domain:kvetch.substack.com
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
41m ago
Up zoning is great for property values. The nimby argument is not due to property values but rather "neighborhood character".
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
43m ago
No, you simply have to allow people to develop their own property.
ResoluteRaven
32m ago
Buildings are torn down and rebuilt all the time as they age and wear out. In the absence of zoning restrictions, homes in high-demand areas would be replaced piecemeal with taller and denser structures over a period of many years. We don't need a massive government intervention to flatten entire neighborhoods and remake them from scratch, we just need to give people the freedom to build what they want on their own property and market forces will take care of the rest.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
44m ago
Lots of people do this (see Taiwan, Japan). Even in San Francisco there are tall buildings. There's no shortage of demand.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
51m ago
Do you think there are no Indian or Chinese, bay-area tech workers on this forum? I thought part of conceit of a public forum like this is that you are talking to some notion of "everyone". Either way, I'm definitely sure there aren't any antebellum southerners on this forum (they're all dead), so it's still super confusing why my linked comment wasn't also not antagonistic by this standard.
The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I never conflated these two groups in that entire conversation and repeatedly tried to explain that I didn't. From the very first post, I tried to be very clear that I was only talking about the antebellum south:
The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
This is in fact the main issue. If you try to argue many points on this forum, you get pattern-matched and rounded-off to a very different point that is actually objectionable. You can take however many pains you want to say that you are just talking about the antebellum south, and even the moderation team thinks that you are somehow also talking about the modern south. Like how are you supposed to interpret the group that's being teabagged by melting down a statue as something other than the group led by the person the statue represented?
In the case here, a similar effect creates huge blindspots when applying the guideline:
You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here
How is "infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over" at all being careful while talking about a group? Pointing this out, however, gets conflated with other crying wolf about racism, so this rule about not casually and unjustifiably sideswiping large groups of people doesn't really get applied properly.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2m ago
If builders are confident they'll actually be allowed to build, the market price will be high enough that most people will want to sell. Those that don't won't, but many will for the right price.
ResoluteRaven
7m ago
There was some discussion about fisetin a few years back. I recall some said it cleared up their brain fog while others said it had no noticeable effect. If you don't want to buy the stuff you can always just eat a bunch of strawberries and it might amount to the same thing.
laxam
7m ago
I'm serious. The light hand used against the ex-rebels after the Civil War -- Reconstruction but not imprisonment or execution -- played an important role in reconciling the South to once-again membership in the Union.
SSCReader
11m 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.
ResoluteRaven
17m ago
Italy and Germany contain multiple roughly equivalent population centers due to their relatively late unification, with each of those cities once having been the capital of an independent nation. This is also true of Spain, which has Barcelona to counterbalance Madrid.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
42m ago
You are still in the new user filter, which means your posts have to be manually approved by a mod. After you've been posting for a while, this will stop happening.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
42m ago
Not having a personal obligation doesn't negate the fact your choices may be sup-optimal for society at large in other words.
And so what? No one is obligated to get the short end of the deal to achieve Kaldor-Hicks optimality.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
43m 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.
-
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.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
43m ago
If that’s a priority for you there are tons of places in the country where demand is low enough to allow that.
I'm already living in my home. Let the NEETs have their pods elsewhere.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
45m ago
you're knew, so your comments automatically get filtered and the mods have to approve them manually. This goes away once you've picked up some level of net upvotes. We get asked this a lot by new users, and to head off the obvious questions, yes, it really sucks, and no, there isn't anything we can do about it. The functionality is baked into the code package that was used to set up the site, and the owner and his support staff haven't had the time to change it. It's dumb and it sucks, but usually it goes away pretty quickly.
Welcome, by the way.
practical_romantic
50m ago
Business to consumer, a web/mobile app that's based exclusively on a monthly payment plan.
yellowgreenred
55m ago
Are there any good estimates for "gotaways"? There are quite a lot of deportations and quite a lot of immediate expulsions, and when combined with repeat offenders, the overall number of people entering does not appear to be as high as people might think.
Sheepclothes
30m ago
A couple of months ago, I made a post about my struggles with retroactive jealousy/relationship OCD.
https://www.themotte.org/post/825/wellness-wednesday-for-january-10-2024/178374?context=8#context
I'm happy to report, I've beaten it (and waited a couple of months to be sure), without breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very, very hard, but I came up with an effective strategy that was successful, my girlfriend was supportive in her way too. If you go to Reddit communities about this thing, it looks pretty dire and terminal, but there is hope!
So here's a quick summary that might work for other modal mottizians:
The process was first to never ask another question about her past relationships, no matter how innocuous, never trusting my subconscious to not have an ulterior motive. The disease is categorized by an escalating need for certainty that can never be fulfilled. This was the hardest step and where most people fail. I managed by committing myself to ask these burning questions, tomorrow or a month, and see if I still cared to know exactly how often she cuddled with her ex or whatever. Also, I told my Girlfriend not tell me even if I asked, which mostly served to make the commitment public and easier to keep.
The second step was trying to fix the bad world model I had that caused the issue in the first place. Which was also very hard. I talked to a select few of my female friends and asked very personal question about their past love life, questions that I would have like to ask my girlfriend but didn't let myself. It really put it into perspective how ridiculous and unproductive my probing was, and how woman just didn't think like that. Reading about internet woman's experiences also helped.
The third step was exposure therapy, where I went through some bad scenarios in my head and came up with answers to questions that would hurt me the most. This was and seemingly didn't work at first. I felt like my confidence levels plummeted those weeks, and I felt like I was losing my pride.
Finally, since I hated that, I just started acting like I was amazing. Being completely shamelessly confident in my sexual and relationship abilities. Stating out loud how I'm way better than other guys in this or that. Just being super cocky. Because fake problems require fake solutions. And it worked amazingly. Obviously, my girlfriend didn't mind me saying those things, because she believed it too! That's the great thing about woman, if they love you, you are their one and only.
Positive delusions, are said to be good in relationships. I couldn't just will it into being, though, I couldn't just stop caring about her past either. I firmly believe I had to go through the previous steps, my heroes journey, to really get me to believe in my new truth. It's all fiction, and I needed to make myself a story.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
50m ago
If we are assuming omniscient tyrants we can probably simplify the system a bit.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
51m ago
Incorrect, the bay area has been losing population since the pandemic, albeit at a slowing pace.
And the population becoming insanely wealthy like the Bay Area has because of tech and wealthy people moving in from all over the world can shift the demand curve to the right even if the population stays the same.
Okay but prices have been marching up in the face of declining population, so clearly people moving in from all over the world is not a factor. Perhaps you wish to bite the bullet and say that it's bad that people are getting rich in the bay area because they have higher willingness to pay?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
54m ago
I can see the point. Thanks for elaborating, and as always, thanks for moderating.
That depends on the quality of the skyscrapers. High-rises in Taiwan can easily withstand magnitude 7 or higher quakes that had they occurred in Chile, Turkey, or the Philippines would have devastated thousands of one or two-story buildings.
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