Immigration:
Image by krebsmaus07 
[Im1] Sam Bowman makes the case for arguing about immigration. Arguing with people who disagree with you on immigration is probably better than blithely dismissing them.
[Im2] Borders between countries and walls between families.
[Im3] Television has a tendency to portray Latino immigrants as criminals.
[Im4] As we look at what happened in New York and reconsider the Diversity Visa program, here is a look at another beneficiary of the program who stopped a terrorist attack.
[Im5] I’m not sure I can think of a more efficient way to breed anti-immigration resentment.
[Im6] Speaking of immigration and housing, the new New Zealand government is coming down hard against foreigners who want to buy existing houses. Some perspective from someone who immigrated to New Zealand.
Housing:
Image by torbakhopper
[Ho1] Houses are getting bigger, but yards are getting smaller. That seems likely better than the other way around.
[Ho2] Pete Saunders writes of the limits of Build Baby Build.
[Ho3] Gavin Newsom has some ideas to alleviate housing costs in California and they’re not all bad! And maybe not a moment too soon.
[Ho4] Rhiannon Bury argues they can mitigate London’s housing shortage by building over railways. A quarter of a million homes!
[Ho5] Though often cited as a positive example, it turns out maybe rent control hasn’t worked in Germany, either.
Space:
Image by Kevin M. Gill
[Sp1] Dwarf planet Haumea – the oddly shaped one – has a ring.
[Sp2] NASA has a plutonium problem, but it’s working on it.
[Sp3] The mystery of the neutron star collision… solved?
[Sp4] I’ve lost track of whether or not we think Planet Nine exists, but NASA just sent out an indication of yes?
[Sp5] New tools to find habitable worlds?
[Sp6] We were a mistake. All of us. Everything.
[Sp7] The Pope chatted with some astronauts.
Healthcare:
Image by Eye to Eye National
[Hc1] Bob Tedeschi looks at how doctors handle patient bigotry.
[Hc2] There may be a new way to straighten teach, and Orthodontists are trying to put a stop to it.
[Hc3] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry explains how a ton of our healthcare spending is being wasted.
[Hc4] This is really exciting! Dyslexia is one of those we don’t even know how common it really is, in part because we don’t know how it works. I’d always assumed it was strictly a brain thing.
[Hc5] Kumar Yogesh wants to unload medical records onto the patient.
Sex Crimes:
Image by JenXer
[SC1] Ew.
[SC2] Here’s an interview with one of Kevin Spacey’s victims. And rumors from two years ago. Russell/Daniel has some things to say about a Slate article trying to minimize what Spacey did.
[SC3] In addition to being generally “crimes against women” should we actually think of sexual assault more as crimes against the young (PDF)?
[SC4] From Sam: Diana Moskovitz’s evisceration of the disbelief women endure in media is worth stopping everything to read. {Related}
[SC5] What… what precisely does Bernard Godard think rape is?
[SC6] Megan’s law is going global.
I don’t know how you solve both problems simultaneously.
There is a when it rains it pours aspects to all the stories coming out against various powerful and famous men in the Harvey Weinstein which leads to a credible likelihood of the stories from all victims. But anonymous accounts still need to be questioned at times.
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(You know, if you’re talking about someone later found innocent, or cases of mistaken identity, or the increasing problem of Internet Detectives running down the wrong man and 24/7 news blaring it on the screen for two hours until they realize “oops”).
So if you get sued, you can point to “we never said you did it. We said it was alleged that you did it, or that police claimed you were responsible, etc. Which are true facts”.
And the last thing you want, if it’s legal butt covering, is people using their own judgement. Because people have awful judgement.
That being said, yeah — women aren’t believed either. If you ever want to be depressed, watch an internet thread about women and rape and see how quickly it turns into someone insisting everyone talk about prison rape OR about how many false rape allegations there are.
I don’t really know how to square any of those circles.
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That you have to say women aren’t believed?
Do you REALLY think guys are more believed than women?
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2. Because they’re often not.
3. Yes.
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There is no magic number of accusations that make a truth. 95 allegations don’t constitute proof. Maybe the reporter should think about reporting the facts and letting the reader reach his own conclusion. Yeah, 95 allegations carry more weight than 1. The reader can come up with that insight on his own. I mean, seriously, does Moskovitz think that a lot of people are carrying around positive thoughts about Harvey Weinstein?
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The problem is a little more deep-rooted than that. Benefit of the doubt in cases of sexual assault is usually giving regardless of evidence. With women, innocence of the accused is commonly assumed not just with He Said/She Said testimony, but of style of dress, past relationships, and other seemingly irrelevant distractions.
