China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].
20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in backwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
>First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Anti-corruption pushes in the government are 100% purges, just under a different name. As for Jack Ma, wasn't he targeted because he said something that the censors really didn't like all while pushing some finance app? My memory is hazy as to why it happened, but it certainly wasn't because he was wealthy.
There were lots of red flags with Xi, and I’m afraid the world will learn the wrong lessons from his success. Maybe Democracy really is overrated, after all it gave us Trump…twice. The world looks at the USA and China as role models, and only the latter don’t look like a complete clown.
He did suffer from the cultural revolution but afterward he was elevated with strong preference. He even lost one of those Chinese “elections” where they take the top 20 out of 21 candidates, and they still let him through.
Jack Ma’s situation wasn’t corruption though. He simply made the mistake of publicly criticizing the government’s economic policy. He was disappeared shortly after. Then he reappeared a few months later and he has been on his best behavior since.
> First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.
It's this kind of incident that gives me faith that the military isn't hiding aliens and in fact pretty much any grand conspiracy that requires secrecy across a large group of people for long periods of time can pretty much be dismissed immediately.
One of my favorite examples are the soldiers who leaked classified information to win arguments on online forums [1]. Similar incidents have occurred with a Minecraft Discord [2].
To add to your point, the War Thunder leaks aren't isolated to one or two incidents; they keep happening! IIRC, every UN security council member has had classified military documents leaked multiple times. Regarding aliens, there's just no way that an E-4 wouldn't have posted dozens of pictures to prove that 'The Grays' are actually more of a purple color.
Most of the War Thunder leaks just aren't. What frequently happens is that people go and dig up a manual that's published openly in America but controlled under ITAR (I think), post it, and Gaijin delete the post and ban them because it's technically illegal to "export" the information and trying not to get involved in crimes is usually a good idea.
Then, because "someone's leaked classified data on War Thunder again!!!" is a standard story that you can publish with zero effort and get lots of clicks on, people post formulaic articles about it. But it's nothing that would be of any use at all to actual spies, they can just go on the internet and read the manuals themselves. Nothing like as spectacular as the actual classified leaks, which were incredible but have not been anywhere near as common as people think based on reporting.
What are some instances of a large group of people hiding something for long periods of time and then getting found out? Snowden? Epstein? Are these cases the bulk of the conspiracies or is it the tip of the iceberg? I'd like to think it's the latter, for purely egocentric reasons: conspiracies stimulate my imagination like almost nothing else: keep them coming, please.
Established in the 60s so it was kept pretty secret for a long period of time.
It's interesting to think that the government has been using technology to watch us for awhile but now thanks to ubiquitous networks, cheap internet, phone and apps like tinder and strava and a bit of ingenuity, we can watch back. :)
Wow, that is a good one. I'm surprised that I've not heard of it. Maybe not admitting something officially really does help in keeping something out of press. The list of intercept stations is comic: all except ~4 are in US or allied countries that are far from any adversaries.
MKUltra was another government program that was widely run but kept secret.
Not so fun fact, the UnaBomber was one of the subjects of that program and it is said that his personality changed drastically afterwards. Note his wiki page doesn't call out MKULTRA or government links by name...
Unabomber-CIA connection is wild. This is great stuff.
> There are some who claim the dirision associated with the term Conspiracy theory is in fact a Conspiracy..
Haha, that's entertaining. I've heard of quite a few stories, some proven, that CIA or similar agencies were fabricating evidence and bribing people to _create_ conspiracy theories. I believe one such case was a diary discovered related to "Richard E. Byrd's North Pole Flight". If I recall correctly the person that found it later admitted that he was bribed or coerced to do so. I can't look up sources now, might try and look it up later today.
It makes sense. If conspiracies are leaking, you can create fake leaks and then discredit them. Shaming and marginalization is great too.
Another instance is one darknet market being taken down by Dutch police. They were also in full control of the next biggest market where they knew everyone would flee to, and they spent some time monitoring all comms on that second site before intervening.
Wow, I admire your confidence. These folks came on TV to tell you what they felt, saw, and heard with their own bodies, and the cover-up they say at the agencies too [1], and you still think it's fake? If the story gets confirmed will you take back anything you've said, give how confident you are of this?
And are you also aware of the mystery weapon in Venezuela, which clearly corroborated the story? [2]
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1].
