Casey Handmer, PhD
@CJHandmer
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Physicist, Immigrant, Pilot, Dad. Former Caltech, Hyperloop, NASA JPL. Founder @terraformindies. Read scrolls. Build more solar!
NASAdena
Joined June 2012
My 5 year old just drew a ruler scale from memory. Then we got the square to check. As a dad, should I be worried?
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People generally have no idea how much the past sucked. It's fun to study history but anyone who genuinely romanticizes the past I struggle to take seriously. Even the recent past was miserable by comparison with today, but the pre-industrial era was a total horror show on.
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Airlines realize that free fast wifi will save them money.
NEWS: Air France today announced that it will be installing SpaceX's @Starlink on its entire fleet. This new fast internet will be completely free of charge for all travelers. Installations begin in 2025.
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Where is the 20000 word post explaining in exquisite prose and exhaustive detail the complete lineage of all the design features that go into the Logitech mouse? This has to be someone's on-spectrum special interest. This thing is the Sistine Chapel of consumer hardware, probably
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I have a PhD in theoretical physics, studied BCS theory, ran extremely complex numerical simulations, published papers on (optical) heterogeneous nanostructures, researched Landau level type stuff in 2 degree electron gas, ran calculations for SQUIDs. I still have no strong.
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If you're mad about Peanut wait until you learn about Aaron Swartz.
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This is your periodic reminder that you should write a blog. It doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't have to be well-edited. It just has to be something you can cumulatively add to over time. It's easiest to write about stuff you like, and ignore your non-existent audience.
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In 2023 it's still insane that we've decided to make housing, a technology at least 100 centuries old, scarce enough to consume a major fraction of GDP in a speculative unproductive deflationary asset that we could otherwise allocate to solving real problems.
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Trains are incredibly absurdly obsolete technology.
What unpopular technology opinion will have you like this
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Next up for Starship:.Orbit.Starlink.Re-entry.Land.Booster reuse.Orbiter reuse.Prop transfer.Lunar orbit.Lunar landing.Lunar return with a truck load of rocks.Lunar base.Mars orbit.Mars landing.Mars return.Humans on Mars.Logistics on Mars. And until then, "test failed again lol".
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I'm continually surprised by how rare mental arithmetic skill is among technical people. It's about as hard to learn as riding a bike (ie not hard) and it puts first principles thinking on warp drive. With daily practice you can quickly get faster results than using a calculator.
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In retrospect I drastically underestimated how much I would enjoy children, and had I been correctly calibrated I would likely have had more and sooner. Now I'm unsure I'll be physically capable by the time grandchildren come.
I feel so bad for all the millennials who have been sold this tragic lie. Sadly, it won’t be realized until it’s too late. There is the joy and love you have for your child, and then there is everything else. Seeing your wife as a mother, your parents as grandparents, your
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You can build factories in real life.
finished factorio. It took around 60 hours. I've been playing for like 5 days straight. Haven't done anything on any of those days. Didn't do laundry, didn't browse twitter, didn't work. I ran out of food and I just stopped eating. Haven't eaten since yesterday. I feel like shit.
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I have reflected on, in the context of AI, what the subjective experience of encountering much stronger intelligence must be like. We all have some insight if we remember our early childhood! . The experience is confusion and frustration. Our internal models predict the world.
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I will do this for free.
NEWS: @Starlink being used to remotely operate a 320 Cat excavator from 200 km away in Tomago dig pit, Australia 🇦🇺. (via National Diesel Dirt & Turf Expo in Sydney)
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If 2% of Factorio victims become possessed to build actual factories it will be the strongest driver of growth over the next century.
-That engineer was great, what happened to him?.>Oh he got one-shotted. -Ayahuasca?.>No. Worse. Factorio.
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@heyalexfriedman Sometimes I have all three kids and my wife in my field of view at the same time, then I know I am rich.
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One of the most profound things Christopher Hitchens ever said was "children give you a glimpse of a second life, if not an eternal one.". I think about this on long summer evenings with my kids frolicking in the back yard as the setting sun glances off their hair. It's a.
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Unexpected side benefit to founding a hardware startup - every day I gain a better insight into how Elon got that way. It is impossible to describe. You have to see it for yourself.