IOW, if someone is caught at your house without your permission carrying a bag of your valuables to their car at 2:0 am when you are on vacation, there is a very good chance that person will be assumed guilty of a crime based on that information. It’s also quite likely that you will be perceived to be the victim of a crime.
If you are a woman who has told some guy to F off in public and then hours later shows up at a police station with cuts, bruises, and that same guy’s DNA all over her, there’s a pretty damn good chance that he is not going to be either prosecuted and/or convicted. And if charges are filed, there’s a pretty good chance she is going to be seen not as a victim but as a morally questionable person.
(Also, FWIW, this is not an issue confined to just women. If you or I were sexually assaulted, it’s pretty unlikely that we would get any relief via the criminal justice system either. Male victims are also commonly assumed to be primarily at fault for their own sexual assault.)
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At least those people aren’t enforcing lack of justice for rapist children. You want a school that folks are clamoring to leave? Try that one.
Some fucking experiments are crazier than others.
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http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/10/a-different-take-our-robot-hellscape-awaits-us/#
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Since robots can be programmed to be pleasing, humans will find them easier to get along with for platonic companionship to. Robots aren’t going to socially isolate people for even the most slight weirdness if we do it correctly.
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If they’re programmed to have sexual chemistry, they aren’t robots anymore.
… because, um, it is an actual chemistry phenomenon.
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In my own limited views of social norms I mostly think of people being biased towards actual human intimacy. The thought that a person would prefer intimacy with something other than a human at first glance looks foreign to my vantage point.
I guess it goes back to subjectivity, people will prefer different things, and some people wouldn’t prefer the actual hassle of going through the maze of arbitrary social norms to get to actual human intimacy.
If this is the case, then can we agree that humans are a social animal only to a degree?
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Why can’t it be both? At some not-too-distant point I will be dead. I will probably have living descendants, who in turn have a reasonable shot at producing offspring of their own, etc., so there is a reasonable chance of my genetic legacy living on. In the event that there is continued interest in early baseball history, I expect my writings will occupy a dusty back corner of the literature, so I have an intellectual legacy as well. Yay, me!
But this is not the only possible sort of legacy. If humanity creates true AI, complete with sexbots, and realizes that we no longer desire messy human interaction, then the robots are our legacy. Why exactly is this a bad thing? I don’t see why intelligence contained in a sack of dirty water should be the only kind that counts. And while we are genetically programmed to favor our gene line as our true legacy, it seems to me that this is something that culture can and does trump. Otherwise why would I care about my early baseball writings?
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Im4: People forget about the good stuff.
Im5: You are absolutely right in this. The Swedish government is dedicated to doing the right thing as they see it and that includes helping the groups they see most vulnerable first. In this case that means refugees over Swedish citizens from other vulnerable groups. Its just a mindset that some people have and it seems common in Sweden. The problem with this mindset is that it doesn’t take into account certain political and psychological realities.
Ho1: Non-agricultural families need less open space than urban and suburban families. I suppose big houses and smaller yards would be easier to retrofit into walkable and transit oriented communities.
Ho5: A source less hostile to government intervention in the economy might be more convincing. We know CapX will be quick to find any fault with rent control or any other government intervention into the holy market.
Sp1: Maybe it just got engaged. What’s it to you?
Sp6: Probably the best evidence for the divine yet. Not much evidence but the inherent implausibility of the universe is some evidence.
Sc1: Grossing out or worse the person that is supposed to represent you in the criminal justice system seems to be a really bad idea.
Sc5: Its dark but I’m a little bit happy that Tariq Ramadan turned out to be a criminal scumbag. What loathsome man with a loathsome and anti-Semitic ideology.
Sc6: Lets make a bad idea that doesn’t work and the criminal justice system into an even bigger mockery and due process violation international. Beat the State Department officials who thought of this with a rusty spoon.
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Sp6 — not at all. talk to some data compression theorists. The universe only makes sense as a simulation, using the principle of parsimony. And that’s a far better argument for God than just “why didn’t we disappear?”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/the-surprising-revolt-at-reed/544682/
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Yeah, that is very encouraging, because honestly, bringing radical elements to heel is an inside job. It’s good to see people standing up to the bullies.
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And those that aren’t preaching are appeasing or capitulating. If some student protesters tried to interrupt one of my classes that was a graduation requirement, chances our my prof would have shut that crap down quick with the full support of the Dean, and if he hadn’t, the my classmates would have.
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I’d hit the “magic keys” on my computer that are supposed to silently summon campus police, and if I could safely get myself and my class out of the room, I would.
If it were my ecology class, I suppose we could reconvene in the arboretum for a surprise lesson on tree morphology or something, but yeah, I’m not taking a chance that “protestors” aren’t armed in some way. It’s not worth my life.
