulations with any plans or intentions to fix that.

No, he’s focused on getting rid of regulations in other areas. Like AI. Of course.

There are of course other things going on with the Presidential candidates than the places where I focus. But I leave such discussions to others.

The Anglosphere has a big problem.

Gary Winslett: Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or an Anglophone country how it’s housing policy is going.

There is a solution.

Darrel Owens: Evan Mast did a study, highlighted by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, on the city’s flat & decling rents, finding that for every 100 market rate apartments built, 70 existing apartments were freed up in low income neighborhoods. What lessons on gentrification can be extracted here.

Scott Lincicome: ICYMI: I review the latest evidence of “filtering”, which shows that places like Austin & Raleigh that build more housing have lower prices/rents for ALL classes of homes/apartments (not just “luxury” units). But I also caution that true US Housing Abundance is still a ways off.

The problem is that people locally tend to oppose it.

Jacob Shamsian: I need to read a New York mag essay titled “NYC or kids?” that explores the tension between being able to afford this city vs building a family.

Matthew Yglesias: The two things I hear about ~every affluent city:

1) Voters’ number one concern is housing affordability and they are desperate for politicians with bold solutions

2) Broad, city-wise relaxation of land use rules would be toxic and unpopular

Despite my reputation, I actually do think there’s a lot of stuff more market rate construction can’t solve.

But “middle class people with decent jobs can’t afford a bigger home / more convenient location” is like THE thing you can fix with pure deregulation.

Is ‘affordable housing’ better than market-rate housing?

I would bite the bullet and say ‘affordable housing’ is simply some combination of:

An inefficient tax on building or owning housing.
An inefficient allocation of housing to those who value it less.
An inefficient allocation of capital, where we massively subsidize a few people.
An inefficient lowering of the quality of the housing stock.
An inefficient way for people to seek rent or feel righteous. Sometimes both.

I put affordable in quotes because what people mean by ‘affordable housing’ is ‘housing where we allocate below-market units to those who have our favor’ rather than ‘the market price of housing gets more affordable.’

I am all in favor of that second one. Ideally the prices decline sufficiently, and we allow the renting of sufficiently small units, that housing becomes highly affordable.

There are three legitimate purposes this is trying to address.

We need to tax something. Residential real estate makes sense to tax.
We want to do progressive redistribution. We can write that into the tax code.
We would like some less good apartments to exist. We can remove regulations.

Thus, we have much better options than this affordable housing.

I realize this is not a consensus view.

Also one could argue that current convention allows requiring that a developer provide ‘affordable housing,’ but it does not allow the state to require that developer write the city a large check or agree to take on higher property tax rates. So while affordable housing is never first best, it could in practice often be superior on the margin to the alternatives.

What should be clear to everyone is:

More market rate housing is good.
More non-market rate housing is good.
A combination of more of both is also good.
The problem is too little of one, not too much of the other.

Matthew Yglesias: We have some of the longest-standing YIMBY organizing efforts here in DC, but there isn’t really a single strong pro-housing person on the Council championing ambitious legislation and big ideas.

It’s very disappointing.

Martin Austermuhle: I mean, D.C. has by no means been perfect, but there’s been loads of housing construction in recent years, and the city has put more money into affordable housing than most comparable jurisdictions. The D.C. Council also passed an updated Comp Plan.

The main criticism has been that D.C. has allowed too much market-rate housing, hasn’t invested enough in fixing public housing, and hasn’t done enough to enforce existing tenant protections. And some criticize the continued existence of single-family zoning.

Matthew Yglesias: Yes this is what I mean. The dialogue in DC is about whether there is too much market-rate housing when we should be arguing about how to create dramatically more of it. Right now, ~zero people on the Council are championing the cause.

Right now the Council is debating how much to raise taxes and how much to cut services in order to address a big fiscal crunch. The best solution is to substantially roll back anti-housing regulations and grow the economy.

As in forcing you to include ‘affordable’ housing, meaning misallocated mispriced housing, in order to build new housing.

It is poorly named, since its primary purpose is to exclude housing construction.

Dan Bertolet: HB 1110 requires cities to upzone for middle housing, but does not require inclusionary zoning. IZ is particulary harmful to small-scale housing and Seattle data shows it. To avoid undermining HB 1110, Seattle must not impose IZ on middle housing.

Aaron Green: Look at how housing production plummetted after inclusionary zoning took effect. Now the people who would have lived in these new buildings are out competing with others for existing rental stock, pushing rents up for everyone. IZ makes the housing crisis worse.

As always, San Francisco found a way to make this more of a disaster. The city tried to specify a wide variety of conditions for who can rent its ‘inclusionary’ units and rules on how much owners can charge, and the whole thing is such a mess that 80% of the units are sitting empty. The city fails to deliver a tenant they are willing to let lease the apartment, and are unwilling to let someone else rent it instead. Chris Elmendorf suggests some obvious potential fixes, via giving some window for ‘qualified’ renters to appear after which the units can be leased to a market rent tenant. That would work, but misunderstands what the city cares about.

Offered for contrast and humor, because yes you can do so much worse than rent control, that challenge has been accepted successfully: Here is the Guardian attempting to blame the UK’s housing shortage, caused of course by their ‘never build houses’ policy, to not the absurd lack of supply but rather on ‘landlordism.’ The proposed solution is ‘landlord abolitionism.’

I’ll hand this one off. Iron Economist has various amusing counterpoints, some of which you know already, some details you likely don’t.

The UK really does have it far worse than us on housing.

Hunter: The UK has a deep state and it’s the planning system. If you can’t build dense housing in the North London Business Park then you’ve made it illegal to build dense housing. London has the worst housing crisis in the world.

The current planning system should be utterly abolished.

