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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2925 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've been doing some traveling lately, I started wondering. What happens if I lose my wallet (my ID, all credit cards, etc.) and my phone, or get mugged or such? How can I establish my identity? Say, my hotel key was in the wallet - would I be locked out of the hotel? How would they know I am me if I show up and ask for a replacement key? I mean, they can send a security guy with me to the room - and then what? All the stuff in my suitcase are very generic guy's clothes that could be anybody's. I probably don't even remember which exactly t-shirts and jeans I packed. They don't have labels or anything that points to me. How would they know? How would I get home, for that matter - I can't fly without an ID, and I can't get a new ID until I am in the same state at least - if I am not living in this state, they can't issue me a new ID.

I could go to the police maybe - though I wouldn't even know where "the police" is in a random city. But even assuming I just get lucky and encounter a traffic cop or something, and they explain me where the closest police station is - do I walk there then? And when there - how would they know I am me? Do they have access to other state's databases? Since I am a naturalized citizen, DHS for sure has a lot of my photos and fingerprints, but can any police precinct access it just on a word of a random dude? And after that - even if they do believe me, they can't issue me a new ID, right? So how do I still get home (or even to the airport, for that matter)?

Also, is there a good strategy to prepare for such eventuality? I can't just ask DMV for a secondary ID that I would keep in my suitcase in the hotel, for example, can I? I could probably take my passport, but the chance I lose it actually makes it more dangerous, and recovering the passport is probably even more annoying. Does a form of secondary ID that is not as costly to lose exist?

For me (someone who has been living alone as a digital nomad for several years now), my system is:

  • wallot with most of my stuff in my front pocket. it's quite thick and doesn't come out easily, I think it would be pretty easy to tell if someone was pickpocketing it. That's never happened.

  • backup old phone in my backpack. I did once lose my main phone and that was a huge pain. Luckily I could still use the old phone to connect to all my online accounts, but losing my US sim card and associated phone number was a huge pain.

  • Passport in its own separate shoulder bag that I wear under my shirt.

  • Documents in my suitcase like bank info, insurance info, an old driver's liscense, etc. I've never really had to use any of this but it's there if I need it. If you're just flying domestically in the US they're surpisingly permissive on what counts as ID, you can get home with almost government-issued paper that has your name on it.

  • Some small amount of physical cash, either in the suitcase or the backpack.

Basically you can't plan for everything, but as long as you're flexible and have some redundancy you'll be OK. You can also just stop and ask random people. If you don't look completely crazy you can find someone to help. I got locked out of my hotel room once and the staff let me back in, no questions asked. People on the street will give you directions if you ask them nicely. Police are not very helpful in my experience, mostly they just help you file insurance claims. The embassy is supposed to be good at helping stranded citizens get home, although I've fortunately never had to resort to that.

If you don't mind answering some questions... Do you recommend the nomad lifestyle? What's the best and worst things about it? The best country to live alone in?

I don't have any clear answers on whether I recommend it, I'm still deciding on that for myself. But I'll give you my thoughts.

The obvious best is getting a way cheaper cost of living. With my middle class American salary, I feel rich in a lot of foreign countries. Like 1/2, 1/4, or even less than what it would be in the US, depending on what you're willing to tolerate. I also really enjoy being able to get away from some of the stuff that's always bugged me about the US- suburban sprawl, health insurance, red-blue politics, enshittified apps for everything, and lack of good nightlife. Those are just my own preferences, but nice thing about digital nomading is you can kind of pick and choose what lifestyle and culture you want. Of course, every place has its downsides, and you start to see those more once your there.

Worst thing is that I can never stay for as long as I want, because of visa issues. Plus being an obvious foreigner with no permanent ties to the community, it makes you feel like weird and adds a lot of hastle to even simple things, like getting mail delivered. It's hard to stick to a regular diet or exercise plan or join clubs. I'm hoping to figure out a way to stay more permanently, but a lot of countries don't have good visa options for that, or only for older people.

Country-wise it depends a lot on which city and neighborhood you're in, but I really enjoyed my time in Mexico, Taiwan, and Japan. All 3 managed to hit the sweet spot for me of feeling comfortable enough to relax, significantly cheaper than the US, and interesting enough to find fun things to do as a random foreign single guy. It also helped a lot being able to speak some Spanish and Japanese. I did not enjoy my time in Southeast Asia where I couldn't understand anything at all, and I thought Western Europe just felt too similar to America to be worth the hassle.

Thanks for the reply! Sounds like overall it's kinda fraught with issues. Once you find a place you actually like a lot, you can't stay for long. And you should know the language before you arrive. I can imagine feeling alienated if you don't understand what anyone is saying. Japan is tempting, even for solo travel, but I would have to either learn some Japanese or be prepared to not be able to communicate with anyone beyond extremely basic words.

I'm not looking to be a perma-nomad or anything, but I do want a place where I can stay for ~3 months per year with a decent climate.

The thing about language learning, especially a non-European language like Japanese, is that it's a never-ending process. It's not like you hit some threshold and suddenly understand everything effortlesslly. It's a continuous grind to learn new words, new grammer, and improve on the basics. You can get by in any country with English, hand gestures, and phone translation, but it's not very comfortable. It's one thing to be able to do simple things like order food in a restaurant or follow transit directions. It's a whole other level to do the things that I want to do when I'm actually living somewhere- take a class, read a book, or keep up with people's jokes. Hardest thing of all is being in a group conversation and trying to understand what multiple people are saying, while also thinking of stuff to say myself. Even if I'm fast enough for the conversation, I might just not know the thing they're talking about, like if they're referencing some random local celebrity.

On the plus side, being an obvious foreigner who speaks English does have some advantages. You'll naturally meet more curious, intellectual type people who want to practice English and learn about other countries, as well as other foreigners travelling. And if you're like me and you tend to over-intellectualize everything, speaking in a foreign language can force you to just be blunt and spit it out in plain, simple words- because that's all I have!

Since most problems can be solved with plastic money, I have a second credit card for travelling. I keep it separate from the rest of my valuables, usually at the bottom of my suitcase. That way, I have 3 sources of money: wallet, phone and travel credit card. So in your scenario, I'd be walking into my hotel room with security/reception staff saying "There's a black master card with my name on it behind this zipper, which I will tip you with. The Card Verification Value is 123."

If that's not enough, we might need to look at CCTV footage of the reception area from when I checked in.

I misread this as international travel, so this is advice specifically for that, but if you get mugged or lose your passport, go to the embassy. I traveled in a group to Australia and one of the guys lost his passport (WYD Sydney, so we were mostly 14-18 years old with a handful of chaperones.) He went to the US embassy, made a few phone calls to his parents, and was back home before the rest of us.

As far as establishing identity goes, you weren't born with an accurate photo ID. At some point the government just takes it on faith that you are yourself if you have the right papers and someone willing to vouch for you. You hopefully keep your birth certificate, marriage certificate, SSN card, etc at home (in a fire proof safe if you're forward thinking.) People routinely lose everything in fires and floods and then start over again. Not great or convenient, but they don't suddenly become non-persons.

A lot of the advice is along the lines of, "Don't travel alone." You might lose your phone, but your travel buddy would hopefully still have his. Even if you are traveling alone, hopefully you still have some phone numbers memorized - family members, best friends who would be willing to drop everything for a few hours and help you out.

A lot of travelers wear something like this under their clothes with some cash and their ID. It's not going to deter a serious mugging, but it does protect against pick pocketing

While I believe it's not technically legally valid, I keep both my drivers' license and my old state ID card from the last state I lived in on me. For international borders, they will give you a lot of shit, but I know firsthand the US has a database they can just look you up in and let you through without your passport, the hard part is getting on the plane without it (was very possible to do if you are a dual citizen, ESTA makes that less likely). You can also (anecdotal evidence, do not rely on) still fly without a Real ID, they just take you aside and, again, give you a lot of shit while they establish your identity.

But cjet is correct, your best strategy in those circumstances is social proof, looking like a respectable citizen and being able to talk your way into things. Find a helpful person and ask to get connected to the authorities - walk into a random hotel and ask the front desk, find a branch of your bank, ask a corner store for directions, etc. Harder if you're in suburbia but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Losing your passport if you don't need it immediately is a bit of bureaucracy but not a big deal. You have to file a new application and wait a bit. The main issue is if you need to do international travel in that time, in which case you'll have to do some shenanigans to go in person to a passport office. I would never travel without my passport even within the US, but yeah leave it in the hotel room (I don't recommend the safe, you are infinitely more likely to forget you put something in a hotel safe and leave without it than to have housekeeping break in and steal your passport).

For something like the border it's less worrying for me, because I know they have all the data on me, and they are legally bound to let me in. They can give me a lot of shit and marinate me for a bit there (for procedure or just for the heck of it, who knows) but at the end it'll be fine. I once got into the US from Canada with a wrong ID (I think it was expired or something, and I didn't realize that) and they were very upset at the document being invalid, and I had to go sit for an hour in a room with other suspects, but then they finally let me in, after admonishing me about the necessity to keep valid documents and follow proper procedures.

than to have housekeeping break in and steal your passport).

I stay mostly in cheap hotels (not always, but very frequently, though I avoid outright dumps, but a step higher is often ok for me) and over by now decades of travel I can't remember a single thing that was stolen from me in a hotel. Of course, not that I have a lot of stuff worth stealing, except maybe computer tech. Maybe I just got lucky, but I am not overly concerned about hotel housekeeping stealing my ID - if the cartels need my ID so much, they'd just bribe a receptionist and he'll copy it for them and I'd suspect nothing. But they probably already have all my data anyway from the last Experian hack or a dozen of similar ones that followed.

I mean it in the sense of "getting your ID stolen from your room is too rare to every worry about." The only time I or anyone I know has had something stolen from a locked hotel room was a dodgy hotel in rural Turkey where some girls with us had their cash disappear from their purses left in the room. Stealing stuff from hotel rooms is vanishingly rare, and even then I would think the thieves would generally try to be subtle rather than taking stuff that ensures you'll make a scene. I do sometimes slip my ID and a credit card out of my phone case into my pocket in very dodgy areas, so that if I get mugged I can hand over my phone/wallet and still be fine - as you say, criminals really don't care about your ID, we're long past the days when passports were valuable targets because you could cut them up and stick another picture in.

P.S. I'll take the chance to recommend Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole to anyone reading this thread who finds these sort of travel/identity scenarios tantalizing to consider.

