Axioms are arbitrary, but must be agreed upon. It's a good point to make. Most ethical theories suffer from this meta-ethical problem that people really just won't agree on the axioms at the end of the day.
I mean let's not pretend that an app on the vast majority of peoples phones isn't a non-trivial vector for a zero-day attack.
If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.
Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.
i dont think fhats the right attack? the influential use of tiktok sould be sharing propaganda like the US did about the iraq war "we did it and the taiwanese people are excited to be liberated and reunified with china"
along with details about how the US has no defensive alliance with taiwan, and that the US does not need to intervene
I agree; the Tiktok algorithm would be used to subtly shift public opinion rather than something overt that burns their assets
This is a very realistic scenario. It doesn't mean people will suddenly see messages from the CCP on their screens. It could mean that posts that are critical of China are subtly downweighted (not banned, that would be too obvious and problematic) while those favorable towards China would be upweighted.
One thing the CCP is quite good at, from its long experience of always controlling the narrative in China, is this type of social media manipulation.
Ehh... I just disagree, even if I agree that my concern is wildly speculative. The isolationist right already has them covered there. If they can take the island, it's over. The US is not going to mount an invasion to save Taiwan, but will sell them weapons and help defend it.
If they can't take the island quickly, then maybe propaganda helps. I just think neutering or nuking everyone's phones for a few days is enough to genuinely split the attention of the American people. I think it's very safe to say our culture cares much more about it's butter than it's guns right now. We are decadent.
Yes, but my point is that TikTok is the most downloaded app in the United States, with apparently about 100 million installs. I'm just looking at reports on various sites.
Edit: other sites put YouTube, and others higher with TikTok at 40% of phones.
Nothing else controlled by the CCP looks like it even comes close to that in America.
When nerds like me were freaking out about climate change in 2003, what did people think we we’re talking about?!?
This is the exact scenario every single scientist I studied under openly discussed: probably not an extinction level event, but very, very expensive… Expensive to the point of it being cheaper in the long run to switch to renewables asap and hope for the best.
It’s like a 150M conservatives are all at once are saying “Wait a minute! We should do something about this!”
I literally just finished The Return two days ago, because the Blank Check Podcast, a very long form podcast about filmographies that I love, is covering Lynch.
The fact that The Return exists at all is amazing. The fact that it is not what you expected or wanted is really compelling. I absolutely loved it, even if I honestly have no idea what much of it means. Lynch's ability to use pacing -- lingering on a scene -- to cause unease is really something special.
I forget if this is something Lynch ever explicitly talked about, but the way he pulled this off was masterful. We’re in an era of franchises, sequels, and reboots, and all a lot of people wanted from The Return was more Dale Cooper being Dale Cooper. And we get what, maybe 15 minutes of that out of 15 hours? Yet it’s one of the best seasons of television I’ve ever seen.
I finished that show with such mixed emotions. Dismay at the lack of closure. Foolishness for ever thinking that a Lynch production would provide anything approaching closure. But after letting things settle, it was the perfect ending.
Watching it as it aired, fans of the show were SO mixed on their opinions. Many people were so upset that we get very little OG Dale Cooper and so little closure on so many things.
But it couldn't have gone any other way. The director that gave us "how's Annie? how's Annie?!" approaching it any other way would have not been genuine.
Eraserhead is borderline unwatchable. I love David Lynch, sort of, but without telling people that they're about to sit down and watch an hour-and-a-half of what is effectively an unwatchable piece of avant-garde cinema, then they're not going to be able to appreciate it.
There is nothing worse than getting excited to see a famous director's debut film, thinking you're going to have a good time, and then getting Eraserhead.
Just start with the pilot first -- as it is, the US pilot is basically a feature-length film (it runs 1h25m), and features enough of Lynch's trademark juxtaposition of horrible and mundane, and piles on the warmth and love for his characters that set his works apart. The European cut of the pilot adds a few minutes to the end and originally aired as a TV movie, and may be worth it if you're not otherwise hooked by the show, since it features a definitive ending as well as the first appearance of the show's trademark "red room" (footage from the sequence was included in a later episode in the US).
For me, the second step would either be The Elephant Man or Mulholland Dr. -- many of his works tackle very dark subject matter and include sexualized violence that can be downright disturbing to watch, but those two omit those elements. The Straight Story is much lighter, but largely lacks the surrealism Lynch is known for.
i tried watching Twin Peaks but my GenZ attention-hungy brain got really bored during the first episode. maybe i should give it another shot...
it's not like i'm not used to watching long movies and i would call myself some form of cinephile, but for some reason Twin Peaks felt unbelievably slow.
Eraserhead is highly watchable, but the first time you see it, it's best to just experience it without trying to process it too much. The nuance comes through on repeat viewings.