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
If Mongolia pays a bunch of US citizens to vote for some candidate that promises to push the US towards militarily supporting Mongolia, do you think the First Amendment supports that?
Or more accurately, imagine if the US had special rules and exceptions for dual citizens of Mongolia and the US that don't exist for any other country and then it allowed those dual citizens to push for certain candidates without having to be registered as a foreign lobby.
Now try substituting Mongolia with Russia or China.
The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns.
The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
Even still, this is money on how a private entity decides who its going to support for a future election.
None of these people are even running for government yet.
If the democratic party wanted to so something about it, they could, but the freedom of expression and association guarantees that a party that wants to have lots of money spent on ads an such can do it
They didn't throw the election per se, they just didn't try very hard to win a fight they could easily lose. Why burn bridges with a very important ally over something that might not end up being your problem?
Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
Kat did not in fact come close to winning. She mobilized exactly the people she was expected to mobilize, and the only surprising thing about the election is that Bushra Amiwala --- a locally engaged and active elected with exactly Kat's profile --- didn't pull more votes from her. That sucks. But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.
People are looking at the vote spread in isolation and not the whole breakdown of the election. Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender, and that was to pull votes from Biss and Fine in north suburban Cook County. She failed to do so, and Biss, who basically everyone thought was going to win, won.
I mean we can be honest here about how she performed. I just dont believe that you dont find it surprising that a carpetbagger with no experience and zero ground game got 26% of the vote and the winner only got 29%.
> Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender
All she needed to do was convince Simmons or Bushra to drop out and she wins. She didnt need any of the Biss or Fine votes
> But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.
If she got every of Amiwala's votes she literally wins by more than 1%
Approval makes the game theory too complicated imo. Too easy to think of cases where a voter leaves off someone because they want their favorite to win but then ends up with neither winning. STAR is the best but voters might be too stupid to figure it out. Really multi district is the best but unfortunately no chance of that happening it seems
I think the threat of unapproved candidates winning would lower a voter's approval threshold to include other candidates. Increasing the approval threshold happens when the voter likes all of the candidates, in which case there isn't too much of a problem.
I really want to believe that ordinary people can handle STAR voting. Not too far from product reviews: most will initially vote 5, 4, or 0. As long as the system encourages more honest voting (instead of lesser-evil voting), it can help fix our corrupt political system.
Full agreement with multi district/proportional, but I don't know how to sell it to normal people (they want THEIR representative).
That's a long way of saying "Kat ran a better campaign".
I have criticisms of her campaign, specifically
1. She was a carpet-bagger (as you said). She moved in Illinois in 2024 I believe;
2. She initially ran in a district she didn't live in. I believe she initially lived in IL-7 but ran in IL-9 and moved there at some point;
3. She chose to primary a relatively good candidate, Jan Shakowsky. My working theory is she was trying to fly under AIPAC's radar by primarying a relatively pro-Palestine candidatei; and
4. She essentially advocated for going to war with China over Taiwan for literally no reason. Nobody in her district cares about this. You can blame that in part on having a bad foreign policy advisor but the buck stops with the candidate.
And despite all of that and millions being spent against her by pro-Israel groups she still got ~30% of the vote and came second.
But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
She had exactly the same policy profile on China and Taiwan as every other Democrat in congress and didn't change that until a bunch of tankies on Twitter jumped her about it, because she is susceptible to Twitter tankies, which is something you can't say about Fine or Biss, and is a small part of why Biss won.
Nobody in her district cares about her Taiwan position. It's not a real issue. But she made it one because Ryan Grim or Hasan Piker (I forget which) got mad about it. Because she's terminally online, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants a terminally online congressperson.
Oh I agree she ran a better campaign given that there isnt ranked chocie voting. Im just stating that I am very unhappy that 25% of the dem electorate are looking for clown meme candidates. Thats by far the biggest lesson from her campaign, 25% of primary voters do not care about anything other than memeage. I cant say thats a good way to get competent politicians but it is now the world we live in.
> But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
I know this is wishful thinking but itd be nice if politics had just a little bit of substance instead of purely being a popularity contest where competence at governing is irrelevant.
Also Kat still lost. If the progressives backed one of the local candidates they likely win, so its hard to really say she ran such a great campaign. She blew it for them
This is what I've been saying to the people who blame the voters for Trump's win in 2024. Democrats knew how dangerous he was and how weak of a candidate he should have been and they still decided to skip the primary and run an unpopular candidate so late in the race after it became clear that Biden wasn't going to make it after the first debate. They met a serious and decisive moment with incompetence and the public is facing the consequences of that. They should be taking this all more seriously and doing introspection on the loss rather than blaming the voters.
