Linky Friday #152: Russian History
Russia:
[Ru1] Turns out, it’s good to marry the daughter of the king. Not so good to be a critic, because mysterious illness.
[Ru2] The Old Believers are a fundamentalist sect that fled into Siberia in 1930’s Soviet Union later to be discovered in 1978. It’s a fascinating story.
[Ru3] Dave Schuler watched August, Eight, a Russian movie on the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, which gives a view of the war from the Russian side.
[Ru4] Tim Marshall writes of Russia’s unfortunate geography, and why it’s so concerned with its eastern neighbors. The annexation of Crimea, though, turned out to be pretty expensive.
[Ru5] Alexander J Motyl explains what he believes to be the coming collapse of the Putin regime.
Media:
[M1] Chris Hughes is apparently selling the New Republic in favor of a new house.
[M2] What happened to the paparazzi? The subjects of the media are in revolt.
[M3] Kelly McBride looks at the ethics of how Bloomberg should treat Bloomberg.
[M4] “One of those wrecked ships carried a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there was no cat; but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and put the cat in. I wrote a true report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat.”
Housing:
[Ho1] Even in New York, the market for bazillionaire housing is apparently not endless.
[Ho2] Wendell Cox looks at the most and least housing-affordable cities in the world. USA! USA! USA! (Excluding California.)
[Ho3] Microcondos are coming to Houston.
[Ho4] Abby Schachter writes about the major problems with micro-living. It seems for micro-living to really work, you need robust public spaces.
[Ho5] Kriston Capps makes the case against ethical landlording.
[Ho6] “In high-demand areas, [Vancouver demonstrates] new dense construction can and does improve affordability by making more productive use of expensive land. As the adage goes, a skyscraper is a machine to make the land pay.”
Resources:
[Re1] OPEC may have started a price war, but rich investors are going to make winning it hard. Saudi Arabia could come out the loser.
[Re2] Meltdown-Proof nuclear reactors? You have my attention…
[Re3] Woohoo! Peter Dockrill looks at a potentially cheap mechanism of desalinization!
[Re4] Never mind space, is the next frontier the deep blue sea? There may be power in them there oceans, though, Oscar Gordon reports at Hit Coffee.
[Re5] Mining in Europe began more than 4,000 years ago.
Gender:
[G1] Justin Wolfers reports that when it comes to teamwork, women kind of get the shaft.
[G2] He wanted to sleep with her and couldn’t, so what else could he do but fire her.
[G3] Ruth Graham has perhaps the best take on the CDC’s report about whether women should drink when they are off birth control. A little guiltily, I’m kind of glad to see the CDC getting some hate from other quarters.
[G4] Priceonomics looks at female rulers before feminism, where queens may (or may not) have been more warhawky than their king counterparts.
[G5] The Femitheist thinks that we can fix all of our problems by decimating the male population. The good news for the men that remain is that they would be relied on pretty heavily for mating.
[G6] IUDs are the most effective method of birth control, and honestly one of the only forms of birth control I see making a serious dent in our abortion rates.
History:
[Hi1] “Snavely told Heaton about the stories, and the two of them did something un-geoscientific: they decided to take the Makah story not as myth, but as history. That is, they assumed the Makah were describing a geologically-recent tsunami, compared the Makah narrative with their understanding of Cape Flattery’s geology, found the similarity between story and geology ‘noteworthy,’ and published their findings in the scientific literature.”
[Hi2] Atlas Obscura looks at Kiska, Alaska, and the history of the battle that was fought there in World War 2.
[Hi3] Matt Novak looks at Australia’s secret history as a White Utopia.
[Hi4] Helen Andrews (who previously wrote this absolutely fantastic look at the Siberian/Australian parallels) looks at Women Against Suffrage. Here are some cartoons used for the anti-suffrage movement.
[Hi5] Elizabeth Wright explains how Marcus Garvey should be honored as an enemy of Communism.
Ru1: You mean Czar, not King.
Ru2: The Old Believers aren’t strictly fundamentalist. They are more like the English people that decided to remain loyal to the Roman Catholic Church after Henry VIII formed the Church of England. When Peter I became Tsar, he issued a series of church reforms to bring Russian Orthodox practice in line with other Eastern Orthodox churches. People being people, some people decided that they like things they way they were. Hence, Old Believers.
