Linkage

In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)

The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.

One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.

“Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse,” announced the headline of the top story on the WSJ website on Monday. The article illustrated “Austin’s recent downswing” and its “glut of luxury apartment buildings” with photographs of abandoned downtown plazas, as if the fastest-growing city of the 2010s had been suddenly hollowed out by a plague and left to zombies and tumbleweeds.

[…]

If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset.

This magical thinking isn’t just a phenomenon of real-estate reporting. It is deeply rooted even in the highest echelons of policy making.

The poll, surveying registered voters in South Carolina, posed the question: "If parents are already involved in the decision-making process, do you believe the government should or should not intervene in LGBTQ gender-affirming health care decisions concerning individuals under the age of 18?" It found that 71% of the state's registered voters believe the government should not intervene in such gender-affirming health care decisions. Opposition to government intervention was substantial across all political affiliations: 67% of Republicans, 70% of independents, and 80% of Democrats were opposed.

A few years back, a writer in a developing country started doing contract work for a company called AdVon Commerce, getting a few pennies per word to write online product reviews.

But the writer — who like other AdVon sources interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity — recalls that the gig's responsibilities soon shifted. Instead of writing, they were now tasked with polishing drafts generated using an AI system the company was developing, internally dubbed MEL.

"They started using AI for content generation," the former AdVon worker told us, "and paid even less than what they were paying before."

The former writer was asked to leave detailed notes on MEL's work — feedback they believe was used to fine-tune the AI which would eventually replace their role entirely.

The situation continued until MEL "got trained enough to write on its own," they said. "Soon after, we were released from our positions as writers."

The UN agency's annual State of the Global Climate report confirmed it wasn't just the hottest year on record, ocean heat reached its highest level since records began, global mean sea level also reached a record high and Antarctic sea ice reached a record low.

The impacts of extreme weather and climate events up-ended life for millions of people across the world and inflicted billions of dollars in economic losses, according to the WMO.

"Extreme climate conditions exacerbated humanitarian crises, with millions experiencing acute food insecurity and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes," WMO Secretary General Professor Celeste Saulo said.

"Heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires and intense tropical cyclones wreaked havoc on every continent and caused huge socio-economic losses." 

A good explainer:

In 2017, the body responsible for standardizing web browser technologies, W3C, introduced Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—thus bringing with it the end of competitive indie web browsers.

No longer is it possible to build your own web browser capable of consuming some of the most popular content on the web. Websites like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and others require copyright content protection which is only accessible through browser vendors who have license agreements with large corporations.

[…]

These roadblocks were primarily introduced to appease the media industry.

[…]

Since the introduction of EME to web standards, the ability for new browsers to compete has become restricted by gatekeepers, which goes against the promises of the platform.

User agents are pieces of software that represent the user, a natural person, in their digital interactions. Examples include Web browsers, operating systems, single-sign-on systems, or voice assistants. User agents hold, due to the role they play in the digital ecosystem, a strategic position. They can be arbiters of structural power. The overwhelming majority of the data that is collected about people, particularly that which is collected passively, is collected through user agents, at times with their explicit support or at least by their leave. I propose to lean on this strategic function that user agents hold to develop a regime of fiduciary duties for them that is relatively limited in the number of actors that it affects yet has the means to significantly increase the power of users in their relationships with online platforms. The limited, tractable scope of software user agency as a fiduciary relationship provides effective structural leverage in righting the balance of power between individuals and tech companies. 

The Internet, itself in constant innovation since its inception, has historically supported unprecedented innovation across the globe, driving considerable growth in technology and commerce.This paper reviews a set of properties set out by Internet experts in 2012, which aimed to capture the unvarying properties that defined the Internet (“the Invariants”).

[…] 

An early realization was that that the Invariants not only capture an ideal form of the Internet, they describe a generative platform — a platform capable of continuous growth and fostering the expansive development of new things upon itself.

[…]

Notably, several technologies being developed and deployed in today’s Internet don’t conform to those Invariants, and thus are not laying the foundation for similar innovations in the future. With the Invariants in hand, however, we have a tool to evaluate the state of the Internet and any proposed changes that would impact it, and support discussion between and among technologists and policy makers to help ensure that future choices foster a better Internet, aligned with the ideal expressed in the Internet Invariants.

This is “climate change” of the Internet ecosystem: absent concrete action to address the departure of the application infrastructure of the Internet from the ideal outlined in the Invariants, the experience of the Internet going forward will not feature such a rich diversity of solutions to the needs of the world’s population.

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

[…]

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? 

California State Assembly member Lee is one of a small number of voices leading calls for a new social-housing programme to alleviate America's severe housing-affordability problems.

[…]

"This idea that the government shouldn't be doing certain things is one of these weird, subconscious beliefs that a lot of Americans have," he continued.

"If we tried to create public libraries, public schools, and social security today, it would probably be labelled as some great Marxist scheme."

[…]

"I think more people are coming around to the idea that the current system of housing we have is fundamentally broken," Lee said.

"Anyone who says that just doing a little bit of that and a little bit of this fix to it is, I think, completely wrong."

Lee is doubtful that it will be possible to increase housing supply sufficiently to improve affordability through the market alone – where the profit motive means there is little incentive to bring rents and house prices down.

"The free market is working as intended today, where sky-high rent prices and housing prices are driving people away from their home communities – that's the market at work," he said.

"Without an intervention of the public sector, which we want through social housing, there cannot be a solution entirely to the housing crisis."

 A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity.

“Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students.

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

“Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.”

One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”