I keep an older phone. Primary reason is backup in case the primary phone battery explodes (or other weird shit), but it doubles as backup phone when I travel.

While traveling, I have a big conspicuous wallet where I keep cash and enough of my cards, and inconspicuous one with one other credit card and folded-in paper with important phone numbers.

Never been mugged, as I travel in boring touristy places, my primary worry is pickpockets.

TBH my primary worry is me. I've never been mugged or pickpocketed, I just added it for completeness sake. But I have lost a lot of things over the years. If I get to thinking deeply about something or reading something interesting, I could get quite absent-minded sometimes. Usually the victims are hats, umbrellas, sunglasses, chargers, water bottles and such small items, but one day I could get especially unlucky.

That's the list of Stuff I Lose as well. You know what the common thread is with all those items? They're things you don't carry in your pockets every day, just when you're out and about. Life gives us very good instincts to take care of phone/wallet/keys - in fact, when I travel, it often takes me a day or two to get over not having my regular keys in my pocket. This is the other thing about passports, they're easy to lose because you're not used to carrying them.

If you get mugged or pickpocketed, you walk into the nearest establishment like a bar or a hotel, tell them you have been mugged and ask them to call the police. This solves the question of getting to the nearest police station. You also ask them to call your hotel so they can block access to your room and your bank to freeze your credit cards. The cops probably know where your wallet is, most street-level criminals don't need your ID.

If you've lost everything (let's say you mixed your prescription pills with alcohol and blanked out), get to your hotel. They know enough about you that you can prove your identity to them: full name, room number, phone or email, maybe they even have some CCTV footage or a copy of your ID (I don't know if they copy it in the US).

They stopped copying IDs years ago in most hotels. Of course they'd have a record of Mr. JJJ in their database, the problem is proving that guy and me are the same person. CCTV would help but I am not sure whether an underpaid receptionist would have access to such things, especially days back. I guess if I am insistent enough they could at least get someone who does on the phone, if only to get rid of me.

What edgecityred said is good stuff. Also:

Your secondary ID is other people that have not lost their IDs and are willing to make a lot of calls and spend money for you.

Parent / spouse work best since they will have a reason for knowing you and a paper trail that connects you.

Your employer/ HR department if you are traveling for business reasons.

A good friend might help you in some ways that require spending money, but not as much on identity things. Unless you pre-plan giving them documents or access to your private stuff.

If you are traveling outside of your country your embassy can also help you out.

You will need to memorize their numbers or have a way of contacting them in case of an emergency.

You photocopy these documents. You can leave a copy in the hotel safe (if you're not leaving your original passport in there). You should also keep phone numbers handy: your credit card company, for one, though you can probably google that. I have Amex and the concierge had my phone I'd left in a rental car FedExed to me. That's the card provider I prefer for service like that. They will also wire you money and find you a lawyer or directions to a consulate. https://www.americanexpress.com/content/dam/amex/us/credit-cards/features-benefits/PGA_Benefit_Guide_Rev_09-17-final.pdf

You can black out anything sensitive like your SSN, etc. if you put copies of things like this in your luggage.

Also, get luggage tags. A big, colorful tag is extremely handy at airports anyway if you have nondescript black bags that look like everyone else's at the carousel. Mine is a large lime green circle tag.

So what's the deal with the National Guard deployments? I've seen a lot of reporting around whether the cities want the Guard, whether Trump will deploy the Guard, whether the courts will force Trump to pull the Guard out, etc.

But I haven't seen much reporting on the impact that Guard is having where it is deployed. Is crime down, even anecdotally? Are the streets safer? Have National Guardsman shot or beat up or detained anyone?

Was it a good idea? What are the early results?

I heard it worked in DC, and as I understand it also quelled LA riots pretty quickly (though we always have the possibility they'd have ended the same without the Guard deployment). In general, such things serve multiple functions: showing the ne'er-do-wells that the Law is serious now and the free ride is at least temporarily over, which makes the opportunists among them to either lay low or move on to other places/things, showing the local police that if they aren't doing their jobs, their jobs will be done for them, which makes the city admin more open to the idea to actually instruct the police to do their job, showing the random normies things are happening in the most perceivable and obvious way - you literally see those guys on the street. And the thugs see them too, so they aren't likely to rob a grocery store right in front of them. Of course, the idea is that once the quiet is established, the local police will take over in maintaining this quiet - which if the local police is not willing to (or the local government does not intend to let them) makes it only a temporary measure. But the local politicians do not want to establish a pattern "with Trump - quiet, without Trump - mayhem" in the minds of their electorate, so they would be at least somewhat incentivized for maintain the quiet, once established, for a while.

I've heard anecdotally from the national media that the DC NG has made a huge difference.

Less reporting of it being helpful in other areas, the proposed explanation for that is that DC was somewhat open to the idea and coordinated areas for them to be present.

Even some dems have supported it, although usually quietly.

The main difference is that DC is a federal district, so it has no independent sovereignty and the federal government can do whatever it wants. Other cities have overlapping state jurisdiction which the Constitution gives some weight to, so the permitted activities of federal forces is much more circumscribed. If the locals are cooperative of course there is a lot more leeway, but if they are not, then there would have to be some federal nexus in their activities.

I've heard anecdotally from the national media that the DC NG has made a huge difference.

I travel to D.C. for work pretty often and always meet up with friends who live in the city. During a recent trip, my friends and I agreed the city has changed for the better since the National Guard deployment.

The usual "crowd" that spills in from Maryland at night dropped significantly, making walking around past 10 p.m. without the fear of getting mugged or murdered possible for the first time, according to my friends, in "years." There's still some gun violence, but it's mostly contained to southeast D.C., across the river, which is a hotbed for criminal activity anyway. If there's a place the National Guard should focus its attention, it's there.

There are fewer homeless people and drug addicts harassing people on the street, thanks to a faster turnaround time by the cops to remove them when businesses and residents file reports. Before, homeless people would make forts out of cardboard boxes and squat, sometimes for months, in front of buildings, with the city shrugging its shoulders; not the case anymore.

With ICE on the prowl, there are also fewer noisy scooters driven by illegals working as food delivery people. There was a point, my friends said, when traffic was "filled" with scooters that swerved through cars, drove on the wrong side of the road, encroached into bike lanes, and sped through sidewalks. Additionally, they'd hear the whistling sound of scooters being locked for deliveries at all hours of the day. Now, they're all mostly gone.

On Sunday evening, I watched Southern Comfort.

Which is a film about how @hydroacetylene spends his weekends.

No, seriously - Louisiana Nat'l Guard in the 1980s. This film is, essentially, an attempt to re-make Deliverance with, I guess, a more military patina. It doesn't do a great job and mostly survives on a sloppy thriller plot and some competent to good performances by a very young Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine.

It isn't a great film, but it is an okay-to-good film that wants to be great.

So, my low stakes question for Sunday is: What are other films that are good, not great, but really want to be great?

I would say Christopher Nolan's entire career after the Prestige (maybe bar Inception. I think it's held back by Leonardo DiCaprio, but I recognize I'm in the minority in not thinking he's a very good actor). I've really liked all his movies since, but there's always been something that held them back from being great (the Dark Knight's disjointed third act, the general sloppiness of TDKR, Insterseller's "love is the greatest force of all" cop out, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer's focus on practical effects to the detriment of their stories and Oppenheimer's reliance on an unnecessarily elaborate non-linear structure. Tenet was just a swing and a miss.). It feels like Nolan's always one glaring issue away from making a great film, and really wants to be more than just another action director, but can't quite recapture the magic of his early career.

Another one that's closer to my heart is Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. I really love the director's cut, but the combination of a miscast Orlando Bloom and overly on-the-nose War on Terror commentary makes it impossible for me to recommend it without reservations. Scott was this close to making an all-time great historical epic, but it's just too incredibly 2005 to ever be a timeless classic.

It's amazing how stacked a resume Orlando Bloom built off of a couple year span after Lord of the Rings before people realized his limited range wasn't just an acting choice for Legolas.

I really love the director's cut, but the combination of a miscast Orlando Bloom and overly on-the-nose War on Terror commentary makes it impossible for me to recommend it without reservations.

That’s actually something I love about historical epics. Over time it becomes a double period piece, for both the period it was set in and the period it was made.

Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs, penned by Aaron Sorkin, was a transparent attempt to recapture the magic of The Social Network, Sorkin's earlier film about a brilliant tech entrepreneur whose arrogance and single-mindedness ends up compromising his relationships with his loved ones. It was slated on release, but I thought it was actually quite good, with an interesting narrative structure, great performances all around and some clever cinematography to reflect the passage of time. What was lacking compared to the earlier film was the propulsive force of Nine Inch Nails's score and a strong narrative through-line: Steve Jobs just ended up feeling too episodic for the audience to feel consistently engaged throughout. Each of the three "acts" could have been broadcast as an instalment of a three-part miniseries without compromising the emotional effect one iota.

It was slated on release

Slayed? Panned?

To slate:

  1. (transitive, chiefly British) To criticise harshly.

I would nominate Dark Blue and Street Kings two films penned by literary crime novelist James Ellroy. I think had a few things gone differently they could have been up there with LA Confidential and Training Day as some of the best neo-noir movies of last half century. As it stands they are still very underrated and well-made.

LA Confidential might be in my top ten movies of all time (definitely in terms of the number of times I've watched it). But I've always considered Training Day a terribly overrated film. Denzel deserved his Oscar, but I don't know that the film has much else going for it.

I don’t like it that much either, but its always on the lists of best neo-noirs so I felt I had to mention it. Honestly I think it’s one of Washington’s weaker performances (it’s a bit hammy) and I think a lot of people were just reacting to the novelty value of him playing a villain, which he hardly ever does.

@Earendil Have you stopped posting weekly chapters of The Mountain?

What tools are people now using for LLM coding? Claude code?

simonw's llm command line tool: https://github.com/simonw/llm and the related tools like ttok and files-to-prompt.

Combined with decent knowledge of the shell, it's very easy to ask very detailed questions about a code base. Here's an example I just pulled up from my ~/.bash_history that I did last night.

$ llm <<EOF
Modify the json schema so that art_characters is a list of strings and identify other areas where this may cause problems.

$(files-to-prompt schemas/*.json_schema)
EOF

The token usage is also trivial. The query above cost <1 cent. I do dozens of these types of queries daily using the most expensive llm apis, and my total usage this year is under $20. Tools like claude code pack a lot more into the context which makes them more expensive and the additional context confuses them.

