Aren't you just describing "the projects"[1]? Is that a better outcome?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing_in_the_Unit...

They create a strong incentive to keep a flat indefinitely. It's not unheard of for a person to continue renting a rent frozen apartment after they buy a house because the rent is so cheap - effectively it's a second home.

There's also plenty of corruption. "Knowing a guy" is one of the best ways to get a rent controlled unit since the wait time can be years.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024...

How are they undeniable? They're very deniable. One example is the (seemingly) increasing maintenance costs for AI-generated code[1]. Another is the cost incurred by everybody reading AI slop instead of actual communication.

I don't have hard data as to whether these cancel out the benefits, but it's not as rosy as some seem to think.

[1] After years of people understanding that LOC is not only a poor productivity metric but also a negative indicator of code quality (shorter code for the same thing is better), we now have people touting how many LOC their LLM agent is generating. It's like everyone forgot what LOC actually represents and what it means for long term maintenance costs.

Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].

Some choice exerpts:

> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.

> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.

> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”

> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”

[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/inside-the-anti-tech-rebe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojena

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia

I hate it and I hate that this is what became popular instead of what the internet was in its heyday. It's sad to see.

I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".

> Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.

Great! This article is all good news, it seems.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-venture-cap...

[2] https://thehub.ca/2025/12/08/canada-added-950000-government-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_Program

> Estimates have placed Alberta's losses between $50 billion and $100 billion because of the NEP.[32][33] Alberta still initially enjoyed an economic surplus due to high oil prices, but the surplus was heavily reduced by the NEP, which, in turn, stymied many of Lougheed's policies for economic diversification to reduce Alberta's dependence on the cyclical energy industry, such as the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, and also left the province with an infrastructure deficit. In particular, the Alberta Heritage Fund was meant to save as much of the earnings during high oil prices to act as a "rainy day" cushion if oil prices collapsed because of the cyclical nature of the oil and gas industry.

[1] https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/apple-on-bill-c-22-this-...

[2] https://www.bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-th...