https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/public/ recent bookmarks from jerryking 2026-01-21T17:53:10+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-the-tech-world-thinks-the-american-dream-is-dying-daf793dc?mod=wsjhp_columnists_pos_3 jerryking>the American dream.<< And everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side. It’s the kind of FOMO that on first blush seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief. But the idea’s mere existence helps explain some of the increasing class worries in California, where a growing movement to tax billionaires is roiling the Democratic Party, affordable housing is a real concern and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach. Yes, it smacks of sci-fi thinking. But in San Francisco it feels real. And it’s made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and warnings by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei about Great Depression-like worker displacement. “The transition will be bumpy,” Musk said this month on a podcast. “We’ll have radical change, social unrest and immense prosperity.” And that’s Musk’s best-case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats. What’s being talked about now—massive >>job loss<< to >>automation<< and the need for public safety nets, in the form of >>universal basic income<< — paints a dramatically different future. It’s still not clear there’s any appetite for so-called UBI, which runs counter to many Americans’ bedrock ideals of personal achievement. “I used to be really excited about UBI…but I think people really need agency; they need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go,” Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said last year when asked by a podcaster about how people will create wealth in the AI era. “If you just say, ‘OK, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets…a dividend from that,’ it’s not going to feel good, and I don’t think it actually would be good for people.” If money is out, scarce assets, like art, could become key. Musk has said as much himself. His vision for the future involves robots who handle physical tasks while humanity struggles to keep up with AI thinking, leading to what he calls “universal high income” and an era of abundance. “If you don’t have a scarcity of resources, it’s not clear what purpose money has,” he said at a conference last year. More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn’t even worry about saving for retirement, predicting AI will provide healthcare and entertainment. “It won’t matter,” he said of retirement savings. Bold statements from a guy who insisted on a $1 trillion pay package from Tesla, where he is CEO—which he has argued wasn’t about the money, but about maintaining control over the company from misguided activist investors. Still, it can look like the rich are trying to get richer. So maybe it’s not surprising the San Francisco tech community has been infused with a get-rich-now-or-die-trying vibe. Sheridan Clayborne, a young man working in the AI-startup scene, seemed to embody the current zeitgeist when he was quoted this past fall in the San Francisco Standard. “This is the last chance to build generational wealth,” the online news site quoted him saying. “You need to make money now, before you become a part of the permanent underclass.” It was a sentiment that would have felt at home a few years earlier during the meme-stock craze and YOLO investing approach. Weeks later, social-media posts on Facebook, X and LinkedIn began claiming Nvidia’s Jensen Huang had said something similar. The CEO, these breathless posts claimed, was warning “the period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for everyday people to build real wealth through technology.” Scary stuff, except Huang didn’t say it. Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology. “We’re going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today, that in the future are just not that valuable…because it’s automated,” Huang told Joe Rogan last month. It can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from an Iain Banks novel. And backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions, of reasons to hope their gambles aren’t just >>once-in-a-generation<< jackpots, but once in a human existence. Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, will soon go public, minting many more millionaires. After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about the wave of “mega” IPOs expected this year, local real-estate agent Rohin Dhar posted on X: “May I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this.” The tech entrepreneur, who was once part of Y Combinator years ago, told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom. Or, as he predicted last year, “the mother of all tech booms is coming.” Get some while you can. ]]> artificial_intelligence Elon_Musk generational_wealth Sam_Altman Silicon_Valley techno-pessimism tech_bros the_American_Dream automation FOMO job_loss once-in-a-generation San_Francisco universal_basic_income https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:15e6169c6c10/ 2026-01-01T18:44:41+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-food-more-expensive-becoming-ultraprocessed-garbage/ jerryking>ultraprocessed-food<< companies, alleging that they have saddled governments with excessive public-health costs. The case targets household names that include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo Inc.,and Kraft Heinz Co. and it cites that they comprise roughly 70% of the American food supply. The suit accuses **manufacturers** [i.e. CPG"] of knowingly selling products that harm consumers while marketing them as being “wholesome” or “convenient” in a violation of California’s public-nuisance and unfair-competition laws.