Armand Domalewski: It blows my mind that UK politics is not an endless, 24/7 screaming match about the housing crisis. London has Detroit wages and San Francisco rents and yet people are still anxious that it is adding too much housing.

Remember, though, it can always get worse.

Scott Lincicome: Yiiiiiiikes.

Alec Stapp: New degrowther idea just dropped in the UK: Instead of making it legal to build more housing, they’re just gonna… checks notes… reallocate the spare bedrooms in “under-occupied” houses.

Forest Ratchford: This reminds me of a story my Polish friend told me that during communist period, when his parents went to ask for permits to expand their house the government said if they did they would relocate another family to live with them.

Symon Pifczyk: Funny. In Poland and the USSR, the government would really do this but mostly because of war time damage. It was universally agreed that it’s temporary and housing construction must solve this issue. The UK wanting to do this just so that they can avoid skyscrapers around is wild.

Arthur Boreman: My God we did need the 3rd amendment.

Stefan Horn: I’ve written a new piece for the @IIPP_UCL blog: Meeting housing needs within planetary boundaries requires opening the black box of housing “demand.”

The key idea of the paper and research agenda is that housing can be used very differently: 1) to meet the housing needs of the population, and 2) as a luxury good or status symbol. Housing policy is typically about achieving 1).

The central tool to deliver housing policy has been to “just build more homes”. However, it has been shown that this is both ineffective and resource-intensive. We therefore take a step back to look at the entire housing stock.

It turns out that, in England, there are already more than enough houses to meet housing needs. But a large part of the housing stock is not used to meet housing needs. Around 19% of bedrooms in England are second or further spare bedrooms.

You see:

Gabriel: ngl telling people that the government is going to take away your spare bedroom instead of allowing the redevelopment of crumbling buildings from the 80s into medium density mixed use housing has gotta be one of the worst political strategies ever conceived in a democracy.

Yoni: it’s so much worse than that. “in NIMBY england your teens have to share a room.”

Sam Bowman: This surprising result comes from using a definition of “spare bedroom” that, among other things, describes two teenagers having separate bedrooms as involving a “spare bedroom”, because the teenagers could be sharing one of the rooms instead.

So, yeah, do remember that it could be worse.

Or you could look at Stockholm, where a powerful tenants’ union holds rents are much as 50% below the market, and wait lists for rent controlled apartments average 20 years. By the time you get to the front of the queue, you probably already own a home. But who are you to turn down such a deal?

That’s two key things about houses.

They need to be where people want to live.

And they need to enable people to live with the people they want to live with.

Kevin Erdmann (via Alex Tabarrok) tackles the with whom portion of the problem. We have an all-time high in houses per capita, but we also have less people per household.

I am actually surprised that adults per home has been this stable and this high, given other trends. The drop in children still has to be accounted for.

There is also the issue of where you want to live. If no one wants to live in St. Louis anymore, which is mostly true, then the extra empty houses in St. Louis give people a free option that no one wants, but are limited in their ability to solve our problems.

Scott Sumner points out that the declining number of people per household means we can effectively have a housing shortage even when we have more units supporting fewer people. This is not a huge effect, a 4% decline in household size, but it matters.

Jeremiah Johnson: The ’empty quadrant’ is one of the most replicated findings in housing research. There expensive cities that don’t build. There are cheap cities that do build. And there are no cities that build lots of housing and still see very high housing costs.

But that chart’s data only goes through 2013, you say! Sure. What if we use a completely different data source and time period? Top right quadrant is still empty.

It works for both overall price level as well as *changesin price level. No city that has large increases in inventory also sees increases in housing cost. Upper right still empty.

Seth Burn: One of the things about new construction that might not seem obvious is that they have an urgent need to fill all of the units ASAP. They start off with debt and need cash flow, so they have to price these units to move. In short, they need to undercut the market.

The counterargument would be that most places have stopped building tons of housing, and the only places that still do so are ones with lots of empty space around and a willingness to grow via sprawl. Those are not going to be high rent locations, so this relationship might not be causal. Except, supply and demand, so of course it also is causal.

Megan McArdle: One of the more interesting paragraphs I’ve read in a while.

Paper: If internet search is increasing equilibrium match quality, then some of the recent observed house price increases may be due to improvements to match quality rather than basic supply and demand factors. Assuming that gross output measures should be adjusted for quality changes, this implies that real growth in the output of housing may be understated due to quality increases being misattributed to the price deflator. Standard hedonic methods for estimating constant-quality price deflators in housing typically only control for the observed physical characteristics of a home, and do not account for unobserved match quality between the buyer and the house.

Megan McArdle: Basically improved search technology might mean people find homes better suited to them, and since they value them more, they might be willing to pay more. So some portion of the house price increases we currently treat as inflation should actually be seen as quality improvement.

So first off, no. Even if true, that is some bullshit, on the conceptual level. That is not what quality means. My being able to find the right house raises the utility I get form my house. It does not improve the quality of the house, and that increase should not impact the deflator. We can talk about matching as another product we produce perhaps, Zillow and StreetEasy count as services, or we can talk about the resulting utility or both, but that doesn’t measure the quality of the housing stock. That is the quality of the matching market.

What about the underlying dynamics? Does better matching increase prices via increased willingness to pay?

This is not obvious. How do people choose how much to spend on housing?

One obvious strategy, that many actually employ, is to buy the best place you can afford. In this case, if matching improves, then one should expect higher consumer surplus, and also for customers to sometimes ‘move down’ and buy a place that is generically worth less because it is better for them. So if anything this would point the other way?

Another obvious and common strategy is to meet your needs, and pay whatever it takes to do that. In that case, better matching will mean you ‘need less house’ to meet your needs. So you will end up paying less, and overall the market should stay static or decline once more.