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Budgeted for $250m, already heading >$600m. How is it possible to spend that much money, that quickly, on a robotic moon rover?. I've heard a lot about dire NASA funding wedges, and almost nothing about NASA's ongoing catastrophic productivity collapse. I worked there for four.
After a comprehensive review, we are discontinuing development of our VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) project. We are committed to studying and exploring the Moon, and will pursue other methods to accomplish many of VIPER's goals:
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@Plinz @elonmusk @VivekGRamaswamy I think it's more important to sell the plan to the general public.
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@AlecStapp Remember, cars are inviolable private property stored in public for free, bikes are indefensible public property even when stored privately.
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Well it's official, Hyperloop is finally dead. It was my first gig out of academia and an incredible venue to learn from some of the best engineers in the world trying to build an impossible thing. We got damn close. Also we got to speed run organizational drama next to which.
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New blog on desalination. I think solar plus matched desal can get below 10c/m^3, cheap enough that we can put 5 million acre feet into Nevada, terraforming about 1500 miles of valleys and waterways in that state (>90% remains unchanged though) and creating space for tens of
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@Penn @NobelPrize Historic as in left Penn a while ago after they were forced out? Better rip the bandaid off now: Apologize!.
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Kids, it's possible to master huge chunks of our collective knowledge, you just have to read a few dozen books. It gets much easier after the first few.
I'm apalled by the average CS newgrad level of technical knowledge, I could not have imagined the situation was this bad. What the fuck are universities spending those 4 years in man.
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Russia is not like the US - nearly the whole country has pre-industrial levels of development. I have been fortunate to travel in Russia, mostly the remote parts, for a total of about 3 months. It is a singular place, and I remember fondly the spirit and hospitality of its
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This is the Dirac equation. Essentially everything people interact with except for gravity and radioactivity can be explained by this one equation. One of my professors once said there were only two truly surprising corollaries of this equation, two things you would not expect.
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I can finally post this now. A somewhat solipsistic view of our progress with reading scrolls. Brought to you by Mathematica and ffmpeg.
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I took a look at the Neuralink compression challenge. The data has a bunch of noise, so 200x compression isn't possible, at least according to any method I'm aware of. But if you truncate to 4 bits you cut off the noise and if you subsample from 20 kHz to about 400 Hz (I used
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TL;Dr: genius autistic teenager who helped invent the world wide web, mercilessly harassed and imprisoned for (checks notes) allegedly violating the ToS on a metadata database for publicly funded academic research papers. Some asshole low wattage prosecutor decided putting him.
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Turns out all you ever needed was an impossibly enormous reusable rocket. Logistics rules all. 70 years of paper missions spending 98% of their ink trying to cram 20 lbs of stuff into a 10 lb bag. All their insights irrelevant once we build a 10000 lb bag. This trend applies.
The Moon is where the growing capability gap between SpaceX and NASA is about to become glaring. NASA wants to build an "Artemis base camp" but realistically can't. There's pressure from higher ups to cut and run and do humans to Mars, but they can't do that either.
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I will pay astonishing sums of money for an LLM that doesn't scold me when I ask perfectly innocent questions about hydrazine. Where is the nerd edition?.
During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks—at a fraction of the cost. As a result, we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence:
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And here's one that's a bit easier to see on Twitter.
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I'm sure this esoteric corner of math will have no real world consequences. .
There is no simple, exact formula for the perimeter of an ellipse. The formula presented below uses an elliptic integral, which cannot be expressed in terms of elementary functions.
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Reasons to write a blog are:.- It improves your reasoning. - It increases your luck. - It creates a durable record of thoughtfulness. - You can refer to it. - It becomes a gathering point for people who like the things you do. - It provides a temporal bridge between old hobbies.
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My politics is that if your plane is cool enough, it gets a blanket exemption from all noise regulations.
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This was a fun show but I remain amused by the "shock horror!" attitude of the space/NASA community in general that the mere idea of measuring and rewarding productivity in government, with or without firing people for non-performance of their contractual obligations in the work.
join us now with @CJHandmer to talk about all kinds of stuff!.
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The number of smart foreigners I know who have been trained in the West and would like to stay, build and pay tax, but who were deported back to their autocratic adversary countries to be drafted into working on weapons would blow your mind. We've been running Paperclip in.
@iamyesyouareno @MarioNawfal It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.