This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the results were identical to just one cycle ago where AIPAC wasn't a factor at all? I'm a politically engaged Illinois Democrat (to the point where I have precinct maps of CD7 and CD9 running for local political discussions), I understand what AIPAC was doing here. Unfortunately for your argument, it doesn't appear to have had any effect.
First, IL-7 was nothing like it was in 2024. What are you talking about? In 2024, a 14 term incumbent, Danny Davis, was seeking reelection. Now there's some noise here because IL-7 changed in the 2021 redistricting and became more Democratic but still, Davis is a long-time veteran.
Davis was a progressive but has a more mixed record on Israel funding and defence bills. He's concered with what he has called a "humanitarian crisis", which is more than most, but never gone so far as to use terms like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" AFAIK.
Davis faced challenges in 2024 but won pretty handily. One of his challengers wasa the future 2026 AIPAC chosen candidate, Melissa Conyears-Ervin. AIPAC indirectly (eg through UDP) spent millions [1] in the IL-7 Democratic primary and still came in third.
So, IL-7 in 2026 was a massively funded primary in an open field with no incumbent and 2024 was a 14 term incumbent seeking reelection without massive spending. In what way are they comparable?
Bonus question: if millions are spent to oppose a candidate and they still win, how can you say the results were "identical"?
MCE got the same votes she did in the 2024 primary in 2026. It's not complicated; just get the precinct level results, give them to Claude, and tell it "put this on a map". Remember you'll need precinct results both from Cook County and Chicago. She played in exactly the same parts of the CD7 map that she did last cycle, and ranked the same.
Tell me what AIPAC had to do with that, given that AIPAC was not involved in her 2024 run.
I love the Afroman story so much. Everything about it.
It does more to expose just how incompetent, entitled and corrupt the average cop really is, something I wish was better known. The cops who brought this suit are basically the biggest crybabies, are too dumb to realize it and too entitled to realize that others wouldn't see it that way. It's fantastic.
Compare this to policing in Japan [1]:
> Koban cops go to extraordinary lengths to learn their beats. They're required to regularly visit every business and household in their districts twice a year, ostensibly to hand out anti-crime flyers or ask about their security cameras. The owner of a coffee shop told Craft, "With Officer Sota, we can say what's on our mind. He's really like a neighbor. Instead of dialing emergency when we need help, we just call him."
American cops are a gang, by and large.
Cops have absolutely massive budgets, from small towns to big cities. Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.
> Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.
Not only did they not stop the shooter, but they actively prevented parents—who were willing to risk their lives—from intervening. They didn't just not help, they proactively ran interference for the shooter.
Uvalde should’ve been the nail in the coffin for the thin blue liners. Turns out, not only do they not have a problem with cops murdering black people, they also have no problem with them standing by while their own kids are shot inside a school.
Hell of a death cult this country has turned into.
Uvalde was the moment my hopes for the future of this country died. The parents there voted to reelect the same people who stood around and let a solitary madman murder their children just a little while later.
To be fair, OK is rock bottom in things like literacy rankings and likely income as well. Something like that would not have gone over will in New Jersey. US is a patchwork quilt of very different places.
Let me outline how broken policing is an institution in the US:
1. Cops are generally stupid and untrained. You just had to watch them testify in the Afroman trial and you might think "geez these guys aren't the brightest bulbs". No, theyre not. But they are also the most average cops;
2. Cops are corrupt. They steal things all the time. "We miscounted the money". Yeah, right. You got got caught stealing;
3. Cops lie all the time. They'll lie on the stand. This happens so often there's a term for it: testilying [1];
4. Cops never go after other cops. In fact, you're generally punished or even killed for going after other cops. It's career suicide;
5. If, somehow, you get charged with a crime, you as a cop have rights the rest of us can only dream about. You're not allowed to interview the suspect for 24 hours. Their union rep must be there and so on. Enough time to get their story straight. Why don't we all have those same rights?
