For your morning viewing pleasure: How Ireland & Scotland are ruining their housing markets (spoiler: by instituting rent control).

As bad as DC’s government is on crime, at least they know that they only way to combat homelessness and high rent is to increase supply. (↬Marginal Revolution)

One very good use case for ChatGPT is… actually chatting. Who knew?

I was waiting for someone at a restaurant and had 10 minutes by myself — a rarity these days. Instead of scrolling through one social network timeline or the other, I opened up the ChatGPT iPhone app, and learned that the only Leonardo painting in the Western hemisphere was right at my doorstep. Also learned that there are only 20 paintings by Leonardo and more than 300 by Rembrandt, and a few other tidbits.

Are any of them true? Well, trust but verify as they say, but why should I trust it any less than a random X account? Or worse yet, a non-random threadboy — now there’s a useful word I saw just recently — who posts unsourced graphs and opinions-as-facts.

Now sure, X and other social networks have upsides, like bonding with fellow humans over topics of joint interest. But these are for the most part shallow connections, empty calories for our socialite stomachs. A more stable and sustainable equilibrium for most people, certainly for me, could be real-life interactions for socializing and algorithms for tickling the mind without any pretense that we would be buddies. Social networks try to be both but are not great at either, the same way pickup trucks try to be both a car and a truck but are mostly gas-guzzling parking spot-hogging behemoths, and at the same time the most popular vehicles in the US. So, a perfect analogy.

From this perspective, ChatGPT’s forgetfulness is an excellent feature. It remembering prior conversations would bring it a step closer towards parasocializing, making it even worse than human social networks. I have no doubt that the feature is coming any month now, if it’s not already here. If and when it comes will the the point when X/Threads/Bluesky et al should sound the alarm — or introduce friendly algorithms of their own.

The DC Mayor is not looking good at all this week. Writing about the crime in DC, I may have hinted, several times, that it’s the District Council’s bad lawmaking which led to the great crime wave of 2023. Well, a pseudononymous but (a bit too) well-informed Substack writer has recently outlined why that just isn’t so: most of the responsibility falls on the executive branch, that is to say the Mayor and her office. Ineffective council members are but convenient scape goats. Go figure.

The Washington Post has a history of the Wizards' plan to move to Virginia, and no one looks good: the Wizards' owner Ted Leonsis is a billionaire whose feelings got hurt for not getting a fruit basket from the city, DC mayor Muriel Bowser and her office are slow on the uptake, loosing two birds in hand (the Wizards and the Caps) for one in the bush (the Commanders), DC council is values street busker’s “freedom of expression” to play music over an amplifier in the wee hours over noise complaints of businesses and residents. Only the Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin would seem to know what he was doing, but that is only because the article left out some major deficiencies of the proposed new site and of course without his pushing of the project none of this would have happened.

And all that drama for the second-worst team in the NBA this season. Sad.

It was a wet and cold Chinese/Lunar New Year parade yesterday, but great fun nevertheless. Happy New Year to those who celebrate!

The Capital Weather Gang is as good of a local weather forecasting service as it can get, but I don’t understand their daily digits — “a somewhat subjective rating of the day’s weather, on a scale of 0 to 10”. Yesterday was a beautiful winter day: crisp air, blue sky, snow still on the ground for children and adults to play with. Sure, it never went above 30°F but isn’t that why we have winter clothes?

Their rating? 3 out of 10. What a bunch of wusses.

❄️ After two snowless years, we now have our second snow day, almost back-to-back. With Monday’s MLK day and Wednesday’s delayed opening, did kids have had a grand total of 1.5 days of school this week.

The response in parents' chat groups: tears in pre-K, an equanimous thumb up in 6th grade.

❄️ There is Christmas and there are birthdays, but then there is finding out that tomorrow is a snow day and the joy that lights up children’s faces when you tell them is second to none.

The first snow of the year. Meager for now, but more is on the way tonight. The kids were ecstatic.

Always good to see a friend’s work out in the wild. This is Bump by Matt Wallace in the tweens section of Politics and Prose.