fartVader
7mo ago
To add to this, the Spanish women's team was already very unhappy with the Spanish federation.
They were in open protest before the world cup, and won by ignoring their coach's instructions and with half the 1st team 'exiled' from the squad.
Vilda and the federation have been under fire for nearly a year over failing to create a professional environment for the team. A group of 15 players sent individual but identical emails in September 2022 asking not to be called up until certain changes were made, including Golden Ball winner Aitana Bonmati. The players' complaints reportedly included insufficient preparation for matches, including travel arrangements and a limited amount of staff, as well as coaches who restricted their freedom during camps.
The federation and players held discussions last winter and spring over improving conditions, which led three of the 15, plus three who publicly supported them but did not send the emails, to eventually be included in the World Cup squad.
The federation continues to back Vilda despite the complaints, with president Luis Rubiales saying on Thursday that the coach has "forgotten the people … who wanted to destroy him." The official account for Spain's women's national team also posted a photo of Vilda kissing the World Cup trophy after Sunday's final with the caption "Vilda in."
They won despite Rubiales (who put his weight behind the coach). He was the villain in the story even before the kiss. (Yes, the team was that absurdly strong. Sort of like a USA NBA team)
The previous post annoyed me. It was written by someone who went looking for a culture war angle, and came out with the least charitable interpretation of the whole thing, just so it looked like SJWs had gone too far.
Some men deserve to cancelled. (or at least fired for gross incompetence)
fartVader
8mo ago
If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Suburban homes have space. Suburban homes have large cars. Suburban homes find groceries to be detour. Costco only exists because large cars & large houses allow families to do groceries in bulk. It's negatives (inability to provide fresh food, fresh bread, 1 day expiry or non-standard items) are also unnoticeable, because you can't get those things in a suburb anyway. You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads. The idea of letting kids go to their activities themselves is so impossible to consider, that the car then becomes a solution to a problem of its own creation.
It's like saying that Pandas & superior to Orcas because because they do well in Chinese captivity. Well, the entire Chinese captivity system was an unnatural system created to facilitate the conservation of Pandas. If you are going to compare to animals, then maybe evaluate them outside of a system hand-crafted to benefit one of them.
Why would someone want to solve suburban problems in a city. A city should not have suburban problems at all, emphasis on 'should'.
American suburbs appear great, because honestly, American cities are forced to suck. Even the best ones : 'NYC and Boston' have to be the unrivalled centers of the world to rise above the quicksand that is the American system. Other cities, are straight up terrible. Cities should have city advantages. If the streets are unsafe despite sufficient density and transit, then nothing is going to convince parents to let their kids be independent. If residential and commercial areas are zoned far away from each other, then you can't ever grab groceries 'fresh on the way back'.
What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.
Yes-ish. Suburbs are perceived to be higher status because it allowed people to have big families, better schools & lower crime. But, what about suburbs enables any of those 3 things ?
Safety : There is safety in numbers and it hard to commit to the most common crime (car crashes) if you aren't interacting with cars as much. NYC has a lower homicide rate than the median American suburb. American cities are only unsafe because American city police does not enforce crime the same way suburban police would.
Schools : Wealthy places have better schools. When cities are able to self-select for wealthy people like suburbs (Somerville, Newton, Brookline), they have great schools. If anything, cities have access to the best talent and should have better schools as a result. Boston Latin, Stuy High and Bronx Science are 3 of the best schools in the country and they're all in big cities despite much lower property taxes.
Big families : This one is tricky. In an era when most people won't be having more than 2 kids, I can't see why a house needs to be bigger than a 4 bedroom apartment. If anything, a safe city allows your kids to be independent and therefore allows the parents to have more kids without a proportional increase in required work. It is also much easier to setup babysitting when your kids can hang out in a large apartment lounge area or a neighbors house in the same building.
And those points are precisely why Americans live in suburbs. All of these benefits of cities are badly realized in most American cities. People would rather live in good suburbs than bad cities.
fartVader
10mo ago
some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free"
I do, it is amazing. I haven't driven a car once in 2023. I used to have to drive a car everyday on the west coast. I can confidently proclaim that at least all NYC boroughs, Boston (until 2022 MBTA collapse), Mumbai, Madrid, Singapore & Paris can be lived in completely car free.
Note: I have nothing against cars. I literally have an automobile-engineering degree and spent a past life building cars at a big-car co. I love cars, I love road trips and I don't drink just so I can be the happy designated driver. It's just ....... Cars just make no sense as the primary mode of transport in an urban environment. Yeah you can have a car. A fast, spacious and small car. VW Gold R, Model 3 & the Mazda 3 Turbo are better SUVs than SUVs. You just don't need to drive it 99% of the time. Guess what ? The roads are still packed with cars. But now those who NEED to drive can drive, and the rest of us get convenient options.