I rented Eraserhead and watched with some friends in college. I loved it, and so did the other Lynch fan. The other two, well, the first words spoken over the credits were “What the actual fuck was that?” Let’s just say it’s a divisive film.
"You can't build dense buildings on a mountain side"
What are you talking about?!? Downtown San Francisco has easily 4x the density of the area and it's built on mountains. Italy has dense villages on the sides of mountains all over the place. The idea that nobody can build density in 2025 because of some type of geological feature is just ridiculous, self-serving, nothing should change ever talk.
None of SF's dense apartment buildings are on hills, there is a good reason for that. You could terrace them like they do in Chongqing, but even in HK they tend to build in valleys between mountains except for luxury condo housing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Levels). Italy follows the same pattern as SF.
The point isn't that LA should force the area to be highrises. The point is that it should be legal, in a housing crisis, to increase the density of one of the lowest density neighborhoods in LA, which is already an incredibly low density city.
Literally just building row houses instead of SFH's would easily double the density. Three-unit row houses like in much of hilly SF would increase the density by 6x. The idea that we either need skyscrapers or SFH's is exactly the problem with our zoning laws. People should be able to build multi-unit when the demand is there.
The point was that the headline numbers don't really represent the amount of existing development that was destroyed. There's been lots of comparisons of the area to e.g. Manhattan which I think drives some of these think-pieces that act like there's a city-sized blank-canvas area to rebuild.
Could we have built on more of the burned-over mountainside? Maybe? I'm not sure SF is the right comparison though. Just the developed portion affected by the Palisades fire ranges from sea level to 450m elevation (over ~2.5mi straight-line distance); Temescal Peak is 650m. Most of developed peninsular SF is below 100m elevation. Its more like trying to densifiy Berkely or Pacifica or Carmel by building apartment buildings up their hills.
Doable? Probably. But why go to the trouble? Why take the fire and seismic risk of building dense housing on a mountainside when LA is spoiled for space in the basin and valley?
I'm just so sick and tired of ignorant people pretending that elevation, grade, or seismic matter at all when Japan exists, and builds high density housing, regularly in conditions that are vastly more inhospitable than coastal California. Pretending that suburban SFH are safer and more economical is just backward.
Building suburban SFHs requires everyone else to subsidize it's development, which is already happening exactly with the California FAIR Plan, which will now require literally everyone in the United States to pay more on their homeowners insurances policies to compensate for the predictable losses here, if the system isn't just federally bailed out directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_FAIR_Plan
> I'm just so sick and tired of ignorant people pretending that elevation, grade, or seismic matter at all
If they don't matter at all, there's tons of steep lots you can buy in the hills for like 10-50k with neighboring houses in the mid-to-high millions. People say they're unbuildable but apparently there's no such thing?
More seriously, I generally agree with most what you're saying. It should be easier to increase density in Los Angeles. By-right ADUs & JADUs, 4-unit TIC conversions, transit-oriented dvelopment are all a good start. We should do more. I shouldn't see anything but the back of apartment buildings from my window on the Expo line. 500k people should live in DTLA. Wilshire should look like Tokyo as soon as the train is done.
It's just weird to bring this energy to such a tragic situation. I don't think you could honestly say Altadena and the Palisades were the top two areas you'd focus on increasing density prior to Jan 7. They're no closer, nor easier to connect to transit, nor less fire-prone today than they were then. Most of the SFH that was destroyed in the Palisades were $3-9m[1] houses on 1/8th acre lots i.e. doing a pretty good job paying their own way on their infrastructure. The insurance stuff is going to be a pain, but I expect the prospective-risk model that was just authorized will force homeowners to bear more of their risk (and thereby apply some market forces to land-use decisions in the rebuild). And if the highest-GDP county in the highest-GDP state in the county needs, for once, a bit of Federal help it'd be hard to characterize that as unfair.
To focus on them as a place to enact specific parts of your urban-design vision (however good it is!) feels just as exploitive as 'investors' trying to buy lots cheaply to remake in the image _they_ prefer. These are our friends and neighbors, victims of a disaster. We should help them rebuild as quickly and prudently as possible, so we all can continue pulling the city toward a denser, safer, healthier future.
[1]: yes yes some prop 13 bases in there that I'm approximating away sue me.
>If they don't matter at all, there's tons of steep lots you can buy in the hills for like 10-50k with neighboring houses in the mid-to-high millions. People say they're unbuildable but apparently there's no such thing?
Except that it was literally illegal to build anything except SFH's, until the state removed R1 zoning, and even now, you can generally only get two units. They are "unbuildable" because the projects won't pencil, not because we don't have the engineering capabilities.
>It's just weird to bring this energy to such a tragic situation.
I will be completely honest, that the move to exempt wildfire victims from the regulations that anyone without an established home has to deal with is one of the most self-serving, "rules for thee but not for me," results I've seen in my lifetime.