The only downside to this approach is that you actually have to understand bash syntax to craft good prompts using heredocs/variable substitution/loops/etc. It's about 10 minutes of work to learn the basics, and 10 hours to learn the subtleties.

Did you see the study that said that devs using AI thought they were 20% faster but they were actually 20% slower? Cal Newport discussed it on his podcast.

Personally I love the help troubleshooting but the code I generate myself.

I like Claude Code. I know how to program and don't use it to vibe code, and it's helped me solve some difficult problems and saved me a lot of time over the past year.

More importantly, what tools are people now using for expert level code that isn't trivial Javascript / Python boilerplate or doesn't interface to trivial apis using such languages?

I do such coding for living for many years now. My experience is in no way exclusive, people use a lot of tools, but what I have been using is Java/Scala/Python, with a little bit of C/C++, a good IDE (JetBrains is pretty good at that, though a lot of people I know also use VS Code) and a lot of head-scratching. All the rest is secondary. So far my conviction is if your main tool is LLM then either a) it's not "serious" coding - and by this I mean no disrespect, a lot of coding needs are quite well covered by trivial JS/Python boilerplate, and there's nothing wrong with that, just as a lot of medical needs are covered by "take this Tylenol and call me if it doesn't resolve itself by the end of the week", but we don't think that's all of medicine, do we? - or, more dangerous, b) you are dangerously deluded as to what coding tasks LLMs are appropriate to. In the latter case, may God have mercy on your soul, because you will find out soon.

Windsurf for one-off stuff where simple iteration will do the trick ("write tests for this code, iterate until tests pass, usual caveats"), the llm cli command for very simple repetitive stuff that doesn't require much context (e.g. simple semantic stuff like "check for out-of-date comments", or stuff where I could figure out eventually how to do it with tree-sitter but it's not worth the time like "replace this function call with that one, here's how to structure it").

For writing core business logic where I'm the domain expert, vim to write the code followed by windsurf for automated code review ("here's the patch, here's the codebase, review the patch for [long list of things] and anything else that stands out to you").

My heuristic is to never use the LLM to do something I don't know how to do myself. Since most of my job involves doing things I do know how to do myself, this does not actually block off very much.

Personally I just want some fast, decent boilerplate refactoring of a simplistic codebase at the moment, and I don’t know what’s available.

Setting aside the crazed "magic bullet/second shooter/faked with AI" conspiracy views on the Charlie Kirk assassination, are there any takes on it wilder than this one:

MAGA pastor Shane Vaughn claims that God allowed Satan to kill Charlie Kirk before Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson could turn Kirk against Israel: "God said, 'No, not today. You're too pure and you have too much influence.'"

(And also, what do you even call this type of position/argument?)

Not exactly a take or an argument, but there's a billboard in my town with Charlie's face on it and the phrase "Well Done Good and Faithful Servant, Well Done." And it's sponsored by a prominent local Republican family. And every time I pass it I'm deeply uncomfortable, like passing Dr. T.J. Eckleberg on my way to the Hamptons.

The phrasing is weird. Who is speaking? Was Charlie the servant of this local Republican family? Or are they speaking/writing as God? Because that's just so disturbing and arrogant, you don't write as God. And how is it appropriate to say Well Done to Charlie at this time? I mean, sure, say the guy was a good guy, you can even say he achieves more as a martyr (Joe Hill or Horst Wessel as your opinion runs], but it's just so off-putting to say "Well Done" for dying. This wasn't Charlie doing well, this wasn't what Charlie wanted, he wanted to be alive raising his kids.

And why is a private individual sponsoring it? It would be one thing for the local Republican party, or even a local evangelical church, to do it. But just a guy? It's weird and self centered.

I'm bothered by it every time I drive by it.

It’s a quote from the parable of the talents, and is definitely meant to be from God saying that Charlie lived a righteous life and is now with God. That meaning will be patently obvious to any practicing Christian, and pretty clear to those of us exposed to a lot of the Christian memetic superstructure in American culture.

It’s a bit surprising to me that it’s non-obvious to you. That’s not meant as a criticism, more as an acknowledgment of my own blind spots. I suppose that the superstructure has significantly eroded over the last 50 years to the point that even the most basic points of the Christian memeplex are no longer part of the general culture.

I didn't mention the bible verse because I don't think it makes the usage any less bizarre in context.

A wacko. You call this type of position/argument "a wacko".

In British English, the "whacko" would be the person who advances the argument. You might also call the argument a "whacko argument".

And also, what do you even call this type of position/argument?

Chronic Scofield’s disease.

Alternatively, the fruits of heresy.

If this guy were trying to popularise the anti-Israel position and not get in trouble for it he would have a hard time writing a better line. I assume he's actually being genuine here, but unless he's claiming Charlie Kirk was stupid or weak then drawing attention to the idea this pure hearted man was about to turn against Israel raises questions about why a good man would come so close to turning against Israel.

(And also, what do you even call this type of position/argument?)

Grifting. Rent's due, and he's low on funds.

Wouldn't it pretty clearly be angling at a Divine Taboo: even questioning Israel or talking with someone who might cause you to question Israel is so offensive to the Almighty that he might smite you early just to be safe.

Cornutus ex machina ?

Kirk was affiliated with a heavily Zionist Church. They have sermons where they teach that every Christian has to support Israel politically to be on favorable terms with God, that Israel has a divine right to the entirety of “Greater Israel” (large swaths of neighboring countries), and that America will go to war with Iran sometime soon to spark the End Times.

This is a prime example of the mental gymnastics one has to preform as a rational person with fundamentalist beliefs. For whatever reason(s), Vaughn has decided that core axioms of Christianity are true (powerful invisible beings who intervene in human affairs, valid prophecies waiting to be fulfilled, etc.), and his theory about the metaphysical implications are basically rational if you consider that he’s not going to question these priors.

All that assumes he has sincere belief. There is some MRI evidence that most people are quite uncertain about metaphysical claims.

Once you fully accept divine providence, you're sort of forced into rationalizing events in this way. There are still a bunch of biblical prophesies that God has to fulfil eventially. It is very convenient for the fulfilment of these prophesies to have the Jewish people concentrated in the holy land. It is reasonable to assume given these premises that God will prevent the United States from turning against Israel.

No you are not. You can just say "God does things that I do not understand, and I accept it because I do not pretend to fully understand God". If anything, I can't understand how you can fully accept divine providence without being ready to admit that - I mean, this would literally require a God-sized ego otherwise. At least for a Christian I think, it is on the list as hyperēphania, or in simpler words, pride.

I've outlined this at length before, but I have a lot of trouble seeing how an open minded reading of the OT makes it reasonable to expect God to do anything in particular with the Israelites on any particular day. God throws them back and forth constantly in ways that make sense to him and maybe to the Israelites themselves, but are rarely easily diagnosed by outsiders.

First thing coming to mind is a chutzpiracy theory?

Do you think that Trump's strategy in Ukraine is just him messing with EU leaders, because he knows how much hate and contempt they and their societies feel towards him (and showed it during 2016-2024) and he just enjoys their squeals? Dangling some help and resolution that will never materialize, especially since Europe is no longer of interest for USA.

I'm not sure if Trump has a strategy. He plays by instinct and the seat of his pants, as he does in many other situations. It's got him this far, why quit now?

and he just enjoys their squeals?

This is you imputing your revenge fantasy on geopolitics.

he knows how much hate and contempt they and their societies feel towards him

You write this like you think Europeans wake up every day and go "awe fuck trump is alive, fuck I hate that guy", they don't (they reserve that daily affirmation of hatred for Gypsies, lol).

The opinions you see as presented to you by rage and engagement maximizing algorithms are not real life.

you think Europeans wake up every day and go "awe fuck trump is alive, fuck I hate that guy"

If Canada is any indication, the answer to that question is ‘yes’.

Europe isn’t Canada

I am European and even in my eastern europe backwater the pro EU parts of the intellectual yet idiot class foam at the mouth at every mention of Trump.

You write this like you think Europeans wake up every day and go "awe fuck trump is alive, fuck I hate that guy", they don't

Most people aren't very political, so you're right about that, but the ones that are... ho boy...

I don't think Trump cares too much how much they squeal. He does want to have a "peace achieved" badge on his belt, but he is not overly concerned whether or not some particular EU squealers are happy with it, as long as he is happy with it. The problem with this is you can't really have peace without Putin actually giving the peace, and the latter has zero interest in it so far, unless he achieves either swallowing Ukraine fully or a reasonable approximation of it that can be sold as such.

No.

Trump doesn’t actually play 5D chess. I don’t see any reason he’d set up a gambit like that. No, trickling aid to Ukraine lets him score some points without actually committing much materiel.

Humiliation of the people that looked down on you for 10+ years is hardly 5d chess.

I’m saying if he really cared about humiliating them he wouldn’t bother “dangling” aid.

I think we've seen what Trump does when he wants to humiliate someone. He's going to be direct and crude, not act coy.

No.

I think Trump would very much dislike having a loss on his record as president, and bounces back and forth on whether that means he needs to push negotiation at any cost, or that he needs to keep Ukraine from losing, or if he can just blame the whole thing on Biden and pretend the USA didn't lose.

It's pretty similar to the gyrations of Nixon and Kissinger during the Vietnam war and the Decent Interval combined with bombing Laos and Cambodia.

I think Trump wants to get out of Ukraine without taking blame for it.

EU leaders are fully committed to Ukraine as part of their grand EU project, but don't want to commit their own resources on scale or take the blame for failure. EU foreign policy experts are basically in a state of delusional groupthink.

So Trump is doing a dance where he acts cooperative enough that they won't all band together and blame Trump while also attaching conditions that EU leaders are unwilling to meet.

He probably enjoys messing with them, but not enough to actually affect his behaviour.

I think Trump wants to get out of Ukraine without taking blame for it.

I think this is the core of the issue from a Trump admin perspective. Trump came into office wanting to stop the fighting (and take credit for it), and believed that there was an easy deal to do where Ukraine gives up territory that Russia already controls, the US recognises Russian sovereignty in Crimea and promises not to let Ukraine into NATO, and everyone agrees some kind of face-saving arrangement so that Ukraine can feel safe from Little Green Men XVIII - Whoops I did it again. I strongly suspect (because it was and still is the standard position among most MAGA-adjacent foreign policy thinkers, and because it is consistent with what he says when he is in a pro-Russian mood) that he thought that the only reason why Ukraine hadn't accepted this deal was that the US Deep State was encouraging Ukraine's unreasonable belief that it could regain lost territory.

