Tree
12d ago
Nimby because it's a village, it's surrounded by empty fields. A building license in a village should not be worth 300k euros (the destroyed house).
Another thing I remember: In my grandparent's village (pop 2000, in the middle of nowhere), the one time in their life where they felt rich was when the village council declared some of their land constructible, which they immediately sold for like 100k, when it was worth almost nothing before.
Tree
12d ago
You're saying you don’t see the evidence of european nimbyism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the continent known for regulations and environment protections has three times the housing price to income ratio of the country with the more libertarian bent. We don’t have the yimby/nimby distinction here because it’s all nimby, all the time, to a level that an american couldn’t comprehend. In my ~10,000 pop. home village they routinely raze perfectly good, newish houses to replace them with 3-story, 6-small-apartments buildings. It's nuts the wealth that gets destroyed because people can't get a building license.
Tree
12d ago
The only time I hear a connection between immigration and house prices is in a positive context, from home owners: ‘with all these immigrants, the prices can’t go down!’.
It’s not : We have immigration => we should build more to meet the demand.
It’s : We need high prices, therefore unmet demand => let’s build nothing and have immigration on top of it.
Instead of solving one problem, homeowners’ financial incentives are creating two.
As far as I can tell there's a historical center (and I mean actually historical) in most cities that they like to preserve, and otherwise there isn't much of a fuss to build anywhere else.
I know for a fact there’s a shit ton of red tape, plus the greens consider any new constructible land to be ‘a loss for nature’.
Tree
12d ago
That’s the conflict theory view, which doubles as a zero-sum, ‘cosmic balance’, perfect information narrative. The stock market and the “elites” lose money, while the regular man will likely prosper in all the new tinsel factories. The ‘debate’, if it can be called that, is the vocalization of each side’s interest.
The mistake theory perspective is that people are often wrong and so act against their interests. The stock market is just a reflection. Trump was wrong about the effect of his tariffs on the stock and bond market, and on his trade partners and allies, and soon he will be wrong about its effects on the economy.
Tree
14d ago
Of course it’s not, it’s an ugly thing, this ongoing defection by russia. To encourage cooperation, defection has to be punished. Basic morality.
You refuse the ukrainians the aid they ask for. You do not consider them friends. So don’t pretend you care what happens to them. You want to act in a purely self-interested manner, do it without the sentimality.
Tree
15d ago
Crocodile tears. Helping a friend resist aggression is good, actually. The higher the price russians pay for ukraine, the better the world will be.
Tree
16d ago
Fundamentally, because it’s easier to avoid paying a tariff than to avoid paying a corporate tax.
Why is a corporate tax a better way to raise money than a tax on, for example, jogging? Because if it’s big enough, people will simply stop jogging, and in the end the state will have no money, plus a semi-pleasurable activity will be prohibited. You are strictly worse off than before you started.
In a world where every state tried to finance itself entirely with tariffs, foreign trade and state revenue would drop to near-zero. In contrast, corporate tax world would be similar to our world.
Tree
30d ago
Don’t brag about blocking people, it’s a shameful thing. Then you can spare us the excruciating story on how you had to remove your own barriers.
Tree
1mo ago
That only works if the right-wing barbarian agrees that there is any value left in those institutions. I’m not sure modern anthropology departments or modern hollywood clear that bar.
Empty museums are depressing. Close most of them, sell all the old coins, keep the mona lisa. If the people then clamor for more museums, just buy the stuff back. And if these so-called ‘public goods’ are only enjoyed by the rich, , like opera, let them pay. The rich and cultured get a perverse kick out of having the poor pay for the very class markers used to exclude them.
Tree
1mo ago
Because it destabilizes any society in which it takes root.
The problem with assertion such as these is that modern society is really its own extraordinary thing. From his food to his health to his habits to his reproduction, man is unlike other animals, and modern man is unlike other men.
Male violence is centered on three things; money (or money producing commodities; drugs), social esteem (or "respect"), and intimate partner exclusivity.
Is this an established theory, or did you come up with that yourself? Either way, my objections are:
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assumes some rational reason for violence, when there are better ways to get money, respect, intimate partners. In modern society, the only people using interpersonal violence have low self control.
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It’s missing raw hatred of the other guy as motivation
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those are valid reasons for female killers as well
Adultery ought not be criminalized (and, on the other side of the coin, both divorce and marriage ought not have any financial incentive tied to them), but rampant promiscuity and adultery still ought to face social consequences because that simply means the society in which they occur is aware of the high stakes of promiscuity / adultery's likely outcomes.
