SF to Establish Office of Emerging Technology

Nobody is against housing development in San Francisco? It is not really a controversial position that it is very difficult to build new housing supply. There have been numerous well studied articles on this fact and a variety of first hand accounts from real estate developers who have had enormous difficulty in building new housing in the bay area.

edit: candidates may run on new housing development as it easy an easy thing to say and run on. But when rubber meets the road, local planning boards and strict zoning requirements mean translate into orders of magnitude less development than people would like or the market would have.

there are both city wide studies and the specific examples like the infamous laundromat or garage-door based house that are deemed too historic or architecturally significant (standards that would not hold up else anywhere in the nation)

for info on the two examples, google "Largent House" or "SF Mission Laundromat redevelopment"

I agree with the goals of this directive, but it's written in a deliberately silly way. No non-fictional agency would put restrictions on increasing production or creating new technology. On the contrary, abolish the USPTO and let people invent all they want, but the new inventions can be used freely by anyone for the good of the country, too.

Preventing people like d'Anconia from shutting down their manufacturing sites seems reasonable in the abstract, but in a world where so much interesting technology is digital and therefore copiable, what's the need? If Steve Jobs wished to torpedo Apple, that's fine, we've got enough other OSes.

Moreover, it's quite clear that much of the interesting and productive technology of our generation has come from people with no profit motive. AT&T was legally forbidden from profiting from UNIX, so UNIX became a standard. Netscape failed to make money and became reborn as the donation-supported Firefox, which immediately became better than Netscape could have been. And so forth.

I sometimes watch SFGOVTV https://sfgovtv.org/

You can literally see the sausage being made.

You know what? These folks don't seem like mustache-twirling Machiavellian monsters to me. They seem like people just like you and me that are doing their best to manage a city. It's not easy.

We techno-elite have been shouting "Disruption!" in their faces for about two decades now, eh? So here's the counter-reaction, the pushback. If you don't like it, participate. Maybe I'll see you on SFGOVTV.

The actual function of China's special economic zones is control, not freedom.

Passing into one is identical to passing through an international checkpoint, with minor differences. When driving, the guards basically ignore white people and party members while non-party members have to pull over and go through full scanning and scrutiny to prove they are allowed to enter.

Once in the zone, setting up any kind of business that requires actual capital equipment is completely impossible for anyone who is not a party member.

Even for party members it is close to impossible. China is actually highly regional with provinces having a lot of power. You have to get permission from the province to do anything, and the local powerful elite will only permit those they can control to establish industry.

With this in place, they do not have to care about anyone outside of these zones, so they are free to enact whatever brutal policies they desire.

Special economic zones are only for powerful, rich, and well-connected. Everyone else loses.

This really fits in the greater scenario that:

Once an emerging technology has gotten popular enough (no longer limited to few inventors and early adoptors). You've got people that understand barely anything about it trying to get a slice of a pie. This can come in any directions, some of it as job applicants/VC management deals, some of it posing as regulatory bodies, and it happens both inside and outside of the company/circle that created tech.

Sometimes it works out as the new tech is competitive enough to absorb the cost of these overheads, other times it just sink with edge/non-contributing members sucking the blood out of it.