Ho4: This should be a no duh explanation. People really do not like being cooped up in small places even if there are a lot of distractions. In the past, people spent as much time as possible outside their houses to get room. Micro housing doesn’t really work well with America’s auto centric cities that sprawl and lack street life.
G5: Ivory Tower thought like this really pisses me off.
Hi3: This is only secret because most people do not know anything about Australian history unless they are Australian. A lot of people don’t know much about their own countries history. If people read more than they would know this. It wouldn’t be a secret.Report
What the hell do you propose to do with the people who are NEVER EVER going to find someone to date/marry? An excess of sexual frustration is often a prerequisite to murder and rape, not necessarily in that order.Report
On an individual level, this is deeply, deeply offensive.
On a society level, I keep waiting for China and India to go to war.Report
How offensive is it to know that you’d drink the blood of someone else, if you were thirsty enough?
(I’m taking it as a given that you weren’t deeply offended by an offhand glance at necrophilia).
Tracking the people who are growing steadily more upset at the lack of womenz laid at their feet like so much treasure isn’t good for anyone’s bloodpressure. (This is why we leave it to trolls, who are much better equipped to laugh at other people’s stubborn misfortune)Report
Well, I know from personal experience that the lonely bachelor life is frustrating but very few men actual go on a rampage because of it. Most of us lonely bachelors manage to live our lives without committing crimes. And given the choice between the lonely bachelor life till an old age or being murdered, I choose the former.Report
Most men have a decent shot, at some point, of finding a relationship.
Certain subsets of men are rather hopeless though, and I’m not just speaking about Chris-chan.Report
Ru1: Who are Marc Mezvinsky and Henry Hager, Alex?
Ru4: I think you mean western (and southern) neighbors, at least in the context of this article. Russia’s battles with it eastern neighbors are either older (Mongols) or newer (Japanese & Chinese).
Ho4: You also need to talk really fast to make micro-living work.
Ho1: Trigger warning (graphical picture with exaggerated y-axis)Report
Ho4: You also need to talk really fast to make micro-living work.
Ha. Your bringing back nostalgia from my elementary school days.Report
Re2: “an alternative nuclear fuel that is cleaner, safer, and more abundant than uranium.”
This is literally true, but the magnitude of the difference isn’t overwhelming. ‘Raw’ Th-232 and U-238 are both alpha emitters with similar half-lives (~10 billion years for the former, ~5 billion for the latter). ‘Cleanliness’ comes from somewhat fewer nasty (and relatively long lived) zoomie makers after the reaction is complete. (i.e. no Plutonium).
“Safer” is the same thing – the actual material is about the same for handling and storage (with some thorium oxide compounds being a little *more* icky with less forgiving melting points and chemistry), but you’re saving risk during the reaction and energy production. That is, if everything works as advertised. A long history of operation is one element of any safety system, thorium reactors don’t have that (yet)
The internet also says that while Thorium is more abundant than Uranium on earth (about 3x the amount on an elemental basis), the quantity of commercially feasible extraction of each is about the same.Report
But which one is more likely to grant me superpowers in the event of an accident?Report
Neither, probably, or both equally.
The Hulk was from gamma rays (neither Thorium232 nor U-235 or U-238 are gamma emitters at the top of their decay chain), the Fantastic 4’s cosmic rays are similarly EM (i.e gamma) radiation, not alpa or beta.
It’s posible that the radioactive spider contained an alpha emitter (breaking the skin is the only way alpha and beta particles can harm you, aside from inhalation/ingestion), but again, both elements have very similar characteristics in terms of nuclear decay for the relevant isotopes.Report
Welp, looks like I’ll have to go with plan B – get a time machine, go back and make my parents millionaires somehow, then engage a two-bit thug to murder them.
I just want to help people, is all.Report
It maybe more practical to just get a bow and arrow and practice for many years?
it seems to be only way to be a superhero if you’re not born rich or simply born that way.Report
I recommend developing skills in combat yoyo and the ninja arts.
(Yes, seriously).
[Asking people, again, to remember that not believing me is a requisite of me continuing to post crazy but true bullshit.]Report
If I didn’t know that Arrow was a real thing, I would think you were pulling my leg with a parody. “There’s this superhero, right? And his power is that he’s a really awesome archer? Like, with all kinds of trick arrows and shots?”