Trump has now learned that

  • Putin doesn't want a deal where there is still an anti-Russian government in Kyiv. The real Russian war aims are about sovereignty (or "neutrality" when pro-Russian voices are talking to Westerners), not territory. And unless and until he takes a bigger beating than he has done to date, he isn't willing to agree to one. Likewise, he isn't interested in a temporary ceasefire along the current front line. (Ukraine has publicly said that they are open to this, but it is likely that they only said that knowing that Putin wouldn't agree, and that the Zelenskyy regime doesn't want a clean temporary ceasefire either).
  • Ukraine and Western Europe have credibly signalled that they won't co-operate with a face-saving surrender agreement - if Trump tries to sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia or Nixon sold out South Vietnam, the Ukrainians will probably tell him to pound sand and keep fighting, and Western Europe will continue to support them to the best of our ability. Whichever side wins that war, Trump looks like a loser.

The logic of MAGA thought is that the Trump administration's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine should be "Not my circus, not my monkeys" but once Trump has said he will fix the problem his ego won't let him do that.

There aren’t a lot of good solutions for Ukraine. It’s like trying to give a mouse stuck in a glue trap helpful advice on how to get out. The only way for Ukraine to actually win would be to send half a million NATO troops to openly fight the Russians in Ukraine. That would be dicey for multiple reasons. Other than that, you can continue military aid and hope for the best. Trump doesn’t like Zelensky, and he’s annoyed by the EU’s cheapskate attitude toward military spending. But he’s always been more pro-Ukraine than is widely reported, he was the first president to start sending them weapons.

There aren’t a lot of good solutions for Ukraine.

The only "realistic" solution for ukraine right now is Russia holds the territory (taking it back will be way too bloody), but forfeits the assets and pay additional hundred or two billion more over decades as reparations. Guess what - it is unacceptable for everyone.

Europe should just confiscate the Russian assets it has had frozen over the last few years and use them to arm Ukraine. Those add up to more than a hundred billion.

One hundred billion dollars sounds like a lot, but when you’re talking about funding the western military industrial complex it’s not as much as you would think. Ukraine has already gotten about 430 billion dollars worth of aid. So the impounded funds would be enough to sustain the current level of aid for about another year. And that’s putting aside @ArjinFerman’s very good point about transmuting money into actual tanks.

Couple of problems with that approach - there is additional reputational damage about EU being a good place for your money, especially when Germany and France's economies are going down the drain. Second - it is not clear that this will be enough money to turn the tide of the war. And there is not even certainty that there is even enough materiel on the market to be bought and gifted to Ukraine. No one is too keen on giving their latest toys to Ukraine, or even second to last gen - they know China has lots of advisers and they are taking notes. And there will be a problem if they are needed somewhere else and china has figured a way to make the wunderwaffes a lot less wunder will be a nasty surprise. The 4000 thousand tomahawks the US have will be worth a lot less if their efficacy suddenly becomes comparable to obsidian tomahawks.

And of course the big question - what happens when those money are over and there is no breakthrough?

Money makes for poor munitions.

They could simply pay $500k to every deserting Russian soldier. That's 200000 deserters. Could have somewhat of a cobra effect, though.

Imagining a world where wars are settled by each side bidding on each others deserters

I’m pretty sure a couple of Roman wars were settled this way.

I mean... it's kind of the best explanation that fits.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Eternal Dissident. Reattempting Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.

12 Miles Below VI: The Icon of Stars by Mark Arrows.

What did you think? I'm worried about the possibility of things going off the rails a bit.

Doh, I'm actually only a few chapters in, but it's certainly an odd beginning. I'll reply here in detail later this week when I've finished it!

Don't worry I'm still loving it! This book just went in a very different (literal) direction.

Still a cheap date over here so no worries on my end even though the whole opening with the ravens thing definitely gave me the feeling that this book would be different!

ETA: I'll be interested to see if expies of either Huginn or myself exist in the book...

Personally I thought what you are talking about works fine, my concern is just pacing issues. The ideas are explored with the usual higher degree of competence than I would expect from random web author.

I just finished Beyond Cynical and I'm not sure why this isn't a bigger book. It's a great explanation of why we have negativity bias, and seeing it around us, and working against it to be happier. I also just finished Witch King (I love Murderbot and this is her other major series) and I liked it but it lacked the humor of Murderbot.

In lazy comfort food rereading I read Thief of Time (Terry Pratchett) for the first time in years, and it was great, and I'm rereading Scruples and Scruples 2. (70s/80s wealth porn, think Crazy Rich Asians but more episodic and fantasy fulfillment. The book equivalent of a bubble bath in a sunlit bathroom.)

Still "Die Staufer", on the house of Hohenstaufen. Now at Friedrich II's side-gig as a patron of science and a scientific researcher and writer himself. The book makes much of how arabicized he must have been - I wonder a little about how much of that is actually substantiated by evidence, and how much is wilful conjecture by the author, because he cites unusually few sources when it comes to the topic of Friedrich II's acculturation, but overall it's interesting enough either way.

My understanding is that while Sicilian culture was highly Arabicized compared to the rest of Christendom, Frederick II was not much more notably Arabicized (or Byzantinized) than his predecessors on the Sicilian throne. Roger II, for instance, Frederick's grandfather, spoke Arabic, employed Arab scholars, and even wore a coronation robe using Arabic writing and the Muslim calendar - but he also spoke Greek, employed Byzantine scholars, and adopted Byzantine customs he liked. By the time of Frederick's life, Sicily had been a melting pot for over a hundred years, and many Arabs had melted in there, but that doesn't mean they were the dominant element, just an unusual one (the Crusader States, of course, had many Arabs, but their leaders were generally far less cultured and intellectual than Sicily's). What Frederick really brought to Sicily that was new was his Latinizing, Classicizing impulse, the desire to restore the Roman law of the Roman Empire that he inherited from his other grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, and while the intellectual life of his administration owed much to the Arabo-Byzantine influences on Sicily, his political program and specific policies would be much more in a Classicizing, proto-Renaissance mode. Essentially, he added the missing element to the melting pot to turn Sicily from a prosperous and uniquely cultured regional power to a base for truly imperial ambitions.

I enjoyed the Berlin book as very readable, maybe because it's largely (maybe wholly) transcription of talks he gave. You can find some of the actual talks online.

Restarting my read of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. For the age it's a surprisingly pleasant and easy read.

Finished the travel writer book. It was unable to resolve the contradictions of backpackers who want to find the "real" "untouched" locations and the reliance on guidebooks that serve only to funnel people down a well worn tourist trail. To his credit the author did demonstrate ample self-awareness and acknowledge the problem, and it was never the central thesis of the book. If anything it underlined that the guidebooks themselves are of questionable authority, relying on freelance writers like the author who, due to a tight deadline, demanding editors and a low budget resorted to taking advantage of quid pro quo while canvassing hotel and restaurant owners for their opinions on where to stay and where to eat.

Now reading What Not. From the blurb: "Rose Macaulay’s speculative novel of post-First World War eugenics and newspaper manipulation that anticipated Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by 14 years."

Some time ago I read an article talking about how literary publishing is experiencing something of an extreme Pareto distribution: every year, one book becomes the literary book that everyone is reading, to the point that its sales completely dwarf the sales of every other literary book published that year. In 2022, that book was Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which a family member (I think my sister) gave to me some years ago and which I started reading earlier this week.

I'm as surprised as anyone to find that the hype is entirely warranted.

Seriously — of the 27 books I've read from start to finish this year, this is the best I've read so far and it's not even close. (I was only about a third of the way through it when I started to think it might achieve this accolade.) The last time I remember being so affected by a book was when I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in February of 2023. When I woke up this morning I was on page 236, and when I picked it up this afternoon, I found that I simply couldn't put it down, tearing through the remaining 242 pages in three sittings and finishing it all of ten minutes ago.

It concerns two childhood friends who reconnect as Harvard undergrads in the mid-nineties and, with the help of one of their dorm-mates, decide to design a video game together. As a gamer it was of particular interest to me, but even my family members who don't game enjoyed it, so don't let that put you off.

Tender, moving, perceptive, topical, gorgeous. The three main characters are so vividly drawn, I feel like I know them personally. I don't think I'd change a thing. I will be thinking about this book for quite some time.

Funnily enough, about a decade ago I attended a talk by Brenda Romero, an American game designer. (You might have heard of a certain project her husband John designed.) She was talking about a board game she'd designed as an art installation called Train. One of the characters in Tomorrow... designs a video game with a broadly similar premise, to the point that Romero publicly accused Zevin of plagiarism. I can certainly see the parallels, but it seems possible that it was a coincidence: even when Romero was describing the premise of Train I thought it sounded a bit trite. Creative works using the "actually it was the Holocaust all along" twist often come off as cheap and manipulative, and that's coming from someone who used exactly that twist in a short story he wrote (come to think of it, I was about the same age when I wrote it as the character is when she designs her video game).

Holy shit. You're not the first person to lavish this amount of praise on it, but it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?

I literally threw it away 3/4 of the way through. Shut it, walked outside to a dumpster, and dropped it in.

The main protagonist is a Mary Sue who's a barely veiled stand-in for the author. Even she's a cardboard cutout: only the combination of her and her two sidekicks begin to make a whole human being. Every gaming reference is inaccurate in some critical way or topical enough to have come from asking an LLM. The sheer hamfistedness of the central conflict (a right-winger strolling in to shoot up a game studio because he's mad about gay marriage being allowed in this Super Perfect MMO That Everyone Loves) couldn't have possibly been more idiotic.

Anyway, sorry to be a wet blanket about it, but I'm continually baffled by the praise.

Agree with your overarching point though (re: Pareto distribution of modern literature). It's all becoming a lot more monolithic, for many reasons, and it's not a development I appreciate.

Okay, I know I said I wouldn't change a thing, and yet I did bristle a little at the culture war aspects. Marx just had to get murdered by a homophobic white American, didn't he? We couldn't dream of having him get killed by an Islamic extremist. This and the book I read immediately beforehand, Doxology, were published within five years of each other and mention 9/11 and the ensuing atmosphere prominently, but one of the ways you can tell they were written by Blue Tribers is that the authors express no curiosity about the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks at all: 9/11 is essentially just treated as a natural disaster, an act of God, something that just happened. But after Marx's death, the rest of the book is just about how Sadie and Sam process and come to terms with it, and the culture war implications of his murder are barely even touched upon.