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Any day…
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(but a bit more seriously, it’s also very likely that criminals in general are over-represented on American (and every other country’s) TV shows compared to the overall population)
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It’s kind of how the tv (and internet) news biases heavily towards the awful things people do.
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People also want shows that neatly pack the drama into digestible time frames (about an hour), and they want a bunch of those packets.
Hence you need a hellhole.
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So you think Miss Marple was a brilliant serial killer that framed scores of people for murder….
I guess it all finally makes sense now
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Which if you haven’t encountered it, is like a 20 year running British show about a fictional county/parish/whatever the heck the British divide their country into. Idyllic country scenes, quiet little towns,and the highest murder rate in the world.
Seriously, it’s not just “someone gets murdered” and the main character (a detective) figures it out. No, multiple people get murdered. Sometimes to cover up the murder, sometimes because “why not, I’ve already killed”, sometimes because “Hey, I can sneak in my murdering and they’ll blame the original murder for it”….
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Watching it also gave me a greater appreciation for the satire in Hot Fuzz.
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Their relationship flows naturally, without making, so so speak, a big Fuzz out of it. It just is. You don’t need to see the sex -hell, there might not be sex- but you feel the emotional bond. That’s not bromance; that’s same sex marriage
Plus, in the one-year-later epilogue, they go together early in the morning -Nicholas leaving from Danny’s house- to put flowers on Danny’s mother’s grave. That’s married couple stuff.
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Or ya know, employers could raise their wage/salary offers.
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In fact, if the housing supply isn’t allowed to expand, wage increases will only drive up rents even further.
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So in order for your argument to hold, you’d have to show that either the pipelines are nowhere close to operating at or near capacity, and/or that there are uses of the water making it into the SF core that is being used for industrial purposes that might be better located elsewhere.
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Executive pay is generally not a large fraction of a business’s costs.
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I’m tempted to change providers just so that when they try that stunt I can sue them.
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Donna Brazille (yes, *THAT* Donna Brazille) wrote a tell-all book in which actual and for-real bad things are said about Hillary and the DNC. Like, remember Berniebros arguing that the primary was rigged? Well, Brazille comes out and says that the primary was rigged.
Elizabeth Warren, for that matter, was asked “Was the primary rigged?” and Elizabeth Warren answered “yes”. Like, I suppose that people can say something like “well, she didn’t, herself, use the word ‘rigged'” but she was asked “Do you agree with the notion that it was rigged?” and she answered “yes”.
Why does it have overlap with the Weinstein thing? It has to do with the question of whether these stories would be coming out if Clinton still was seen as having power/influence. It seems to me that if Clinton was not seen as having power/influence, these stories wouldn’t be coming out… and we’re in a situation where the stories are, indeed, coming out and when members of “the future of the party” are asked about it, they jump in the pile-on.
(Another take I saw that was pretty good said that the DNC sees Clinton as doing more harm than good at this point and is bringing out the long-knives in order to protect itself. The DNC just might be poised to capitalize on a bloodbath among the Republicans in the 2018 election but if Clinton is still front and center, it might hurt those chances. The calculus is that they need to get Clinton to shut up and they will improve their chances thereby and it’s just that simple.)
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When the Clintons’ power diminished sufficiently, yes, Weinstein did acquire a prosecution.
Funny that.
Big donor to the Clintons.
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Warren has always been cool towards Hillary Clinton, she was the very last Democratic female US Senator to endorse Clinton, and did so conspicously after all her peers did.
So both of these cases are people not ‘defecting’ from Clinton as much as serving their own interests (long held or otherwise) – and the poltical junkie press picked up these stories because that’s what the poltical junkie press does. That’s *all* it does.
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It’s probably both personally and professionally vital for her to distance herself as far as possible from any responsibility for the 2016 fiasco.
Which is such consumate BS, as Brazile was a DNC officer (vice chair*) during most, if not all of the Obama adminstration. She wasn’t Truman getting clued in on the Manhattan project when she took over from Wasseman Schultz. Brazile had an positive responsiblity to at least be aware of the state of DNC finances – and at least to ask some questions. That she claims she was blindsided by the state of things when she took over reveals her own management neglilence.
*vice chair is not quite as an important position as deputy chair. It looks like there are several vice chairs, who perform various ad hoc functions, and one deputy chair, who acts like an executive vice president. (though there’s also an actual hired executive staff of a CEO and their minions)
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https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/clinton-fundraising-leaves-little-for-state-parties-222670
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Therefore, for quite some time, HRC sat on a lot of money that she couldn’t do squat with until the Democratic Party officially picked someone. Which often happens much earlier, but hasn’t the last two cycles. (In 2008, for instance, HRC released her delegates in advance of the convention, which meant Obama because the official nominee before the Convention. In 2016, Sanders didn’t — which meant the nominee wasn’t official until the Convention vote).
