It's not hard to imagine that not every derelict wreck has to turn into the new battersea power station. In fact, it's hard to think of a less inclusive redevelopment project in the UK than battersea power station.
Ok but that doesn't contradict the original point that the area ended up soulless and expensive, so your "people like you are what holds this country back" is still unjustified (and rude)
It turned into a luxury place because that's where the highest margins in construction are. Every developer wants to build high margin houses, nobody wants to build low margin houses.
City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.
If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.
There actually is some "affordable" housing in the wider project but only because there was a very long battle to keep the developers to their legally-bound promise to build some affordable property that they — of course — tried to wriggle out of.
Imagine you're the mayor. You want to hire companies to build prime housing and affordable housing. Every company only wants to build prime housing, because that's where the money is. If you only give out contracts like that, basically nobody will apply to build affordable housing.
You're not dumb, of course, so your next step is to say, "if I give you the contract to build prime housing, you also must build affordable housing". That's not ideal for the developer, because the time spent on building affordable housing is time they don't spend on stuff where they make proper money, but at least they can make some money. They agree to take the deal. You think, problem solved, but turns out the developer outsmarts you: they structure the company in a way that they can chicken out of building the affordable housing. In real estate, it's very common to have every building project be its own limited liability company so that one failed project doesn't influence the others. In this case, you put the affordable and the luxury housing together in one Ltd, build the luxury housing, extract the profits by moving them to the parent company and then declare your Ltd bankrupt, meaning they unfortunately can no longer build the affordable housing.
As a mayor, you observe how you're being cheated, you get real angry but the walk through the courts is too slow, and your voters demand action now. Realistically, you do the court route in the background, but you learned your lesson and now you tell the developer "before I give you a high margin luxury contract, you must have completed affordable housing first".
Alternatively, you mix the buildout into the same building so that you cannot open the luxury flats/office space without having completed the affordable part. Either way, affordable first, luxury second.
That is basically the story of the London property market.
Another issue is how do you even build affordable housing on land worth millions? The only way to make that work is if the government owns the land forever and commits to never selling it. Which is kind of what the government was going for after WWII with council houses, but Right to Buy ruined that.
It was only dragged into zone 1 in order to charge higher fares to recoup some of the cost of building the Northern Line extension. If it weren't for that, it'd be zone 2 - and one of the less well-connected bits of zone 2, at that.
I don't have that much of a problem with it, tbh - before the development it was a weird light industrial bubble, disconnected from the rest of the city. Now it's a weird bland commercial bubble, disconnected from the rest of the city.
And we've lost Marco Polo House, the home of QVC, and gained Apple. Seems about a wash in terms of cultural value as well.
Ahh yes because the only destiny of large buildings in London is high-end retail and luxury flats for the wealthy. That's what holds us back as a country, isn't it? Not enough places for the very very very rich.
I didn't at all say or suggest I would have preferred it to stay derelict. It's an absurd straw man.
There are many things that project could have been, for London, that it is not.
But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.
I don’t want to dive into Reddit like territory but this is not a fair representation of the place. It is a shopping centre, yes, in the same vein as Westfield or any other created in the past twenty years. There is a Lego store, Uniqlo and many other normal high street stores [1] alongside higher end places but Sloane Street this is not. Throughout the year there are events in the riverside space with stalls from local traders and various other free events, especially for children.
I would argue that it is one of the more successful new developments in terms of “placemaking”, certainly in that part of London. It is very clearly targeted at the residents of the local area who are normal London middle class wealth. The little shop no doubt has bottles of expensive wine but it also has £10 ones.
For clarity; I’m not a resident of the area but have visited a bunch of times, especially with kids.
Making new places is hard and I think they’ve made a decent go of the place.
What holds the country back is anti-growth, financially insecure people who complain about anything and everything.
> But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.
Try actually going there. You might find there aren’t as many “foreign” people as you fear.
> What holds the country back is anti-growth, financially insecure people who complain about anything and everything.
That isn't me. I am not complaining about anything and everything. I am complaining about one specific place.
> Try actually going there. You might find there aren’t as many “foreign” people as you fear.