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Increasingly I realize that the frontier is the very opposite of efficient. I always assumed that sooner or later someone will figure out any given problem, but actually most problems aren't even legible to anyone at all. If you have a vision for the future that includes.
Train your dog to start barking every time you say "it's probably already priced in".
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It is insanely difficult to make a great physical product. Tireless attention to detail, lots of moving parts. Everything from compliance and payroll through to sales and recruiting and that's not even including technology development. Just getting the design right takes.
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Let's use Starship to build gigantic space telescopes and image Earth-like planets around other stars! We can explore the universe with a gigantic span of glass. More importantly, doing so represents a big shift in how we perform space exploration, away from spiraling cost and.
It is time to build a gargantuan, self-assembling space telescope that will allow us to see distant alien planets in as much detail as we see the Moon. SpaceX-driven decreases in cost to orbit make this possible. Read the new article by @CJHandmer here:
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Every time SpaceX launches a transporter mission, a smallsat launch startup dies.
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@elonmusk I bought $3500 of TSLA in 2011, and it forms the backbone of my personal wealth. It has bought me the freedom to start an ambitious hardware company. Terraform would probably not be possible without it. =D.
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Why has Alzheimer's research failed to progress for 20 years? I wonder. Cooking the books is not a victimless crime. Cultivating bad memes in some field of science blocks progress, forces a generation of honest researchers out of the field, and kills millions.
BREAKING: STANFORD PRESIDENT MARC TESSIER-LAVIGNE RESIGNS.
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I recently read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, which makes several references to Fermi's 6" slide rule. I bought this one, and have been running various operations on it.
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A "Walk to end Alzheimer's" emanating from the local retirement home yesterday. Two years ago, following @patrickc and @tylercowen, I wondered why we'd seen so little progress on Alzheimer's despite NIH and friends spending 10 Manhattan projects' worth of cash on it every year.
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What I don't understand about the increasingly grotesque spectacle of nearly-dead elder politicians not moving on (RIP Dianne Feinstein) is that surely some time in their 30-70 year career they met someone worthy of being their protege?. Why hasn't Dianne, Nancy, Mitch, Joe,.
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Don't overthink it. Just get cheap energy and deliver value to customers at scale.
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Lord give me strength.
NASA has published its “#Moon to #Mars Architecture Definition Document.” It contains 434 pages of gibberish, but no plan. To quote Richard Feynman, it’s not even wrong. #MarsSociety #Space #SpaceX #NASA @elonmusk @GregWAutry @SciGuySpace @jeff_foust .
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@bryancsk Meanwhile the Japanese ambassador in Germany issued insane quantities of visas to help Jews leave Germany. .
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I can not describe how proud I am of the Terraform team who, after two years of hard work in the wilderness of the "probably impossible, why even try", have snatched from the chaotic realm of forms and ideas a real, physical implementation of a machine that not only makes.
Here's a blog with more details:
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It seems to me that the Fermi paradox can be at least partly explained if either relativistic interstellar travel is relatively easy, or any kind of interstellar travel is basically impossible. I favor the first explanation. The implication is that the night sky is not full of.
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I love how we cancelled Saturn V because it was too expensive and dangerous then replaced it after 7 years of R&D with Shuttle, which was even more expensive and less safe, killed two crews then replaced it after 10 years of R&D with SLS, which was even more expensive and less.
Moon landing deniers complaining that it makes no sense for NASA to just “lose” the technology to go to the moon simply highlight how illogical it is that humanity had the ability to send humans to the moon, and then threw it away for 50 years. Correct observation, wrong takeaway
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It's been four years since my last post calling for the cancellation of the SLS, so I wrote an update. It's hard to keep up with @SciGuySpace and @Dr_ThomasZ also writing critical pieces in recent days. TL;DR: It's just as bad as it was, only now it costs twice as much.
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If trains were first invented today, they would never be built. No rail-less nations are building rail networks. No, China doesn't count because they're the Paragon of poor economic choices.
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We're going to build Hyperdrive City at the Salton Sea. It's going to inspire people for one thousand years.
Yesterday with schools closed, neighborhood evacuated, and smoky skies we took the family to the Salton Sea. Here we stand 240 feet below sea level, 12 feet below nominal lake level, on a muddy salty crust. Despite the fires and the lack of water, there was beauty in the
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What if, instead of spending years fighting over meager slices of a diminishing pie, we spent a few billion on desal and guaranteed water for the south west forever?. It seems nuts to me that a water-supported economy that spins trillions of dollars per year won't consider.