This position of ‘no criminal, only social repercussions’, looks like an incoherent compromise to me. You don’t have the heart to beat your daughter and flog her suitors, so you unload the burden of your repressive sexual project onto society. The passive voice will do your dirty work, shunning perhaps. It’s like the woke saying ‘freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences’ – who will administer the consequences, exactly? If it’s you, and it surely won’t be me, then it’s not society.
Tree
1mo ago
I don’t see why the default for promiscuity should be to forbid it rather than allow it. It is a strange kind of ‘control’ that leaves the decision to the ‘controlled’.
Tree
2mo ago
That's bullshit, Dean. You're always long-winded even when you have little to say. They would have taken east germany and showered it with money regardless of the the retirement benefits situation. East germany was full of pensioners anyway, so there was no relative gain to be had from the cheapness of the rest of the labor force. In your theory, east germany is both a cost and a profit, depending on what your theory needs it to be.
You weave these elaborate causal chains which bear no relation to reality. People never believe stuff, they 'have to' believe it, because random cause X is the true cause.
I disagree. They believed in neoliberalism, they believed in the productivity of syrian refugees, they believed that debt is a bad thing. Their opinions, like mine and yours and even the german people's, matter. When they're right, good things tend to happen, when they're wrong, the opposite.
Tree
2mo ago
You’re a pretty knowledgeable guy, Dean. But the problem is, the more one knows, the more spurious relationships one’s brain can come up with. There’s really nothing linking german elites’ mistaken evaluation of islamic third-worlders’ productivity, to the debt ceiling, to german unification. They could easily have rejected any one of those, and keep the others. Those are all independent events.
Tree
2mo ago
It's a simple question for me because bringing more life into the world is an unalloyed good, and I fail to see the negative in this situation (aside from vague religious and personal feelings). But overall it’s a complex issue. Not the place for blind moralism.
Tree
2mo ago
I'm not saying those are core claims, just what garden-variety conservatives frequently say at the dinner table. I don't consider anecdotes like justawoman's to be refutations of serious conservative thought. But they are not "trolling".
It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.
I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.
Other ideologies have their own idealizations of an imagined past or an imagined future, of course. And simplistic stuff they say at the dinner table.
Tree
2mo ago
It’s a legit point. The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.
Plus, a lot of straightforward claims conservatives make like ‘all mothers love their children’, ‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’, ‘all people have a god-shaped hole’, etc, can be refuted through a single anecdote.
Tree
2mo ago
I do agree that the end can justify the means in certain cases. But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended. I'm not arguing for rape-and-kidnapping-based natalism.
Tree
2mo ago
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You must have a low threshold for what you consider ‘deep, deep evil’. Most people probably don’t realise all the ways in which they’re ‘profaning’ your preferred norms on “Sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a mother and her child ”. Is almost everyone deeply deeply evil then?
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Wrong comparison. I don’t consider surrogacy as an alternative to normal child-bearing, but to normal non-child-bearing. A surrogate child is not pulled from the set of normal comfortable children and thrown into an orphanage, he's pulled from the aether. He's thankful he even has a mouth to eat old bread with.
Do you have scientific evidence for your position? And if the available evidence was against you, what about the ‘ancient and holy ways’? It would be a waste to debate this if it was never your true objection.
Tree
2mo ago
is it moral to buy children, or is it not?
Of course it is. It's immoral and selfish to deny them life. Do you accept this consequence of your stance?
What is your actual justification? A vague appeal to sacredness("not a business practice.")? Personal feelings of disgust ("I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice.")? "Objectification"? Forced acceptance that life sucks ("That’s just the way it is.")?
Tree
2mo ago
The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist? The bond between mother and child is a sacred thing yada yada, the problem is, modern mothers, left to their own devices, don’t have any. No bond, no child, and no mother. And that’s a sadder outcome than some blemish on your idealized view of motherhood.
Kids are resilient. You can just pump them out, hand them over to some strangers or an institution, and they’ll turn out fine. Well, they’ll complain in adolescence, but they’d do that anyway. Even life under suboptimal starting conditions is still well worth living.
Tree
2mo ago
The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.
Tree
2mo ago
I didn’t say that. Also don’t simultaneously doubt my word on what studies say and preemptively dismiss them. You have insulated your position from evidence. You are hostile even though our object-level positions aren't far apart. Your comments are terrible and you should feel bad.
Let's summon the expert: What's the situation like in american rural areas, oh @grendel-khan ?
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