[i.e. = "misleading"] It’s a novel premise, and the connective leap makes a lot of sense. These companies are reshaping what we eat through cheaper inputs sold at higher prices. >>Processed food<< is being optimized for margin and >>shelf stability<<, promoting >>addiction<< instead of >>nutrition<<. Experts say >>ultraprocessed foods<< are a major >>public health<< threat. Here’s how to protect yourself Perhaps the ubiquity of >>ultraprocessed food<< is ultimately a governance failure. We treat >>obesity<< and other metabolic diseases as personal >>moral failures<<; but they are a predictable result of market design. In Canada, our pushback on the degradation of our >>food system<< has been tepid, though a major new Canadian study shows that diets high in >>ultraprocessed foods<< are strongly linked to early indicators of serious health problems. Drawing on data from more than 6,000 adults, researchers found that people who eat the most ultraprocessed food had much higher blood pressure, insulin and triglyceride levels, larger waist circumferences and higher body mass index numbers compared with those who eat the least. These are well-known risk factors for >>heart disease<< and >>Type 2 diabetes<<. Data from Statistics Canada confirms that many Canadians get a large portion of their daily calories from highly processed food products. The rapid expansion of >>ultraprocessed<< items in our food supply appears to be reshaping our health. That is undermining metabolic and >>cardiovascular<< well-being long before overt disease and across all income and education levels. Eating >>ultraprocessed foods<< increases risk of >>early death<<, study finds The federal government is starting to address this pollution, but in a very narrow way. Earlier this year, >>Health Canada<< mandated a new nutrition symbol on the front of food packages that makes companies declare when defined thresholds for saturated fat, sodium and sugars are exceeded. The rationale behind this is similar to how we have approached tobacco regulation: Regulators seek to inform, stigmatize and gradually suppress demand for products that are now well understood to drive >>chronic disease<<. But we haven’t dared to test whether companies themselves can be held financially responsible for the downstream >>public-health<< costs to which they directly contribute. Plus, we already know that >>public-health<< expenditure is ballooning, not unlike our waistlines. It’s time to reckon with the quality of the >>food system<< we want, and what else we might be able to do to support access to healthy, affordable food. A food system dominated by foreign conglomerates will always prioritize margins over health. Ultraprocessing is the next frontier of public-health governance. In some ways, we have been here before, pushing back against corporate power: Quebec restricted junk-food ads to kids in 1980. A decade later, we banned lead in gasoline, then we capped lead levels in tap water in 1992, got BPA out of baby bottles in 2010, removed trans fats from food in 2018 and regulated tobacco packaging in 2019. Some >>ultraprocessed foods<< are better for you than others, according to new science advisory Each time, industry swore that regulation would be disastrous, but public health won. The question now is whether and why we want >>ultraprocessed foods<< at all. Europe bans a lot of U.S.-made food. And while it makes sense for people to obsess over >>grocery<< prices, we may be ignoring a deeper loss: a general lack of control over the quality of ingredients and processing standards. Not only is food getting more expensive, but it is also getting demonstrably worse. This is largely due to a >>lack of competition<<, and our hesitancy to regulate junk. In a way, the claims made by these food companies about ultraprocessed products are fundamentally a form of economic disinformation: Providers deliberately use misleading tactics that distort the truth, often to pad corporate profits. In the case of food, other tactics such as skimpflation (reducing the quality of the inputs of a product without lowering the price) are designed to mislead us. Costco may have a $1.50 hot dog, but the chain’s bagels have fake blueberries. What used to be chocolate is now mostly a chocolate-flavoured palm oil. If San Francisco wins, food giants may face the same reckoning that Big Tech is encountering: accountability for designing harmful defaults and for profiting from our predictable dependency. It’s something to chew on. ]]> Coca-Cola CPG Kraft_Heinz litigation Pepsi public_health processed_foods San_Francisco ultra-processed_foods Vass_Bednar lawsuits food_system addictions misleading moral_failures nutrition obesity pushback shelf-stable Big_Food cardiovascular early_deaths GoC groceries Health_Canada heart_disease supermarkets systemic_challenges Type_2_diabetes chronic_diseases_&_illnesses lack_of_competition https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b4c71009d436/ 2025-05-20T16:04:06+00:00 https://notes.pinboard.in/u:jerryking/8e6e1f03a0ef083b2570 jerryking ambitions Boston brain_drain brainpower Canada crossborder disillusioned entrepreneur human_capital Mark_Carney Miami New_York_City Richard_Florida San_Francisco talent talent_flight https://notes.pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b4555b64b651/ 2019-10-18T17:55:43+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/business/city-parks-infrastructure.html jerryking infrastructure parks public_spaces Salesforce San_Francisco overlay_networks economies_of_scale High_Line repurposing green_spaces piggybacking cost_of_delay https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:9f2d08c8dedc/ 2019-04-06T23:58:54+00:00 https://www.ft.com/content/1b8ef552-554b-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c5b1 jerryking books entrepreneur fiction founders science_fiction Silicon_Valley start_ups virtual_reality William_Gibson storytelling reading_lists augmented_reality future futurists authors Amazon_Go Ayn_Rand cautionary_tales San_Francisco pay_attention Elon_Musk novels Philip_K._Dick Neal_Stephenson Kim_Stanley_Robinson https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:29b5311e4383/ 2018-12-21T13:54:20+00:00 https://www.ft.com/content/3bf99516-02b9-11e9-9d01-cd4d49afbbe3 jerryking fiction Janan_Ganesh literature San_Francisco Silicon_Valley writers Bonfire_of_the_Vanities Tom_Wolfe storytelling world-changing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f9c198544576/ 2018-12-03T14:06:47+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-as-we-know-it-turns-50-1543786471?mod=hp_opin_pos3 jerryking 1968 Andy_Kessler anniversaries conferences GUI San_Francisco Stanford demos Silicon_Valley Douglas_Engelbart https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:be89ebcca15c/ 