Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

This guy on Hacker News is buying up the entire town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas for reasons that seem unclear even to him. Someone please help him go home to his children pic.twitter.com/6wO0JIyxQ1

— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) August 15, 2022

His twitter handle is the same as his username there, it's just post after post of him getting robbed by Pine Bluff tweakers.

a new wrinkle I didn't see yesterday

oh. pic.twitter.com/TFiddlxQAA

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) August 15, 2022

Pine Bluff thing is like one of those great, long, self-owning threads slowly documenting a guy's deranged and ill-informed home renovations, or hapless efforts to establish a utopian compound or whatever.

that falls under the reddit DIY-fail thred or whatever

lol great minds xp again

twit’s creek

this is like if something from the SA forums got VC money

lmao max phoned this guy

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-man-who-bought-pine-bluff-arkansas

my "read max" subscription money going to good use

omg of course he's a utahn

I enjoyed this bit:

New York was terrible, in the ‘80s. Everything they’re saying about Pine Bluff now they were saying about New York in the ‘80s! And I sure wish I could have bought some real estate in New York in the 80s!”

he comes off more sympathetic in max's interview than I expected, but the initial plan of just buying a huge warehouse for a maker space/entertainment venue/place for his existing businesses without making sure it's close-ish to a population center is wild

a lot of cities have those amenities, so the target market is... people who want to drive 45 minutes from Little Rock to do stuff?

we need pplains in here for the arkansas view

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3c_pJ_CLJQ

the initial plan of just buying a huge warehouse for a maker space/entertainment venue/place for his existing businesses without making sure it's close-ish to a population center is wild

it's been done before by various people with various levels of success ... on the one hand you have Las Vegas and the current incarnation of Burning Man ... on the other hand you have this guy, as well as stuff in between like the guy who bought a town in Nevada and then there was a fire that burned like 90% of it ... though that guy had done something similar in an urban area and had gotten displaced, so he had an existing community of people as well as some experience

I was just randomly reading a reddit thread of purported real estate investors discussing (celebrating really) that arkansas is the most landlord friendly state in the country. Fucking bleak stuff. I believe one of them said it was a crime with jail time to stay in an apartment without paying the rent.

Texas is also very pro-landlord. Like, if you look at the civil code related to residential tenants and tenants rights, and you are only familiar with the laws in states like California and New York, you would be shocked and/or confused.

sometimes this site really delivers pic.twitter.com/dJmlYRF4ZZ

— cathode ray theory (@said_mitch) August 18, 2022

so apparently the guy who bought a bunch of real estate in that arkansas town has recordings and transcripts from the city meetings where he was trying to pitch his plans on his own website

it's him trying to get someone to walk through and tell him what he'd need to fix, and they keep explaining that it's a change in zoning, he needs plans signed off by an engineer and completed, etc.

I mean, there are areas of the country with less stringent building and occupancy codes, but dude bought a giant warehouse and adjoining buildings and wants to use them for commercial purposes!

it's been done before by various people with various levels of success ... on the one hand you have Las Vegas and the current incarnation of Burning Man ... on the other hand you have this guy, as well as stuff in between like the guy who bought a town in Nevada and then there was a fire that burned like 90% of it ... though that guy had done something similar in an urban area and had gotten displaced, so he had an existing community of people as well as some experience

― sarahell

this is one of the settings for _summer fun_, the trans brian wilson book i'm reading for my book club...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceport_America

I think buying abandoned real estate and attempting to use it as-is is different from building an entertainment city mostly from scratch or building a temporary city in the desert, though? This isn’t “if you build it,” it’s “if I get them to turn electrical service back on” or at least it was until someone stole his walls

Unless we’re not talking about the Arkansas guy

it's him trying to get someone to walk through and tell him what he'd need to fix, and they keep explaining that it's a change in zoning, he needs plans signed off by an engineer and completed, etc.

I mean, there are areas of the country with less stringent building and occupancy codes, but dude bought a giant warehouse and adjoining buildings and wants to use them for commercial purposes!