This can be achieved in smaller towns too. There is high car ownership in college towns (Amherst, Ithaca) and small town New England (Portland Maine), but people still walk around or take transit for most occasions. The car comes out when it's needed.
I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it
Many major cities now have bike sharing systems around the city which completely eliminates the need to carry your own bike around.
I can walk, but homeless shelters and drug injection sites.
Sounds like Portland, Seattle, SF..... west coast cities are not walkable. They are not even cities. They are dystopian examples of human deterioration. West coast cities are exactly what happens when car culture is unwilling to cede any ground. Not a single wealthy boomer lives in the city core, because highways drop you in the middle of the city core anyway. All 3 of these cities are designed with meeting the needs of car based visitors more than the needs of the residents. And it shows.
The parks are de facto homeless encampments, meaning if I want to take my kids to play, guess where I go? 30 minutes out into the suburbs.
I fully agree with you here. Progressives are idiots. Stringent enforcement of public-safety is first step towards convincing people to move out of cars.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
It is true. They did ruin everything. It's just that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy now. Boomers created the wound and cars were the bandage. So if you ever suggest removal of bandage it gets met with obvious anger. But if you ask for funding to treat the wound itself, it gets treated with confusion and dismissal.
fartVader
9mo ago
Do individuals relations need to be so strongly hyphenated with the zeitgeist. With individual relations, everything is negotiable.
Just talk to them. Make your boundaries known without having an explosion. Tell them in clear words that this behavior is not acceptable. Be ready to erect boundaries if need be. Talk to your wife before you do anything. Ideally, she will take care of it for you.
get his family into heaven
That being said, I struggle to make sense of people who are logical about everything except religion. Not so much about the existence of God or the social technology that is religion. I mean religion as the arbitrary yet oddly specific rituals that can make or break your entry into heaven.
It is one thing to delude yourself for comfort or to believe in the social value of religion. But, to live in a world of Science in 2023 and to think that the specific sub-set of rules outlined by your pastor will get you into "Christian heaven" is some proper hypocrisy. By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven. (hell?). Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.
I know, "2005 called, they want their Christopher Hitchens rants back". But still, do these people never reflect on what they believe in ? Even for a moment ?
fartVader
1yr ago
Fair enough.
landlords have uniform behavior
At this point every new-urbanist has made so many videos about this, that I thought the point was obvious enough. 1 2
"Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome."
The current incentives force landlords to behave the way they do. If I was a landlord, I'd be a selfish dick too. Afterall, the system actively promotes it.
Doctors are evil
Full disclosure, I am still working on this thought right how. Not entirely sure if I believe it myself or I am trying to be transgressive for the sake of being transgressive.
But my underdeveloped argument goes as follows:
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Programmers are idiots
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Status and wealth of a profession is tied to limiting access
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Doctors by and large populate all medically relevant structures - from hospitals, to NIH, to Medical university depts, to Govt. health secretary roles
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They have made no effort to make it easier to be a doctor
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Introducing AI / tech / new ideas / pathways to be a doctor are limited, not because it keeps medicine safer, but because it keeps doctors a rare commodity
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GPT-4 is already a better doctor than most
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Lawyers are very similar, but they conceded control on the university side of things, and their profession has lost a lot of prestige and wealth since
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Programmers are idiots, we make ourselves obsolete, we make it easy to access our profession, we don't gatekeep and then wonder why it is so competitive
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Doctors are evil, doctors are effective at extracting all value from their profession, even if it means worse healthcare
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Be like doctors.
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Selfless people are idiots
fartVader
1yr ago
There really is no winning with Trump.
Both Democrats and Republicans seem to be their own worst enemies this time around. Democrats can't figure out 1 decent candidate because of the infighting and senile old man. Trump out here making it impossible for a Republican politician to move on from MAGA while at the same time being unelectable.
fartVader
8mo ago
There are surprising synergies (I promise the word works in this context) in scenarios like these. You have to start with understanding what metric the consumer optimizes when there are no limitations.
Health and Palatability have always been counter to one another. When given a choice, people have chosen Palatability. So the consumer maximizes palatability until they reach a point where their health falls off a cliff (and sometimes they keep going even after that).
