Public Affairs, Funk & Bolton | Maryland Policy & Politics | Communications | Media Production | [email protected]

Baltimore, MD
Joined February 2009
Ben Groff retweeted
Permitting reform makes it easier to build all kinds of stuff, including bad stuff. But do you stop the building of bad stuff by focusing on the “building” part or the “bad stuff” part? For economists the answer is easy. Encourage building. Discourage bad stuff.
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🍎 We’ve brought the teacher vacancy rate DOWN by over 70% in under four years – and I got to share that news with one of our educators this morning! @pgcps
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Bingo. I’d only add that litigation against projects used to be “good guys against bad guys,” but now is often fossil fuel front groups litigating to delay low-cost clean energy competition. 90% of new power is clean; we know what the market wants. vox.com/future-perfect/50506…
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This is the only theory that makes sense me why VCs whine about Anthropic non stop. Like they feel embarrassed by them somehow.
They’ll never forgive a bunch of grad student libs for making a company more valuable than almost anything they’ve ever funded and that all their portfolio companies are dependent on
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Ben Groff retweeted
Real work for real clients
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Ben Groff retweeted
Abundance usually gets explained as a list of problems: zoning, permits, licensing, slow approvals. Here’s what we'd actually get if we fixed them: Lunch costs $4, like it does in Japan and Singapore. Most US cities require three or four separate sinks, which makes a kitchen under 200 square feet nearly impossible. Anyone can open an owl cafe or a vegan lesbian bookstore. Japan is full of tiny, oddly specific businesses run by one or two people. They survive because small spaces are cheap and enough people live close enough to walk in. A room in a big city for $400 a month. These buildings housed millions of low-income and older Americans until cities banned most of them by the 1980s. A three-bedroom apartment you can stay in after you have a kid. US codes require two staircases in buildings over three stories, so family-sized units only fit on the corners. Most of the world allows one staircase. A new electric car for about $10,000. China sells these globally. Americans can't buy it. A government so dependable it's boring. When a loved one dies, you report it once instead of to every agency. We can decide to make it happen here. The full list has 16 things, from taco trucks on every corner to no more pandemics. I wrote this to also announce that today is DC Abundance's official launch! If you’re in DC, come celebrate and see the G.O.A.T. Derek Thompson speak!
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just 21% of DC's rental apartments are market rate! I found this really surprising, I would have guessed it to be much higher...also now wondering how much lower it was prior to the NoMa/Navy Yard/Wharf developments of the past decade
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If Nithya wins too and we have three YIMBY mayors leading the pro-housing charge, so help me God I will get a shirt that says Zohran & Janeese & Nithya
We can and we must build more homes for all of us.
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$3.7 BILLION in investment. 14,000 jobs. Welcome to Baltimore County, @anduriltech!
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Ben Groff retweeted
Want lower power bills? This bill makes data centers pay MORE than the costs they cause, and the surplus brings everyone else's rates down. It also lets states bring in FERC to oversee local spending and cut utility profits and levy fines when its' going wrong. It's good!
The data center language in the permitting deal is the best yet & isn't getting enough attention. As I've argued for, it goes beyond "fair share" & forces data centers to pay full costs they cause AND their share of the existing grid. That's *billions of $/year* for ratepayers.
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And the bill text is out! Enjoy the light reading Energy Twitter (X) epw.senate.gov/public/_cache…
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NEWS: Senate permitting text is coming tomorrow, Sen. Alan Armstrong (R-Okla.) tells me. There’ll be a press conference and a full bill release, he said. A senior aide involved in negotiations also confirmed to @NicoPortuondo.
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Ben Groff retweeted
For the last few years, @TheBTI has been working to influence and build support for national permitting reform. It appears we're close to a deal on major legislative progress. We need to seal this deal, and then keep going. 🧵
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I work at a restaurant that does events and we received some challenging last-minute requests from a client. We scrambled to fill them. I realized later that these requests were likely made by an AI agent, and that the human client might not have personally cared. This felt bad!
a world where everyone has a perfectly rational, tireless optimizer working on their behalf is much more adversarial than people realize. a lot of our existing infrastructure will not survive this transition.
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nyc's free-bus mayor put out a 51-page, $900 million bus plan this summer and it's entirely about speed. up to six minutes off 50 priority routes. the word free does not appear. welcome to the frequency-and-speed caucus, we've been here the whole time, there are snacks
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Ben Groff retweeted
Just to update this chart: 1) AI salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined 2) 80% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI will cause widespread job loss in the five to ten years 3) 64% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity's survival 4) Large bipartisan majorities back immediate government action on AI even when primed about risk from China
Excited to be on Odd Lots to talk about the politics of AI. AI today is less important than it will ever be. Over the past year, AI rose in issue importance faster than any issue we track — it's now more important to voters than climate change, child care, and abortion.
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Ben Groff retweeted
1) AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously. 2) If you worked in a company where you anticipated a 10% chance that your product would kill ten people, let alone all people, the correct response would be horror, ceasing all operations, and likely contacting the police or other criminal authorities. I am obviously no Coxon booster but at least his behavior is in line with his stated beliefs. Any current AI company employees saying "yes, me too, the thing we are building and about to IPO may kill all humans" should, again, not be taken seriously. Their actions betray their actual beliefs. 3) Antitrust law does not prevent AI companies from coordinating to make sure AI does not hurt people. It does not prevent companies working together to make sure it doesn't hack people; the DOJ and FTC made this clear a decade ago when they issued a policy statement saying that the agencies "do not believe that antitrust is – or should be – a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing." The same principles apply here. See: justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/… 4) Antitrust law does absolutely prevent AI companies from organizing to prevent the entry of cheaper, upstart rivals because the bigger companies are burning cash and failing to achieve sufficient profitability. The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad "antitrust waiver" or "exemption" should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models.
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BREAKING NEWS: Amalgamated Transit Union And Locals 689, 1300, 1764, And 1777 Endorse Maryland Governor Wes Moore And Lieutenant Governor Aruna Miller For Reelection!
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This is a great @ChristinaTkacik piece on a bar with kitchen near the Baltimore train station that's prospered in part bc it's open every damn day, from noon til late, when so many others have narrowed hours. "The biggest key has been simply being there." thebanner.com/culture/food-d…
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Ben Groff retweeted
y’all are not getting how big of a bfd this is yet
SCOOP: The Trump administration claims it will complete the entire federal environmental review for the biggest gas power project in the U.S. — the OpenAI-Nvidia data center in Ohio — within the span of only seven months. heatmap.news/energy/trump-ga…
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