2018-07-31T09:15:17+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/article-where-to-stay-eat-and-shop-in-san-franciscos-evolving-mission/ jerrykingtravel restaurants San_Francisco things_to_do https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:40315001c6ff/ 2017-05-27T11:32:06+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-summer-of-love-a-walking-tour-of-san-francisco-50-years-later-1495108803 jerryking 1967 San_Francisco psychedelic summertime neighbourhoods gentrification bohemians things_to_do anniversaries counterculture epicenters hippies https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:36f771cb846d/ 2016-10-24T14:57:41+00:00 https://thebolditalic.com/ jerrykingSan_Francisco magazines https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:81278640777e/ 2016-03-22T14:21:24+00:00 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/microtransit-cities-should-explore-innovation-that-will-help-move-people/article27931173/ jerryking transit microtransit Marcus_Gee innovation San_Francisco entrepreneurship https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:394db4de017f/ 2014-11-20T15:48:38+00:00 http://online.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-readies-for-the-big-one-a-block-at-a-time-1416443960?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks jerryking San_Francisco disasters preparation neighbourhoods emergencies catastrophes readiness earthquakes natural_calamities tragedies disaster_preparedness https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d791ad9fb997/ 2014-10-08T17:17:44+00:00 http://online.wsj.com/articles/startups-spend-with-abandon-flush-with-capital-1412549853?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks jerryking Silicon_Valley start_ups San_Francisco https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5b5c7259e587/ 2014-05-16T10:22:29+00:00 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/top-5-spots-in-san-francisco-to-get-a-real-feel-for-the-city/article18460384/#dashboard/follows/ jerryking travel things_to_do San_Francisco https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:fdcdb6b5c2b8/ 2013-02-24T06:49:57+00:00 http://gigaom.com/2013/01/30/max-levchin-talks-about-data-sensors-and-the-plan-for-his-new-startups/ jerryking>slack resources<< are abundant, so are the companies trying to rationalize their use. Über, AirBnB, Exec, GetAround, PostMates, ZipCar, Cherry, Housefed, Skyara, ToolSpinner, Snapgoods, Vayable, Swifto…it’s an explosion! What enabled this? Why now? It’s not like we suddenly have a larger surplus of black cars than ever before. Examine the DNA of these businesses: resource availability and demand requests — highly >>analog<<, as this is about cars, drivers, and passengers — is captured at the >>edge<<, automatically where possible, then transmitted and stored, then processed centrally. Requests are queued at the smart center, and a marketplace/auction is used to allocate them, matches are made and feedback is given in real time. A key **revolutionary insight** here is not that the >>market-based<< distribution of resources is a great idea — it is the >>digitalization<< of analog data, and its management in a centralized queue to create amazing new >>efficiencies<<.” ]]> massive_data_sets data Max_Levchin start_ups incubators sharing_economy analog efficiencies meat_space data_coordination match-making platforms Om_Malik resource_management resource_allocation auctions SMAC_stack algorithms digitalization radical_ideas slack_resources market-based San_Francisco sensors underutilization edge centralized_repositories https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:22eb4bce1200/ 2013-01-28T03:16:15+00:00 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235104578244231122376480.html?mod=hp_opinion jerryking transportation disruption San_Francisco Andy_Kessler urban Uber mobile_applications start_ups on-demand sharing_economy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5ba0a9a74546/ 2012-06-07T07:50:41+00:00 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577446631342936446.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_smallbusiness jerryking grocery San_Francisco growth https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ef09c56d4dfa/ 2012-03-11T23:56:13+00:00 http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2011/10/sysco_americas_biggest_restaur.php jerryking Sysco locavore restaurants supply_chains San_Francisco https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:439fd0b77e87/ 2011-09-25T07:07:16+00:00 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/technology/internet/lunch-catered-by-internet-middlemen.html?ref=dining jerryking intermediaries San_Francisco disintermediation 5BO delivery food_trucks middlemen small_business new_businesses inexpensive travel_agents https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d52be5ae914e/ 2011-05-13T06:48:14+00:00 http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/travel/36-hours-in-san-francisco.html jerryking San_Francisco things_to_do travel restaurants https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c5af638e7932/ 2011-03-28T19:53:44+00:00 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/the-future-of-manufacturing-is-local/?hp jerryking manufacturers local future economy hyperlocal San_Francisco branding cities geography pride geographic_ingredient_branding brand_identity https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:17cbf1700a1c/ 2010-09-30T14:39:17+00:00 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703384204575510153748696016.html jerryking food_trucks curries San_Francisco Vauhini_Vara https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2f1cd86b3565/ 2010-08-15T12:24:16+00:00 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_33/b4191085697532.htm?chan=magazine+channel_etc. jerryking travel magazines entrepreneur bubbles San_Francisco howto https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:23b95ed11623/ 2010-07-07T13:09:01+00:00 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/magazine/04icecream-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all jerryking ice_cream San_Francisco travel flavours https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:77874396e2bc/