domain:felipec.substack.com
stav
2hr ago
You're straight up wrong if you think wealthy Indians and Asians are voting to bring low income housing into their neighborhoods. Also, prop 13 was passed when my parents were in high school so that law was passed by the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation. And those 30 year old Hispanics are net takers. Whites pay significantly more in than they take over their lifetimes. Can't say the same for Hispanics and especially blacks.
jeroboam
5hr ago
The California model.
I just got back from a brief trip to California that didn't include the parts where the violent drug zombies live. It was a lovely vacation. California is absolutely beautiful.
Let me introduce the secrets to California's success.
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Be blessed with the most amazing geography and weather anywhere in the U.S. and maybe the world
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Be the center of the world tech and entertainment industries
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Make a deal that baby boomers get to live out their natural lives in splendor and grace while a complete population replacement happens beneath them
As a wealthy tourist, it was all very nice. Whereas the coast of Florida is loaded with aggressive traffic and people, the coast of California is dotted with pleasant beach communities. All the houses cost like $3 million dollars so no one can afford to live there. Despite the best weather and scenery on the planet, the population is going DOWN. People are friendly and nice. The restaurants are full of white retirees, still paying $1000 in annual property tax on their $4 million house they bought for $200,000 in 1981. 95% of the workers are Hispanic. I have no idea where they actually live. But the quality of service was very high and prices were reasonable (at least compared to Seattle).
A quick 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz and you're in a beautiful redwood forest. No houses or people here. Just a beautiful state park with miles of trails. I saw a school group with an earnest white teacher explaining tree rings to a group of about 20 young students. 100% of the students were Hispanic.
People are actually leaving this state, the state that has everything, that was dealt a hand of aces. Productive citizens are taxed at eye-popping rates to prop up the seniors and the underclass. It works for now. It seems kind of similar to what's happening in Europe and where the rest of the U.S. is headed as well.
In any case, I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
26m ago
· Edited 22m 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).
cjet79
44m ago
I don't watch the news. My smartphone news feed is heavily curated. I in fact do not leave the home most days because I work from home. My main outside trips are to pick up my kids from school and to go grocery shopping. I am not on Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc. My reddit browsing is limited to gaming and fantasy fiction subreddits.
There are things I "hear about" in the sense that I might have seen a news headline. That was probably as aware as I would have gotten about Campus protests.
As unaware as I am, my wife is even more unaware. Most topics barely pierce her awareness. Unless it shows up directly at her workplace she usually doesn't know about them. Since the closest person to me is just as unaware I find this state of things normal, and the opposite hyper awareness of culture war issues strange.
Tomato
13m 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.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
16m ago
How could you see this and not be reactionary?
Simple, by recognising that the problem isn't Indian and Asian workers but ratherer old and retired whites who fight tooth and nail to keep property tax for themsleves much lower than what an Indian or Asian tech worker would have to pay to live in literally the same house.
stav
5hr ago
I grew up in CA. I recently looked up the house my parents bought for under 300k in the 1990’s and it just sold for over 3 million. It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian. Nobody I know who grew up there still lives there. Keep in mind this is a 1 story house and is basically 3 bedrooms and an office so by no means a mansion. I essentially don’t have a home town anymore.I see stuff like this and I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular. How could you see this and not be reactionary?
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I have no idea where they actually live.
20 people to a three bedroom trailer.
The secret side effect of high housing costs is extreme crowding in lower income households. They need the income from renting out bedrooms to keep paying their own way. And people can’t afford their own place, so they rent rooms, often to share.
I’ve seen people on here wondering how low functioning but not actually dangerous people can be homeless; don’t their extended families take care of them? There’s no room, quite literally, in these households. Couches are being crashed on by someone who can contribute, or a more sympathetic dependent. Bedrooms are rented out for the cost of apartments in more normal cities. You don’t see the same scenes in place like houston where housing costs are more reasonable, because low income households can accommodate people like that.
2rafa
1hr ago
Yeah, a top paragraph can be the length of one tweet - I don’t see how people can complain it’s too long. Becoming a news aggregator is a failure state for the board too.
How could you see this and not be reactionary?
Answer: Boomers.
Boomers don't see it because they are the beneficiaries of it.
Imagine a boomer living in Monterrey. Their house is worth $3 million. They pay almost no tax and in fact receive large checks and free health care from the government. Services are high quality because of an army of low-wage immigrants. The town isn't crowded despite its magnificent natural environment. Nothing has been built in 30 years.
There's an eerie lack of children but that's a small price to pay.
It's like when all the old union workers sign a contract to grandfather in their benefits while screwing the new workers. And it's why the Democratic party is now the party of the old, upper middle class whites. The high/low coalition makes the present comfortable for these wealthy boomers while replacing their society wholesale over time.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
40m ago
The next decade will be quite "interesting" if political assassinations became as common as they were in 19th century. Japan, Slovakia, who's next..