It sounds like the Knifeketeer.
http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2012/7/24/how-to-re-explain-details-in-a-long-running-narrative.htmlReport
I was thinking Hawkeye, actually.Report
“Brilliant, acerbic combat surgeon” isn’t a real superpower either.Report
How else can you explain being in the Army for 12 years and never having a regulation haircut?Report
The Korean War actually only lasted three years. The preachiness of the last year’s worth of episodes just made it seem like it took ten years.Report
Technically, the Korean War never ended. There was an armistice, but there has never been a formal cessation of hostilities.Report
How about “Can turn hilarious sitcoms into preachy snoozefests”?Report
Ain’t that the truth. I watched it faithfully, back in the day, but now find it unwatchable.Report
Try Aquaman. He talks to fish. That’s pretty much it.
(It’s not even like they give him a primarily aquatic setting)Report
Or you could spend the years specializing in a combination of weightlifting and psychosis (Punisher, Comedian, …)Report
It’s the fission products — cesium, iodine, strontium, etc — whose decay chains include gamma emitters.Report
Seeing as how willfully ignorant the population is regarding fission reactions, this won’t matter in the least.
The only nuclear anyone wants to hear about is clean, beautiful fusion, because nothing bad can ever come from bottling up a star.Report
Im waiting on singularity drive myselfReport
Re2: Ahhh the beautiful idea of molten salt. Last I’d read the salt presents material problems in that it’s so caustic though. But yeah it can’t melt down. Also it eats nuclear waste and doesn’t run under super pressurized conditions so containment and backup systems are must less costly.
H01: There’s not an infinite supply of super rich to buy all the high end housing? Who knew…
H06: Increasing supply of housing units decreases prices but zoning and land use regulation gets in the way. In other news sun rises in the east.Report
Yes, there are advantages to properly-designed reactors where molten salts are both the primary coolant and carry the dissolved fuels. OTOH, every single reactor has to have a sophisticated on-site chemical processing facility to keep the molten salts that run through the core properly “balanced”, extracting at least a few hundred pounds of the most problematic isotopes in relatively pure form each year.Report
For sure, I’d be delighted to see some come to commercial use. I have a feeling the Chinese may do it first though.Report
Umm.. what happens to those isotopes? Anything different than the mostly-liquid-water nuclear waste that result from other sorts of reactors?Report
Yes, it’s different Burt. Molten Salt turns solid at room temperature so the moment you remove those isotopes they turn into solid radioactive salt and you don’t have very much of them. That’s also why the reactors are so much safer: punch a hold in a traditional assembly and super heated radioactive steam explodes out and flies all over the place. Punch a hole in a liquid salt assembly and liquid salt spills out onto the floor and solidifies.Report
I was thinking about it from the non-accident spent-fuel direction. In a PWR, the fission products — cesium and strontium in particular [1] — are contained in the fuel pellets. In the US, where the pellets are buried [2] intact, the cesium and strontium remain contained. Russia, France, and Japan do reprocessing and have to deal with the fission products, but at only a handful of reprocessing sites. In a liquid fuel reactor, the fission products have to be removed on site at the reactor on a relatively continuous basis — many, many more opportunities for them to get loose into the environment. A 1 GWe reactor will produce 60 or so pounds of both cesium and strontium annually.
[1] Cesium and strontium are problems because they dissolve well in water, and are readily absorbed by plants and animals.
[2] Well, maybe someday buried. For now, the pellets sit in spent fuel pools and then storage casks.Report
M2: It’s not so much that the celebs are revolting (but some of them do stink on ice), but they are seizing the means of production – which I guess *is* a revolt, in the oldest sense of the term.
While the glossy magazines and photographers themselves may be squeezed out by technological obsolescence, there’s still going to be a market for publicists & promoters – they just need to be say of the new means of production.
