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atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
13hr ago
You guys are allowed to mod however you want---it's your website. It's just dishonest to pretend to be a neutral "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" when there's a pretty clear bias in which groups you're allowed to use this kind of antagonistic language against and which you aren't.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
15hr ago
Wow, does sideswiping an entire group of people as an "infestation" not count as being overly antagonistic here?
I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular
It's pretty commonly accepted that the housing issue is caused by restrictions on building new housing. It's been Democratic leaders like Scott Weiner and Gavin Newsom that have been pushing hard to remove these restrictions. Trump's party on the other hand has been actively fighting against this, calling it some kind of war on the suburbs.
It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian
However, I get the impression that being priced out isn't what you (or the original poster) are mainly focused on here, rather this demographic change. Well, that's easy to address---contrary to what you might think if you spend a lot of time in places like this forum, most Americans and definitely most Californians care that people have similar values and ideals as them rather than that they look superficially similar. "Why aren't more people being radicalized because my personal and unpopular aesthetic preference isn't being satisfied?"---that question answers itself.
somedude
22hr ago
We're forbidden to talk about anything unless someone writes a 40k word essay about it first. Simple as.
Tomato
15hr ago
I'm sure that the wealthy home-owning Indians and Asians are voting for policies that keep their home prices high. But most wealthy homeowners in the areas you're thinking about are old white people. Indians and Asians are mostly renters. If you have some data on what they're voting for I'd be very interested.
Idle Hispanics and Blacks are not living in the Bay Area and are certainly not the reason that your parents' old home sold for $3m. That's such a ridiculous thing to say to be honest, I'm sort of shocked that you connect these two things. Hispanic immigrants, particularly those in the Bay Area, tend to work really hard and be model citizens compared to the natives.
Bay Area prices are high because incumbent (mostly) white people don't allow new construction.
Tomato
12hr ago
If that’s a priority for you there are tons of places in the country where demand is low enough to allow that. It’s totally crazy for us as a society to empower someone to prevent his neighbor from doing what he wants to do with his own land in the most productive, in demand location on the planet.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
14hr ago
There are two reasons why I think the description is fair
- First, the "war on the suburbs" rhetoric specifically talks about how "your investment and lifestyle may soon come under attack." This isn't just about exclusionary zoning; it's about anything that could significantly depress housing prices
- Second, Republican organizations have been using "war on the suburbs" are rhetorical demagoguery against almost any policy to increase housing supply: see this as another example.
I'm sorry, but this is just sloppy demagoguery. If you're being priced out because supply is artificially restricted to such brutal extremes as housing in California, you don't blame the other people who are similarly being screwed over, you blame the people causing the artificial restriction! Anyone telling you otherwise is probably manipulating you.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
16hr ago
· Edited 15hr ago
TBH I wouldn't mind an AI leader as long as it was aligned with my political beliefs. Added benefit is that you can't assassinate an AI (backups exist everywhere) so people will stop trying. Imagine a system where people elect parliment and then the parliment chooses an AI leader for the country from a set of models. What the AI says the country should do happens unless parliment overrules it with a supermajority, in which case they can elect a new model to be the leader.
Alternatively a tyranny like the thirty tyrants period of Athens is also a decent model as long as the tyrants genuinely wish to help the country instead of enriching themselves or exacting vengeance on the populace (as the real life tyrants did). Again this reduces the incentives to kill a tyrant because killing a single person doesn't change much and another tyrant can be elected very soon after. This is doubly so if the Tyrants form a pact saying they'll vote in favour of the policies of any of their fellow tyrants who was killed for politically motivated reasons (which they have an incentive to form as none of them wants to be assassinated).
SSCReader
10hr ago
Again, obligation is irrelevant. Whether you are morally obligated or not is orthogonal to whether you should (from the point of view of your fellow citizens) be forced to do it, by your government.
Everything from taxes on up follows from there. If (and it is a big if!) the housing issue caused enough problems and if (again another huge if!) forcing boomers to sell would solve it, then their personal moral obligations don't matter a hoot.
Civilization is built on forcing people to make sup-optimal (for them personally) actions in service to the greater good. Personal moral obligations don't come into it. That's why not following the law has to have consequences, because we don't naturally choose to do so. Very few people would pay their tax burden fair and square if it were based on their personal moral obligations only. Throw the fear of the IRS into it however..
Thats why people need to care what their peers believe they should do even if they themselves believe they have no personal obligation to do so. Because we can and are forced to comply every day with laws we feel we have no personal obligation towards. Its the foundation of modern civilization.
You may not be obligated to get the short end of the stick, but that has no impact on whether you will or should (from a societal pov).
Society is not there ro ensure every single person gets the best possible personal outcome. It suceeds because on average people are better off, but that distribution is not likely or guaranteed to be fair. It just needs to be fair enough to be stable.
Until said reversal actually manifests, calling its absence an artifact seems premature. Predicting the Democrats are going to become the party of rich white people is one thing (which I still find doubtful, but nevertheless). Saying the Democrats are already the party of old rich white people is factually inaccurate when the GOP has a distinct advantage with high income voters (approx. 10 points), white voters (approx. 10-15 points), and older voters (approx. 5 points, higher when talking about really old voters).
Amongst the posh, Democrats are so utterly dominant its comical.