The standard economic strategy of maximizing consumer surplus, of moving up in price until you aren’t getting enough out of it, could potentially raise overall demand, if better matching meant greater marginal returns not only greater absolute returns.

Then there’s the contrast between houses with multiple matching buyers, where the price gets bid up higher, versus places that are not actually great fits for anyone, so the price collapses. As with many markets, this means that details matter more, and the places that do everything right (the ‘A-level’ real estate) profits, whereas those who are flexible get better deals.

This feels like another one of those ways in which economists tell people they are better off and getting richer, and people look at them like they are crazy.

Why do I want Balsa to help us intervene in housing at the national level, rather than the local and state levels where all the action has been so far? Because if you act everywhere at once, then everyone knows they are not the target, that their particular neighborhood will probably not much change in relative terms, and they can accept the deal.

Kevin Erdmann: The irony of the immediate yimby project is that the solution – that we need to legalize and build 10-20 million extra housing units – sounds outrageous. And yet, if those units were equally distributed across every city, would be barely noticeable in the built environment.

Matthew Yglesias: This is exactly right — dramatically reducing land use regulation in your neighborhood would be very disruptive but doing it in *everyneighborhood (including yours) would transform the national economy without changing that much in any specific place.

We still should change certain specific places quite a lot. The most valuable cities, especially New York City and San Francisco, should grow much bigger. And there are some hugely underbuilt other areas like Palo Alto. But mostly this is a deal that should have overwhelming support, if done all at once.

Here’s some rhetoric that I presume is not helpful, although obviously true:

Matthew Yglesias: YIMBYism makes leftists insane because “it should legal to build apartment buildings where there is demand” is obviously correct, but they also don’t want to admit that a significant social problem could be ameliorated with less regulation.

If you own a home, you own two things.

The home.
The land.

When zoning changes, you get to build on your own land too, or sell it someone who will. It is not crazy to think that the land might go up more than the home goes down.

Alas, this does not seem to be the case.

Harlo Pippenger: If you’re a YIMBY and homeowner, do you believe you’re supporting policies that will cause you to forgo thousands in home equity?

Matthew Yglesias: My view is that better regulatory policies will increase the value of land but decrease the price of housing.

Buildhomez: I don’t think so based on Houston.

The study says it did not happen in Houston, perhaps because so much new housing was built that this was sufficient to offset the value of being able to build.

Ben Southwood here walks through the obvious fact that if all the homeowners of Palo Alto got together to turn it into the density of lower Manhattan, they would come out massively ahead, creating by his estimate $30 million in profits per household. So, he says, NIMBY is not about money and home values. Alas, that does not follow, because homeowners are not thinking this way and considering this alternative, merely opposing each marginal change in turn.

It does however propose an alternative. We are talking about $1 trillion in total net profits, to be divided between landowners and developers, and a total investment required on the order of $2 trillion to get it including upgrading city services including mass transit.

So the obvious thing to do is to run for mayor with a city counsel slate, on a platform of full Manhattanization, and an offer as part of that to buy all existing homes for their current assessed value plus $5 million. Get funding from every VC in the Bay, stop thinking so small. Sure, some people would still vote no, but would half of them turn that down? Plenty of other places to buy elsewhere with your windfall, if you want to keep the old lifestyle going.

Space can definitely be oversupplied where people less often want to live. Once it starts, it makes the problem worse.

Unusual Whales: Oh, no.

The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ.

In 2006, it sold for $205 million.

Konrad Putzier (WSJ): “It’s a classic chicken and egg kind of deal,” said Glenn MacDonald, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. “People don’t go there because there’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to do because people don’t go there.”

…

From there, desolation spread south. Across the street from the garage, a St. Louis Bread sandwich shop—part of the Panera chain—shuttered. That left the attorneys at law firm Brown & Crouppen without a lunch spot.

“It’s pathetic that a Panera was the thing holding this area together, but it really did,” said the firm’s managing partner Andy Crouppen. “It brought people from five, six blocks away, it created a little bit of activity.”

“When that left, it created a noticeable void in the area,” Crouppen said. “People started walking in another direction.”

This is the 44-story AT&T tower, so I presume it is the building on the left. The majority of area storefronts sit empty.

Several replies claimed this failed to include assumed debt, but there does not seem to be debt? According to Wolf Street, this same building was sold for $4.1 million in a foreclosure sale in 2022, which means it was bought debt-free. It also means this was a loss even from that low point.

Danielle Fong: imagine you just bought this. what would you do with it?

Benjamin: there is a crazy power incentive that came with this, something like <7c/kw hr I think.

Obviously at that point turn the whole thing into a btc mining farm.

The obvious play is to convert a lot of this to housing plus commercial space, while leaving some offices for those same people.

Indeed, one could imagine building one hell of an intentional community and world community hub with this much space. And there would then be plenty of space to include what would effectively be a convention hall on a few floors, and other public areas. I imagine one could get really creative, if the law allowed it.

But the regulatory issues and costs of conversions have defeated many who have tried in St. Louis already, and I am assuming anything like this would be a giant mess.

And of course, the $3.3 million is almost exactly $0, when compared to the cost of upkeep. Claude estimates that cost at between $5.6 million and $8.7 million per year, including property tax of 3% on the new value of $3.5 million, although you would get some discount on that if the building was largely unoccupied. So in a sense the ‘cost to own’ in a practical sense here is on the order of $100 million, or about $2 million per floor or just under $100 a square foot.

I am actually rather excited by what you could do with a building like this at a price like that, assuming it was in good physical condition, and especially if you had the budget to make supplementary investments in the area. You could think big, and ensure that the area suddenly had good versions of everything people actually want to have locally available, by being willing to initially run them at a loss, including inside the building.