So far, the food industry has worked with this limitation. Create the most delicious food, but stay under a certain calorie limit. If you think that 2000 calorie Cheese-cake-factory pasta was the limit.....hoo boy are you in for a ride. If the new drugs allow us to move the needle on the point where health falls off the cliff, then we are not going to necessarily see healthier people. We might just see unhealthier (and even more palatable) foods while people more or less stay in the same weight bracket. Portion sizes might go down, but calorie counts might stay the same. People might start having Bubble tea / liquid calories with every meal.
When fundamental limitations of industries go away, we often see the culture change dramatically. Once that happens, older intuitions on what industries worked well together and which were in conflict do not work anymore.
What I AM worried about, is drug dependence. If your eating habits only work in a world where you regularly consume these drugs, then you'll never be able to cope without them. Even worse, if the world is built with the assumption that everyone consumes them, then it will be especially hard for a drug-avoider to sustain themselves in that culture.
fartVader
1yr ago
No candidate has greater potential to derail DeSantis than Trump. He clings onto the hardcore vote and takes them with him, sets fire to his opponents in the primaries, and renders them worse general candidates.
I hope Trump actually gets convicted, irrespective of the validity of his crimes, just to render him ineligible. Even if De Santis loses in the generals, seeing him as the opponent will force democrats to prefer a moderate candidate.
fartVader
20d ago
The oldest gen-Z is 26 years old. Their home acquisition numbers are reflective of inheritance and a minority with social media success. Addtionally, home ownership is a useless metric if you don't know their monthly premium. Home ownership is only 'liberating' if is is somewhat affordable.
fartVader
5mo ago
There is something a pretty about a defaced statue. I much prefer that than having it be taken down. I can imagine many artistic ways of 'tastefully defacing' a statue than crudely spraying red paint on.
A statue that's taken down erases history. A defaced statue keeps all the layers of social change intact. If that's too much to ask, then I'd be all for relocating these statues to a civil war museum that accurately portrays these complex figures for who they were, without glorifying them. And please, do not replace it with George Floyd. Black people deserve better immortalized figures.
fartVader
11mo ago
I would expect their contribution to be high, because jews are wealthy, disproportionately represented in the media industry and live in places where voices are heard (LA, NYC).
Antler estimates that two-thirds to three-quarters of the women in these collectives were Jewish.
It could be as high as 40% (while being 7% of the population) and I wouldn't bat an eye. But, at 66% there certainly was something about being Jewish that led to the numbers being so high.
If Jewish conspiracy theorists would quiet down for a bit, it would be really interesting to do good faith studies into why urban WASPs and secular Jews behave so differently. But I don't think there is any world in which such a modest proposal gets interpreted as anything but anti-semitic.
fartVader
1yr ago
These laws are clearly counter-productive and a case of "missing the forest for the trees". The easiest way to reduce demand for petroleum cars, is not to target the petroleum, but to target the cars.
The discussion has to begin with overturning obvious loopholes. The zero cost changes include:
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Remove the "light truck" exception. All cars smaller than a semi/ RV must meet the same emissions requirements.
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Allow 'electric subsidies' to be used for all electric vehicles. Including e-bikes & e-scooters.
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Allow all hybrids of a certain range to be eligible for electric subsidies. (It can be as simple as extra tariffs not applying, or using median-emission numbers to apply tariffs)
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Universal removal of zoning regulations within walking distance of transit centers
When it comes to things that cost $$, Infrastructure investments are simply more effective than 1 time car subsidies. The electric car subsidies would soon reach the 100s of billions if we keep seeing electric car adoption.
- Use the billions to build BRT bus lanes instead. Cheap, effective and much much lower energy consumption. It pairs excellently with the universal removal of zoning regulations suggestion above.
Indirect dis-incentivization can also be done through long overdue good-faith mechanisms.
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Road safety regulations must include safety outcomes for all people involved in a collision. Including pedestrians and the secondary vehicle.
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Liability coverage should be mandatory nationally, and cover all costs medical or otherwise for those in the car crash.
There is so much that can be done, before draconian 'petrol cars are illegal' laws ever have to be passed.
consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand
Yes ! It is hard to tell what the true cause of this is. (lobbyists ?) But it is seems to pervade all American society.
fartVader
20d ago
downstream of the cultural issues
You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.
With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.
So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.
fartVader
5mo ago
which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
They would've replaced the statue with a Mexican dude if they wanted striking symbolism. Ironically, the only black people immigrating to the US are South Indians.
fartVader
9mo ago
I was not born in an Abrahmic culture, so forgive my ignorance, but...
At its core, each Abrahmic sect believes that they understand the words of God. I would assume that for a group that claims to understand God's words, surely you would have to be confident before making such a claim. Credit where it is due, Christians are confident. However, they are all confident in their unique truth and just as many of them are confident in the false hood of every other Pagan, Abrahmic and Christian sect.
