Sam Alcorn

Watching “My Dinner with André” right now. I don’t know how I’ve never seen it before, having been a theater major in college in the northeast and so on.

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Calling taxes on building housing “inclusionary” is straight-up Orwellian Double-Speak. The effects are demonstrable enhancement of exclusion, by increasing costs for everyone, especially those least able to pay for it. Always have been, always will be. This has been realized for at least 50 years.

Call me old-fashioned, but having any tattoo at all counts as a mark against a candidate for high office. But a fucking Nazi tattoo? Are you fucking kidding me? And once people discover it, you cover it up with a symbol from Norse mythology? JFC. What kind of upside-down world are we living in?

All cotton. Available in a wide range of colors and sizes. Order now! It’s the perfect gift for the Never-Trumper in your life.

New shirt: MAGA = RINO
Remember when right-wing candidates used to disparage their opponents by claiming they were Republicans In Name Only? I don’t know how anyone can think the MAGA Party has any relation to the party of Lincoln besides its name.

voiceofdissentwear.etsy.com/listing/4392...

If something could make less than no sense, that’s it. Obviously nobody thought that one through.

The language as passed would seem to indicate that one has to calculate the number of “phantom” parking spaces that would be required absent AB 2097, and then provide tons of EV charging spaces (which emphatically are NOT parking spaces) and accessible parking spaces, even if no parking is provided.

I remember when the bill was moving through the legislature, I asked the author about where the part about accessible parking spaces came from, as it makes 0 sense to me (as an expert in these matters). She said it got added in one of the committees.

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Chapter 3 THE ECONOMICS OF BUILDING CODES AND STANDARDS Peter F. Colwell James B. Kau

@stephenjacobsmith.com, I wonder if you’ve read this book from 1982. Chapter 3 might be especially interesting to you:

archive.org/details/reso...

If you haven’t returned your ballot yet, do so now! I never thought I would say this, as I can’t stand the idea of Gerrymandering, but as long as it’s temporary, crack and pack that shit!

I think you’re right. CEQA wasn’t brought up in that Ellickson paper from 1981. It was focused on “inclusionary zoning,” and not impediments to housing more generally, so I suppose that does make sense.

There’s so much stuff in there that I thought were new findings from Evan Mast’s work, but this was written when I was in diapers. Before I could walk, even. I guess CEQA hadn’t been ruled to apply to private projects yet, but most other things seem exactly the same as now.

Legislators, judges, city councilors, et al: please read this in full. It was written in 1981, and if all the dollar amounts were adjusted for inflation and a few other changes, it reads like it could have been written yesterday.

openyls.law.yale.edu/server/api/c...

I’m reminded of local lobbying from a couple of years ago, where the concrete industry was trying to get the LA City Council to amend its Fire District to ensure wood buildings didn’t get built in as much of LA as possible.

I’ve long wondered about that too. If automotive designers/engineers wanted to use 12V things in EVs because they’re mass-produced for all vehicles, why would they not use a DC-DC voltage converter? I mean, I guess they do to charge the small battery, but why have that small one at all?

I got it to come up with a correct response, but only after pointing out why it was wrong. My fear is that people will take its certitude at face value without checking.

And also since the San Andreas fault goes pretty far east, as far as San Bernardino.

Agreed. Especially scary is what it’s doing to people who take its responses as definitive because it says them with such matter-of-fact conviction. People do that too: present untrue things with confidence. I didn’t mean to repeat that as fact so much as just to relay its response.

Kind of gives away the game there. It’s clearly the implementation of Lawrence Veiller’s comments to the NAHB in 1913, carried forward through the last century.

Far from the first time ChatGPT has confidently presented me with false information. Then, when you point it out, it’ll say, “you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Since the vast majority of California’s land area and population are east of the San Andreas Fault, the North American Plate easily contains most Californians — probably around two-thirds to three-quarters of the state’s population, depending on where you draw the exact fault-based boundary.”

Here’s how ChatGPT responded:

Why you should care about the national debt hitting $38 trillion As the government borrows more and more it makes it more expensive for U.S. consumers to borrow money for mortgages, cars, and more.

www.marketplace.org/story/2025/1...

@cselmendorf.bsky.social, are you familiar with this paper from 1981?
Makes me feel like my time machine must be broken.

openyls.law.yale.edu/server/api/c...

1981] INCLUSIONARY ZONING 1185 housing. As time passes, any individual housing init tends to filter downward in relative quality as its components depreciate, and as its layout and equipment become obsolete. The central point about filtering is this: low- and moderate-income families benefit from the construction of housing at all levels of quality, including the highest quality units that they could not conceivably afford to buy. The infusion of new lousing units into a regional market sets off a chain of noves that eventually tends to increase vacancy rates (or reduce prices) in the housing stock within the neans of low- and moderate-income families. Conse-quently, an excellent way—-perhaps even the best way-to improve the housing conditions of low- and moderate-income families is to increase the production of housing priced beyond their reach. 83 Although this trickle-down process does not occur instantaneously or without some friction, most housing economists agree that it does work in due time, 84 and that it has produced in the United States a housing stock that is the envy of the world. 8s

From several decades before the Mast paper we all like to cite:

When I read that, it threw me into a deep depression for the rest of the week, realizing that the exact same nonsensical arguments have been used against building housing since I was an infant.

which forms a chapter of _Resolving the Housing Crisis_, published the next year.

That’s what I thought when I found that last month. I was looking for a paper I’d read a few years ago about federal loan standards being the reason I’d only seen row houses in a few US cities, and that led me indirectly to this paper from 1981: openyls.law.yale.edu/server/api/c...