domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
stav
16m ago
And I agree they should develop those and it will help with the housing crisis. But it’s not going to make the Bay Area affordable. Let’s say they develop all of that into high rises tomorrow and build 100,000 dwellings. Those homes would still be prohibitively expensive for most Americans.
stav
29m ago
I think you are massively overestimating the percentage of homeowners in SF etc who are retired boomer and older whites and how much power they have.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
39m ago
No, you can't even build housing in the middle of nowhere without hearing these nimby arguments.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
42m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever
https://protectcoyotevalley.org/
In east Alameda countythere's enormous amounts of empty space. Much of the prime real estate in Santa Clara county is warehouses or other industrial areas, and much of the bay area is really shitty SFHes built on shoestring budgets in the sixties.
That's off the top of my head.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
45m ago
Why would they keep buying it if the value of that housing is being diluted by all the new housing? Foreigners buy houses in these markets as an investment. The only reason the sunset is a good investment is because the supply of houses is fixed by the boomer death grip. If you could actually build something there it would cease to be a good investment.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
Except the actual regulations in question are often things like ‘allow duplexes and triplexes in single family zones’, which NEETS will not be living in except as a dependent, and they could easily live as dependents in single family homes as is the stereotype.
Few people want to build the Kowloon walled city.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Houston also has the loosest zoning rules anywhere in the country.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Correct, housing prices are artificially high because it’s illegal to build houses. That, in turn, is mostly because old white people use their political power to make it so.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Greg Abbott has a propaganda push about trying to reduce housing prices. Someone immersed in Texas politics- or heavily into the YIMBY scene- would probably be aware of it.
In practice a lot of the actual programs he’d point to are populist signaling, but Austin is the only major city with declining apartment rents while the city grows.
SSCReader
1hr ago
Exactly! And it does because Boomers vote and lobby and spend money to look out for their interests.
How they feel about their personal moral obligations has no impact, but what they do does. And the people opposing them need to learn that lesson if they hope to succeed. Being morally right does exactly nothing to advance their cause.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
Singapore has a new prime minister, marking the end of the political dynasty founded by Lee Kuan Yew. I don't know much about this new guy, but it will be interesting to see for how much longer the People's Action Party can maintain its current level of centralized control with less charismatic leaders. Given the popularity of Lee around these parts, I figured others may have something to add about the stability of the current system or the future of everyone's favorite Southeast Asian city-state (no offense to Brunei).
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Voice of America is a thing. TBH I’d be shocked if the EU didn’t have similar programs.
Honestly a big, wealthy, influential country is naturally going to perceive a nationalist-ish media law, no matter how anodyne, in its poorer, smaller periphery to be aimed at it.
sliders1234
1hr ago
The white nationalist guy had me thinking about this a lot when they did the full discussion. You can’t just make whites holes by doing things to mitigate black crime. More policing makes a neighborhood feel worse. Many of the small crimes and generally annoyance of the lower class blacks that will find there way in will make the neighborhoods less desirable. People will do things to mitigate the undesirableness by doing nimby things or moving to the suburbs. The mitigations themselves have costs (longer commutes/more pollution). We would probably build our cities more like Buenos Aires which is chill and dense with very walkable communities.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Well, no. Because what the pod people want is basically Kowloon Walled City surrounded by farmland. An urban growth boundary, inside of which there is only high density development, outside of which no one may build at all. So if the pod people have their way the McMansion people will be pushed until they hit the boundary and then they'll be forced into pods.
remzem
1hr ago
It's surprising how radicalized people have become by the western empire / media / ngo complex. Seems like this also involves efforts to limit foreign NGO influence https://www.politico.eu/article/commissioner-upbraids-slovakia-on-changes-to-ngo-public-media-laws-robert-fico/ and is a similar situation to the bill causing all the riots in Georgia and of course a few years ago Hungary... attempted? or actually passed? I don't remember, a similar bill to label and monitor NGOs with significant foreign funding among other attempts to rid their local media of foreign influence. Are these people just NPCs that listen to too much Slovakian NPR? Or people that see themselves as members of the borderless global professional (laptop) class? Seems strange to me that labeling foreign funding for NGOs would be controversial and bad. The US and EU response to these laws is very telling as well.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
This is basically a paen to "might makes right". But if we look at it that way, right now the people who own the houses have the upper hand in government, and the would-be pod-dwellers who want their space don't. So it turns out civilization favors the NIMBY, at least for now.
sliders1234
1hr ago
It does seem that “when unification happened” is the key predictor for biggest city versus rest for most of Europe. Or maybe it’s just random geographic factors. China of course has mostly been unified forever (and I believe more ethnically pure than any European country) but has multiple equivalent cities. Mexico and America settled around same time but Mexico City seems dominant while America is spread out (and there are geographical factors for Mexico of course).