But for all that, it didn't sully the emotional impact of the book for me one iota.

it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?

Try reading the aforementioned Doxology and come back to me.

I've been enjoying asking basic math questions to destroy dearly held beliefs and I would like to continue. This one requires more intuition than cold basic math though, but it's in the same ballpark.

Let's talk about housing. Housing's so fucking expensive. Especially in desirable places! YIMBYs (or maybe abundance democrats) argue we should build more housing. A lot more. But what kind of housing? Who are we trying to help?

Well. Take a town of 150k people. A one bedroom in a decent part of mine is approaching $1600 a month and inventory is also frustratingly low across the board. Before we get to my actual point lets focus on an absurd toy non-solution first. Let's build 1,000,000 Connestoga huts across town and charge $450 a month in rent. This eliminates a lot of housing pressure but anyone but the most hardcore libertarian would recoil in horror at the thought because it would mean the town would be flooded with poor single people. Per capita tax revenue would plummet while per capita demand on public services would likely increase. Traffic would explode. Parks would be overrun with trash. Police would respond to calls by lottery. This would turn the town into a nightmare.

But we don't have to get this absurd! My contention is, because of progressive taxation, public services are diminished even if you build housing that the median income family can afford!

Looking at federal income tax, the top 1% pay almost 50% in federal income tax. The top 10% pay about 75%. State and local income taxes are structured in similar progressive style. What about sales tax? More tax is paid by people who spend more, and things that are considered essential (like food and cheaper clothes) are usually exempt. Property tax? Lots with higher assessed value and luxuries are taxed at higher rates. Public service spending is carried by the affluent.

For another intuitive look at this, a family with two kids in public school will consume $3000-7500 per month(!) in state expenditure. Public education costs alone dwarf the entirety of taxes most families pay (of which only a small amount is even earmarked for education).

Not just education. The Medicare and Medicaid we all know kicks in at the federal poverty line, but the thresholds for some kind of subsidies are high enough that a family can earn as much as $85,000 in a city like NYC and still qualify for some assistance.

This means every municipality has an economic incentive to refuse newcomers that aren't making potentially 90%ile household income. This means sure, build housing, but only 90%ile housing, or become poorer.

I would like to be wrong about this! It's frightening to think of every newcomer to your town as making it per capita poorer unless they're very affluent!

One weakness in this rationale is we don't have a solid accounting of all of the transfers. E.g. if 90% of education was funded through federal and state revenues, you could imagine purpose building a town just to have a lot of schools so that people with small kids move to it and pull funds from the rest of the country and state. But I think that number is more like 60% and a lot of the "state" funds are likely a matter of appropriation and will be distributed ~right back to where they came from.

I'm kind of surprised nobody else is pointing this out! Am I hitting on some truth neither side really cares to acknowledge because it doesn't support their favorite platitudes or am I just smart enough at economics to twist myself into a gnarly retarded knot?

EDIT: oh! one argument that I've heard from a grimacing YIMBY is that he is forced to admit I am correct, but that's why we can't do this on a local level. Instead we must mandate more housing be built on a nationwide basis (e.g. a federal #NoZoneZone authoritarian order) so any one town or city would be protected from all of the poor not affluent people rushing to it at once and ruining it. This seems like a solution but I am still not convinced I am describing a true real and local deficiency.

The obvious problem with this is that marginal costs of new people aren't at all linear, and your model assumes that they are.

Adding, say, an additional train to a prexisting route is a tiny expense compared to the cost of the route. Adding a new student to an existing school is basically zero cost (and comes with extra funding!) until you get so many new students that you need a new building or something.

Different things have different levels of nonlinearity.

So as places get bigger some things (public transit, road quality, library funding, etc) get better funded, while other things are more linear (or even superlinear -- knowability of a random person on the street, for instance) and get worse.

Which is why cities, as opposed to towns, are good for some things and bad for others.

The vast majority of normies (and probably still a majority of non-normies) lack a coherent answer to the simple question, "Should housing be more expensive or cheaper?" They want too many different competing things from one aggregate number.

What they want is housing to be affordable, but that's not a function of the price number (alone). Of course, if you try to optimize a complex problem by only concentrating on a single variable and asking "should it be bigger or smaller" - nobody would be able to give you a coherent answer, because there isn't one.

Much words have been said about how people bury incoherence in the phrase "affordable housing". What do you think it means?

I'd tentatively define it as a situation where a typical family (yes, I know it's a fiction but that's the only way to create a generally applicable definition) can eventually pay for a culturally adequate housing without incurring catastrophic long-term financial risk or heavy financial hardship.

Best I can tell, this is just a less specific version of the response that @disk_interested gave, which was followed up by agreeing that if we hold wages constant for a conversation about the price of housing, then it just cashes out as saying that the aggregate number for the price of housing should go down. Should I be interpreting it differently?

I'm not sure "agreeing that if we hold wages constant for a conversation" makes sense. I mean, sure, if you exclude everything but house prices, then it's house prices. But that feels like hollowing out the problem's complexity. These things are inter-related, and the relationship is not uni-directional - the house prices influence wages and the structure of other expenses. And most of the normies can not really appreciate the full extent of all those factors - I am not sure I truly can, for example. I just want to be able to live in a decent house and pay for it from my earnings without working three jobs or trying to win the lottery. How to arrange wages/prices/costs/regulations to achieve this is quite complex, and I don't think "just make houses cheap!" is going to answer it.

Do you think it doesn't make sense to do this for any other product, either? Like, we can't talk about healthcare prices or education prices, or car prices, or apple prices, without discussing every other aspect of the economy? Or maybe it's that we must at least discuss wages to talk about apple prices? I'm really just not sure how I'm supposed to think about this.

In some very theoretical and "well, akshually" sense yes, the price of apples is connected to everything else too, just less strongly. But we can say close to 100% of adults participate in housing marked in one way or another (maybe excluding prisoners, the military and such, but these exceptions are tiny) and for an average family, housing costs influence daily life and family budget significantly more than apples. Same for employers - many large employers literally have separate pay scale for "high cost of living areas" - which is mainly driven by housing costs. Discussing whether this arrangement is good or not will take us too much off course, but the huge influence of housing prices must be obvious. Not so with apple prices. If by some quirk of economy the apples become prohibitively expensive, you can just eat something else. If housing becomes prohibitively expensive, you have a society-wide problem on your hands. Having no access to apples for a year is barely an inconvenience. Having no access to housing - even for several days - would be catastrophic to most families. So if we approach it practically, housing is not "any other product" due to its oversized importance in the life of an average family and the society as a whole.

And sure, if we lived in an alternative word where you could buy a house (or any housing solution, however you call it) for the price of the week's wages (you still could buy a car for $1-2k - it'd be an old crappy car but it will get you from point A to point B for a while) then the picture would be completely different. But we aren't living in that world.

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My progressive liberal friends steelman it as wage to housing ratio is such that everyone outside of the lower class can eventually own

In practice, I’ve heard this described as pretty much everyone outside of poverty can budget for 3-10 years to afford a down payment and total monthly payment for a duplex, condo, detached house, etc. Currently, the issues are: the number of people near the poverty line has increased massively, and wage growth outside the upper middle class seems stagnant. I’m not an economist, so I’m not familiar the recent stats here, but I agree with my friends on affordable housing being about ratios in essence. Regardless, bad policy can easily hide in the term “affordable housing”.

In this case, I think that if we hold wages constant for the conversation about the price of housing, what distinguishes this from what I think the summary of it is: the aggregate number for the price of housing should go down?

I agree. That is essentially what the argument boils down to.

I prefer the ratio framing, because it frees us from the anchoring bias, which is especially confusing given recent inflation. To have a serious discussion on this issue, we all need to keep the relevant variables in our minds, and given that the complexity of the entire economy is in play here, most people are unable to think seriously about this issue, let alone have a discussion about policy.

The thing is, though, I think if you simply reword what they're saying in this way: "So, uh, you want the aggregate number for the price of housing to go down?" you are unlikely to get a simple "yes". They also want other things, don't know how to process it, and likely do not have a coherent position.

I have yet to meet a progressive liberal in the PNW who has a coherent position here.

"Should housing be more expensive or cheaper?"

Yes.

This analysis looks wrong to me too, and I think I'd go further than @fmac and say that there are ways to make anyone a net productive citizen. There are probably barriers to accomplishing it, but its theoretically possible.

Adding a homeless / jobless beggar may seem always net negative. But if you can manage to rope in federal funds, or sympathetic donations from other areas you can turn that homeless / jobless beggar into a net bringer of wealth to the town. Or at the other extreme a single billionaire living in a town of ten thousand people. The billionaire basically pays all the taxes of the town. But that tax revenue gives the billionaire enormous leverage over all policy and enforcement. They can get out of just about any legal trouble in the town. They can get any building or new business approved for their friends, or denied for people that they don't like. Those are the theoretical reasons why I think your analysis breaks down.

In practical terms the story of the billionaire is usually more indicative of why towns are happy to add more people. Policy and policy enforcement can be carefully tailored in such a way that tax contributions and government services can be very equally balanced. Wealthy neighborhoods are often full of people who know how to manipulate the levers of local government, and are also full of people that are actively running the local government. Running governments requires human capital, and human capital tends to align with wealth and resources over time. Wealthy neighborhoods get better response times from emergency services, better access to public parks, and those parks are more likely to be kept clean and patrolled by the police. Their roads get repaved and fixed sooner. The schools get more oversight and quality. Successful businesses fill in the commercial space around those neighborhoods. The effects go on and on. The common phrase "you get what you pay for" applies to local government. Its hard to quantify it, but if you live in the different areas it just becomes very noticeable.

One major and obvious problem with your analysis that I saw in the discussion with fmac is that you are way over-counting the cost of schooling for a very simple reason: people aren't in school their entire lives. You need to offset the cost of school based on the number of years of their life that they will be in school. Just like if a road needs to be repaved every three years, you don't count the one time cost of repaving on every year's budget. You divide that spending across the three years. This does method does not even assume any benefits to schooling. To make the math easy lets just say people are only in school for 1/4 of their lives. So if the per student per year cost for a district is $20,000 you should instead think of it as $5,000.

there are ways to make anyone a net productive citizen

Not if they are young or old enough.

