In The Guardian

This is spectacularly dysfunctional.

It’s not just historic flats from Britain’s postwar housebuilding boom that are being sold. Brand new council houses are also going under the hammer, almost as fast as they are being built. Design blog Dezeen revealed this month that seven of Norwich’s newest council homes are already in the process of being sold off, fewer than five years after they were completed. Other authorities have also been forced to sell their new council homes, such as Hackney in east London, which has already lost some of the social housing it built in Stoke Newington in 2018.

Despite right to buy being so destructive to public finances that it has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, Labour has announced it will keep Thatcher’s policy if it wins the next general election. This U-turn, backtracking on the party’s previous two manifestos, which promised to suspend sell-offs, has bitterly disappointed many local politicians who are desperate for change.

[…]

It’s hardly surprising most councils are not building many homes at all, given they are obliged to sell them at a discount almost as soon as the paint is dry. Would you spend hundreds of thousands of pounds building a new house to rent out if your tenants could force you to flog it to them for less than it cost to construct, just three years later? According to research from UCL, right to buy “remains the major disincentive to local authorities building more social rent homes” as the majority of councils rightly fear the policy will impact any new housing developments they undertake.

Instead, many authorities have launched schemes to cling on to as much of their remaining stock as possible. Some offer grants to incentivise council tenants to buy on the open market instead of via right to buy. Wandsworth, in south-west London, for instance, will chip in up to £120,000 towards helping their tenants purchase a home “within the UK or anywhere else in the world”, provided it is not a council property.

Paul Krugman apparently called this article "truly stupid". I can think of no higher praise.

President Truman was aware of the risks of ending price controls. On 30 October 1945, he warned that after the first world war, the US had “simply pulled off the few controls that had been established, and let nature take its course”. And he urged, “The result should stand as a lesson to all of us. A dizzy upward spiral of wages and the cost of living ended in the crash of 1920 – a crash that spread bankruptcy and foreclosure and unemployment throughout the Nation.” Nevertheless, price controls were pulled in 1946, again triggering inflation and a boom-bust cycle.

Today, there is once more a choice between tolerating the ongoing explosion of profits that drives up prices or tailored controls on carefully selected prices. Price controls would buy time to deal with bottlenecks that will continue as long as the pandemic prevails. Strategic price controls could also contribute to the monetary stability needed to mobilize public investments towards economic resilience, climate change mitigation and carbon-neutrality. The cost of waiting for inflation to go away is high.

Imagine designing one of our great cities from scratch. You would quickly discover that there is enough physical space for magnificent parks, playing fields, public swimming pools, urban nature reserves and allotments sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. Alternatively, you could designate the same space to a small proportion of its people – the richest citizens – who can afford large gardens, perhaps with their own swimming pools. The only way of securing space for both is to allow the suburbs to sprawl until the city becomes dysfunctional: impossible to supply with efficient services, lacking a sense of civic cohesion, and permanently snarled in traffic: Los Angeles for all.

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It is impossible to deliver a magnificent life for everyone by securing private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication. Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging most people’s quality of life.

Social indicator alert:

Women and children in New South Wales are being offered a car park to sleep in overnight as part of a pilot program aimed at keeping those experiencing homelessness and domestic violence safe.

The program is being run by an organisation in Newcastle, which has not disclosed its name, for fear of giving away the location. But Nova, the housing assistance service for women and children fleeing domestic violence, has been referring people to the pilot, which began in April and will run until June.

It comes as the NSW government announced on Friday it would develop an urgent emergency package within days to address the domestic violence crisis in the state.

The “Women in Cars” project, offers those staying in the car park food and drink, showers, toilets, laundry, kitchen facilities and access to television. Dogs are allowed and security and support is also on site.

In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word “delve” in responses. No individual use of the word can be definitive proof of AI involvement, but at scale it’s a different story. When half a percent of all articles on research site PubMed contain the word “delve” – 10 to 100 times more than did a few years ago – it’s hard to conclude anything other than an awful lot of medical researchers using the technology to, at best, augment their writing.