Why is this building worth something rather than nothing? The price is an option. If you buy the building for $3.5 million, you always have the option to sell it for $0, as indeed effectively happened in 2022, since transaction costs ate the entire sale price. If you figure out how to make the building profitable, or St. Louis gets a downtown revitalization and suddenly people want to come back, you win big. So that is worth something, even if you then must pay millions a year if you want to hold onto it. Alternatively, it is pure winner’s curse. The option value is not worth the ongoing costs, but someone will be willing to try.

My guess is that the bet is good if you can afford to make the full bet and lose, considering the upside. But if you have this kind of budget, risk appetite and willingness to actually do physical things, then you have many great opportunities.

More surprising is this sale, given that Washington D.C. is going well. It looks like it was due to massive floating rate debt, and in this case all we actually know is that no one thought it was worth assumption of the debt?

Triple Net Investor: JUST IN: Holiday Inn Express in Washington DC sells at a shocking ~80% ‘discount’ to debt owed.

The lender was the only bidder in the foreclosure auction, bidding $18.5M.

The lender was owed $83M as the largest secured creditor.

The 247 room hotel opened in Dec 2022.

And here we have 1740 Broadway in New York selling for $185 million, down from $605 million, it is approximately 600,000 square feet. So tempting. This resulted in the first loss on an AAA-rated slice of a CMBS deal since 2008.

And here is 750 Lexington, down from ~$300 million to about $50 million.

Here’s San Francisco’s 995 Market Street, sold at auction for $6.5 million versus an old price of $62 million in 2018:

Boston flirts with doom loop territory.

Brooke Sutherland and Sri Taylor (Bloomberg): Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is seeking to raise commercial property tax rates to help protect homeowners from the brunt of the historic slump in office property values.

So your commercial real estate drops in value and your response is to tax it more?

This seems like it shouldn’t be sustainable?

This is less extreme, but similar.

It is especially baffling given the recent jump in interest rates. With a 3% fixed rate mortgage, sure, a 140 ratio is not so crazy. At 7.22%, it seems pretty crazy. After other costs of ownership, that makes ownership very clearly unprofitable versus renting. In general, why does the rent-to-price ratio change so little when interest rates move?

Tomes Pueyo also notes that population has previously been going up. Soon it will begin going down, as it already started doing in China. Declining demand follows. He has a bunch of other speculations as well.

What if the ‘superstar cities’ like New York and San Francisco are not superstars after all, and merely ‘closed access’ cities? Kevin Erdmann makes that case. Their rents and productivity numbers are only high, he says, because they prevent housing construction and choke off supply. Yes rents are high, but also they fully capture the gains in income, if you include that they price less productive people out of living there. He says we shouldn’t see such cities as having such high demand, and contrasts this with Detroit’s heyday, when it was more productive but only modestly so because it did not keep people out.

I don’t buy this at all. Yes, it is sad for you if you move to New York, your productivity doubles, your salary doubles and after rent and taxes and other higher expenses you do not have any more money. That does not mean your productivity did not double. Even if you are doing the same tasks, the fact that people willingly pay you twice as much is strong evidence that your production is worth more.

Also, price will always be the ultimate measure of demand. So when he says ‘it isn’t remotely clear that demand for living in Los Angeles is higher than Dallas’ (really Dallas-Fort Worth) because Dallas-Fort Worth grew by 77% from 1995 to 2022 (it seems like Dallas itself only grew about 30%?) while LA only grew by 10%, again, look at prices and population.

Or ask people where they would live if the economics was similar. Yes some people will prefer Dallas for political or social reasons, or because of particular people there, but obviously most people would, if given the choice where money canceled out, rather live in Los Angeles, or in the version of Los Angeles that was growing faster.

He also highlights other trends, and especially points to house prices dramatically declining in poor areas of cities like Atlanta due to inability to get mortgages in the wake of the financial crisis and the subsequent tightening of lending standards. This seems to now be fully reversed, but the inability to get mortgages remains, forcing people to rent, and the lack of interim building forced rents up. Well, then, that sounds like a problem that should fix itself in turns of rental stock. In terms of mortgages, that is a policy choice.

But as always, if someone is saying no one can afford to buy a house, one can respond that the homeownership rate is up rather than down. So that’s weird.

A flashback I continue to not understand:

Zvi Mowshowitz (October 10, 2022): A remarkably high share of the responses to ‘why is it illegal to have a bedroom without a window?’ seem to be willing to bite the bullet that it should be illegal for me to have the blinds down and the window closed.

Ja3k: Wow, I had no idea. I almost think a bedroom with no windows would be desirable as I only use the room for sleep and tend to expend a lot of effort preventing light from coming through the window

Zvi Mowshowitz: Yeah, that’s the funny part in all this, if everyone was like me we’d make sure all the windows were in the common areas and the bedrooms were always dark.

And now:

KUT Austin: “Windows should be a human right,” said Juan Miró, an architecture professor at UT Austin who has advocated against windowless bedrooms.

Headline: Austin outlaws the construction of windowless bedrooms.

St. Rev Dr. Rev: Imagine the society we could build when the upper middle class forces even more of their preferences and consumption habits on the rest of us in increasingly ridiculous and unsustainable ways.

Luis Guilherme: Building windows wouldn’t be hard if fire codes didn’t require more than one staircase. Both together severely limit what you can build.

Tracing Woods: This is a petty case, but I’m always fascinated by those who use the language of human rights to remove them. “I want to ban people from building things I dislike” becomes, with the wave of a hand, “My preference should be a human right.”

Neat trick if you can manage it.

Dan Elton: Some problems with windows in the bedroom:

– More noise

– Harder to maintain consistent temperature for sleep

– Higher heating/cooling costs

– Need to install blackout curtains (extra cost, need to be maintained).

(Otherwise light trickles in from moon, street lamps, etc)

The first thing a large percentage of people I know do when they move into a bedroom is to do all they can to functionally destroy the window.