6. Cops aren't trained to de-escalate. They're only trained to escalate, lethally. Cops kill over 1000 people a year [2]. A pretty famous example is the murder of Sonya Massey [3]. Sonya was lethally shot for being near a pot of boiling water. This case was also quite rare because somebody went to jail;
7. Some departments go so far to essentially be gangs. One of the most famous examples is the LA Sheriff's Department [4];
8. Should a prosecutor actually go after a cop, it's typically career suicide. Prosecutors live and die by conviction stats. It's how they get promoted and seek judgeships and higher office. Why? Because for there other cases, their cop witnesses will start missing court dates or even changing their testimony so your cases get dismissed or found not guilty.
A lot of TV is what's called "copaganda". It typically paints police as competent, not corrupt, honorable and not at all the job most likely to commit domestic violence [5].
One exception to this is The Wire, which is a portrayal of institutional failure at virtually every level of American society. For bonus points, We Built This City [6].
It's a much deeper topic why it is this way but unsurprisingly the answer can be overly reduced to "racism" eg the origins of American law enforcement are in slave-catching.
Fundamentally as a society we need to stop treating housing as an investment. It is and should be a utility.
Suring property prices is a relatively new phenomenon (as in, post-WW2). The true origins of NIMBYism, at least in the US, is (you guessed it) racism. Long before segregation ended, and long after, there was economic segregation. Redlining [1], HOAs [2], the post-WW2 GI Bill [3], where highways were built [4][5], etc.
In fact this is a good rule of thumb: if you're ever confused why something is the way it is in the US, your first guess should pretty much always be "because racism".
Rent control is the wrong solution to the right problem (ie affordable housing).
It creates all sorts of problems that wouldn't exist otherwise. For example, if you've been in a rent control house or apartment for 10+ years and are paying significantly less, what happens if you want to move? Or just need a bigger place? It's a huge impeediment to mobility and flexibility.
Also, you have an adversarial relationship with your landlord. They want you to leave so they can raise the rent. They'll skimp on maintenance, turn off the heat (even when it's illegal) and generally make your life miserable until you leave.
The solution to these problems is social housing, meaning the government becomes a significant supplier of affordable, quality housing. The very wealthy and the real estate industry don't want this however because it will decrease profits.
> Property ownership is at the very core of entrenched power,
In the literature, there is a distinction made between private property and personal property. I'm fine with people owning their own home if they want. That's personal property. Private property is when we allow people and corporations to hoard housing. I'm all for making it financiall punitive to own more than one house.
The problems that rent control creates are far smaller than the problems that exist without it.
To start - your 'very first example' is not even really 'a problem'.
'Without rent control' - you get kicked out of your abode every few years if your salary doesn't keep up with housing inflation. With rent control, you have the option of 'having a home; you decide when you want to leave (for the most part).
The answer to the 'second example', 'adversarial tenant/landlord' is that the theory doesn't line up with reality for the most part. Again - in most rent controlled areas this kind of stuff does not happen, especially if it's entrenched in the culture. It works well in a ton of housing markets like Quebec, Germany.
The primary concern about rent control limiting expansion ... just does not exist. It doesn't really impede new builds.
> 'adversarial tenant/landlord' is that the theory doesn't line up with reality
So disconnected from reality that it beggars belief.
Anytime you put two or more adult people into a relationship together and at least one person feels like they do not have the option to leave if things get bad (e.g. landlord feels like the tenant is wrecking the property but has no right to evict, tenant feels like landlord is not taking care of maintenance but feels pressured to stay due to artificially low rent), the result is toxic suffering.
Rent control is literally the removal of the right to evict a tenant who refuses the otherwise-uncontrolled rent increase you request. The inability to evict them for refusing the rent increase is what de-facto keeps the rent from increasing beyond its controlled limit.
Oh, I get that, but what's stopping the landlord from evicting someone who damages their property? Or if the landlord no longer wants to rent and wants to live in it themselves?
> To start - your 'very first example' is not even really 'a problem'.
Yes, it is. Anywhere with significant and strong rent control results in a large number of people who simply cannot move. Look, rent control is better than no rent control but it address the symptom not the problem. The real problem is that rents shouldn't significantly outpace inflation. In a better world, you should be able to easily move because you're not locked in to a below-market rent that you don't want to lose. And rents get more expensive because a whole bunch of people make sure that housing is an appreciating asset. It should be a depreciating asset.
> The answer to the 'second example', 'adversarial tenant/landlord' is that the theory doesn't line up with reality for the most part. Again - in most rent controlled areas this kind of stuff does not happen
You will not find in any American city, especially one with rent control, where tenants do not absolutely hate their landlords as the general rule. What are you smoking?
