Tag: policy

Stockholm Rent Control

Dear Seattle, I am writing to you because I heard that you are looking at rent control. Seattle, you need to ask your citizens this: How would citizens like it if they walked into a rental agency and the agent told them to register and come back in 10 years? I’m not joking. The image above is a scan of a booklet sent to a rental applicant by Stockholm City Council’s rental housing service. See those numbers on the map? That’s the waiting time for an apartment in years. Yes, years. Look at the inner city – people are waiting for 10-20 years to get a rental apartment, and around 7-8 years in my suburbs.

AI Ethics

I looked a bit at ethics in neural network science/engineering. As I see it, there are 3 categories of ethical issues specific to the topic rather than being general professional ethics issues:

  • Issues surrounding applications such as privacy, big data, surveillance, killer robots etc.
  • Machine learning allows machines to learn the wrong things.
  • Machines as moral agents or patients.

The first category is important, but I leave that for others to discuss. It is not necessarily linked to neural networks per se, anyway. It is about responsibility for technology and what one works on.

$5.3T Energy Subsidy waste

Subsidies for coal, oil and natural gas were $5.3T worldwide in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP). Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%. China was the biggest subsidizer ($1.8T), followed by the United States ($0.6T), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3T). Eliminating subsidies would have reduced global CO2 emissions by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2% of global GDP. The figure likely exceeds government health spending across the world, estimated by the World Health Organization at 6% of global GDP, but for the different year of 2013. They correspond to one of the largest negative externality ever estimated.

Bioethics will kill us all

We have ideological biases that say, “we shouldn’t be meddling with nature” In China, 95% of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference

As of 2021-07-01, things are even worse:

Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still 100K of lives.)

1DaySooner wrote a letter. The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. 2 of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed. 15 Nobelists signed. 10s of philosophers who otherwise agree on extremely little signed. But they’re unethical.

Rarely do I so strongly feel the boot of others on my neck, and humanity’s neck.

The one distinctively courageous thing about the UK – the human challenge trials which got 40K volunteers – actually eventually started!.. In January 2021, with n=90.

evil Homeowner subsidies

this is really dumb economic policy, and is the cause for the inefficient over-investment in housing:

Less developed countries have consistently higher levels of homeownership, while more advanced nations combine higher levels of economic development with substantially lower levels of homeownership. The US spends $46b on affordable housing, but $195b-$600b in subsidies to wealthy and middle class homeowners via tax deductions for mortgage interest or the non-taxation of imputed rent

the absurd housing fetish continues

I’m not sure I understand the proposal, but here is what the NYT says: The Senate voted to expand the economic stimulus package with a tax credit for homebuyers of up to $15k, a provision championed by Republicans as addressing a root cause of the recession. Like Arnold Kling, I wish to shift the economy out of housing, not into it again. I also believe that the supply of homes is relatively elastic right now. The tax credit will subsidize the new buyers without propping up the price of homes. Demand will go up, supply will go up, price will stay more or less on the same trajectory, and banks won’t be any healthier. The subsidy goes to new home buyers and why should we be helping them above all others?

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

zero-knowledge proofs are one of the most powerful tools cryptographers have ever devised. But unfortunately they’re also relatively poorly understood. In this series of posts I’m going try to give a (mostly) non-mathematical description of what ZK proofs are, and what makes them so special. In this post and the next I’ll talk about some of the ZK protocols we actually use.

2016-09-20: how do you inspect nuclear weapons without learning the secrets of their design? enter zero knowledge proofs.

Destroy Red Cross

time to shut these clowns down. if you’re donating to the red cross, you might as well burn your money, for all the good that does.

IN 2012, 2 MASSIVE STORMS pounded the United States, leaving 100Ks of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks.

Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent $100Ms to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job.

They were wrong.

2015-06-03: the red cross is an utter failure and is giving nonprofits a bad name.

many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

why you shouldn’t donate to the red cross

the best charities are 100s of times more effective at improving lives than merely “good” charities

Cafeteria Corruption

The average school-nutrition director is not unlike the chief executive of a medium-size catering business, but with a school for a landlord and a menu regulated by the government. With lower subsidies, the lunch ladies needed cheaper calories, and they turned to the increasingly efficient processed-food industry to find them. School cafeterias also began to rely more on revenue from so-called competitive foods — snacks and lunches that are not regulated by federal guidelines and “compete” with the regular school lunch on cafeteria à la carte lines.