73% of Americans not in paid work are either under 18 or over the Social Security retirement age. Admittedly some of the people over retirement age could work, although blue-collar workers are getting a lot slower at this age, and "net productive citizen" is making the stronger claim that they could work enough to, in expectation, pay for their own healthcare. The other groups of non-workers are the working-age disabled (9% - again most could do some work, very few could work enough to pay for their own healthcare), students (5% - these are people who society is already investing in to make them net productive citizens in the future), SAHMs and other carers (7% - most of these people are net contributors, but not in a way that is legible to the GDP statistics), and the stereotypically unproductive (6% across "temporarily unemployed", "early retirement" and "other").

The vast majority of able-bodied working-age people already are net contributors (40 hours a week at the going rate for reliable low-skill labour is enough almost everywhere across the first world). This is obfuscated by measuring contribution at household level - a typical household contains net-contributor parents and net-leech kids.

The US has federalised the cost of subsidising olds and undergraduates, but mostly localised the cost of subsidising kids. This means it makes sense for communities to try to attract retirees and students (the "eds and meds" strategy) and the federal subsidies that go with them, but to try to keep families with children out. This isn't true in other countries where more of the cost of schools is nationalised and more of the cost of social care for the elderly is localised.

The threshhold for a net productive citizen is very low in my mind.

There is a concept in economics called the velocity of money. Basically money doesn't just disappear when it is spent, it usually get reused and spent on other things. Higher velocity things usually cause more spending and re-spending.

I have lived in a couple towns. In both, existing residents have complained that high-income new residents are bidding up the price of housing, so it seems like the problem you are describing does not exist that much. Things probably change when you get to poor immigrants, refugees, etc, but few families with an $85k income would even consider moving to high-cost cities like NYC.

Another thing that your argument is missing is that many muni services have very high fixed costs. As you correctly point out, growing cities indeed run into traffic problems, crowded classrooms, etc, as population rises but before they do the next big capital infusion. Sure, it is annoying, but it is far better than the opposite problem of spreading the same fixed costs across a declining population, especially since the latter usually means an increasingly poor population.

Another thing that your argument is missing is that many muni services have very high fixed costs.

An even more important point is that paying existing debt is a fixed cost. Most governments (at all levels and almost everywhere - blue state municipalities in the US are just particularly bad) have marginally-payable debt (if you include implicit debt from underfunded pension liabilities, which you should) and adding a net zero-contribution new resident improves their finances by reducing debt per capita. This is a Ponzi process (the population needs to grow exponentially to keep the government solvent) but one that can be kept going for longer than a human lifetime, so a growing city is more sustainable than most phenomena that exist nowadays.

I'm kind of surprised nobody else is pointing this out! Am I hitting on some truth neither side really cares to acknowledge because it doesn't support their favorite platitudes or am I just smart enough at economics to twist myself into a gnarly retarded knot?

There's a direct line from that argument to strict immigration policies on a national level. The high housing price areas are also all very liberal so making basically assures they'll never listen to you.

Yeah this argument felt much more like "why bother YIMBYing if it's just a bunch of low tax per capita extremely unproductive Guatemalans?"

You can have both good housing policy and good immigration policy. I actually think that should be the baseline expectation for a western country but our politicians seem to disagree.

high housing price areas are also all very liberal so making basically assures they'll never listen to you.

In a way they are, given they're allergic to building stuff.

Yeah this argument felt much more like "why bother YIMBYing if it's just a bunch of low tax per capita extremely unproductive Guatemalans?"

No.

Those people are obviously problematic looking enough that it's not even worth debating. I mean some people will debate it but that's not interesting to me.

The point of my post is to advance the premise that even (e.g.) well-meaning white families with jobs who follow the law and don't have high medical burden might also be social dead weight.

How do you calculate the cost of education, though? Yes the family's likely social dead weight when the children are growing since they're being subsidized, but at a certain point that child's going to become economically productive etcetera.

The point of my post is to advance the premise that even (e.g.) well-meaning white families with jobs who follow the law and don't have high medical burden might also be social dead weight.

Thank you for the clarity

But what kind of housing? Who are we trying to help?

Market rate; society

But we don't have to get this absurd

Why did you get this absurd then? Kind of feels like you started this off with a nice strawman to anchor on a certain tone.

"Oh you want to build housing? What if it was a shanty town?!?!?!? Anyway let's talk about this."

My contention is, because of progressive taxation, public services are diminished

I understand this to be your core thesis, although if I'm incorrect please let me know

Taxes

You are conflating progressive income taxation with municipal taxation, which is much less progressive. You also don't demonstrate that "lower per capita tax receipts" = "funding shortfall for services" you just assume that.

Federal or State income taxes being progressive does not tell us much about the marginal fiscal impact per new household in a city.

The focus on per capita tax revenue is also somewhat myopic. You could also look at tax revenue per acre/sq kilometer/sq mile and that would go up. Also the average doesn't matter, the margin does. As long as people are marginally economically net positive, you're ahead.

Property taxes account for 72% of municipal revenue. They are pretty regressive, which is why many cities have many carve outs for old people, etc.

Property taxes in my experience typically have lower mill rates in dense cities versus suburban/exurban cities. Because:

Services

The provision of almost every public service is made more efficient when provided in a more densely built area, all else equal. This is due to both physics (less meters of road/pipe/wire per person) and economies of scale.

A quick google tells me that NYC spends $36,293 per student per year which is 91% above the national average. That's $3000 a month at the highest end. Also not entirely sure why we're focusing on educational costs specifically here.

Similarly I have no idea what medicare has to do with building stuff? If Medicare is a bad system that's a federal level society problem, and not a reason to not build more homes.

Additional economic activity

You completely neglect the fact that more people = more demand for stuff and more people to work at jobs to supply that stuff = more 1%s who own the new businesses that supply the stuff so even if you want to fixate on the progressive tax brackets you'll get more of that too. Plus more 10%ers to be accountants and lawyers to support the new businesses, etc

Closing thoughts

Your argument seems to rest on the concept of "tax net takers are bad in large numbers" which is obviously true.

Your argument seems to ignore the fact that NYC, SF, Chicago, LA, London, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Ruhr corridor, etc are all massive economic engines and the most productive and prosperous places in all of human civilization.

As stated above, building more results in simultaneous increases in demand/supply for everything while also bringing down marginal service costs, with the one assumption that you are in fact adding productive adults, which any non-failed civilisation should be capable of doing (given this paragraph basically summarizes 10,000 years of human economic development).

If you'd instead like to discuss how the US education system is ridiculously expensive per student (it is) or that the US healthcare system mis-allocates vast amounts of capital, much of it taxpayer's (it does) by all means do so. But don't wrap incredibly expected value positive construction in with that. You can walk and chew gum at the same time.

My contention is, because of progressive taxation, public services are diminished

Also, how did the USA's various urban areas come to dominate it's economy if this held? How did they ever work if they, according to you, should have had their tax base average down into insolvency?

But we don't have to get this absurd

Why did you get this absurd then? Kind of feels like you started this off with a nice strawman to anchor on a certain tone.

"Oh you want to build housing? What if it was a shanty town?!?!?!? Anyway let's talk about this."

Because there's two debates we can have.

  1. Is it even possible to have a line where adding people below it makes the town richer or poorer?
  2. Oh wait actually of course there is, now lets just debate over where the line is

If I don't include the absurd Connestoga huts example people get lost in believing that everyone you add to a town that's not a homeless alcoholic like Million Dollar Murray enhances it with their unique specialness. But it's pretty clear even just poor people that aren't mentally ill and are simply of modest means would also make it poorer. If you accept that, then you should be open to the idea that the line might be higher than "Connestoga Charlies" and it may in fact be people of median means.

A quick google tells me that NYC spends $36,293 per student per year which is 91% above the national average. That's $3000 a month at the highest end. Also not entirely sure why we're focusing on educational costs specifically here.

Now look up the national average. It is almost always an enormous amount of cost per household with kids that is almost certainly not paid by the median household.

The point of mentioning this is to give an example of how even modest families that aren't blatantly poor or problematic are more costly than the revenues they directly produce. You should be thinking "fuck, these hard working people who pay their taxes and aren't an obvious drain on society are actually a net drain on society" (at least if we look at direct receipts/expenses).

Your argument seems to ignore the fact that NYC, SF, Chicago, LA, London, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Ruhr corridor, etc are all massive economic engines and the most productive and prosperous places in all of human civilization.

I do. But at least these places in the US were built over centuries over a variety of different economic and political climates. Lets talk about today. In case we haven't noticed, NYC isn't going out of its way to build housing that people earning $70,000/year median income can afford ("market rate" bros in shambles). If you go to any town or city's subreddit where some new development is approved you find rage that these are not anywhere close to affordable and appear to just be catering to the affluent.

I doubt the city council has economists explicitly standing up showing slide decks with a line between dead weight citizen and productive contributor near the top, but they are clearly internalizing this on some level.

You completely neglect the fact that more people = more demand for stuff and more people to work at jobs to supply that stuff = more 1%s who own the new businesses that supply the stuff so even if you want to fixate on the progressive tax brackets you'll get more of that too. Plus more 10%ers to be accountants and lawyers to support the new businesses, etc

How do we look at it? What tools do we have to measure this? This just seems like a hand-wavey way of smuggling in "Connestoga Charlies are all net contributors, too!" :hugging_face: but you were skeptical of me even bringing that type of person up at all so I assume you believe, again, there's a line somewhere. Where is it?

Great response. Thanks for following up.

But it's pretty clear even just poor people that aren't mentally ill and are simply of modest means would also make it poorer.

I think one disconnect here is that I don't entirely understand why you're so focused on the "average wealth" (so to speak) of a hypothetical city/town. I don't really care if my town's GDP (can substitute GDP with income, or net tax receipts, or whatever) per capita drops a small amount while the overall GDP goes up. The overall "line go up" benefits me greatly as the demand for the services my job provides will increase, and the supply of shit I can spend my money on will also increase. Also the amount of money I spend on housing should decrease, which means I can spend more money on funkopops or whatever. Also also ideally the provision of city services should both increase in scope and quality due to economies of scale.