"Anywhere with significant and strong rent control results in a large number of people who simply cannot move."
Having the choice when to move if the far, far more ideal scenario - there is not even a discussion.
This is not Apples to Oranges, it's Apple to Bag of Apples.
Rent Control gives people the option to stay, yes, with the realization that it may be more costly to move later.
So 'no rent control' is a horrible situation, with rent control it's a workable situation.
"l not find in any American city, especially one with rent control, where tenants do not absolutely hate their landlords as the general rule. What are you smoking?"
That is a function of garbage culture and total social break down - not rent control.
I live in an area where everything is rent controlled in entire region - and we dont have that.
This is tantamount to the "We need guns everywhere to stay safe!" argument so many people make because they can't wrap their heads around a community of people that just don't act crazy and violent.
>'Without rent control' - you get kicked out of your abode every few years if your salary doesn't keep up with housing inflation. With rent control, you have the option of 'having a home; you decide when you want to leave (for the most part).
But your renting, you don't own your home, why are you entitled to live there forever paying a below market rate? Maintenance has costs too, eventually if you live there long enough the property owner can even be losing money on your share of the building upkeep (paid by other people's higher rents). And yes the government _should_ let you increase rent in that instance, but then you're relying on your local government, which can dramatically change decade to decade as the political landscape changes.
The quickest Google revealed rents have gone up 71% since 2019 in Quebec [1], so I'm not sure if it's the poster child for rent control. I will say that at least makes them seam reasonable to accepting increases.
> 'Without rent control' - you get kicked out of your abode every few years if your salary doesn't keep up with housing inflation.
Nope, you don't. You just do your best to foresee that outcome in advance before renting and pick a house you can afford. And if rents start to move against you, you plan to move out well in advance of getting "kicked out" by unaffordable prices. But that's actually easier than the status quo since no rent control means (1) lower rents overall for the same quality housing! and (2) everyone gets a home for the right price, there is no hidden privilege or lottery aspect to it. Of course it should be paired with higher property taxes or LVT so the rent itself isn't just value-capture by landlords, but that's politically doable. Just a matter of not picking the wrong political fight.
So pretty much everything you've said here is wrong.
Build more housing? In a place like Austin, you can just keep building out, basically. To a point. Eventually cities doing this reach a limit. Houston and Atlanta are pretty much at or beyond that limit.
And it's not that building low-density SFH housing is the most economic. It's simply the most subsidized. Every road, every parking space, every sewer pipe, every water pipe, every utility pole, every school, every hospital, every police station, every fire station... they all add factor in to the true cost of housing and the more spread out things are, the more expensive those things become. Taken to extremes, look at the billions Houston spends now to add just one more lane (because this one will totally solve traffic) on, say, the Katy Freeway or the ring roads.
Yes it does need to be affordable. NYC is the posterchild for this. Nothing that's getting built on billionaire's row will ever trickle down to being affordable housing. They build ultra-luxury housing because it's the most profitable and it does absolutely nothing for anyone else because these units are just ways for non-residents (mostly) to park wealth and not pay their fair share of taxes.
Rent control is the wrong solution for the right problem and it's typically American. By that I mean it forces the solution onto private landlords who are going to do everything possible to get out of those obligations and deliver subpar but compliant housing. And they'll demand tax breaks for it. When in fact the solution is for the government to supply a large chunk of the housing market ie social housing. But there's a pervasive and wrong idea that we can only solve problems in the private sector and that's nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the already-wealthy.
"Just build more housing". Yeah, and then you get Houston. Cities need to be planned. Cities require infrastructure. And one of the most important thing cities need is public transit infrastructure, something sadly lacking in virtually every American city.
The core to so many of these problems is that we need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. Owning two or more houses should be incredibly difficult and expensive and should be taxed punitively. By this I mean the capital gains on non-primary residences should be 80% and property taxes should be significantly higher.
I dont understand your solution, houses are expensive because there are too few of them in desirable places (otherwise we have plenty). The govt becoming a command economy wrt to housing does not fix the supply. If the govt is just supposed to handle all the supply and demand aspects of housing well I have good news, there is a lot of very cheap housing in former Soviet Republics just not desirable housing.
Also taxing homeowners harder doesnt really solve the problem. CA has insane taxes, SF especially has a giant budget. They just waste it. I dont believe that once the govt raises taxes they will suddenly become efficient and competent.