I wrote that comment because I have been there. And my fear isn't foreign people — not remotely. My fear is foreign unexplained wealth — one of London's biggest and most intractible problems. It's not xenophobia, it's the corrupting influence of dubious, hard-to-trace oligarch-connected money being sloshed around in the London Laundromat.
The Battersea Power Station project is legit — all done legally — but the project was literally built by people not exactly tenuously associated with 1MDB. And as with many of these developments, many of the people who live in those expensive flats will be doing so thanks to money that was ill-gotten through proximity to power elsewhere in the world.
It's central London. Of course it's a place for foreign wealth; as long as we get to keep enough on the way. We need to stop being snobby about the very real need of the country for foreigners to spend money on stuff we sell.
I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.
They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.
The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.
I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.
When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.
An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.
Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns
> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."
Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome.
> if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.)
Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour.
He doesn’t need to “grab the wheel”. Simply saying “go-around” would have been enough, it’s highly highly unlikely that the captain would have ignored that.
Yes I was wrong. Looking at the transcript that go-around call out was likely from the PF; that's where the data recorder indicates the brakes were released the throttle set to max for the go-around (and go back to braking only 4 sec later).
Still, the PM notified PF that they were going too fast many times during the approach. All warnings were ignored.
I also take my shoes and off and find it gross when people don’t.
That said, I don’t think it’s really rational. Our houses are full of bacteria and dirt one way or another anyway. It’s impossible to avoid that without having some kind of airlock equipped with a shower in your porch.
I think it has or had practical reasons. It rains a lot in Japan, and its prime occupation used to be flooded field rice farming. So it is/was normal for shoes coming home to be in a somewhat gross state.
Old farmer style houses in Japan have an entrance area behind the main sliding doors in bare soil[1], and a wooden platform at waist height between it to hallways. The platform can be sat on to take off shoes or to drop off bags of produces, and then hallways and tatami matted areas are further raised an inch or two - the walking floor level of houses are therefore give or take a whole feet off the ground. These together create multiple mental boundaries for dirtiness.
Modern houses have it miniaturized into just a cinder-block high gap or sometimes just industrial colored tiles before a bump. But IMO it's still nice being able to leave wet shoes and umbrellas there.
1: 土間 or doma, meaning soil-space. Oddly this transliteration coincides with "home" in Russian(and of course rhymes with Latin domus).
I think these practices come from more rural but also tropical origins?
One part is purely practical, making it easier to keep the living space clean when you are coming in from the farm etc. Places with messy winters have similar concepts for muddy boots, snow boots, etc.
Some regions also have (or historically had) real risk of parasite transmission from soil and short grass. Taking off shoes reduces the chance of bringing their eggs or tiny larva into your living space.
I can imagine some cultural practices here being early memetic/evolutionary in nature, much like some religions codifying what are essentially food-safety rules from a time before microbiology was scientifically understood. We think about the parts we can see, but also have some instincts and practices that seem aligned with threats we can't actually sense.
> That said, I don’t think it’s really rational. Our houses are full of bacteria and dirt one way or another anyway.
True, but I don't know about you, but we don't have literal rocks, sediment, dirt pee, or literal poop on our floors in our home, anywhere. But shoes do occasionally step on stuff like that no matter how small, and neither of those things I want inside of my house on the floor.
But you're right that there still is bacteria or dirt all over the place, no doubt. But still, I don't step on something slightly soft with my socks in the living room and then inspect my foot to find poop stuck to it, and I think I'm gonna continue to prefer this way.
> This is basically what dust is. It’s everywhere.
What?
> Dust in homes is composed of about 20–50% dead skin cells.[2] The rest, and in offices and other built environments, is composed of small amounts of plant pollen, human hairs, animal fur, textile fibers, paper fibers, minerals from outdoor soil, burnt meteorite particles, and many other materials which may be found in the local environment.[3]
Further: dust is floating in the air and can be removed with decent (MERV ≥11) air filters in your HVAC system. Stuff on the bottom of your shoe makes contact with your floor and stick around until you wash it (and for much longer in the fibre of carpet or rugs).
Where do you live, where dust and pee/poop is the same? I'm fine with having small amount of the former inside, it's unavoidable, but the second is avoidable by removing your shoes.
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