That all being said yes, there is absolutely a line that if you fill up a city with impoverished people, it will go to shit. Detroit is I think a good example of this. Although the mechanism of action here was different, it had the same result of what happens when your tax base is of extremely low quality. And even then, after the exogenous shocks, it is bouncing back now I understand, kind of showing that cities are profound economic engines thanks in large part due to their scale alone. And also how lower residential and commercial rents present a much more vibrant ecosystem for capitalism to thrive.

If you accept that, then you should be open to the idea that the line might be higher than "Connestoga Charlies" and it may in fact be people of median means.

I absolutely accept that, but I am not convinced on putting it so high we're including the "median taxpayer" so to speak.

I think if the median/average adult was a net economic drain, industrial society/economy would not work. The whole of human civilization works because adults create more value than they consume, which results in the ever expanding pool of infrastructure, knowledge, and productive capacity that we've been piling on top of itself for the last 10,000 years.

You should be thinking "fuck, these hard working people who pay their taxes and aren't an obvious drain on society are actually a net drain on society" (at least if we look at direct receipts/expenses).

This may be true, given Western governments all love to run infinite deficits. This is however a top-level society problem. If our society is unsustainable, we need to fix that (it is, we do). But I don't see what that has to do with making building easier and cheaper. I would even posit that basically any fix to Western society's issues basically mandatorily has to include making building shit easier to help us un-fuck everything.

If you go to any town or city's subreddit where some new development is approved you find rage that these are not anywhere close to affordable and appear to just be catering to the affluent.

These people are stupid and don't understand how anything works. They are literally the "no take, only throw" meme.

How do we look at it? What tools do we have to measure this? This just seems like a hand-wavey way of smuggling in "Connestoga Charlies are all net contributors, too!" :hugging_face: but you were skeptical of me even bringing that type of person up at all so I assume you believe, again, there's a line somewhere. Where is it?

This is a really interesting question I don't have a great answer to.

I definitely don't believe "Connestoga Charlies are all net contributors, too". As a resident of Toronto, sympathy for the homeless is at rock-bottom, even amongst the libs I inhabit this city with.

I was skeptical because tying YIMBYism to homeless people is 1) a pretty unfair comparison (I don't want to spam low income housing, I just want the free market to work) and 2) deeply ironic given homelessness is robustly connected to the fact we don't build enough housing.

I assume the metric I'm looking for (imagining? Inventing?) is "net economic contribution" which would be some blend of tax collection vs social spending, and some type of dollar/economic gain for the additional stimulation of the economy via demand for goods/services, and the additional stimulation of the economy from using one's labour to produce more goods/services for others. Then subtract any crime/chaos/suffering that one inflicts on others and society. Connestoga Charlies are obviously deeply negative here.

Instinctively, I think the line for when this "net economic contribution" is positive is actually pretty low. Presumably somewhere around "working near full time at minimum wage job".

While the laptop class (lawyers, accountants, consultants, finance, tech, etc) capture a huge % of the economic value of society, they obviously are not the primary drivers of the massive prosperity we enjoy. They instead exist because of it.

I say this as one of the laptop class, while my skills are economically valuable, they obviously contribute very little to the production of shoes or carrots, which is what our wealth ultimately actually comes from. My job would be worthless in a society that didn't have legions of people who put shingles on rooves or whatever (as that society would be starving and falling into anarchy), even if I contribute an order of magnitude more tax dollars than they do.

Ultimately, I think the "anti-YIMBY" people (I am not even sure if you are?) need to present their solution, not just nitpick YIMBYs. Because the status-quo of western construction/the ability to build shit in response to human needs is profoundly and fundamentally broken. This is causing massive issues across society. The status quo is unstainable, full stop (unless you disagree, but that's a different argument).

So given the status quo is fucked, and if you don't like the idea of "let people build things on their land that other people want/need", what do you propose to do about it?

While the laptop class (lawyers, accountants, consultants, finance, tech, etc) capture a huge % of the economic value of society, they obviously are not the primary drivers of the massive prosperity we enjoy. They instead exist because of it.

The laptop class includes the software engineers who generate most of the marginal value which makes Americans richer than Europoors.

Connestoga

It would be nice if you were to stop consistently misspelling "Conestoga".

State and local income taxes are structured in similar progressive style. What about sales tax?

Most state and local income taxes are much flatter, specifically to avoid the sort of problems that you're talking about here. For example, in Maine (not a red state), the top tax bracket is anything over $58,000. Sales tax is a little more complicated, but usually poor people pay a higher share of their income on it, because not everything is exempt and most people aren't carefully strategizing to avoid paying sales tax.

For what it's worth, as a renter I didn't pay property tax, whereas as an owner, I have to. If you count people who are renting as residents of the area, per capita tax income (at least on the local level) has to increase. Note that I'm in Canada, so it may not work the exact same way as it does in the states.

You also have the option of...not building 1,000,000 homes, and instead building a much smaller number. There are certain phenomenon that only occur when the number gets super large. Imagine, for example, that the town has a university that admits around 30,000 students at a given time. Instead of having them all as renters, you could build student housing for cheap up to say 15,000 units, and capture the value of people who would be there anyways. Regardless of what you think about universities, the modal university attendee is probably better behaved than the modal low income newcomer (and they would have a lot of incentive to capture those properties, as they are there anyways).

Now, if you're willing to use #unethicalLifeHacks (which as a government, you always are), you can pull some whacky shenanigans to capture extra value out of 'low income' housing. A very simple approach would be to make the 'market value' of the house be much greater than the value that it was sold for (for example, the government offers the house for sale at $100,000, which comes out to roughly a $600 monthly payment at 5% interest. After a year, the property assessment claims that it would be worth $600,000, which at a tax rate of 1% would be $6000 a year, or $500 a month. $600 + $500 < $1600 for rent, so you've managed to transform the rent seeking behaviour of the landlord into rent seeking for yourself, instead - and if there's one thing a government loves, it's more money.)

as a renter I didn't pay property tax

Yes you do, abstractly via your rent price

The Ontario Trillium tax benefit even pays you back for some of it

I'm actually not sure this is correct. The steel-man case for YIMBIsm is for market rate new construction, not incentivizing a bunch of Connestoga huts.

The marginal new construction unit is typically purchased by people above the median income in a given location.

This is obvious at an aggregate national level. The median sales price for new houses sold in the United States is $413.5k. At 20% down, prevailing 6.48% interest rates, and 30% of gross income spent on housing, this is a household income of $98.6k which is well above the ~$83k national median income.

In areas with higher housing prices the marginal income of home purchasers is also higher. For example the media sales price of all homes in California was $833k. While in Santa Monica the median sale price is $1.9MM. Connestoga huts are not competing for developer dollars in an area where the marginal sales price is in the millions. Because of Prop. 13 those purchasers are also paying far more in local property taxes towards local schools than people who were already locked in.

The nice married family with two kids moving into the new built house down the street is well above the average income, and therefore definitionally increases the per capita income. At the national level for example, married family households have a median income of $122.5k, again well above the unconditional median.

A marginal change in zoning will lead to a marginal change in the marginal new home purchaser. You might be able to make a reductio ad absurdum argument for the most extreme straw-man YIMBY, but the "official" YIMBY position is more like revise model zoning codes to allow triplexs where duplexs are now allowed.

  1. Zoning should be done at the state level.
  2. Zoning should be more about common sense rules to permit access to shared resources like street parking by mandating additional density, also include increased off street parking.
  3. Reduced immigration and very limited foreign direct investment in real estate
  4. Mortgages should be arms and Freddie and Fannie should be in the business of democratizing access to pay fixed swaps/swaptions.

In my view, the reason housing is such a wealth engine is the 30 year fixed rate mortgate's inflation protection. The goal of housing policy should be to make the inflation protection available to creditworthy citizens without tying it to real estate ownership. Housing should be financed with balloon arms then people with business loans, home loans and other investment asset financing could get pay fixed swaps or chains of swaptions in amounts that match individual liabilities. The goal being to increase ownership and financing of higher return assets than housing.

I’d consider myself financially literate, but I can’t tell what the hell you’re talking about.

The goal of housing policy should be something like “getting more citizens into their own housing.” I don’t see how you’d decouple that from real estate.

Would inflicting “swaptions” on the average family of four actually do anything to achieve that kind of goal?

By lending money for 30 years at a fixed rate we bundle two things together in homeownership. First the purchase of a home, second a massive inflation hedge (because we lock the cost of borrowing the money for 30 years).

In most of the world you buy a home with a floating rate loan or shorter term mortgage. Which means if inflation rises, the cost of financing homes rises everywhere but in the US.

This makes home ownership an excellent investment in the US,, raising both the price of homes and the amount of home people want to buy in the US.

Most business debt is on the same floating rate terms, as non US mortgages, but at international business scale it's inexpensive to buy a derivative to make the net effect act much more like a fixed rate debt product. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in the US use these financial instruments to allow them to loan money on long fixed rate terms, too, effectively taking a derivative that's too big for an individual, and splitting it, but only for home loans.

If we swapped them into a pure splitting derivatives to individuals and severed the tie to owning a home, it would make financing that's currently only available to large businesses available to smaller enterprises and let people buy the inflation protection they may want with their home loan, but getting it in a separate rather than bundled transaction. Or getting a smaller more leveraged bet at a higher cost to protect other financial.

The wealth engine of homeownership isn't just the home it's also getting to finance it at a fixed rate for a long time. We should let people who would otherwise prefer to rent not need to buy a home to get long term fixed rate financing.

I'm actually not sure this is correct. The steel-man case for YIMBIsm is for market rate new construction, not incentivizing a bunch of Connestoga huts.

I didn't say YIMBYism was about building lower income housing.

Sorry, I wasn't maximally clear in what I was even responding to.

You asked the question:

But what kind of housing?

My answer is the kind of housing where there is:

  • Strong latent demand
  • By purchasers who will pay market rates
  • Where market rates will support direct constriction costs and marginal infrastructure requirements

With current aggregate zoning requirements, new market rate construction is on average purchased by families well above the median income family. Therefore you can make marginal changes to relax aggregate zoning requirements without reaching the point where

you build housing that the median income family can afford

Further, because of effects from initiatives like Prop. 13, public services are not necessarily diminished by even a median income family making a housing purchase.

My basic math argument is: the marginal elasticity is sufficiently small, and the existing equilibrium is sufficiently far from public service collapse, that marginal changes should not produce a catastrophic phase transition.

