I searched one other comment of theirs in their history and see the same thing. On mobile so I can’t easily tell if this account is the bot account or if the ones on Reddit are.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47934437

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1sxzzop/comment/...

The Reddit comments are both older.

Karma-farming bot..?

The housing shortage has nothing to do with a lack of electrical engineers or plumbers. It’s entirely self inflicted and cheaper electricians will not change that.

More directly: I doubt there will be a meaningful increase in housing in states that have banned construction of new data centers (NY, Maine) than those where data centers are allowed to be built.

You don't work in construction do you?

Lack of skilled tradesmen is a widespread problem and a major source of project delay (on top of massively higher housing production costs).

I assume next comes the zoning-causes-all-shortages and if only we could fix zoning then we'd solve housing – a thesis for which there's zero evidence.

That "lack" of labor is the norm because construction is a boom-bust business and nobody wants to pay to retain talent and skills they aren't actively profiting off. And very few want to spend time training new people when they are currently earning 3x their normal rate working a boom cycle.

If the AI boom crashes, how many of these people will get laid off and unable to find comparable paying work for years afterward? Even if it picks up again 5 years later, many of those people have moved on to new careers. And the only way to get them back, even temporarily, is pay them way more than their current career to pay for their losses and hardships of quiting their current career path. So ultimately boils down to "pay people more" because you aren't just incentivizing people to work for you specifically during a boom cycle, you are also trying to poach workers out of other industries for a job they know is temporary.

Yes, the labor supply for skilled tradesmen is very inelastic. Which is one reason it sucks to have so much of it drawn into a probably-speculative boom.

> I dont know why apple, samsung and google are not getting it.

I know nothing about smart watches other than the fact that the Pebble company failed and that I see Fitbit/Apple Watch everywhere. I’m not convinced that Apple/Google don’t get it.

>The cynic in me thinks this will go down in history alongside asbestos, leaded gasoline/paint, and the opioid crisis.

Can you elaborate? Leaded gasoline is estimated to have contributed to the deaths of like tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Asbestos probably millions.

Why would high RAM prices be remembered alongside these events?

Sorry for the late reply, I regret the dramatic comparison to obvious physical harm. The argument is we tend to recognize industry-scale externalities after the fact, and that AI infrastructure costs are currently underpriced and borne by all, including non-participants. Gasoline with lead and asbestos both had great positive impact that we don't talk about anymore, because they are lessons in the negative side not being properly accounted for until much later.

Doesn’t that mean we have an insufficient number of cameras?

Or an insufficient number of AirTags installed in Grandma.

This is not the only possible outcome. Another approach would be not to offer software within the affected region. U.S. local news is often not available to European visitors now due to GDPR. Similarly, Canadian news outlets are not available on Facebook due to Bill C-18. If I was an indie game developer I would consider this approach and simply avoid selling within California.

Larger game studios would likely adjust as you say. However they too could adjust in such a way that they only offer subscriptions within California as that appears to exempt them from this rule. Many outcomes are possible beyond simply adjusting to the legislation in the way you are suggesting.

Lets skip California, the 5th biggest economy in the world.

Ok, then customers in California/EU would be at least aware of the deal they are getting and more ethical companies would have a competitive advantage. Sounds good.

> But if someone claims that the trend toward increasing AI capabilities will never reach some particular scary level, then the burden is on them to explain either:…

This is not the context in which I hear about sigmoids vs exponentials. I hear it in regards to “the singularity”, not that AI won’t reach some pre-specified level. You may get AGI, you aren’t getting a singularity.

Would you work for free?

Blendle, Scroll, Flattr and several others have attempted this. It turns out no consumer actually wants to do this, it’s primarily an idea that’s invoked on HackerNews to defend not subscribing to journalism while using ad blockers, it’s not a real business model.

How much do they charge per article? If it's above 10 cents or so, I can't imagine it being a reasonable price.

> it's very, very much more bad than it is good

Is it? I don’t have a clear picture in either direction. What does an environmental impact assessment for a housing project typically result in?

Well, I've witnessed this on dozens of houses in the town where my ex-wife grew up. The local river was slow-moving in a shallow river valley. Every spring, it would flood, and houses built within a half-mile of the main river would flood up to the second floor.

Would the environmental assessment help? I'd like to think so, but when I almost bought in the area, I discovered that the floodplain maps were "optimistic."

That's not what an environmental impact assessment is. Environmental impact assessments look at potential harms to the environment, not the property. It would look at if building a house would impact the wildlife, and sometimes other related phenomenon

Insurance solves this for you. You don't need government. I bet that town allowed those houses anyway, so zoning didn't prevent it.