Edited to add: Some of the money was routed into the DNC for list-building purposes and the usual long-term investments, but the vast bulk of the money flowed to states once the general election began.
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That article is also from after Clinton clinched the nomination, where a Candidate-Party agreement that gives the Candidate the lion share of the money and pretty much direct control over the entire Party aparatus is standard.
Brazile’s contention was that she came across a Candidate-Party agreement of this sort back in 2015 – and not the usual pre-nom Candidate Party agreement that everyone (Clinton, Sander, O’Malley, etc) normally enter into – and the wikileaks dump has this early ‘standard’ agreement, and not anything Brazile is talking about.
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The questions I have would be (a) did the Minnesota get money back? and (b) how does George Clooney feel about whether money he donated to help downballot candidates actually did so?
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I probably shouldn’t find that funny.
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That’s a bit harder to believe given she placed it in her book, with loaded language. (Although now she’s shocked, SHOCKED SIR, that people think she was implying anything was rigged! She said the very opposite, she checked and there was none!).
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With Trump protecting her, how do you think she got the message?
The show ain’t over until there’s bullets involved.
/cynic
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If you mean protection from folks on the level of the Kochs, and with about the same criminality factor… yeah.
Not protection from the law. The clintons had international clients.
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It comes from knowing a Clinton operative. He worked for the Clintons before they got to washington for god’s sake.
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I don’t think you believe that person.
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My friend who was consistently a clinton operative said that if Clinton didn’t get the presidency, she’d be lucky to get away with her life. That was the sort of quid pro quo promises she made to international clients.
Trump actively chose to make the call to allow her to leave with as much face as she could carry… and nothing else.
… but Trump’s call wasn’t the interesting one.
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Clinton’s e-mails got to Israel before they even got to the FBI.
… you think that’s not worth investigating?
(I’m not going to call that treason, but…)
If Trump wanted to spend the political capital to go after Clinton, he could. Probably make a pyrrhic victory, even.
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So far Brazile is quashing some of the actual stuff that the DNC did. If she wanted to talk about canning Bernie supporters from the voting rolls, she by all means could.
But I think that treads too close to illegal for her taste.
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And Howard Dean, who preceded Kaine, was pretty close to the vaccum spherical cow of impartiality. If anything, he probably had more of an affinity towards Obama, as Obama occupied a lot of the same political space in 08 as Dean did in 04.
(the main fight Dean had to fight were the state committees moving up their primary/caucus dates)
eta – the Clinton Restoration in the DNC was Wasserman Schultz’s elevation to chair.
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Also, Kaine being appointed DNC chair after Obama’s election isn’t evidence that *during* the election the DNC wasn’t pro-Hillary. Obama distanced his campaign from the Dem establishment for a reason, seems to me. The question I wonder about is why.
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It’s called boswash. yes. washington dc encompasses NOVA
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I’m fond of this current map. Some geographers already stretch the NE urban corridor as far south as Richmond and Norfolk, which are not shown. Almost all of them predict those cities will be the southern end of the NE megalopolis by 2050.
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In 2016, all but 20 of Clinton’s EC votes came from the NE urban corridor and the West. Anyone who thinks the NE urban corridor and the West voted Democratic for the same reasons is foolish. The DNC, in my opinion, is making that mistake.
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I see a lot of Bernie supporters outraged by this. They don’t seem to understand that Bernie only became a Democrat out of convenience and then switched backed to being an independent.
One of the biggest problems in politics is Messiahism. They idea that if we just find the right person, all problems will be solved. A lot of good would happen if people abandoned messiahism.
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How the primaries are structured doesn’t seem relevant to a person’s political identification. Eg., Trump ran an anti-GOP campaign in the GOP primary. Bernie ran a largely anti-Dem campaign in the Dem primary.
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And then there’s this:
If DWS said it, it must be true!
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Bernie, OTOH, was a cranky old man with no accomplishments, who pissed off large numbers of D constituencies, so his supporters (and the people who still insist he would have won) seemed a bit drunk on their own Kool-Aid.
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Many people seem to want Bernie to run in 2020. Does anyone want Hillary to?
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I don’t generally hold with statements that imply someone is arguing in bad faith.
Given Mike’s propensity for jokiness and sarcasm, I’m not really bothered with this one, even though I think he was sincere?
But I wanted to mention it anyway.
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OK.
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Here’s an article from the Warshington Post with more from Donna Brazile which includes this illuminating story:
And here’s a Wikipedia article about Antimicrobial resistance.