As a reminder, no this is not about real safety. Many such bedroom windows offer no meaningful means of egress or entry.

I continue to see this as obviously and exactly backwards. Windows in a bedroom are a mixed blessing at best. Yes, you get a reminder of when it is light or dark outside, but in exchange that interferes with your sleep. Not ideal, my blinds are down most of the time and I paid a lot to effectively get rid of my giant window most of the time. Whereas windows in living areas are obvious goods, and of much higher value.

So my preference order would be:

No requirements because people Capitalism Solves This. If people want windows people will pay more for windows and we will get the right number of windows. Banning what you dislike is the opposite of a ‘right.’
Require a window somewhere in the apartment, on the theory that ‘windows are a human right’ or the worry that people will feel pressured into moving into windowless places and go insane. I disapprove, but I do get it.
Require a window in the living area.
Require a window in the bedroom area.

A tour of a fully minimalist 250 square foot bachelor apartment in Tokyo for $300/month. Ten minute walk from the train station, has all the basic things for a base of operations, completely illegal to build basically anywhere in America you would want to build it. This seems pretty great, we should do a lot of this. Yes, it sucks to be this cramped, but letting people conserve capital and have a good location is really important.

In America, on the other hand, we go big when we go home.

Matthew Yglesias: Not only are European homes small, twenty percent of the square footage is occupied by clothes hanging up to dry.

But they have more orderly public spaces!

Ryan Radia: Maybe the American Home Shield® analysis of Zillow data is more accurate than the HUD-Census Bureau American Housing Survey, but for those who are curious about the latter, it tends to show somewhat smaller housing units in the United States (only certain states are available).

Looks like American Home Shield includes houses and condos, whereas the American Housing Survey includes houses, condos, and apartments.

[first graph below is Zillow, then the one below is HUD]

You know who goes small and stays home if they have one? The UK.

Yes, I am going to go out on a limb and say that having tiny houses in general is bad. Having more house is good.

The counterargument is that having smaller dwellings is good for the UK in the sense that the amount of housing seems permanently fixed. So if you only have so much space, you need to divide it into smaller locations, or you’ll be even more short on housing than you already are.

This is a cool chart, from What Makes Housing So Expensive? by Brain Potter.

This is the ‘hard’ costs:

Brian Potter: The above graph is color-coded: green is the structural framing, blue is exterior finishes (including doors and windows), orange is services (electrical, HVAC, etc.), red is interior finishes and appliances, dark gray is foundations and light gray is outdoor work and landscaping. And if we look at a similar breakdown of tasks given by the Craftsman Construction Estimator, we see a broadly similar division.

The most striking thing here is that there is no one striking thing. Construction costs are lots of different little things, not one big thing.

Also note that this excludes the direct costs of dealing with regulations and zoning and approvals and permits and such, and also the cost of the land. Here are some additional costs:

And a further breakdown of some of the hard costs:

Brian Potter: Per the NAHB, on average hard costs are about 56% of the total costs, soft costs (including builder profits) are about 25%, and land costs are about 18%.

…

We see that hard costs are roughly 50/50 split between materials and labor (and we saw something similar when we looked at how the cost of individual construction tasks has changed over time).

Stephen Smith has an editorial in the New York Times discussing the absurdity that is the cost of and rules around elevators in America.

Stephen Smith: Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

…

Nobody is marveling at American elevators anymore. With around one million of them, the United States is tied for total installed devices with Italy and Spain.

…

Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs and inspections all cost more in America, too.

The Europeans have a standard building code for elevators, and they build lots of small ones, large enough for a wheelchair and one additional person. They do not let the perfect (and huge) be the enemy of the good. We instead impose tons of requirements, force everything to have its own uniquely American supply chains, and due to various requirements our labor costs are, like the most famous of elevators, through the roof.

This and other similar limiting factors hugely raise the cost of housing construction.

The solution to elevator regulations could not be simpler.

The European Union has a perfectly good set of rules. They work. Adapt those.

Similarly, we can copy their rules about what buildings require multiple staircases.

Or even better, let developers choose. You can either follow the local rules, or you can follow the EU rules. Easy. Simple. One page bill.

Yes, that means that various first responders might not be able to use some elevators to transports some types of equipment. But when Switzerland has twice the elevators per capita as New York City, the first responders cannot use the non-existent elevators at all.

The bigger apartment buildings, where the amount of passenger traffic and number of apartments served justifies a larger size, will still choose to build big. The market will demand it. And all those little buildings can get little elevators.

There is also the problem of the elevator unions, which it seems are of the pure rent extraction variety.

Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, in which entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site.

Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the United States.

Ryan Smyth: And if you’re in multifamily you know how unreliable most elevators are and the exorbitant ongoing maintenance costs involved. They usually take days to fix and the down time hammers resident satisfaction.

Bryan: When this sort of rent-seeking happens all of us pay for it. A lift should not cost five times less in *Switzerland*.

Noah Smith: The problem with American unions is not that they exist. It’s that too many of them look backward to the 1950s and want to RETVRN instead of embracing modern technology. Unions elsewhere are more forward-looking.

Noah is exactly on point.

If the union uses its position to get higher pay and better working conditions, up to a rather high point that seems fine and often actively good. Costs go up, but the workers benefit in line with costs.

If the union is as described here, and engaged in active sabotage and massive driving up of costs in order to create makework? That is an entirely different scenario. The union only captures a small fraction of the additional costs and everything becomes hostile and terrible.

We need to find a way to ensure that extraction is in the form of higher wages, not in the form of enforced inefficiencies to create work, and to draw a clear distinction between those two modes.

Of course, the Elevator Theory of Housing, saying it explains housing costs, is going too far. This is a surprisingly large form and cost factor, since it restricts entire classes of construction, but not the main event.