There’s is also probably (maybe? maybe not with all the competing interests and legacy interests and philosophical disagreements?) , eventually, as current paradigms of technology age, going to be a sea change in the legal system on whose rights we recognize with all the competing rights in a moving and/or still picture. Among others, the competing rights are between the people are subjects in a moving or still pictures, the people that initially composed that picture, the people that may have other intellectual property in that picture, the people who disseminate that picture, the people who disseminate that picture with their own changes. (and that’s on top of whether or not there’s audio, which is a whole ‘nother regulatory regime, dividing who wrote the tune, who wrote the lyrics, and who is performing – and if they are performing live or memorex)
I’m just thinking Barbara Jordan’s estate is none too happy with her being the de facto spokesperson for NumbersUSA. (which is another factor, that comes into play most famously with MLK – what should be the rights of the dead?)Report
forgot to add – I liked the Awl author’s pet theory on anonymous sources – since anyone now tell the whole world anything they want at any time, the only reason to tell someone else something to tell the whole world is if you want to keep your identity on the down low.Report
I never understood the economics of this. If a photo of a celebrity eating a sandwich in a diner is worth tens of thousands of dollars, why didn’t the celebrity hire a photographer to take the photo and then sell it? Or, if the point is that the celebrity didn’t want to be followed around by paparazzi, then flood the market. Have your hired photographer follow you around taking photos, and then give them away. If a magazine can get that hot sandwich photo for nothing, there will be no incentive for paparazzi to follow said celebrity around. This is essentially what has happened with instagram, but I don’t see why it couldn’t have been done all along.Report
Well you are not the primary target audience. There are people who probably are perplexed by the amount of time you spend in archives looking for old Baseball info.Report
I’m not questioning why people wanted to look at pictures of a celebrity eating a sandwich in a diner. I am questioning why the celebrity did not take simple measures to supply this demand and profit from this, or in the alternative to otherwise manipulate the supply in order to obtain a desirable outcome.Report
The surprise and off guard factor is the big selling point probably. Not smooth professionalism. Plus I suspect the bigger sellers are seeing celebs do more debauched things than eat sandwichesReport
OMG! She’s eating a sandwich without AVOCADO!Report
The Californian is not strong in youReport
Worth 10 kilobucks to whom is the operative question, methinks. I also think the articles elided over the general decline in print media periodicals and the economic crunch that has put all such business enterprises in. (e.g. Hef is selling his mansion, Newsweek has been bankrupt, what, twice?)
All this operates in a ecosystem stumbled upon in pre-World War 2 Hollywood. The only people that such photos are worth money too (except for blackmailers and extorters) were people that could package multiple such photos into a compilation that would then sell for a profit – where moving up on the demand curve on that compilation was determined by getting a good collection of who was hot (and excluding who was not) *and* being able to do so on a consistent basis. (generating acceptable and consistent content on a predictable basis is the very essence of the business case for periodical media, nonfiction and fiction)
Celebrities saw value in being part of this ecosystem for their own professional ends, even if they couldn’t quite control it. Hence, the creation of the publicist and PR flack. Almost certainly, there were ‘ringers’ in the golden age of hollywood (and later) where a photographer would get a just-so candid photo of a celebrity, with the specific direction (and occasional cash payment) from that celebrity. However, doing this too overtly or too often would upset the balance of the ecosystem, and backfire.
Instagram (and the internet generally) erodes the market power of paper periodical publications, but it doesn’t diminish the need for professional publicists to still manage that public image – if your line of work requires a public image.Report
I think the best-earning photos were either of an intimate or embarrassing nature: Famous celeb topless! or Famous celeb in sweats with taco sauce dribbling down their chin.
Famous celebs didn’t want *any* of those kind of pictures getting out.
FYI, Daniel Radcliffe figured out a similar way to beat the paps: when leaving the theater he wore the same outfit every day for 5 months.Report
He made up for it by not wearing anything at all inside the theater.Report
The other day I boggled at how Clinton won 6 of 6 coin tosses in Iowa.
As it turns out, there were a lot more than 6 coin tosses in Iowa. And, wouldn’t you know it, the numbers come out to around 50/50.Report
Hi3: “But the whitewashing of Australia didn’t start with the country’s creation in 1901 as a British Commonwealth. In 1901, Australia’s population of 3.8 million people was already 97 percent white. It would remain over 95 percent white until the 1970s.”
