Controversial opinion I know, but the Netflix live action Cowboy Bebop is better than the animated series and it's a travesty that there's only 1 season.

She laughed at me and said I should post that on social media, so here it is.

It's not really always that easy of course and I don't always get it right. But if I can't manage to write woman as people instead of accessories I've got no business calling myself a writer.

I read an in-progress chapter to my wife tonight focused on one of my female main characters wishing that her world was different than it is. Afterwards, my wife commented that I'm doing a good job writing women.
I said "It's easy, I just think about what it's like to be constantly under-estimated"

I was there with my kids. Great event!

The national rental market is irrelevant to the argument. Stop trying to move goalposts.

0.3% of properties is not the same as 0.3% of rental units. Obviously.

Large properties often have many apartments and most properties are not rentals. Just one company - Veritas - controlled 6500 units just in SF as of 2024. Ballast owns even more than that now, it's unclear how many.

These 12 secret power players are shaping the Bay Area housing market These companies control broad swaths of the S.F. Bay Area’s rental real estate — home to tens of thousands of families in the region’s nine counties.

Argue with the Chronicle. www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...

In SF in particular, Veritas was the largest single land owner until 2024 with over 6,500 units owned. They fell to second place that year after Brookfield bought over 2,000 units from them.

All it takes is a couple of those mega landlords to pull units off the market and collude on prices.

12 mega landlords own majority of the San Francisco Bay Area Here's who you can blame for gentrification in the San Francisco Bay

Nationally we don't. But it doesn't take a huge amount of market share to begin distorting markets and in specific urban areas like SF where ownership and/or management is relatively consolidated, bad actors can have outsized impacts.

To give a concrete example....

Capitalists in every industry collude to fix prices constantly and big companies buy little ones to eliminate competition all the time. The end state of any unregulated market is monopoly and the destruction of the market.

The "market price" is what the oligarchs say it is.

The only way to avoid this is for people incorporating AI into products to include meaningful verification and review of the accuracy of generated content as part of their UX. And if it doesn't save time after that review step, it's the wrong tool for the job.

Police Facial Recognition Technology Can't Tell Black People Apart AI-powered facial recognition will lead to increased racial profiling

For business, for science, for government, this is potentially catastrophic. And that's before we get into the harms of using such systems in policing or war! We KNOW existing AI systems have trouble differentiating people of color's faces, for example.

Now maybe self driving cars and AI will get better over time, But the current AI bubble is not waiting for that to happen. Instead, companies are racing to replace as many humans as possible as fast as possible & destroying safeguards that would have kept humans accurate instead of adapting them.

Self-Driving Car Statistics | NST Law With driving technologies advancing, NST Law analyzes statistics on the current state of autonomous vehicle accidents.

It's the same impulse as self-driving cars - replace error prone humans with cold calculating objective machines. But AI hallucinates and gets things wrong all the time, and self driving cars crash (after decades of investment) still crash more than TWICE as often as humans.

I believe the issue is cultural - there is a trope in scifi and popular culture, repeated for decades now, about how computers are entirely logical and make fewer errors than humans. And that's nice for fiction, but it's just not true in the real world.

Analytical AI that is not subjected to rigorous scrutiny - the way a human would be scrutinized - is wildly dangerous to the health of information systems.

This isn't isolated. I've seen a number of AI products lately that do not even include a way for the end user to correct the AI's mistakes!

One of the big problems / risk points with AI is that people inside the AI bubble assume what comes out of the machine is correct - all evidence to the contrary.

When incorrect data gets backed into products without adequate human review, bad things happen.

SF is not "the bay area in general." I said SF.

I watched it happen in SF after the dot com bubble burst and again after 2008 housing crash. They took units off the market & kept them empty. It was widely reported at the time.

Note that most current articles on this issue talk about the Bay Area as a whole, but SF is not SJ or Oakland or Fremont

San Francisco is a clear case study in this. A small number of companies own most of the housing stock and have repeatedly reacted to economic downturns by taking units off the market and keeping them empty to keep prices on the rest of their portfolios high.

One thing to keep in mind is that cost isn't just a function of supply vs demand, especially in urban areas. Markets are wildly distorted by the actions of actors that own large real estate portfolios. People who see housing as investment want high prices and actively work to drive up prices.

It's about time! All governments should be on open source anyway as a matter of national security.

My only comment on #Swalwell is that it's no surprise that a rapist would so adamantly oppose gun rights.

Good riddance! Expell him from Congress if he won't resign.

If you think you're part of the "resistance" to fascism and also want to disarm the working class, you're actually a collaborator and need to either come to terms with that fact or change your stance.

All I want for California governor is someone who (a) supports ALL TEN amendments in the Bill of Rights and (b) will fight for working class people to be able to afford to live here.

So basically I don't have a candidate I can support. Yet again.

I wrote and posted this to Instagram a couple of days ago and it became my most-read poem ever. I’m honored I get to feel big feelings alongside you all. I’m posting it here too and want to use this space more consistently. Hello friends ❤️

People seem to think that good writing is subjective and, ok, maybe it is a bit. But also a lot of the beatselling authors whose books I have picked up recently are objectively terrible. I feel like algorithm-drivem popularity is driving a massive dumbing down of literature.

A photo of a cat in a bookstore and text that reads worker co-op startup webinar, first wednesdays monthly at 3pm eastern time usworker.coop/calendar

Are you an entrepreneur who wants to make a long-lasting difference in your community?

Bring your co-founders & friends to our #WorkerCoop Start Up webinar, and we'll walk you through different co-op models & how to get started successfully

info.usworker.coop/civicrm/even...

Mood.

Insert rant about how wildly stupid rhe 2 party system is and how we should have proportional representation. In a functional multi party democracy none of these people would be front runners.