While there are a few inclusive Christians, most Christians aren't going around saying : "My Christianity has the highest odds of heaven, while it is 50-50 with the others." Most are going around saying : "Join us and go to heaven, everyone else will rot in hell with 100% money-back guarantee." Do note, Most Christians believe that most Christians (not them) are going to hell. (It's esp neat, given that Catholics are almost exactly 50%).
So yes, the entry to heaven is gated by engaging in very localized and specific sub-groups underneath Christianity.
belief and trust in Christ
Another thing that confuses me. How do Christians square off human agency against belief in God and his plan ? If I truly believed in Jesus, why would I ever take my child to a doctor or get treated for a wound. A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God. So any person who dares to exercise personal agency is not a true believer, and ends up in hell ? (at least from a protestant stand point)
only define the value of something in relation to other things
Yes?
I'm not materialistic, but the hedonistic treadmill, lifestyle creep and trends are real things. Yes, a cute puppey and green mountains do evoke postive-emotions that seem universal and untethered to society. But, life is usually a healthy balance of emotions drawn from either source.
since we believe God literally had to die to get some of humanity out of going to hell.
The increasing lack of omni-potence of the Christian God does not inspire a lot of confidence.
fartVader
11mo ago
16 to 18 year-old girls would crush 26 to 28 year-old women, much less 36 to 38 year-old women when it comes to desirability. The classic Dataclysm chart and Bruch & Newman, 2018.
Hah. If we had a base-9 number system, the whole chart would say 18.
fartVader
1yr ago
MAGA is about aesthetics, not the issues.
The issues will stay the same. The aesthetics are going from institutional kamikaze (Trump) to institutional capture (DeSantis / Rufo).
Trump is the only candidate which has a chance
We aren't talking about Jeb or Ted as the alternative. DeSantis has shown himself to be a competent public speaker that has united coastal and urban florida voters.
fartVader
1yr ago
The good news is, guys can change their attractiveness far more effectively than women.
Good skin care, grooming and fitness will get you a +2 in points from wherever you are. Add a +1 by catering to a care that has a positive bias towards you. (very lucky if you are white, but staying within your race irrespective of which you are, helps). A 4/10 won't become a 10, but they can become a 7/10. Not too bad.
You gotta work with what you've got, but it is one's first responsibility to make as much progress on Rule #1 and #2 as your constitution will allow.
Love the thought-provoking take, even if it isn't something I fully agree on. I see some similarities between them.
Both Wokeism and the Neo-EA (AGI-fearmongers) movement run against one of the fundamental observed truths of the universe : "Predicting/Shaping the far-future is a futile exercise". I'd add a corollary to that : "Greedy optimization is the only form of optimization that works". Or in 1 word : "Humility".
Greedy optimization through small short term actions and observable outcomes is depressingly slow. But, it forces you to reconcile with the difference in expectations and actual outcomes. The difference is captured by a lack of understanding of the very underlying systems that these solutions aim to fix.
This is where both Wokeism and Neo-EA run into issues. Wokeism's "All of society needs to buy in into unresearched social change in lock step" demands change that requires generations to observe positive outcomes for, while negative side-effects are disregarded through "real wokeism wouldn't have these issues" or "a few negatives today will far outweigh the benefits that are to come in the promised future" kind of comments.
Neo-EA similarly demands that an entire industry should dedicate its efforts to AI-safety without any non-rhetorical research that proves the arrival of AGI, which they insist is definitely around the corner. They insist that a definite event is around the horizon by extrapolating from the present, a practice that has time-and-again failed at predicting the future. (Planes will keep getting smaller until flying cars are here, CPUs will grow at 2x/yr, Democracy is inevitable, and more things that never happened)
Both are impossible to criticize, in that same way that a startup that doesn't exist is impossible to criticize. Your analogies to religions and pseudo religions (Communism) are spot on. "Everything will make sense during the inevitable judgement day / when we have achieved true communism / when we have achieved equity / when AGI is finally here.". They are all the same thing.
For a movement so rooted in math, you'd think that they would have the humility to not look for a closed-form-solution to what is likely a non-convex problem. Small steps, gradient descent and slow progress is the only thing that sort-of-works.
There is certain irony to me suggesting that the only solution that has ever worked well for human systems is the exact algorithm being used to train massive AI models. So maybe the AGI-fearmongers have a point after all /s? .
Boring choice, but I'd choose NYC.