My basic math argument is: the marginal elasticity is sufficiently small, and the existing equilibrium is sufficiently far from public service collapse, that marginal changes should not produce a catastrophic phase transition.

Let's say for the sake of argument that sounds fine, but does this make a dent in housing affordability? I'm not sure the people arguing for build build build aren't imagining they're solving the problem of housing is so fucking expensive.

I keep thinking there's a NoTrueYIMBY fallacy.

I'm not sure the people arguing for build build build aren't imagining they're solving the problem of housing is so fucking expensive.

Fortunately, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." That's a counter-intuitive realization (that quote postdates the divergence theorem!) but it's not wrong.

Seems to be working out for Austin, TX, which has built an enormous number of mostly-market-rate housing units in the recent past. The people I know who live there generally think the city is thriving, and rents are actually decreasing. So I think the cities with massive housing issues (e.g. SF, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston) should at least try Austin's playbook out here.

As I said down-thread I'm not a YIMBY.

The closest I've come is not objecting when a neighbor wanted to build a garage that required a zoning waiver because it was 10% bigger than allowed. I didn't object because their property is otherwise adequately sized, I have to live next to him, it doesn't obstruct my view, and it was so he could store his boat. I think it's more attractive than keeping the boat on the drive, and I wouldn't mind being invited out on the boat. If he had wanted to up-zone his lot from R-1 to R-5 you bet I would have broken out all the NIMBY tropes.

Whether a particular policy proposal from a self-identified YIMBY makes sense probably depends on the YIMBY and the proposal.

For the laundromat example, I do think there exists some system where the zoning and permitting requirements do not have to be so onerous. This would still be a small or marginal change to the total cost, but not zero. For example, if the opportunity cost for the zoning of that building was reduced by $3MM, there were 40 residential units built, each with a value of $1MM. That is a 7.5% cost savings. $1MM is not exactly affordable, but 7.5% is 7.5%.

I think it's also clear that the North America, specifically the US, specifically high cost of living US also has other problems. General cost disease being a big one. I don't think just deciding to build will fully solve this. The Golden Gate Bridge cost $630MM in 2024 dollars to build in 1933. The Golden Gate Bridge suicide net cost $400MM in 2023. Currently San Francisco has density of something like Copenhagen. Clearly they can "afford" to do more density as Singapore has much higher density and much lower GDP Per capita. Do I think they can just build their way to Singaporean quality of life? No. Do I think there is some fundamental limit that would cause a public services collapse above current density? Also no. Do I think public services could collapse if people don't get their act together? Yes.

You might be able to make a reductio ad absurdum argument for the most extreme straw-man YIMBY, but the "official" YIMBY position is more like "revise model zoning codes to allow triplexes where duplexes are now allowed".

To be fair, the linked page also includes tenets that go along with the reductio ad absurdum.

  • "Permit backyard cottages (ADUs, accessory dwelling units) in all residential zones." The same organization's The Housing-Ready City document does not clarify, but the International Zoning Code imposes on ADUs a minimum area of 190 ft2 or half of the main house's area, whichever is higher.

  • "Legalize starter homes in all residential zones." The Housing-Ready City clarifies that that means eliminating minimum floor-area requirements, so that houses of 400–800 ft2 can be built. Such requirements are not in the IZC, but I personally have lived in a zone where the minimum area was 1200 ft2.

  • "Eliminate minimum lot-size requirements in existing neighborhoods." The Housing-Ready City does not clarify, but the IZC generally imposes a minimum lot size of 1/6 acre (7260 ft2—e. g., 70 ft × 104 ft), plus setbacks ranging from 5 ft to 20 ft.

So, even with a charitable perspective, this organization can be interpreted as advocating residential zones that are composed of 30 ft × 55 ft (1/26-acre) lots (with 5-ft setbacks on all sides), each containing a 400-ft2 (20 ft × 20 ft) house and a 200-ft2 (14 ft × 14 ft) ADU—and that's without even looking at duplexes and triplexes.

Yeah, I'm not necessarily in favor of any of these things. As an actual property owner IRL, I personally do not want a bunch of shitty development in my back yard. I'm just willing to admit it's down to wanting to protect my own property interests rather than making the argument that it's obviously in the public interest.

You would for sure have to rework the zoning code for those to work.

  • For ADUs, they are currently not allowed in my municipality. If it came down to it I would rather my mother-in-law live in a ADU on my property than put her in a home or live in an attached suit. In that situation my MIL would not put significant additional strain on local traffic, because she would not be commuting to work and would probably share grocery runs. If you allowed rental of ADUs in a car-dependent place on minimal lots I do think that would be bad. Is there a way you could allow the former without the latter, IDK.
  • For starter homes 400 ft2 would still not allow Connestoga huts. I've guess we've already discussed 800 ft2 homes here. I think that could work for utilizing otherwise unbuildable lots if combined with generous setback requirements.
  • The key is eliminate minimum lot-size would be for existing neighborhoods. Again, this would need to be combined with generous setback requirements.

I actually do think the strongtowns people take it too far, but it's a pretty big gap from build 1,000,000 Connestoga huts to allow dense infill where there is latent demand. Might as well the gap to my actual position which is that it should not take 8 years and millions of dollars to get zoning approval to replace a laundromat with medium density mixed use development along an existing transit corridor.

You are of course correct. Isn’t there a tendency for mandated affordable housing projects to be marked for 55+?

Obviously, NIMBY’s don’t want to make this argument out loud but, uh, what did you think ‘neighborhood character’ meant? I mean I personally oppose nearby housing development because they are being built with HOA’s, which normalizes stricter code enforcement. But most opposition to building affordable housing is that it invites people of affordability, and of course, YIMBY’s don’t want to remind people that these new residents will be people of affordability.

Catholics: how often do you go to confession?

About once a month, sometimes more sometimes less

Between two weeks and once a month. Usually not at my regular parish, because they stubbornly try to have confession mostly at 10 am on a Monday type times.

10 am on a Monday

I swear they do this on purpose. It's like they want people to ignore traditional eucharistic discipline.

Its not just this, its not just Priests/Churches. All institutions, unless there are powerful forces working constantly to counter it, will eventually be run and organized for the convenience and status of the people who have power within it, and not whatever 'mission' the institution ostensibly was created for. Hospitals are a great example of this.

No, these are priests living in a bubble and writing a schedule they can mesh with the rest of their very busy schedules- seriously the average Catholic priest in the US works like 80 hours a week before being on call every two to three weeks and is also at the very least in late middle age. The obvious answer is to move the rest of their schedules around. It's just an unpopular answer.

You are correct that liberal Catholic priests tend to be much worse about this than conservative ones- and the results of this can be seen in very long confession lines at Catholic parishes which make a priority of offering confessions evenings/early mornings(yes, if confession is available at 6 am there will be a line to go to it)/weekends. But I go to an actual Latin Mass parish; the decision to try to steer people to going to confession midmorning monday-friday is not taken out of the idea that people should be receiving in a state of mortal sin. It's due practical scheduling concerns.

Why do priests have on call rotations? Is this like a doctor where a priest can't go to the movies if they are on call because they would have to silence their phone?

At all the protestant churches I've been a member of (some 20 person congregations, some 2000), the pastors are basically always "on call" in the sense that if a member has an emergency they can call the pastor to (e.g.) visit them in the hospital. But the pastors are never expected to walk around with a phone all the time like an on-call doctor would.

The Catholic religion requires a sacramental priesthood- a priest going to the hospital is not just providing comfort to the dying. There is an actual sacramental function there.

I understand the importance of sacraments and that's partly the cause of my confusion. I'm just curious about the mechanical details of "on call" and if it's the same level of rigor as other on call professions like doctors. Can an on call priest not go to the movies? Maybe a priest wouldn't go to the movies anyways, but can they be "on call" while they are doing other priestly duties? (What if someone calls them while they are delivering the Eucharist? I assume they wouldn't interrupt a sacrament to take a phone call. But what if they are performing non-sacramental priestly duties like leading an AA meeting? Do they interrupt the AA meeting to take a phone call?) My understanding was always that places that were likely to need sacraments (like a hospital) had dedicated Catholic priests working at the hospital to provide them, and not that the local parish priest was on call in his bed and would be summoned if needed.

An in particular, cell phones did not exist 50 years ago, and the Catholic church survived 2000 years without them. So how did the idea of "on call" actually develop? It just seems like the sort of modernism that an ancient, slow moving tradition would be hesitant to adopt.

On call before cell phones worked off of pagers. I don’t know how it worked before then. Rushing to fetch a priest was an old timey trope, though.

Hospitals have Catholic chaplains, but even if those chaplains are priests they’re not on duty 24/7. Usually those chaplains are actually deacons who do not have the full range of sacramental powers. Priests who get a call to the hospital are expected to drop meetings, classes, etc to just go; they probably don’t have their phones on for mass or hearing confessions. Catholics are expected to receive unrepeatable sacraments(confirmation and anointing of the sick are the relevant ones here- sometimes baptisms in the NICU) from their parish priest, although during Covid this was changed a bit to have priests nearest the hospitals complying with whatever protocols.

Usually those chaplains are actually deacons who do not have the full range of sacramental powers.

Makes sense, in a hospital there's less reason to care if they don't have the full suite of healing spells. Do your part yourself if you're so great, science.

Thanks. I still have lots of questions, but I appreciate the response :)

I didn't know that deacons would work in hospitals; I've only ever met priests there before.

Do you make the confession in plain language as a more banal description of exactly what you have done (or not done) or thought, or in vaguer terms (“I failed to do this”, “I allowed greed to get the better of me”)?

Confessions are supposed to be made in plain, banal language. EG, bless me father, I have sinned- it has been a month since my last confession and I have robbed three banks.... A typical example used in descriptions because it's plain, uncontroversial, and clearly hyperbolic, but illustrates the proper form very well. Number of occurrences of a particular sin is expected, but specificity of circumstances is discouraged. Confessing character flaws in vague terms alongside sins they contributed to is pretty normal(eg bad temper, laziness, etc) or at least not discouraged.

ETA- to answer another common question, yes, it looks like in the movies on average, very liberal priests like to try to set it up to look like a therapists office. Technically the screen/kneeler/booth setup is supposed to be available but it may or may not be at particularly liberal parishes. Any Catholic can go anywhere that is allowed to hear confessions for confession, with very few exceptions, and going to 'not your regular parish' is very common, either for scheduling reasons or because the priest seems less intimidating or just because.

Every two to three weeks.

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