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Here’s an Open Letter from the 2016 Hillary for America team. The paragraph that has everybody gigglesnorting is the first one (I took the liberty of adding emphasis):
The NYT also has an article that is… what’s the term the kidz use these days? “Throwing shade”?
Here’s a paragraph:
Do we have any reason to believe that the Democratic leaders in Congress or the Democratic governors were even talking about this at the time?
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Or it could be complete bullshit to sell books:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-dnchfa-agreement-donna-braziles-growing-pile-of-nonsense
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But that these stories are coming out is an indicator in itself.
Personally, I find that indicator pretty interesting.
Hey, remember a million years ago when we were talking about Cokie Roberts hearing whispers of Clinton being replaced?
Good times.
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It was just a long game.
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No matter how tall an apartment building is, there is a minimum amount of rent per square foot that must be charged to cover the cost of construction and land.
In downtown Los Angeles, that is about $2.50 at minimum. Which for a studio apartment translates into about $1800/ month, which requires a after-tax income of about $4,000 a month, or about $60K per year.
For a studio. The type of apartment a newly graduated intern would have. An intern who is likely carrying a large student loan debt, and earning 30K if they are lucky.
There isn’t much we can do on the cost side of the equation. Land isn’t going to get cheaper, and construction costs aren’t either.
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The problem I see is that if the wages aren’t competitive with other areas, what’s keeping capital formation (and for that matter potential taxes) from leaving the area to go some where with a less expensive wage rate?
[assuming the area is currently above some arbitrary measure of equilibrium for wage rates already]
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Right now, capital is investing in downtown apartments, which are all competing for a finite (and shrinking) pool of eligible renters.
At some point the market will be saturated with apartments. Except lowering rents will help only slightly, because the gap between incomes is so wide; that eligible income threshold (which is based on construction cost and land cost) can’t lower by very much.
Meaning that capital will eventually have to look elsewhere for investment opportunity.
Wages that rise in comparison to rents creates a larger pool of renters to sell to.
Prosperity, that thing that happens when wages and prices are in a positive balance that meets people’s needs, is a complex thing. It needs a lot of variables to align, some of which are conducive to command, others less so.
Gavin Newsom’s [Ho3] laundry list of proposals is about right, in that he recognizes that there are a lot of fronts and angles to consider.
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High vacancy rates, yet escalating rents
“With so many available units, building owners are offering lavish perks, from six months of free rent to one year of free parking to try to lure tenants. The median price of a one-bedroom in DTLA is about $2,500 per month, according to rental website Zumper.
“The stuff that’s being built right now is really targeting the very top of the renter’s pool,” CoStar senior market analyst Steve Basham told KPCC. “The majority of the renters in L.A. are not going to be able to afford that.”
The article asks why they don’t just offer lower rents, but they really can’t.
Some up-front freebies can be amortized over the life of the investment, but a permanent reduction in rental income would push the project to be forever underwater.
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1.) It looks like the first in the frame of reference that you suggest is probably correct. The cost of living and high rent should be creating a higher local wage equilibrium.
2.) An artificial wage suppression may be coming from companies trying to compete with wages that aren’t localized.
[For clarity note above I didn’t say capital looking for investment, or investment at all. I mentioned capital formation. It’s not the movement of existing wealth, but the creation of new wealth.]
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Ha, maybe a market distortion thing going on also. Geebus, what a mixed bag.
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A) those units would suck renters out of lower level housing and depress rent generally and B) if it didn’t then those buildings would get foreclosed on, rejiggered to lower price point ranges of housing then rented out.
I mean, hell, I agree raising wages would make it potentially easier to pay rent. Except, of course, if everyone’s wages raised then rent would rise to match absent an increase in building supply.
But at the end of the day the ability of the local and state government to directly make wages go up is rather limited whereas their ability to expedite the construction of more housing stock is considerably greater.
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I wish I could embed a photo, so I could snap a picture from my apartment window, showing the absolute forest of construction cranes across the LA skyline.
There are about a dozen highrises, and a dozen more midrises that are either newly opened or under construction, representing thousands of new units.
Its not hard to build compared to other dense urban areas in advanced nations.
The limiting factor is always market absorption and desireability. Not all neighborhoods will pencil out for a 50 story building, even if the government urged them to build it.
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Edited to add: … and people are moving in faster than the buildings can go up.
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As with most cities the NIMBY’s run amok. Want to add an in law unit to your single family home? You’d better install steel shutters because when the neighbors find out it’s going to be like a scene from The Purge.
The articles abound, of course about anti gentrification people screaming against the construction of high rises in general. Environmental complaints, traffic complaints, etc.
Beyond that, of course, I get the vibe that LA’s neighboring communities simply don’t want to build so even if urban LA does build those single family neighboring communities won’t. Silicon Valley, for instance, is 99% single family lots and if the huge moneyed tech giants try to build something denser the locals faces melt off like nazi’s from raiders of the lost ark.