If you don't need to commute, you can buy a house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood or one that is mid-gentrification. I am not too different from you in age or compensation, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn is my dream neighborhood. The area near 11th ARR in Paris is my #2 and Somerville, MA is my #3.
Every place that is sunnier and as happening as NYC is culturally isolating to someone who is not from there. So Madrid, Tokyo and Barcelona lose on those grounds.
fartVader
10mo ago
Public transportation is so slow and a hassle.
Public transit is only slow if it is has to sit in traffic. In NYC, Boston & Western Europe, it is a lot faster to get around in public transit than in cars. The problem with cars, is that you have to build larger roads and parking spaces everywhere. That makes transit impossible. That leads to everyone using cars, which in turn requires larger roads and parking spaces. So now everyone wants to go somewhere by far fast, but that that has made traffic worse and the place you want to go to farther off. When you build for transit, everything is so close by that even walking is faster than a car.
far away
Yes ofc. Agreed. For anything out of town, trains can serve a similar purpose. But I am not opposed to cars as an essential means of transport outside the city core.
All of this is especially perplexing giving the rampant drinking culture in the US. If the only fun event in most towns is drinking, then how can I drive to the spot ? I guess the obesity epidemic keeps the BAC levels low /s .
fartVader
11mo ago
Bring enough garbage bags and make sure to scout out a proper restroom. There are somehow never enough garbage bags, and no one wants to go toa disgusting portapotty.
bring sunscreen even if she doesn't.
fartVader
11mo ago
Sometimes you just don't have the time for it.
Ironing clothes, folding clothes....is just unnecessary work. Especially if they come unwrinkled from the dryer. Cooking and clean bathrooms is more essential, and I agree that they're necessary skills.
There are only 24 hours in the day, and I don't mind if a couple of low-priority chores fall to the wayside while I am doing something more important. Wasting time while ignoring chores is pretty immature though. Especially because you can often waste time and do chores at the same time.
fartVader
1yr ago
The others have covered most points. But here's a few more:
Modern civilization doesn't need to sustain the current status-quo eternally. Nuclear Fusion has been 5 years away for a good century, but it is reasonable to expect it to get there within the next century. Nuclear fusion is infinite energy. So, we only need to survive for 100 years. Piece of cake.
However this is not very applicable in cars
The young are increasingly anti-car, and many cities are slowly but surely, moving away from the 60s-highway-maximalist approach to living. The nature of capitalistic lobbying and collective delusion might make it difficult to uproot cars from our lives. But, it is NOT civilization ending. Car "free" cities ARE a future that is qualitatively better than what we currently have in North-America.
America isn't poor. America is expensive. At minimum wage, you're already richer than the median individual in a European country.
Poverty is easier to eradicate than many other social-ills, because poverty is tangible. Food, shelter, and clothing.
At face value, costs for all 3 are relatively consistent across economies with different purchasing powers. The US as fairly cheap groceries1 for a developed economy) and fast fashion costs the same around the world.
Shelter too is cheap. The US has the most abundant land and houses can be purchased pre-assembled from home-depot to mitigate labor costs.
Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.
Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.
Don't run away from the uncomfortable single group to blame for this. Let's stop caring about 'landlords AND'. Instead let's focus on the landlords themselves. Some landlords are also middle-class salary-men and sometimes they are an investment company like Blackrock, but their secondary identity is irrelevant. When they are a landlord, they are all the same. Landlords the worst kind of burden on the economy. They get paid for hoarding and running what's effectively an extortion racket by limiting where you can build in this country : "pay me whatever I charge, or go homeless. No, you can't manufacture the commodity by yourself." Economically-productive renters lose all purchasing power, and landlords are effectively out of the labor force as they sit on top of feudal-dues extracted from their little 2-bedroom colony. Communists have the worst solutions, but no one points out problems quite as well as a Communist.
The housing extortion racket only works when housing is limited. Let people build and you'll see poverty drop like we've never seen before.
Nothing is entirely monocausal, so I'll do a quick rundown of secondary needs of poor people, how they are and aren't met. (or the pillaging section, as I'd call it)
Bad infrastructure = highways only = cars are needs = At least $5k+ $400/month-per-person just to live life vs 100$/month for top-tier subway systems. That's a lot of extra money for poor people.
Schools - are free
Hospitals - This is a big one, but a bigger topic for another day. (tl;dr - Doctors are evil.)
Safety - American small towns are remarkably safe. The lack of safety seems localized to certain communities, than tied poverty as a whole.
Wifi ? - Wifi is cheap enough
Employment - Unemployment is so low in the US, that the fed can't get people to lose jobs even as it tries its hardest.
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