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It can't be solved politically. Technology is the only way out.
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This is my political affinity.
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@Nexuist And in particular one that had been waiting for an unforced error to lock the remnants of the Russian military into a grinding stalemate.
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Knowing when to leave the stage requires grace, honor, humility, insight, and bravery.
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I'm continually surprised just how few people, otherwise educated and experienced, intuitively understand how the economy actually works.
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Even if we 10xed the current supply, there would still be a shortage because we would just increment the ambition, scope, timelines etc of our projects. These projects would drive better technology and higher productivity, commanding even higher wages for elite talent.
@amasad There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.
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Let's desalinate a billion dollars of water.
your hyperautomated westcoast megaport awaits .(raising $1 billion to speed through permits and approvals! 👍)
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I would watch a @MrBeast style show where someone actually tried to make this work, with a blow by blow description of how it goes sideways. Then we'll gain some insights into the obesity impulse.
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Hey that's only like two Twitters. @elonmusk has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.
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I wrote a post on the LA fires and how we are architects of our own downfall. We didn't have to lose entire neighborhoods. Altadena, my own back yard, wiped off the map. These catastrophes are directly caused by regulatory gridlock and gross resource misallocation.
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Lots of people stuck at airports so I've written a new blog: How solar is shearing off the base of the entire industrial stack and how this represents an incredible one-time investment opportunity to capture any of about a dozen distinct verticals. Link below ofc.
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Being stranded on Mars by inopportune launch windows is basically the worst. So I created a map of all the Earth-Mars (with free return) and Mars-Earth launch windows over the next decade or so. It shows the dV needed on any given launch day and for any given flight duration.
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I don't think people fully appreciate just how cheap and easy sulfur stratospheric injection is for solar radiation management. It could be cheaply executed any of dozens of ways by individuals, autonomously, independently, anonymously, and deniably.
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We should probably ask why VC hasn't managed to reduce hardware start ups to a repeatable playbook the same way we have with software. There is the obvious reason - software lives inside computers, which run a different set of physical laws in which perfect copies are nearly.
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Of all the billionaires, somehow progressives managed to pick a fight with the immigrant industrialist one that cares about climate change and space exploration. Incredible own goal.
Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, President Biden gave federal agencies the green light to go after him. And they have. Today, the FCC adds itself to the growing list of federal agencies engaging in the regulatory harassment of Elon Musk. I dissent.
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3D printed 3e7:1 scale bacteria flagella electric (not magnetic) motor. 48000 carbon atoms. From
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Join the dots. Eaton Fire burned out the one piece of hillside that hadn't burned recently, in some places since the 1950s. Plus most of Altadena. Indigenous people from Australia to California knew to keep their backyard tidy, because allowing fuel to build up is an invitation
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@rookisaacman Can we focus on taxing unproductive, stagnant capital instead of punishing the best capital allocators?.
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I really like this visualization. In the future, we will all be silicon farmers.
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@elonmusk Unfortunately your improved circumstances have eroded now for many years your ability to accurately determine if jokes you tell are funny. Another cost of material success.
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Turns out the US economy can digest $6T of stimulus in about 3 years. Not bad! . I think we're transitioning to a state of much higher baseline growth, which means we'll need money-hungry projects to dispose of surplus capital and production. Time to build cities in space!.
Inflation was a lot more transitory than many people predicted:. Goldman Sachs core inflation tracker is now below 2%
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With our technology, we've made electricity, clean water, internet, basic food, transportation, and decent health attainable for nearly nothing, at close to cost, in a competitive, mostly healthy market. Housing should be no more expensive than food and water.
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Antimatter propulsion post is up. Link below as usual. A teaspoon of antihydrogen icecream is enough to fly a Starship to Mars and back on a single stage. If you refuel with reaction mass, you can do it in a few weeks each way.
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"Hey Dad can you simulate the falling elevator like Sax did in the book?" . "Of course I can.". A few hours of head scratching later, this barely convergent monstrosity emerges.
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@arram They aren't, partly because they very effectively dump the problems on people who have no natural constituency - the unhoused, the young, the unborn, and the non-local.
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