Outside of the rent control schemes I don’t know for sure if the regulatory apparatus in LA is worse or better than the east coast or not. A subjective indicator, though, is you see a lot more rich people buying multiple mid-range housing units in NYC and Bosh-Wash and turning them into luxury housing than you do on the west coast so that’s a positive indicator.
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“Hurray!”
(Rent goes up shortly thereafter)
“WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS?!?”
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Two days later? Any realtor worth her salt will tell you “houses in this neighborhood tend to be on the market for 3 hours before an offer is made. You should be able to raise your price $35,000 if you’re willing to wait 8 hours for an offer on your house.”
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When we were looking to buy, we had the property we wanted to purchase (that we had nicknamed “Perfect House”) under contract before we could make an offer for it.
It frustrated us mightily.
Recently, we watched the house next door to us (that has neither a second story nor a proper basement) sell for a TON of money. (Like, more than we paid for our house in 2005 or whenever it was.) The sign went up; the next day, the sign had an “under contract” sign above it.
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Seriously, man.
Wages and prices don’t move in direct correlation.
Rents have a lot of components, wages being only a small part.
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I got this:
1.San Francisco, CA $3,590
2.New York, NY $3,340
3.Boston, MA $2,310
4.Oakland, CA $2,280
5.San Jose, CA $2,270
6.Washington, DC $2,200
7.Los Angeles, CA $1,970
8.Miami, FL $1,900
9.Chicago, IL $1,790
10.Seattle, WA $1,750
So then I googled the cities that pay the highest wages.
I got this… but it’s frustrating because it bundles cities together. (#2, for example, is San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont and that’s one entry to the above list’s two entries… and since I’m doing this by hand, I’m only going to take the first city in the list because it’s easier):
1. San Jose, CA
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Bridgeport, Conn
4. Washington DC
5. Houston, TX
6. Hartford, Conn
7. Seattle, WA
8. New York, NY
9. Oxnard, CA
10. Boston, MA
Do we see that as one hell of a correlation or not?
Seems to me that it is one.
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But the fact that there is only one high-wage city on there that isn’t also one of the cities on the high rent list (or one of the bedroom communities of that high-wage city) hints that, even if there isn’t equilibrium per se, there is something close to a there there.
That’s 9 out of 10.
Houston is the only odd man out.
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I don’t know that that’s a bad thing, do be honest. I know I don’t view *myself* as a randomized number in our economy.
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However, when you get to groups of individuals about the size of a city, you can make assumptions… such as “will the places with the highest wages also correlate with the highest rents?” and assume before you even look at the data that there will be a pretty good correlation.
And not feel particularly embarrassed when the correlation is only 9 out of 10.
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“The places with the highest wages will also have the highest rents!”
Coming up with a test for the hypothesis:
“I wonder what the cities with the highest wages are. I wonder if they’re the same as the cities with the highest rents (or the cities that are bedroom communities of the cities with the highest wages)… I know. I’ll google the top ten of both and see if they match!”
Testing the hypothesis:
Googling both lists and then comparing them and seeing if the hypothesis is falsified.
And we got to see what happened.
What’s the other theory, again?
“Only political ideologues could predict that”?
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So wage increases don’t drive rents, except insofar as *other people’s* wages are rising. If the local community’s wages were rising then they’d already be paying rents at a level rendering gentrification a non-issue.
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If wages go up for the people who live in a particular place, their rents will go up whether or not people from away move in.
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If wages went up commensurate with rents going up then gentrification wouldn’t be an issue, right? Am I missing something here?
Ahh. You mean something like a “class” change in the community’s identity. If so, yes, there’s that.
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Yes, it wouldn’t be.
But my criticism of the theory that wages should go up to help with rents was that it wouldn’t work.
Not that it would or wouldn’t have anything to do with gentrification.
(I’m about as pro-gentrification as I am pro-immigration in general. People should be allowed to move, if they’re so inclined.)
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We’re no where near that eventuality, even if it were likely. As it is, and until then I suppose, economy is and will be very intertwined with politics.
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Houston cost of living is, was when I checked a year ago, at 94% of the country median.
I love my town. One of the top cultural lives in the country, at bargain rock prices, and above par salaries.
And the good season is just starting: and in eight more weeks Spring will come to town :-)
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The price of labor is connected to the price of rents, connected to the price of fuel, connected to the price of land.
So yeah, all these things are connected in various loops.
But they don’t all move in sync. They move at different speeds and sometimes in different directions.
Wages have in the past moved upwards faster than rents. Depending on who, and where, and when.