The housing system in CA is broken, and instead of taking this as an opportunity to fix it, we just exempt the very people who benefit from the broken situation most. It's perfectly legal, but it's deeply inequitable.
Is that insensitive of me? I want these people to be able to rebuild as soon as possible, but pretending it's not wildly inequitable to not change the rules for everyone, is just myopia.
To double down on my admittedly unpopular concerns, by allowing people to rebuild without exemption but not fixing the underlying issues, we've opened the door for one of the biggest cases of moral hazard I've ever seen. Call me cynical, but if some disgruntled and unscrupulous homeowner is in a fight with the Coastal Commission, they now know that a wildfire will likely let them do what they want. It's not something 99.9% of folks would do, but the incentives are right there. Moral hazard should be taken seriously.
>Most of the SFH that was destroyed in the Palisades were $3-9m[1] houses on 1/8th acre lots i.e. doing a pretty good job paying their own way on their infrastructure.
As you know the vast majority of them are not paying property taxes at that rate, and never will.
Even SBF wouldn’t take that risk. Billions of dollars of personal liability against … the coastal commission lets you build 110% of the house you already had? Gotta do it a few times to get enough additional square footage to make it worthwhile…
The expedited permissions aren’t carte blanche, they’re pretty limited to rebuilding in place. Which I think you know since you’re agitating for looser regulations to allow the kind of development you’d prefer instead. Does the moral hazard work the other way? Should we worry about Strongtowns readers torching neighborhoods they want to rebuild?
> vast majority
Assessments are public record. Go poke around on the assessors map. There’s a fair share of low bases like my footnote said, but plenty of houses traded over the last 5-10 years, and plenty of people are paying 20-50k a year.
> take this opportunity
Again why does this disaster demand we also solve the housing crisis at the same time? We lost <1% of housing stock, it’s not like we’re rebuilding a leveled city. Work toward policies that that will incentivize the development you’d prefer in places it makes sense across the city, don’t be gross and seize on a crisis to try to impose the change you want.
> We lost <1% of housing stock, it’s not like we’re rebuilding a leveled city.
In a shortage, marginal consumers wipe out the consumer surplus. The new marginal consumer is now a multi-millionaire. Housing prices will spike dramatically in LA, in every neighborhood, for a decade.
That frictional pain is going to make the median person mad, and harm many peoples’ lives. We should talk again in a year when that new reality has settled in.
People eat maraschino cherries on ice cream sundaes in many countries where people claim the dye is banned, yet the cherries still contain the die. Maybe you should reevaluate your position.
The issue isn't that it's a health risk directly, it's just the result of some very reasonable principals. The "Delaney Clause" in the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is why it's getting banned. If something is known to cause cancer in animals, and it isn't necessary for the production of the food, then it shouldn't be included.
This is simply an application of the Precautionary Principle to things already associated with harm. Since we can't know all the goods or harms that can come from a substance, if something is known to cause potential harm and it's unnecessary, then we shouldn't consume it. The human body is an absurdly complex multi-variate system, and throwing a bunch of unnecessary random shit at it not a great idea in general, but is generally reasonable when we don't know whether it's producing harms or benefits or neither. However, when we know these additives can produce harms, and it is wildly impractical to do repeated, controlled longitudinal studies with large sample sizes on humans, all at various levels of exposure. So, since the substances are entirely unnecessary we might as well just avoid them unless they are essential to creating products.
I think the reason why Twitter is problematic isn't Musk, but is directly related to the structure of Twitter, thus Bluesky will eventually inherit exactly the same problems.
The underlying issue is that the structure of these services is short form and uni-directional. It's the internet's megaphone. This is great celebrities and media outlets, because it acts more as a megaphone than as a discussion forum. However, it is also great for low-information, bumper-sticker politics. The limited text entry deliberately disincentivizes nuance, thus will not be conducive to good-faith disagreement, and instead forces participants into a team sports style of arguing.
Perhaps there is a local minima where each political paradigm ends up on a different system, but social networks are natural monopolies, especially when they take the form of a megaphone. Thus, they should always try to reorganize themselves into a single provider, leading to the exact same conflict-prone environment that was created on Twitter. That Bluesky now feels peasant now is exactly that the user base is a self-selected group, as one of the platforms becomes dominant again, one can only assume the conflict-prone structure of the service will again assert itself.
For now, I'll stay on Reddit. Admittedly imperfect, but it's a place where nuance can and does show up.
No. The insurance companies won't cover these houses. They called it an "insurance crisis" and then made a state insurance system which will likely go bankrupt and have to be bailed out because of this fire:
The Santiago Canyon Fire in 1889 burned 10x what's currently burning in Pacific Palisades. Whether the fires are a coin-flip or a two-thirds probability, they're just going to happen.
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