Tenaz
1hr ago
Funny how modern humans need "fundamental skills" but people 50 years ago just lived their normal lives and stayed skinny. This strikes me as Usain Bolt saying "you need to develop the skills to run fast" as if 99% of it wasn't God-given.
This doesn't contradict my point. These fundamental skills may not have been necessary in the past, but environmental factors have made them necessary nowadays. If people in the 70's time-travelled to today they'd need to develop those skills too.
Food today is cheaper, more plentiful, more tasty, and less healthy than your average king would have had access to in the past. Exercise is also much less important; you can get anywhere by car, and most modern entertainment is available right from the comfort of your home.
I'm not blaming you for needing to lose weight. I probably need to lose more weight than you do. But no diet is a silver bullet, especially if you don't intend to follow it forever.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
I think this category of "domestication" is orthogonal to race as we normally define it and is more strictly dependent on the length of time a given population has been living in hierarchical agricultural societies. For example, Han Chinese and Hmong are both Asian, but the former are more "domesticated" than the latter. The same is true for other pairings such as Mayans and Comanches, Persians and Pashtuns, etc.
Ponder
1hr ago
increasing longevity
According to marketing literature:
- Bioavailable CoQ10 - CoQ10 functions as a carrier to transfer electrons across the membrane of the mitochondria to drive production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), or cellular energy.
- NAD+ precursors (including Nicotinamide Mononucleotide and Nicotinamide Riboside) - may help support overall cell proliferation. NAD+ levels decrease as we age which leads to the belief that lowered NAD+ levels are responsible for lower energy levels
- Astragaloside IV (a compound in Astragalus membranaceus) - can enhance telomere length. Telomeres are protective caps on the end of our DNA, which helps ensure proper DNA replication. However, the older we get, the shorter our telomeres become. Due to this, telomere shortening is often seen as a hallmark of aging.
- Peptides - I have no idea about these but they are building blocks of certain proteins needed by the skin, like collagen and elastin.
Personally, the first 2 seemed to give me a mild energy boost for a few hours. It is hard to say if they did much beyond that. I was only taking them 1-2x a week and not daily.
I would enjoy seeing more discussion on these because my research is from a biased source (a nootropics seller).
stav
1hr ago
So people who are net negative will magically be productive? Oakland is one of the biggest shitholes in America and it’s close to some of the wealthiest areas in the US. South side Chicago is a 10 minute metro car ride away from downtown and is a total dump.
stav
1hr ago
The person mentioned the Sunset district and people there like their neighborhood and don’t want it to be developed. The NIMBY neighborhoods are nice that’s why they don’t want you to build there. If they got rid of the zoning restrictions there they might build some high density housing over the years but not enough to make it affordable. It would probably just get bought by rich foreigners anyway. I’ve seen it in Austin. New housing gets built and rich foreigners like Indians come in and pay 100k over asking. I don’t think people understand the amount of housing that would be necessary to make the Bay Area affordable.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
Presumably in the process of self-segregation where the pod people and the McMansion people move into separate communities and redevelop them somebody is going to have to get pushed out of their home. Once this uncomfortable business is behind us we can all go on with our lives in peace.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.
MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.
Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.
I think this covers up an important truth. There is an important difference in this respect between "virtually everyone" on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk. It is one thing to feel like your clan has gotten the short end of some particular stick, but it is another thing to feel like that justifies negating the human rights of your countrymen in the entire offending class. Of course you can find, to some degree, talking heads of any class talking about how their group has been treated unfairly, but when that rises to a certain pitch and tone, you'd best keep your rifle clean.
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