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I was worried that this was something that only political ideologues could predict.
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But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Dental insurance doesn’t cover adult orthodontia very often (Boeing offered to pay 1/3 of the cost for adult orthodontia), so nice teeth very quickly becomes something only well-to-do people can have. Poor people have to suck it up and have crooked teeth. My parents could not afford to fix my teeth, and it was years before I could afford the braces, and now the crowns, to get them looking nice. If you look at photos from back then, my smile was always closed mouth. you never saw my teeth.
So the professional org is basically saying that they are just fine having poor people being stuck with crap teeth because they want to protect their livelihood.
My heart pumps purple piss for them.
PS Children, on the other hand, should see a professional and have their progress closely monitored, because heads are still growing and a doctor might need to make a change midway through that a mail order service would likely miss. But as long as the service sticks to adults, and is honest about turning away cases that are beyond the ability of such devices to correct, I have no issue with it.
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ETA. This bit on the McCain collision amazes me. Bridge controls should not be that difficult to understand during normal operations. They should most certainly be easy to parse during combat, when stress reactions will limit the ability to notice fine detail.
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Bryan McGrath
CDR Salamander (nom de blog)
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One thing I think people forget is that a deployed peacetime Navy is totally unlike the Army, the USAF, and even the USMC. When those folks are not in the middle of a training evolution, they are pretty much on a 9-5[1]. Navy ships are never like that. Training evolutions are often stacked on top of normal duties, and sailors have to find sleep and other downtime when they can get it. It only gets more intense if you are doing actual operations, even if not combat related.
A 6 month deployment is intense, and both physically and mentally exhausting as hell, and that is if everything is normal and goes according to plan. Sailor fatigue has been a constant problem with deployed crews, one that has most certainly not been helped by trying to make ship operations as efficient as possible in order to keep costs down.
[1]Wartime combat operations are, obviously, a different ball game.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/trump-justice-department-clinton/544928/
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Today, I demonstrated it again.
We all know about how The Gothamist and DNAinfo got shut down by their (billionaire!) owner after the staff held a vote in which they agreed to unionize.
That’s something that sucks. I don’t particularly feel good about that part of the story and that’s not what demonstrates my badness.
What does demonstrate my badness is the moment of pure schadenfreude that I felt when I read this tweet from one of the former writers for The Gothamist:
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[Sp4] goes to a cool, but different link; but it do sent really matter. There’s a Planet Nine for sure. It’s name is Pluto.
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He was barely able to finish high school after repeating a couple of courses (talk about social grade promotion; he’s an example of that); and while his sisters are successful professionals, he’s an electrician and part time taxi driver, unable to read a menu (we need to go to restaurants with pictures in the menu, or I have to read it to him) and he’s not capable to function in the modern, internet based society because he can’t work his way around a computer screen with drop down menus.
Actually, Siri’s been a godsend to him. He can ask Siri for information that he’s unable to surf for.
On the other side, he’s really good at math, the goto guy for help with math homework for his children and nephews and nieces.
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I respectfully, and regretfully, disagree with the Good Doctor. The Slate article, for whatever other faults it has, is targeting a real thing when it comes to how pedophilia is seen as so different and so much more reprehensible than “normal” sexual assault. It seems to me there’s a sense of utter…not merely revulsion, but exclusion from the category of “human” that obtains with a charge of pedophilia that doesn’t seem to exist when the charge isn’t pedophilia, where the supposed dividing line of how “attraction” is centered rests on pubescence or pre-pubescence.
I feel inconsiderate even making the point. And I want to say that I agree with the Good Doctor when he says that 13-year olds are children and therefore sex with them is assault on a child in a way that, say, sex with someone older might not be. What Spacey is alleged to have done (and frankly, I’m not sure how much is actually admitted/verified and how much is still only alleged) is still horrible.
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As far as the Slate article’s claims that this is all about gay panic, I don’t think so. Someone in my hometown is currently in the process of being tried for a similar crime, against teenage girls, and the rhetoric is pretty much exactly the same. I’m not saying I agree or disagree with said rhetoric** – just, the same phrases are being used almost to the letter.
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** I try not to agree with it, but it’s a set of feelings I struggle with, particularly given my own experiences of abuse, and there have been plenty of times when I just wanted to declare my abuser inhuman and get over it. (he’s one of those opportunistic pedophiles who is also an ephebophile, a sexual abuser of adults, and generally a horrible, terrifying person who really needs to be kept away from people other than same-age males he respects, which would benefit him as well as the rest of the world – and yet, he seems to regularly get away with so many things… it’s unsettling.)
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I have never been victimized in that way (or other way) and I have done zero research into the topic. Therefore I don’t feel I have much standing to comment one way or the other although I did comment. I also feel like I’m making something like excuses for one group of victimizers over another and engaging in a disgusting “who’s worse?” game when the better discussion lies probably elsewhere.