The author is strongly implying design, when the nature of settlement colonies was that they were being settled by people from the home country. Large transportation and settlement businesses developed to support it. I doubt those percentages are very different from Canada and New Zealand. They are very different from the United States in one respect, the vast number of Africans enslaved. In 1970, the U.S. population was almost entirely either white or black (98.6%), with the black population almost entirely descended from involuntary immigrants.Report
In 1970, the U.S. population was almost entirely either white or black (98.6%), with the black population almost entirely descended from involuntary immigrants.
Maybe it’s time for a re-branding, that emphasizes the modern bright side.
American Diversity: We Made It MandatoryReport
There was an official policy of trying to keep Asian immigrants out of Australia just like there was for long time an official policy of excluding Asian immigrants from the United States and discouraging and limiting Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The reasons for this were not noble. White Australia was a real government policy rather than something inadvertent.Report
There’s also the fact that in my limited understanding, what was done to the Aussie aboriginal population was not much better than what we did to the Native Americans here.Report
When i was in Australia a white aussie told me he thought america had done better with trying improve treatment of blacks and stop official discrimination then Australia had with aborigines. He wished they had done as well as us. And he seemed to have a pretty good idea about America. They had some very harsh policies up until the 70’s far after we passed civil rights laws.Report
It was worse in many ways. The aboriginal population of Tasmania was subjected to the only 100% effective genocide of all time. No Native American tribe suffered that much under the United States or white Americans. The United States mainly neglected and ignored the remaining Native Americans. It was malign neglect but malign neglect than the malign attempts at civilization that the Australian government inflicted on the Australian aboriginals. As far as I can tell, White Australians are still largely undisturbed by their history.Report
the only 100% effective genocide of all time
I…doubt this, somehow.
You mean “in living memory”, maybe?Report
Yeah, he does. The Amazons were completely wiped out, after all, so badly they only survive in legend, not a scrap of written history.Report
If they only survive in legend and not in written history, then we dont’ really know if they existed in the first place to have ever been wiped out.Report
really? Because I can tell you about the psychopaths that lived in Merry Olde England, I can tell you quite a lot about them, in fact.
Legends, particularly ones that are tied to a particular place, tend to be… somewhat truthful (you can, of course, take a bit of bias as a given, just as you should with all historical documents)
Particularly the ones that serve as warnings. And the British were ever a mistrustful sort. Turns out they had good reason indeed.
Besides, we do actually have decent historical background for tons of legends, enough to lend a bit of credit to the ones we don’t.
This is Emphatically Not To Say that all legends are true. Take Changelings — it’s a Just So story repeated across the globe (mostly as an explanation for a bit of adultery, mind, nothing magic about it). It’s the ones that are particular to a place that tend to have the most historical significance.Report
Taino
Moriori
Possibly Cathars
And a more general response to your statement – history among oral cultures is generally very strong. We just have to rid ourselves of our prejudice that the only “real” history is written history to not find it surprising.Report
I don’t disagree with oral cultures can have a strong sense of their history. However there oral histories come with a strong and obvious bias. All history has some bias but while their memory should be a part of the record it is a bit much to just take it as they remember it.Report
True, but when you’re looking at prehistorical records of genocide… you are basically trying to ask “why was this important enough to risk your life for?”
With the Amazons, you get back a pretty strong answer for that one, and it’s cultural to boot.Report
I had initially included reference to the Asian exclusion in the U.S. and Australia. Chinese immigration to the U.S. was explicitly banned from 1882 to 1943, and was discouraged or limited from 1790 to 1965.
Mass immigration that moves population needles has been extremely rare, at least prior to 1970. British settlement was rather unique in including women and focussing on settlement, instead of resource extraction or adventurism. But if we are going to cast moral judgments on the past, it should be in the context of what was done at that time. There was mass migration of Chinese to Manchuria from 1890 to 1942, were the policies adapted any different?Report
Hi1 – The best article I’ve read in a while. Thanks.Report
It’s crazy how much good stuff is being written these days.Report
Ho4 – I have been thinking a lot about this lately as my wife and I consider buying a home. I would like a small place (and can really only afford a condo or something like that), but the inability to truly “live” in that space is a big drawback, especially since the rest of the community around us doesn’t have the public spaces necessary for such living to really work.Report
The key is to buy as small a place as you can happily live in, but no smaller. Stuff expands to fill the space available. If you have a larger place, it will just end up crammed with more stuff. The point is that stuff doesn’t equate with happiness. You can only use so much stuff at a time, and if you really want new stuff you can get rid of some old stuff without diminishing your happiness. But you do need enough room for the amount of stuff you will actually use.Report
Kevin Drum had an article up this week or last week about how people can get used to living in smaller spaces but can never get used to long commute times.
