That’s wasteful and dangerous

Harvest the beast for batteries and GPUs

Wait, did he figure out how security clearances work finally or did he just declare it on truth social?

Loose lips shouldn’t throw stones

Yup.

What do you mean? It’s a problem in your way, it takes how long it takes to get through it

I love the in between, where you have to actually adapt algorithms to useful situations

It’s like 2% of all the work I do, but those moments stick with me

Not even that… Kids do it IRL, because they hear it so much online

The core problem is - Teslas suck. They’re not the best, they’re not the cheapest, they’re not the safest or most reliable, and they don’t have the most features. There’s now electric cars out there that beat them in every category

That’s why I’d prefer starting at 3 - you can count as occupying 2 homes. Vacation house, house you’re trying to sell, condo for work - whatever. You get the one, past that I think you should have to figure something out

Why would they demolish homes? They’d have ways to make some money off them vs none - either they sell at a loss, take a tax write-off to surrender it, or they spend a significant fraction of the construction cost to tear it down to resell the land

It would definitely flip the current real estate development industry upside down, but I don’t see that as a big negative - being a landlord is still very profitable, so investors will still want to do it. But you can’t let units go empty, so they’ll be going for affordable or in demand housing rather than highest profit margin (aka McMansions)

Plus, it’s estimated that up to 1/3 of housing in the US is empty - the homes exist, they’re just sitting empty. I’m not sure if that counts stuff like air BNB or not either.

Eventually, these buildings are going to age out and need to be replaced, which my plan would throw some hiccups into - but that gives us time to fix things without forcing people to die on the streets

I have two problems with that - first, it doesn’t directly address empty homes. Housing could still be commoditized, they just pay a larger tax - if they can make property prices go up even faster it would eat the difference

Second, messaging - people will hear that and ask “what does that mean for my property tax?” endlessly. It doesn’t matter even if every individual would pay less, it’s too mathematical and people won’t do the math - they’ll listen to their favorite voices tell them what it means

The nice thing about my idea is that it would crash the housing market, but it would do it by playing on a sense of justice. How is someone going to stand up and say “why can’t I have a bunch of empty houses while we have homeless camps?”. Many people would resist, but they have to do it while sounding like entitled assholes

Also, I think it would work for foreign investors and shell companies perfectly - see, it doesn’t matter who owns the home, it matters who claims to live in it

A company doesn’t live in a house. A foreigner can’t say they’re living their 6 months of the year when they’re not in the country that long. A resident can claim a house and a secondary home (however that works out), but companies can’t claim any - they need actual people to live in the home or it’s vacant.

You put the fact the house is occupied first, then figure out who to tax and how much after - it doesn’t matter what shell games you play, the only way around that is straight up fraud

I like it in theory, but I have a couple issuesn.

I feel like it’s too complicated to make average people understand how it works, the idea is simple on the surface, but I think you’d have an endless parade of people asking “so if I have resources on my land, then what happens exactly?”

And in practice I feel like it would be a difficult transition from where we are. There’s a lot of opportunity to sabotage it if they can muddy the waters, and I feel like lobbyists would end up carving it up in a way that puts corporate profits first… It depends on assessing value of many things, and if you compromise that portion of the process it all falls apart. They might even sneak in easier eminent domain or something

Systems like this can’t be put in place through compromise, they have to be pure or it all falls apart. Maybe someday, I just don’t know how to get from here to there without a lot of middle stages

Nah, it sounds like they want to set up companies to fulfill the role of government procurement, which means they’ll be paying a big markup in the effort to save on wages

It’s one of those things that sound good in theory, like centralized planning. But it really is something that should be done by the government by people closely related to the result - there’s plenty of overhauls that could be made to improve procurement, but doing it big is a terrible idea

It’s so invasive too… Hearing kids self censor for advertisers, like “unalive” or “pew pew” is deeply disturbing

Our language is being artificially pushed towards Corpo-speak

I’m even ok with them owning a second house - but I think simple, easily understood answers are what’s called for in this day and age (nuance is so easily corrupted) so here’s my pitch

You have a second house? If it’s empty for 6 months, your taxes start going up. By a year it should be more then the house value rises, and it should just keep going up

Same with apartments and any property opening companies. Honestly, I’d be fine saying it all starts when your household owns at least three homes

You can surrender the house to the government to be rented at cost, maybe for a tax write-off for the first 10 years or something, otherwise it should just keep rising to insane levels.

I want people begging for renters. Developers should slash their prices to move units quickly - it’ll incentivize more affordable housing. Hell, I want landlords so desperate they pay people to inhabit them for a fixed time period.

And that’s why I like 3 - you had to move and your house isn’t selling? I don’t want to screw over individuals, there’s easier people to. You have a vacation house? Fine, but if you move you better get your empty house sold.

It’ll cause all kinds of problems, but we have empty homes and homeless people - that’s just uncivilized

I mean, yes and no. They just capture device info for a location, which can often be tied back to a person, but they just grab the info the phone sends to the tower. These days with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi you can even do something similar with just your phone

I don’t love that it exists for obvious reasons, but it’s a far cry from looking through your phone

I mean, the cell providers already sell your location info to anyone (including LEO, which is unconstitutional without a warrant as far as I’m concerned), as can Google, apple, and all sorts of apps - so this is a niche thing

FWIW, you can defeat that pretty simply… Just leave your phone behind and/or in a faraday pouch. No signal, no signature, no location data (from your phone at least). It won’t necessarily stop the NSA, but it’ll protect you in a protest where your just another face in the crowd

I mean it’s still insanely overvalued. It’s a car manufacturer priced like a tech giant - the stock is so high because of hopes they’ll be the ones to crack true full self driving, human level robotics, or produce batteries at some insane scale

They’re so behind and have lost so much trust on all those fronts that they’d need to actually do it for the stock to pay out. But they’re no longer the best cheap electric cars, their self driving features are some of the worst because they went all in on visual only, and there’s many companies worlds ahead of them on robotics automation. Even their safety is so bad countries easily banned them once musk’s reputation tanked

Plus, musk would have to divest or have his shares called in to fully separate him… Either of which means the stock tanks or already has tanked

Rather than locked down, they’re basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)

If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is “off”. If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can

But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you’re a terrorist or of strategic interest, there’s a lot they can do… But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.

But for everyone else, they’re not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that’s way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you’re a potential part of the network, and so you’ll be flagged as more interesting. I’ve heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally

But generally, they’re very protective of their tech. They don’t use the good stuff widely, because it’s not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won’t share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies

So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there’s no shot they’re sharing capabilities with border control agents

This is a fact I try to bring up often… It’s a truly disturbing piece of information

Also, they’re struggling to survive without enough supplies, they’re being cut off from the Internet and power in part so they can’t get their message to the world, and they couldn’t kick out Hamas if they wanted to - they have no organization or individual power to actually do that

So it’s worth considering…who is this message for?

I’d only argue that conspiracy is the wrong word… It’s more like speculation

But yeah… I’m sitting in horror right along with you