In other words, I’m not answering your question, not because it’s not a good questions, but because I regret writing my comment. That’s not the type of subject about which I should be offering half-thought-out opinions.
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You’re allowed to change your mind about discussing it though. It’s a hard thing to talk about for anybody, regardless of experiences.
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They overlaid maps of New York City and SF, and showed how people could work in NY and commute from outlying areas much easier than doing the same in SF.
So getting a job in SF meant the demand for an apartment in SF was much more keen than the equivalent situation in NY.
I don’t live in either area so I can’t speak to the truth of it, but I think the premise is generally true.
When you have a city that for whatever reasons is a hotbed of job creation, efficient commuting is an alternative to people working within the immediate area and driving up rents.
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I think thats the thing the ancaps keep pointing out. At least the sane ones.
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Let me give you an “Amen” to that.
I have no idea how to build a better culture.
I have no idea how to *MEASURE* a better culture.
I barely know how to *COMPARE* my culture today with the culture from 1992 (to pick a year at random that I also remember).
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Flip the vantage point for a few moments, has the the escalation of power, and more central power made culture better today?
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But honestly, I think your approach is the right one, fwiw. You can’t oppose power by exercising power and all that.
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The key to rising prices for housing is supply, and in an urban core, increasing supply means increasing density. Increasing density means building up (I suppose it could mean building down, but people like windows that look out into the world for some reason), and building up is expensive! So not only does the land value keep going up, the cost of building in density also increases with every floor above ground level. I am sure could provide context, but there has to be a point at which it starts getting more expensive to add another floor. I mean, a two story house costs more than a one story house, but the cost is nominally less than double (pure construction costs here). At some point, however, there has to be a break even point, where the next floor will cost as much as the previous, and the next after that will cost more.
So for all this talk about affordable housing, one thing I never hear talked about is, just looking at pure construction costs, how tall can you go before the price per square foot just blows past anything remotely close to affordable?
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Very true.
In most urban markets, the cost of building up stops penciling out somewhere in that range.
Maybe!
But the financial equation that greenlights a building has a lot of variables, everything from the fluctuating returns on alternative investments, market absorption, transportation access, and shopping adjacencies.
I’m not seeing a lot of talk in the development world to the effect of “Were it not for this one weird restriction, I would have built a lot more!”
Its more like, we could build a lot more if technological factors A, B, and C were increased, and economic factors X, Y, and Z were improved, and political factors 1, 2 and 3 were resolved.
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Assuming maintenance costs stay relatively flat and all that?
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You don’t see a lot of that because the market absorption is low- not that many renters want to live out there, which is why it is the “outskirts” in the first place.
What you would really be doing is constructing a mini-“edge city”, a dense development that has a tangential relationship with a larger urban core.
Instead of absorbing the existing demand in that area, you would be gambling on singlehandedly increasing the demand, enticing people to move there.
Ironically, that was the plot device in Tom Wolfe’s novel “A Man In Full”, where a greedy developer gambled on building a very tall building way out of the city on cheap land.
And lost the bet, and the building.
It has worked before, in tandem with improvements in transportation- extending a rail line for example, or freeway link. Or a period of cheap money where the risk is low, or a policy of direct subsidy or something.
Which just gets back to the point that any solution will be a large scale multi-pronged effort requiring a lot of stakeholders to buy in.
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This is what seems to me to be what is happening in Denver and its inner-ring suburbs. Closer in to downtown there are a lot of 15-to-35 story apartment towers going in. None of them are even pretending to be affordable housing — stainless-steel appliances, quartz counters, the first couple of stories given over to amenities like the health club, the pool, lounges, on-site kitchen for catering, etc. Closer to affordable stuff is being built farther out, much of it infill along the light rail system. While there are gentrifying neighborhoods, much of it is residential replacing old marginal businesses. Eg, a single-story electric motor parts and repair place on a sizeable piece of what was cheap land 50 years ago can’t resist selling out to someone who’s going to build townhouses or condos.
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And those subsidies typically have strings attached, which raises the costs of the project, and round and round we go…
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I believe this is what the French did, which led to a ring of de facto slums encircling Paris containing periodic riots.
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San Francisco might not have New York’s transit and transportation network but it still has one of the best in the country. BART and CalTrains act as a commuter rail system. There is a decent bus and ferry network throughout the region and freeways. The real reason why housing is expensive is because demand exceeds supply and the NIMBYs have an iron grip on the region.
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So be sure to turn your clocks back.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/books/review/arthur-m-schlesinger-jr-multiculturalists-monoculturalists.html?_r=0
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