Normal economic policy hasn’t really been true since the 2007 financial crisis. Rates were kept at historically low rates because growth was anemic and everyone had seen Japan fail to pump up its economy. To some degree there was also thinking that countries in this situation should provoke inflation to get the growth flywheel growing again; at least the fixes to inflation are known vs deflation.

Well, it turns out that we did it with the COVID economic shocks, and for a while there was talk of a “soft landing” but that’s all but disappeared from the conversation.

I don't think it's correct to say "rates were kept low" as if the Fed had a choice in the matter. All the Fed can really do is respond to market conditions. It can be slow to react, and it could in theory be wrong about the market in a way that causes economic damage (in one direction or the other), but it can't really do better than the implied market rate.

Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.

That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.

This should not have been a surprise.

[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.

Well also at some point QE would have to unwind, and no one had ever attempted an unwinding of such loose balance sheets before

I agree, 2007 definitely changed a lot of "assumptions". But there were no "every main bankman stating out loud that aight, we're playing a new game now". Maybe 2007 started it, but 2020s, I'd say, is where everyone publicly acknowledged it?

> everyone had seen Japan fail to pump up its economy

Agreed about this, but I feel like everyone is watching Japan right now again. And I fear people will make wrong assumptions, given how its "economy is growing right now".

I'll posit that the 'crypto/blockchain-whatever' caused some curiosity in the market (both before and during COVID), COVID messed up everyone's plans for the recovery (recoveries take a long time without stuff like WW2 that cause other economical imbalances) and other political factors played in.

Not saying you're wrong about anything you're saying, to be clear.

Even songs we don't like have a lot of 'poetry' in their notes...

No, out of 2007 we had stuff like negative interest rates and MMT and helicopter money.

also, the part that is making lenders and such nervous is that they like to be paid on time on a schedule, and it's unclear how they will keep doing so without growing an increasingly large amount of debt.

One of these companies wanted an IPO valuing them at over $50B. To put in perspective what kind of crazy number that is, the entirety of Visa raised a valuation of $34B; and this company's parent, Softbank, had an IPO valuation of $64B.

This just doesn't pass the smell test.

I mean really we need to address the root cause which is that OpenAI, even with what is by all accounts massively negligent, will face little to no repercussions from the event; definitely not under current regulators, and probably not anything satisfactory through the legal system.

Compare this to, say, Boeing and the 737MAX fiasco; from the outside looking in, Silicon Valley has been pretty cavalier about liability and negligence, and the rest of the US is fast losing patience with that fact.

The problem is that we’ve wound up in an unhappy place due to the weird perverse incentives of ideology. Taking homeless people off the street, whether to a hospital or jail, costs a lot of money; so we lack something to do in a climate where a good chunk of the populace is rabidly against paying more money for anything.

LA collectively spends about $3 billion on various things for homeless people, who number around 70-80,000. That’s $40,000 per person per year.

What level of spending would you like to see?

The problem is to stop spending money we need to spend some money to set up something like a mental institution.

Prison, which was being used for that purpose, costs California $127k a year https://www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

Just the bed at a Californian state hospital for mental health treatment costs at minimum $150k+ a year. https://www.dsh.ca.gov/Hospitals/

And both systems are already overcapacity

There isn’t currently the political will to start putting people in institutions against their will.

I think you're right that people are against these things, but wrong about the reasons.

Taking homeless people to jail because they're homeless just seems stupid and pointless, not to mention harmful to the person going to jail.

Shelters have the issue where people don't want them near where they live (for often justifiable reasons) but obviously they have to go somewhere.

I say this because this country has a history of dismantling systems and then not paying for replacements.

We did it with state institutions, which were supposed to be replaced by community mental health centers but that never happened. And then we did it with jail overcrowding reduction, where we didn’t set up adequate recidivism reduction programs.

Before the recent pivot to tough on crime, a lot of sentencing reform was started by Republican led states, simply because jail costs a lot of money.

Don't we already have rehabilitation centers? I definitely think that you have to take homeless people being a nuisance off the streets against their will.

There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.

But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?

Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.

It's hard to build something new based on empirical evidence because the thing you are building might be such a radical departure from previous experience the data you have simply does not apply.

The problem is that a core group of modernists kept doggedly insisting on it after it was proven to not work.

For example, we know now that pedestrian skyways only work in limited contexts and have plenty of downsides; or that a large, concrete windswept plaza is pretty to look at but pretty antisocial and unusable space, and yet you still see this kind of thing in the latest from say Zaha Hadid et al.

It’s why a next wave of architects and planners have coined terms like “bird-shit architecture” that only looks good completely devoid of context and landed from the sky.

Also there is survivorship bias.

The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.

I had to scroll way too far to find this comment!

All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.

But how would you enforce that, particularly against bad actors in countries that care less about enforcing laws and norms?

Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.

This is also solvable through regulation though.

For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.

IIRC this dilemma was one of the things that was driving the Google antitrust case that unfortunately will not result in divorcing search from ads.