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.
cjet79
28m ago
We have Sunday threads if someone just wants to throw out a short question.
Otherwise what Primaprimaprima said is kinda true we don't want people who cant contribute three sentences to a discussion to be the ones that dictate what gets talked about.
Some people don't care what is talked about they just want something. But many posters care a great deal about the specific topic, and thus a low quality entry on a topic they don't care about is a double negative. It's crowding out topics they might care about, and it isn't interesting enough to expand what they might care about.
Felagund
1hr ago
I don't think so. I think the threads drive engagement, as people have to scroll past things instead of just skim the titles (To echo @Fruck). I personally am more likely to give things in the megathread a chance than top level posts already, I think, so the effect is real.
It seems risky to change the core of how the site runs, in any case.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11m ago
Wow, does sideswiping an entire group of people as an "infestation" not count as being overly antagonistic here?
jeroboam
11m ago
The party realignment is still in mid-swing. I have faith this narrow Republican majority is largely an artifact. Previous party alignments took decades to play out. For example, Texas elected Democratic governors as late as 1990!
The trend is clear. Democrats are for rich white people and the underclass. Republicans are for the others.
100k is very middle class today. Amongst the posh, Democrats are so utterly dominant its comical. I can't find it on Google (because of course I can't) but someone looked at political donations from every large employer. The majority of donations went to Democrats for every employer except for the NYPD and maybe one other. That's right, even supposedly "right wing" corporations like Exxon had more Democratic donors than Republican ones. Amongst tech companies and universities, Democrats held an edge of something like 10-1.
The elite is all in on the Democratic party. And that is truly new. Back in the day, there were a substantial subset of WASP-y Republicans in the northeast and California. They are utterly gone. I know these people. They vote blue now, no matter who.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16m ago
Please don’t threaten him with a good time.
Also, he’s already banned.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
18m ago
Whites pay significantly more in than they take over their lifetimes
Is this before or after you include the imputed damages of tens of thousands of pounds each year they cause by hogging desirable accommodation near jobs after they retire and forcing actually productive working age people to live further away and waste time on commutes (or alternatively pay through the nose to live a pretty shitty life centrally)?
Tomato
2hr ago
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).
cjet79
5hr ago
For top level posts in the culture war roundup there needs to be more effort and content.
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."
Skibboleth
47m ago
it's why the Democratic party is now the party of the old, upper middle class whites.
That seems doubtful. Trump won the >$100k/yr vote in 2020* and his electoral coalition was significantly whiter and older than Biden's.
*not by a huge margin, admittedly, but the divides aren't huge in any income group; either major party trying to position themselves as the party of the poor/working class is typical American posturing where everyone wants to be rich but no one wants to be Rich.
So today there was an assassination attempt on prime minister of my country of Slovakia - Robert Fico. It happened during his tradition of government meetings across the country, in small coal town of Handlová. He went to greet his supporters when a 71 years old man shot him several times, he was then carried away and sent to hospital in critical condition, he undertook complicated surgery and his fate is still not known.
All the leaders sent their condolences from Putin to Macron, Biden and Ursula von der Leyen all condemning the violence. The same for Slovak political leaders. Of course, Slovak reddit as a bastion of more progressive people could not hold their glee, most upvoted comments for one of the threads were of the like of "JFK from Wish" or "this is what you get from hate". I mention it just as a litmus test of how more progressive people think in Slovakia and to be frank I find it disgusting. As you can gather, Fico is viewed as a populist and Slovak Orban and pro Putin and all that, despite major differences that may take too long to explain. But he definitely is described as archenemy by the strongest opposition party literally called "Progressive Slovakia" here. You probably get the picture.
As for the assassin, to me he seems like an unhinged man that was supporting a lot of fringe movements from right-wing movements to talking against the current government as leaked by one policeman who released a video of the perpetration in custody, where the assassin ranted something about recent law regarding the state broadcasting and overall disagreement with the government.
At this point all I have to say is that I am in shock. Something like that never happened in 40 years history of my country. I see already a lot of spin including Guardian and other foreign press as well as very strong proclamations from parties in government about "political warfare". One thing is apparent, the politics in my country changed and not for the better. I think there will be some ripples also elsewhere, ranging from "stochastic terrorism" by having somebody radicalized by media to just politicians being more alerted to this kind of thing happening. There is also EU parliament elections in couple of weeks and this is something that may have more impact there.
That is all for now, I am not sure if this will be deleted as it is not probably quite a topic for some extra thread, but also not your cookie cutter idea thrown here for discussion. But it is widely relevant on so many levels even outside of Slovak politics so I think there may be some good discussion bellow. I may add some edit and I am willing to anybody else to update bellow if let's say Fico's condition changes in the upcoming hours when I am asleep.
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