I would say this is largely true. Yet a lot of Americans seem to go for the large space want because we have a lot of land. I understand this to a certain extent. If I stayed single or childless, I could see staying in one or two bedroom apartments for the rest of my life but I would not want to live in a small two bedroom apartment with kids.Report
This affects the smallest happy size, but not the underlying principle of buying the smallest place you will be happy in. My wife and I were living in a one bedroom apartment. Then she got pregnant–I have no idea how–and this situation obviously wouldn’t do. We bought a three-bedroom townhouse with a full basement all of two blocks away from the old apartment. We ended up with two kids. (This supposedly was wildly unlikely. The first pregnancy was low probability. When this medical miracle occurred a second time less than two years later I decided that two medical miracles was the right number, and visited a urologist to prevent a third.) Were we in this townhouse with no kids, it would have been larger than two people really need: a joint bedroom, individual personal space for each, and a basement to accumulate the stuff. It is perfectly adequate for a family of four.
We bought just after the market had peaked. I knew perfectly well that it had peaked, but the apartment was not going to be tenable. The alternative was to rent. The wife sometimes grumble about having bought high, but the rental market is absolutely insane. I have checked, and it turns out our monthly mortgage + insurance + taxes payments are lower than what we would be paying in rent for less house.Report
OOO! OOOOO!!! Pick me!
I live in a relatively small (1000 square feet) two-bedroom apartment with kids. TWO kids. Terrible little beastie kids!!! AND I commute an hour+ each way. Though my work day is relatively short.
We have good public spaces. The property has a fenced in courtyard with grass and there is a lovely waterfront walkway with open spaces for bike riding and scootering and the like. There is a great library across the way, a cruddy park in walking distance, and parks galore (with pools!) in driving distance or a short train ride away. We live right next to the train, which also gives us access to the entirety of NYC. And I have no qualms strapping one boy to my chest, sticking the other in a stroller, and carrying the whole lot up the subway stairs.
The logistics of my setup are a little annoying. To get to my car, I have to go down one elevator, across the skybridge, and up another elevator. This is annoying but manageable. I wish I had more ready access to the outside like I did when I owned a home with a big backyard. I miss grilling. I don’t know if I see myself in an apartment long term, largely owing to the boys’ needs. But we’re pretty comfortable in our space. I wish I had a larger kitchen and would trade walk-in closets and a second bathroom for more common space. But being able to clean my apartment in a matter of minutes instead of hours and having the access I do is well worth the trade offs.Report
As the adorable darlings grow larger, you will come to appreciate that second bathroom.Report
@richard-hershberger
Oh, I’m sure. But they’re almost 3 and almost 1 and I don’t anticipate being in this particular apartment more than a year or two. So the second bathroom is nice but a luxury. And it is big… it could be its own little play space.Report
One or both being potty trained changes everything, and this could happen any day now, if it hasn’t already. (Me, I wondered if I would be delivering pull-ups to their college dorm rooms, but they came around eventually.) The day will come when you will be sitting in the bathroom in a contemplative moment, not wishing either to share it with anyone, no matter how beloved, nor to abbreviate the experience. Then comes the knock on the door as the Beloved One announces an imminent event. Being able to direct the Beloved One to the other bathroom will be a great blessing.Report
This is why the wife insists on two (2) bathrooms. As she tends towards baths as opposed to showers, I see the logic.Report
Excellent point, @richard-hershberger . Thanks for the tip.Report
M4: Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat
A perfect example of the add a puss complex.Report
G5:
What kind of men would you choose for breeding? Du you base selection on physical or mental characteristics?
The men will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.Report
It sure sounds like the author only wants to keep those men around for their precious bodily fluids.Report
Ho5: The slatepitch is strong in this one. The woman in question is not a landlord, she is selling one codo in a building, she is not even selling a full house. She is still making a good profit considering the original purchase price. She decided to do a good deed with her one little piece of property. She is not causing massive harm here because there are still presumably other residents in the building. A developer would need to buy out everyone. Plus if this is a free country, she has a right to do what she wants.