[…] 

Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

[…] 

I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.

And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a “bot” is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?

The participation of the internet companies in Prism will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the housing crisis could be solved without building any more homes? There would be no carbon emissions from construction sites, no green fields covered over, no householders upset at dwellings appearing in their view. Instead, rents would become affordable and decent homes available through changes in government policy. Such is the promise of Against Landlords by the author and barrister Nick Bano, a man who has been described as “Britain’s top Marxist housing lawyer”.

[…]

Bano would like to return, with due allowance for the fact that public housing of the time was sometimes less than perfect, to the 1970s to complete the project of driving “landlords and house-price speculators from the face of the earth”. He wants to reinstate rent controls and end no-fault evictions. It’s not entirely clear how people currently privately renting would then be housed (though it seems likely that they would become tenants of the state), or how the transition would be effected. He acknowledges that it might be a brutal process, given the dependency of the national economy on property values, perhaps involving a monumental property crash.

Bano’s arguments have already taken a bit of a battering, both from more centrist commentators and, doubtless to his delight, from the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs (“an edgy Maoist rebel”, it called him). These critics question, with some reason, his basis for saying that there are enough homes, in light of the fact that studies tend to show that Britain has the smallest new-build homes in Europe.

Even the Tories’ political education department had no real objection to the further reduction of the tiny private rented sector that existed in the 1970s. It wrote: “The accelerating decline of the privately rented sector is quite irreversible. The private landlord, as he exists now and has existed, will, within a generation, be almost as extinct as the dinosaur. There is nothing that can be done about this.” Conservatives in the 1970s merely sought to retain a handful of petty landlords, who ought to be entitled to a “fair return” if they let out a spare room or two, but they recognised that private renting tends to be an expensive, poor-quality and economically wasteful way of accommodating the population. The near-death of landlordism was one of the good news stories of the last century.

But the task that Thatcher and her successors set themselves was to undo that progress. The present system was designed, as the supreme court noted in a tenant’s 2016 human rights challenge, to ensure that “the letting of private property will again become an economic proposition”. It should have been obvious to everyone that a market that had achieved such positive effects by its collapse would produce equal and opposite consequences as it was reinflated.

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The yimby argument has always seemed flimsy. Its strange logic is that speculative developers would build homes in order to devalue them: that they would somehow act against their own interests by producing enough surplus homes to bring down the average price of land and housing. That would be surprisingly philanthropic behaviour.

When we complain, rightly, that cities such as Vienna are so much more livable than anywhere in Britain, we must acknowledge that landlordism is holding us back. Our insistence on pursuing policies that ensure that letting private property is an “economic proposition” not only drives up prices for would-be homeowners, but it stands in direct opposition to a programme of municipalising and decommodifying the homes that already exist. It also inflates land values, making new state-led building projects unfeasible. If we want a Viennese-style existence we can only achieve this, as we did 50 years ago, by driving the landlords out. Which is only fair: we have given them a very good innings.

Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines.

The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water.

The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author.

[…] 

He said that the results showed how the chemicals are powerful surfactants that concentrate on the surface of water, which helps explain why they move from the ocean to the air and atmosphere.

“We thought PFAS were going to go into the ocean and would disappear, but they cycle around and come back to land, and this could continue for a long time into the future,” he said.

The lives of detainees in Australia’s immigration detention centres are controlled by a secret rating system that is opaque and often riddled with errors, a Guardian investigation has found.

Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for factors such as escape or violence.

Detainees are also rated for an overall placement and escort risk – which may determine how they are treated while being transported, such as whether they are placed in handcuffs and where they stay inside a detention centre – but aren’t given the opportunity to challenge their rating, and typically are not even told it exists.

Immigration insiders, advocates and former detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar algorithmic tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.