The Times says “median asking rent in Manhattan is $6,000” for a two-bedroom flat. If this is right, you’d need 6*12/.33 = $218,000 income to afford it, assuming ~1/3 of your income goes on rent, or $288,000 if you spent 1/4 on rent, the benchmark I used when I was young to figure affordability.
I’m consistently finding this woman’s analysis enlightening. See, for example, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-society-in. Not just the conclusions, but the methodology: observe something, propose one or two ideas about why it might be so, test with statistics. The application of the scientific method to policy issues.
In Venezuela the opposition surreptitiously got hold of all the tally sheets direct from polling places and uploaded them to a secure central store, so when the administration claimed victory they could produce the evidence of that claim’s falsehood. Perhaps this is a mechanism that we should consider this November?
https://eraldkolasi.substack.com/p/the-global-energy-and-emissions-footprint
Trying to find realistic estimation of energy and water usage for AI. I’ve read water estimates from “less than most agriculture” to “more than a city”, and similarly wide estimates of electricity consumption and waste heat/emissions. This paper is one data point that purports to be more accurate, although as with most others the text is cloaked in hyperbole.
Not sure what’s real here, but want to set a marker on the more extreme position.
Note that some analysts also posit that, since the chips involved have a useful life of months before being hopelessly obsolete and requiring replacement, it’s categorically impossible for the industry to make money on scaling up (https://share.google/TCs1bLRPT2T6G6rPw)
https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperature-zero-for-culture-why
Why everything is becoming bland. I get this when playing music on Tidal; each new selection it makes eventually ends up in Pachelbels Canon or some other old chestnut, regardless of where I start: Brahms string quartets, 20th century experimental vocal music, …. She looks at three different systems: shopping streets in London, lyrics in music, movies people watch, and draws the threads together as a failure of exploration of a space vs exploitation of the space, resulting in convergence of local minima rather than an explosion of personalization options. The solution, she posits, is finding a threshold of variance that allows such systems to climb away from local minima, a value she finds is around 5%. As she says, this won’t work in a market, because it effectively requires a business to propose one twentieth of its offerings not knowing whether or not they’ll be leaving money on the table, a hard sell for a successful business. So she returns to regulatory intervention in the markets.
When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.
This guy sprays out memorable text like a garden hose.
Doctorow has a spiel (https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/23/drop-a-dime/) in the middle of a discussion where he talks about carbon credits, and points to a website that compares them to theoretical murder credits:
The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff
The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.
Except, for many, crime and punishment == appropriate pricing of actions. So unless the cost is high enough, the action is do-able (gangland murders, for example, or corporate pollution). “Crime” => morally sanctioned by the society you’re in, and unless the ethical and moral aspect is part of the analysis crime devolves into market incentives, no?