We have been through this before but don’t people have a right to decide what is in their own economic best interest or does that only matter when it gets the stamp of approval from economists and neo-liberals? Otherwise you are dumb. A landlord can decide that he or she wants steady and regular paying tenants than high turnover.Report
The author definitely overstates their position. The owner was free to sell it in whatever context she liked. She’s most assuredly an outlier but it’s nice she used her privileged position to try and give back to her community I guess. Good for her.
Your last paragraph is kind of mind boggling though. Sure a landlord can decide they want steady and regular paying tenants (presumably at some theoretical lower rate) rather than high turnover. They generally don’t, of course, which is why rules get passed forcing them to do so for as long as their tenants want (so much for people having a right to decide what is in their own economic interest). Then of course restrictionists are shocked that there’re so few housing units available and they’re outraged that prospective tenants need ten years shining rental history, sterling credit and ivy league interviewing skills to convince landlords to lease their units to them.
The article does get one thing exactly right. San Francisco needs to build a lot more units. At some point they’re going to have to accept that.Report
“Plus if this is a free country, she has a right to do what she wants.”
How far are you willing to extend this?
“Purchasers must contribute to the community.”
“Purchasers must be from the community.”
“Purchasers must have been born in the community.”
“Purchasers must have been born in the community prior to 1950.”
In some (most?) communities, that is going to lead to increasingly whiter pools of potential purchasers. Are you comfortable with that, @saul-degraw ?Report
Of course, she can decide what is in her economic best interest, but it is worth pointing out that by seeking non-monetary compensation, she incurred a lot of additional transaction costs to obtain a number of promises that are probably not legally enforceable. To the extent this is about supporting the community, it is certainly worth wondering whether there are charities or other community support groups that she could have supported by just taking the highest bidder.Report
It’s not clear that her decision was in her own economic best interest. Quite the opposite. But that’s okay, and her choice for her property. Reserving and restricting sales on a cultural basis has a dark side, but her decision seems pretty in-bounds.
That’s a separate question from whether or not we consider some of these decisions healthy, unhealthy, or whatever else for the public-at-large. Capps is saying unhealthy.
I’m somewhat undecided, myself. When we sold our old car, we made the decision to accept less in favor of selling it to who we wanted to sell it to. We didn’t apply any non-binding restrictions or anything, but when one potential buyer was a young couple struggling to get by, and another was an older fellow wanting to buy it for his snotty grandson, we sold it to the first. Not sure how that’s different than this.
I think Capps makes some good points about alternatives that might have been more worthwhile rather than trying to prop up a dyke against the ocean of inevitable change.Report
You can’t assume that just because she lives in San Francisco.Report
This is truly a work of genius, @mike-schilling . Even by your own lofty standards. Bravo.Report
M3: Kinda hard for employees to give the business to the guy writing the checks, but then again, most journalists aren’t real journalist anymore anyway, but anything coming out of Bloomberg should be taken with a greater amount of salt that normal when it comes to Bloomberg reporting on Bloomberg.
Ho3: “Prices start from $119,000 for a 300-square-foot loft.” That amount of space would be filled by my dinning room table and chairs. Sardines in a can.
Ho5: I wouldn’t call it “land-lording” since she was selling the place.
Re2: Nice and all, but you’ll never get it passed the NRC with all the anti nuke agitators
Re3: This sounds neat. It’d go a long way address clean water and fresh water demands globally.
G2]: Shesh, you don’t tell anyone that what you wanted and what you did. Jeebus.
G3: This kerfuffle was on NPR the other night. Sounded like just bad PR speak to me. Along the lines of “if you really want to avoid death or injury, don’t drive” kinda speak, not “you should not drive”.
G5: Logically inconstant. “I don’t advocate selective slaughter or brutal processes.” “sex-selective abortions,” Yah, didn’t the Chinese do something similar and now their experiencing the hell of that fubar.
You’d have to take the guns away first, but somehow, I think she’s in favor of gun control already.Report
What in the hell is happening…
In the Democratic race nationwide, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has 44 percent, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at 42 percent, and 11 percent undecided. This compares to a 61 – 30 percent Clinton lead in a December 22 survey ….