Hal Singer: Why have housing costs skyrocketed?

→ Progressives: Hedge fund/private equity have been buying up hundreds of thousands of homes. Pricing algorithms allow landlords to coordinate price hikes.

→ New York Times Op-Ed: No no. It’s the high cost of elevators and the elevator union!

Epilogue: The reason why elevator costs are so high is because of extreme concentration. It is not the fault of the elevator union or regulations, as Yglesias & YIMBYs would have you believe. His team could never blame companies (ie, prospective clients).

…

First, it’s a fixed cost, which shouldn’t enter the pricing calculus.

I love little windows like this into people’s thinking. Why would fixed costs matter?

More than that, he’s claiming that the reason costs are 5x higher in America is because of ‘extreme concentration’ without citing any evidence. Well, why exactly do we not see market entry? And what does this have to do with the central claims?

Matthew Yglesias: So many leftist professors are genuinely incapable of engaging with an argument on the merits and just resort to bullying.

The op-claims that US building codes make elevators more expensive than European or Asian elevators. Is there a rebuttal to that claim?

I know there is a lot of leftist fascination with private equity investments in housing but the explicit thesis of the investors is that regulatory barriers to supply will make these bets pay off.

Hal Singer: Who cares about elevator costs? Many buildings don’t have one, and for those that do, the elevator is a small % of total costs.

The whole reason most building do not have elevators is that we have made it prohibitively expensive in space and money to put in elevators to most buildings. Versus Europe, where a lot more buildings do indeed have elevators. And that difference also rules out a variety of housing construction and is hell on the disabled. That’s the whole thesis.

I do not know how much of the additional costs are due to unions as claimed, versus due to regulatory requirements, including labor shortages due to licensing requirements and immigration laws. All of that, of course, is constantly on my ‘fix it’ agenda all around.

This is not the biggest problem facing those who wish to build housing. Fixing it would still make a substantial difference, on the margin, to one of our biggest problems.

It remains mostly true, I think.

Tweets from Zack Weinberg: The reason everyone feels poor is because of housing prices and nothing else really matters is a view I hold stronger by the day.

Nabeel Qureshi: I genuinely think housing scarcity in/near cities explains 80%+ of the vibecession & the pessimism you encounter when you talk to practically anybody nowadays. It’s way worse than it used to be.

I’ve lived in both NYC and London and in both cities this has gotten significantly worse in my memory; you now often need to write personalized letters to landlords just to convince them to *rentyou their place, and 100+ applications for a single place is super common.

I sympathize with the “but the economy is so wonderful, look at the GDP number go up” people but sometimes I want to send them this quote & ask them to go talk to normal people once in awhile

I assume that the 100+ applications are because of rent control. Otherwise, you can respond by raising your price.

Tyler Cowen only attributes about 15% of the UK’s economic problems to NIMBY, or 25% if you count energy restrictions, disagreeing with well-informed British people he spoke to who said 50% or more.

I am in the 50% or more camp. Indeed I think this is more than 100%.

As in, if the UK was allowing and even encouraging energy including wind and nuclear, and allowed housing construction throughout the country, then the UK would be booming even with all its other problems.

Tyler’s main cause is that the UK is not making products people want to buy, that there was a specialization mismatch. There probably was a mismatch, but I think that dynamism would have allowed that to be solved without issue. I definitely would not blame 20% of the issue on Brexit.

Be careful what you wish for.

Pacific Legal Foundation: [In Sheetz v. El Dorado County] today the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that legislatures cannot use the permit process to coerce owners into paying exorbitant development fees. The ruling, a major victory for property rights, will remove costly barriers to development, thereby helping to combat the housing crisis.

The fee in question was $23,000, supposedly for traffic impact. It is obviously crazy to claim that a single family home will cause that much damage to traffic. I could see a case that it could lower property values by that much by increasing supply, by lowering each of 230 properties by $100 or something like that, although the owner intends to live on the property.

If this changes the rule from ‘you can build a house but you owe us $23k’ to ‘you can build a house and pay us $230’ then that is good on the margin.

I worry that is not the relevant margin. Instead, I worry that this payment, while outrageous, is also a mostly non-destructive and not so distortionary tax. If your new home is not generating $23k in surplus for you, then there is no great loss that you could not build it, and if you have an empty lot then the purchase price is now presumably $23k lower. So all you are doing it imposing a tax on the value of land, which is one of the best ways to tax. In exchange, the city feels good about letting you build, and is less inclined to impose other barriers.

If they tried to charge $230k instead, that seems a lot worse, but this seems fine?

Yes in God’s backyard? Six states propose bills allowing various charities to get around zoning laws or get tax advantages for building affordable housing. I do not see any reason to give preferential treatment to religious organizations, or to give to them a large share of the surplus available from building new housing. It is still miles better than not building the housing. Paris is worth a mass.

Ben Yelin: MD Senate currently debating one of Gov. Moore’s housing measures that you’ve written about! My own Republican State Senator is excoriating it.

Funny twist: After attacking the bill for 20 minutes about how this bill was unfair to landlords, he says he’s going to vote for it because he was able to secure amendments that made it better.

Matthew Yglesias: He’s complaining about legislation “battering the state’s landlord community”

Alexander Turok: Many landlords own one or two properties. They’re not all millionaires.

Yes. One could argue that it would be better if identical housing was more expensive, rather than housing being cheaper, so that those who own the existing housing stock can profit off of those so unwise as to need to rent or buy. It is a preference one can have.

Or perhaps this is the true NIMBY?

It’s basically this, via Scott Lincicome.

Jeff Collins: A Los Angeles County judge found that charter cities aren’t subject to Senate Bill 9, the 2021 “duplex” law that allows up to four homes to be built on a lot in single-family neighborhoods.