― mh, Thursday, August 18, 2022 3:04 PM (two hours ago)

this is a lot of what the org I work for does tbh. part of this guy's problem is the way the system works ... like, it is highly unlikely one person will be able to tell him everything he would need to do, and there's a lot of if/then at play ...
if you want this, the process involves x, but if you are willing to do it somewhat differently, you could maybe avoid doing x, but you would have to do y.
the existing structure / condition / etc of the building would need to be determined to meet certain criteria in order for him to do x, but a licensed engineer would have to actually do a study and calculations and find out if it does meet those criteria. If it does, then the process involves x, if it doesn't, then, before you can even think about doing x, you would need to do z, and maybe, instead of doing z and then doing x, you might want to re-think the whole thing ...

yes, the absolutely basic thing is to make a proposed plan, and hire an engineer

he seemed to just show up to meetings and propose completely different things every time with no blueprints or engineering assessment, just “hey guys but can I do this instead”

I mean, the way the system works may be convoluted beyond that, but that’s entry level “how do I shot occupancy”

also every time he describes the site it reminds me of an EPA superfund site in my city that’s getting slowly developed with so many caveats

"an" engineer ... dude, you might need structural, mechanical, and civil engineers depending on the project ...

generally, the first person you go to is an architect

yes

move fast and break stuff amirite

everyone otm re pine bluff itt. ((man alive also getting points for knowing about the state's criminal, not civil, penalties against renters (which is a whole other subject.))

I can't talk about Pine Bluff. It's sad, it's tragic, it's a whole damn city that's dying a slow death.

But man. I won't say I enjoyed that man's misfortunes, but I sure did enjoy reading about them.

https://i.imgur.com/4M7pRYt.jpg

A few years ago, the paper had a story featuring the mayor pointing at different piles of rubble in town, going "You see this shit?"

I know, I know, in the UK they point at potholes.

https://i.imgur.com/GODvMDN.png

Town so damn broke, the mcdonalds only got one arch

That's some pretty impressive rubble.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55lqCerTvVA

CEDELL SAID COME ON DOWN.

A few years ago, the paper had a story featuring the mayor pointing at different piles of rubble in town, going "You see this shit?"

― pplains, Thursday, September 1, 2022 8:37 PM (two days ago)

she should visit Oakland! So many piles of rubble to point at!

the parallel valleys https://t.co/RxD3iB2vlo pic.twitter.com/4o7Ush2J1V

— kate conger (@kateconger) September 26, 2022

They finally put this genius on the 10 o'clock news:
https://www.kark.com/news/local-news/theft-causing-problems-for-man-wanting-to-bring-science-museum-to-pine-bluff/

science-museum and pine-bluff in the same url. I finally lived to see the day.

Elizabeth Holmes gets 11-year sentence.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-scammer-11-years-prison-1234630584/

non-paywalled story:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/former-theranos-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-sentenced-to-more-than-11-years-in-prison.html

I didn't realize she was expecting a second kid... that's rough
She probably deserves it, but the kids don't

My mind went immediately to "she got pregnant to get sympathy/a shorter sentence."

Ha I thought the same thing

And of course the prisons are full of parents, so...

Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging. AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible.

— Gaurav Munjal (@gauravmunjal) January 21, 2023

The builders who survive (aka thrive) over the next several years will be those who are fundamentally self actualizing on some core vector via what they’re building.

Too hard otherwise.

— Geoff Lewis (@GeoffLewisOrg) March 8, 2023

It says so much.

"Bedrock is a technology investment firm in search of narrative violations."

what happened to Silicon Valley Bank???

it almost seems like an old fashioned bank run - lots of companies pulling their deposits

I think it was exactly an old-fashioned bank run.

what was the cause of it though?

Per SF Chronicle:

SVB lost $1.8 billion in the sale of U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities in which it had invested, thanks to rising interest rates, TechCrunch reported. On top of that, the bank was facing shrinking deposits as the tech industry struggled.

Amid these concerns, the company announced it would sell $1.25 billion of its common stock to investors, $500 million of depositary shares and, separately, $500 million of common stock to private equity firm General Atlantic. After the announcement, shares in SVB plummeted nearly 70% before trading was halted before the opening bell on the Nasdaq, the Associated Press Reported. Clients began pulling out their money, leading to a run on the bank.

But I'm sure there's more BS at work too.