The idea that the more spread things out the more expensive they are is sound theory. However in practice, per capita taxes in a city are often higher than the rural or suburban regions. One water main should serve more people in a city and its cost amortized across the population should be cheaper.
In practice, cities tend to have tons of programs that drive taxes up. They are free to do that, not necessarily bad, but also not efficient from a tax payer perspective.
There's no reason for houses to be as expensive as they are. They are expensive because we've created incentives to make them more expensive. This is because we treat houses as investments, allow people to hoard housing, build the wrong tyhpe of housing (because it's more profitable), allow non-residents to use housing to park wealth, etc. So voters vote in politicians who put up barriers to build more housing and to defeat any kind of public transit infrastructure even though it would absolutely benefit people who still want to drive (by removing people from the roads who don't). Why? Because taxes.
Housing should be for residents of that city to provide a utility: shelter. Not as an investment vehicle.
It simply doesn't have to be this way. The poster child for this is Vienna [1][2].
Increasing house prices are an illusion of wealth creation. Let's say you buy a house for $200k but over the years it goes up to $800k. But every house costs $800k so you still have only 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. You've simply increased the barrier for younger people to buy houses.
Put another way: increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and that money is really going to the already-wealthy and, to a lesser extent, the old. Just look at the median age of homebuyers in the US, currently 59 [3].
You seem to know Houston; alas yes Austin was formerly surrounded by open spaces.
But let's not miss the point of the article. This is a right-ward shift of the supply curve. It means that the economics of building the next unit got cheaper. That's the point.
I've seen a lot of neighborhoods across the USA, and Austin making way for higher-density housing on urban corridors (Lamar) is like, duh, this is more live-able. There are new towers along rail and bus route, townhomes packed in, and behind the tree line it's now possible for some single-family lots to become duplexes or fourplexes. And rather than McMansion ugly, the new Austin residents are dressing those up to look pretty darn cool.
There is a lot more to be done to remove supply-side barriers in every city.
Houston has a very high density of delicious food. The traffic is horrible but if there was a big investment into public transit, I think it would be a very nice place to live.
I find how technology changes warfare to be fascinating. Usually the impact isn't fully predicted beforehand.
The American Civil War was defined by being the first large-scale war fought with accurate long range rifles and the casualties reflect that, being higher than any subsequent war America has been in (600k+).
WW1 was defined by artillery and the machine gun. In many ways, the horrors of WW1 are actually worse than WW2.
WW2 was defined by tanks, air power and aircraft carriers. Although, interestingly, the concept of mobile warfare goes back to the Mongols.
Vietnam was defined by asymmetric warfare and the inability for a vastly superior, imperial power to win a land war against a vastly inferior but motivated foe.
One of the more significant inventions in military technology was the AK-47 (named because it was invented in 1947 btw). This became the tool of choice for insurgencies everywhere for decades. It's cheap and highly reliable.
And this brings us to Afghanistan, which interestingly is called the graveyard of empires. Through a sequence of events the USSR invaded in 1979 and quickly captured Kabul, installing a puppet government, and then weathering a decade of insurgency that resulted in defeat (sound familiar?). The the defining weapon was the Stinger should-mounted SAM [1]. Why? Because it devastated helicopters that the USSR was dependent on in a highly mountainous region.
In the 1980s, the Stinger launcher cost $30-40k and that completely changed warfare.
We're now firmly in the drone era. This really began in the 2000s when fairly expensive drones became the tool of choice for the US to assassinate people. A reaper drone [2] still costs $20M+. But that has all changed with how cheap commercial drones have become and the crucible for that change is of course Ukraine.
We've seen all sorts of military uses of drones, from as simple as a commercial drone silently dropping hand grenades on Russian troops in trenches to more sophisticated attacks that make it virtually impossible for the Russian Navy to operate in the theater.
And now we're seeing it in Iran where the US, despite spending $1 trillion every year on the military has no answer to Iran's Shahed drones, that cost probably $10-20k each and Iran can produce thousands of them every month. These will only get cheaper. It's fair to say that drones will impact every conflict going forward. The US has sought Ukraine's innovations against Russian drones, specifically the bullet drone [3].
So up until now it requires a state actor to make a shoulder-mounted SAM like the Stinger but with advances like the submission, how will the world change if any bunch of insurgents with $100 in chips and sensors and a 3D printer can manufacturer a nearly comparable weapons system?
The war of choice is really the US's Teutoburg Forest moment.
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