The law fails to accomplish its stated purpose of creating more affordable housing, and therefore, doesn’t meet the high bar of overriding local control over zoning, Superior Court Judge Curtis Kin said in a ruling released Wednesday, April 24.

SB 9 “is neither reasonably related to its stated concern of ensuring access to affordable housing nor narrowly tailored to avoid interference with local government,” Kin wrote.

…

” ‘Affordable’ refers to below market-rate housing,” Kin wrote. The state gave “no evidence to support the assertion that the upzoning permitted by SB 9 would result in any increase in the supply of below market-rate housing.”

Yelling ‘the whole point of building more housing is to lower the market rate so all the housing is more affordable, you absolute dimwit fwads’ might feel good but the polite version does not seem to be working.

So, restate the stated purpose, then? Or require that one of the four homes be ‘affordable housing’ in the narrow sense?

Or perhaps something more drastic, like removing all zoning over residential and commercial buildings entirely from the bastards (they can keep the industrial restrictions), if that’s how they want to play it, provided you include at least some ‘affordable housing’?

Emmett Shear explaining once again that if you stop restricting supply of housing, cost to buy will converge to cost of construction, which would drop prices in areas like Manhattan by more than half.

Crossover issue: Using federal subsidies for a housing project can trigger NEPA, at which point you might well be might better off without the subsidies. Even if we do not fix things in general we should absolutely change this rule, so that subsidies alone do not trigger NEPA.

Governor of Oregon uses legos to illustrate that when demand exceeds supply prices go up and poorer people can’t buy houses, whereas if you build more houses then prices go down and also everyone can have a house. Quite good.

Does this help?

Tesho Akindele: Density allows everyday people to outbid the rich for land.

This is not quite right, since cost per square foot goes up if you build higher, and also if you go bigger as a builder you will want bigger profits. It does seem mostly right, and it excludes the impact on overall supply and thus price level.

I doubt this line will work. It does have the benefit of being true:

Michael Cannon: Rent control does not make apts cheaper. It alters the price, not the underlying economic reality that gives rise to that price.

IOW, the apt is still expensive. RC just lets tenants consume surplus it steals from landlords/other renters—until quality falls to match the price.

Cannon’s fifth rule of economic literacy: The price is never the problem.

Or, on the flip side, wow.

Alec Stapp: This article from the London School of Economics is quite possibly the worst housing policy analysis I’ve ever seen. What’s their magic solution that gets around the law of supply and demand?

Headline: “Solving the Housing Crisis Without Building New Homes.”

Stephen Hoskins: I am begging the London School of Economics to understand that houses provide both shelter and location.

We’re inventing new forms of “there are more vacant homes than homeless people” every single day.

The thread has more details, but seriously, I can’t even. No, a bunch of price controls and redistribution is not magically going to fix having less supply than demand, and forcing the nominal official ‘price’ to be a non-economic number does not help.

And no, housing in places people do not want to live does not substitute for housing in other places where those people do want to live. Although I do think we can and should do some work to give people reason to want to move to the less desired places, especially if they are currently homeless. But the homeless mostly do not want that.

Three huge reasons.

People in denser areas consume vastly less carbon.
People in denser areas have lower fertility.
People in denser areas take up a lot less space.

Or you could look at it like this.

Sam: Urbanism protects rural and natural land whereas suburban sprawl frequently requires paving over natural landscapes and chopping down tons of trees.

Jason Cox: It really wrecks some people’s brains to learn I’m pro urbanism largely ~because~ I’m pro rural & agricultural areas remaining such.

They’re so excited to let me know I’m a clueless urbanite that doesn’t know where food comes from or what freedom looks like in my crime infested city abode without realizing I live much of the year on a working rural farm.

Both areas add value to society and the first shouldn’t be allowed to swallow the second unchecked because we lack the will to let cities be cities.

We all know the various definitions of democracy.

One major problem with democracy is people do not know economics. It shows.

Rent control polls around 87%. The only thing ahead of it is ‘property tax control’ meaning California’s Prop 13, a true nightmare of policy arguably worse than rent control.

The people want to not pay taxes, and to not pay market rent, and for existing residents to collect these economic rents forever, and to the extent they realize there is a price to pay for those things (beyond that no one can ever move) they want others to fit the bill.

They also want a ‘renter tax break’ and housing vouchers to go with the homeowner tax break. Why not give everyone a tax break and free money? Oh. Right.

Meanwhile, the policies that are underwater are ‘allow people to build apartment buildings,’ and the close one is to reduce parking minimums.

This is a chart of renter support for policies minus homeowner support:

So yes, their favorite policy in relative terms is ‘give us money,’ what a shock, but mostly there is not much voting one’s interest.

Chris Elmendorf: But do any of these policies matter when push comes to shove, and voters have to make tradeoffs with policies like abortion, health care, minimum wage, climate?

Yes. Rent control is near the top, w/ property-tax controls, IZ, and “Wall St” restrictions not far behind.

Also, people who want rent control and Wall. St. restrictions care a lot more about these policies than do their opponents, whereas opponents of market-rate infill development care somewhat more about it than do the proponents.

Joey Politano: Rent control, property tax control, down payment subsidies, and inclusionary zoning requirements all polling at like +80%.

I care quite a lot about opposing rent control. But I am the exception.

The whole thing is deeply sobering. People do not want the things that cause housing to exist.

Yet somehow, in many places, YIMBY policies are happening anyway. And in many other places, there is tons of popular NIMBY red meat available, and the politicians do not take it.

Something is working, and has been working for a while. One must ask, what allows our civilization to survive at all? Why do we get to tax things and pay some of the bills? Why is there some housing rather than none?

Missed the window for last time, but:

It’s happening?

Rob Wiblin: Keir Starmer is the prince that was promised.