Sanders and Rubio are the strongest candidates in general election matchups …
General election matchups among American voters show:
Clinton tops Trump 46–41 percent;
Clinton ties Cruz 45–45 percent;
Clinton trails Rubio 48–41 percent;
Sanders thumps Trump 49–39 percent;
Sanders edges Cruz 46–42 percent;
Sanders and Rubio are tied 43–43 percent.Report
National polls. *eyeroll*Report
What. did Volvo win?Report
I’ve squinted at this, turned my head sideways and tried googling Volvo, but I just don’t get it. Curse you Schilling! *shakes fist*Report
Try translating it from Latin.Report
Ah, I was thinking something something dieselgate something faking out predicted results.Report
North,
To quote Jaybird: “Clinton’s campaign was supposed to be a coronation.” 🙂Report
I’m just parroting the CW!Report
{{I know!}}
Add: And the latest Q poll has him beating her in head-to-head-against-GOPers!Report
So much the better that it’s not I say.Report
Wow, Chait put up an article explaining why Liberals should root for a Trump nomination victory, pretty much encapsulates my own thinking: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/why-liberals-should-support-a-trump-nomination.htmlReport
btw, neither Sun Tau nor Clauswitz would advocate ‘send a dozen choppers, when one would do’Report
You are likely right but Arni is doing reality TV so I can forgive that; he’s in no danger of being in public office again.Report
K,
Just send Old Man Henderson, he’ll sort it out.Report
A Trump nomination might upend both parties. The Republicans didn’t come out of the McGovern fiasco unscathed.
Report
That’s a chance I’d be willing to take. In my opinion the GOP is ill and maybe a good douse of Trump* would help wisen them up to the downsides of some of the choices they’ve made over the last couple decades.
*Note, I still expect Trump is not going to win the nomination; I don’t think it’ll even be close.Report
I feel the same way about the Democratic party, so, win-win. Lots of winning.
*not that it’ll happen.Report
Ru2 There are a few Old Believer communities in Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula. Very insular and strict. Picture them something like Amish communities expect in a harsher climate and less tasty baked goods. There is some of what you might expect from highly controlled and closed religious communities; women struggling to get out and they shunned for not being good believers.Report
So, who else heard about the massive explosion at a chinese port?Report
I’ve been eyeing it sideways for a while, that punch to the gut is not what the insurers need right now, especially not the Chinese ones.Report
Looks like it’ll be more of a disemboweling than a punch.Report
Surely you don’t think the Chinese insurers are inadequately financed for such a black swan disaster do you? *cough*Report
Noooooooo! Never! Fully funded, all the way to the bottom of the bay.Report
$6 billion is 5 bucks per Chinese citizen. If only those poor backward people had the modern financial tools to leverage that 1000 to 1, then we’d be talking disaster.Report
Average Chinese yearly salary is just under $9K, or about $35/day (for a 5 day work week).
Not sure they have a spare $5 laying around.Report
[Ho5] doesn’t seem to make a case for or against anything. As @saul-degraw points out, the writer seems to have an irrational beef with the fact that the seller has an economic interest expressed in anything other than dollars.
In the midst of a housing bubble, we bought our current house at the most foolish possible moment to buy – nevertheless, the sellers happened to see us coming in to look at the house, and observed that we were the only buyers likely to be buying with an eye to actually inhabiting the house – everyone else was clearly buying out of speculation-frenzy. They sold to us, even though we didn’t make the highest bid.
In the end the sellers probably did a favour to everyone involved – speculators would have lost money because prices dropped shortly after, and we got a house to live in.
The same thing happened to our friends who were buying at the same time (we shared a house, our landlord was taking advantage of the price bubble to sell, and the place was guaranteed to be a knocker-downer for whoever bought it so there was no prospect of keeping the place under a new landlord). The seller’s friend rented a small bachelor suite in the house as a pied-a-terre; the seller wanted to make sure his friend got new landlords who would treat him well and get along with him. Our friends were also the only non-speculators who made an offer, and got the house despite not making the highest bid.Report
Gloria Steinem apologizes for female Sanders supporters remark. Wow the Clinton folks are desperate.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/07/politics/gloria-steinem-sanders-maher/index.htmlReport