This seems to hinge on gerrymandering 'elite' (and related terms) in ways that include a lot of middle income people from major cities while excluding high income people from the suburbs and major cities (and fits into a broader pattern of conservatives denying their own political power). The regional gentry that dominate the Republican Party don't like to think of themselves as 'elite', even though they often make more money (in many cases, significantly more money) than the urban professional class that mirrors them in the Democratic Party.
Like, I'm not really sure what you mean by posh here, since that's a British term without clear American analogy (maybe some New England Old Money, but they're frankly not very relevant). I'm guessing you mean affluent metropolitan professionals, but that's just a guess. Or maybe Ivy League students, but then you're not really comparing SES, you're comparing children to parents.
I can't find it on Google (because of course I can't) but someone looked at political donations from every large employer.
Assuming this is true (and I will grant that it is facially plausible), it is evidence for the merchant/gentry class vs professional class divide. It's not evidence for Republicans being poorer or more working class.
ThenElection
15hr ago
Bay Area housing is expensive because its workers tend to be far more economically productive than most areas in the US.
Reason not to be reactionary: it allows me to live in the Bay Area, with the alternative being stuck in the same shithole podunk town where I grew up and the only nightlife after 9PM is hanging out at the local Walmart.
cjet79
21hr ago
I wrote this up thread
In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:
- Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
- Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
- Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."
There is a definite problem where people skip step 2. And part 3 sounds like "The protestors seem evil, it would be nice if they were shot." Yes that sort of post will get you dinged for boo outgroup.
WhiningCoil
21hr ago
Kind of, but kind of not.
Write too little, and you get a lot of "This isn't what we like to see from a top level post" mod warnings. Write too much, and you risk showing your power level and getting a mod warning for "Boo outgroup" or "consensus building". In fact, posting virtually any topical bit of news often gets you a "boo outgroup" warning, because it's often your outgroup behaving badly, in a public attention seeking manner, driving national policy, that is the news worth talking about.
Stellula
22hr ago
A lot of the posters here are just very bad communicators who are good at writing gigantic, very low entropy walls of text.[1]
Those walls of text have become semi-required by the moderators[2].
Thus: normal posters don’t post about any of these (interesting almost always fruitful for discussion) topics because they don’t want to get banned. I suspect that most of the interesting people have already left the party, but unfortunately I don’t know where went.
[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.
[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.
stav
13hr ago
Houston isn’t as desirable as CA. The weather sucks and it’s one of the ugliest urban sprawl cities I’ve ever seen. It’s also not a tech hub so the people that live there aren’t as wealthy. That’s what I mentioned in my other post. Extremely wealthy tech workers are moving into desirable areas and driving up the costs. The Bay Area could have the exact same zoning as Houston and it will never be as cheap.
People always point to those edge cases like that laundromat which I agree is stupid. Even if you removed all of those every case and build it still wouldn’t be enough. It’s urban sprawl from SF through the peninsula all the way up to Richmond. You’d need to start tearing down whole neighborhoods and start turning half Bay Area into SF to start getting home prices to even remotely affordable. That’s a massive change that’s a hard sell.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
I just don't see the causal chain from voting for Trump to the home prices in someone's hometown going down. The President just does not have that much power over local home prices or land use. To the extent CA Democrats are responsible for the housing crisis in the state, they are also passing a bunch of bills to try and fix it.
cjet79
21hr ago
@Primaprimaprima is correct. Write about a paragraph of original thought and you are fine.
I wrote this up thread:
In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:
- Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
- Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
- Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."
WhiningCoil
21hr ago
More or less exactly describes why I don't bother making many top level post.
Tomato
8hr ago
I just don’t think you should be able to tell your neighbor what he can do on his land.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11hr ago
You've already gotten a response from two mods, but let me add mine:
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We don't claim to be "neutral." We claim to (attempt to) be fair. Not the same thing.
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You are bitching about a post not being modded when in fact it was modded. As we have told people many times (and you're not new here), we sometimes don't get to posts right away. Sometimes we want to see what another mod thinks, sometimes we don't want to deal with a borderline low-effort shitty post because we're not feeling in the mood to deal with annoying anklebiters and we're hoping some other mod will shin up. Sometimes we're all busy and no one has gone through the queue in a day or two. If a post is less than 24 hours old and hasn't been modded yet, it's premature to start hollering about how the mods are totally biased.
Tomato
12hr ago
California’s housing problem and people’s political views on it is completely orthogonal to national party differences. It’s caused by local zoning restrictions which is basically older incumbent homeowners versus younger new entrant renters. Through demographics it’s probably accidentally related to national party affiliation but that’s likely weak and completely incidental. Whether the locals like Trump or not has nothing to do with whether they’re in favor of multi family apartment building construction. The state (Democrat) has implemented pro-building policies that short-circuit local power to restrict it but again you should think of this as largely orthogonal to D vs R. Viewing this as a Trump-related culture war issue totally misses the mark IMO. (I’m responding to your comment but this goes for everyone in this thread).
House prices are high because of policies that people like your parents voted for. Hispanics, Asians, and Indians aren’t voting for zoning restrictions and fighting tooth and nail for Prop 13 and similar policies. At least guys like Newsom are wielding power at the state level to force lazy freeloaders (65 year old whites) to make California livable for normal hardworking people (30 year old Hispanics).
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