YIMBY Alliance: NEW: Local residents will lose the right to block housebuilding, Keir Starmer will announce today.

NEW: Keir Starmer ‘will unveil plans to build 1.5 million houses over five years by forcing councils to approve new homes, including on the green belt, warning that those who refuse will have development imposed upon them as part of a “zero tolerance” approach to nimbyism.’

I especially love this being called explicitly a “zero tolerance” approach to nimbyism.

The Times: The Labour leader will unveil plans to build 1.5 million houses over five years by forcing councils to approve new homes, including on the green belt, warning that those who refuse will have development imposed upon them as part of a “zero tolerance” approach to nimbyism.

If you give indigenous people the right to do what they want with their land, and it would be highly profitable to build housing on it, guess what?

Jason Crawford (quoting): “Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed.”

Warren Wells: As a non-indigenous person, I would simply avoid telling indigenous people what “the indigenous way” is.

Kane: The best parts of left nimbys losing their minds about indigenous people building new homes is the leftists telling the indigenous people they’re being indigenous wrong.

Scott Sumner points out this is very much the pro-wilderness solution, as those people have to live somewhere.

I have no idea if this is a complaint that is all that common. As usual with such matters, the people who are very loud mostly represent a highly unpopular viewpoint.

Stanford hates fun, but if you really hated or truly loved fun, perhaps you would get the law to do something about the fact that 94% of elevators on campus have expired permits? The author of the article is sufficiently onboard with hating fun that this is framed as an actual safety issue.

Sheel Mohnot: Caltrain deputy director built himself an apartment (with kitchen & shower) inside the Burlingame train station with $42k of public funds (each invoice <$3k), and it took 3 years for it to be discovered.

I demand a short documentary about this! I haven’t seen footage anywhere.

Jerusalem: knowing literally nothing else about this… go off king.

Jail?? you should hire him to figure out how to build housing this cheaply in California.

Jason Crawford: My main takeaway here is that you can build a home in CA for $42k as long as no one is watching.

Land trusts are super weird. Shouldn’t we either make who owns what properties public, and something you can take in a legal judgment, or not? Instead you can pay a small fee to get around those issues.

Housing Roundup #9: Restricting Supply Read More »

Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers

Ann Burgess, behavioral sciences, criminal psychology, culture, documentaries, fbi, forensic science, Hulu, Mindhunter, Science, serial killers, streaming television, true crime documentary / Mike M. / July 16, 2024

Dr. Ann Burgess helps the FBI catch serial killers in Hulu's <em>Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer.</em>” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mastermind5-800×535.jpg”></img><figcaption>
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Fans of the Netflix series Mindhunter might recall the character of Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychologist who joins forces with FBI criminal profilers to study the unique psychology of serial killers in hopes of more effectively catching them. But they might not know about the inspiration for the character: Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, whose long distinguished career finally gets the attention it deserves in a new documentary from Hulu, Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer.

Burgess herself thought it was “fun” to see a fictional character based on her but noted that Hollywood did take some liberties. “They got it wrong,” she told Ars. “They made me a psychologist. I’m a nurse”—specifically, a forensic and psychiatric nurse who pioneered research on sex crimes, victimology, and criminal psychology.

Mastermind should go a long way toward setting things right. Hulu brought on Abby Fuller to direct, best known for her work on the Chef’s Table series for Netflix. Fuller might seem like a surprising choice for making a true crime documentary, but the streamer thought she would bring a fresh take to a well-worn genre. “I love the true crime aspects, but I thought we could do something more elevated and cinematic and really make this a character-driven piece about [Ann], with true crime elements,” Fuller told Ars.

There’s no doubt that the public has a rather morbid fascination with serial killers, and Burgess certainly has had concerns about the way media coverage and Hollywood films have turned murderers into celebrities. “Despite how obviously horrible these killers were, despite their utter brutality and the pain they inflicted upon their victims, they’d somehow become romanticized,” Burgess wrote in her memoir, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. “All the inconvenient details that interfered with this narrative—the loss of life, issues of mental health, and the victims themselves—were simply ignored.”

Mastermind.” height=”429″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mastermind6-640×429.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A re-creation of Dr. Ann Burgess listening to taped interviews of serial killers in Mastermind.

YouTube/Hulu

That said, it’s not like anyone who finds the twisted psychology of serial killers, or true crime in general, fascinating is a sociopath or murderer in the making. “I think we all grapple with light and dark and how we see it in the world,” said Fuller. “There’s an inherent fascination with what makes someone who they are, with human behavior. And if you’re interested in human behavior, a serial killer exhibits some of the more fascinating behavior that exists. Trying to grasp the darkest of the dark and understand it is a way to ensure we never become it.”

“I think it’s a human factor,” Burgess said. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. There is a fascination to try to understand why people commit these horrifying crimes. How can people do these things? But I also think people like to play detective a little bit. I think that’s normal. You don’t want to be fooled; you don’t want to become a victim. So what can you learn to avoid it?”

For Burgess, it has always been about the victims. She co-founded one of the first crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital in the 1970s with Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. The duo conducted research on the emotional and traumatic effects of sexual violence, interviewing nearly 150 rape victims in the process. They were the first to realize that rape was about power and control rather than sex, and coined the term “rape trauma syndrome” to describe the psychological after-effects.

(WARNING: Some graphic details about violent crimes below.)

Dr. Ann Burgess research helped legitimize the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit. — Enlarge / Dr. Ann Burgess research helped legitimize the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit.

Hulu

Their work caught the attention of Roy Hazelwood of the FBI, who invited Burgess to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to give lectures to agents in the fledgling Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) on victimology and violent sex crimes. Thus began a decades-long collaboration that established criminal profiling as a legitimate practice in law enforcement.

Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers Read More »

Author name: Mike M.