evancox100

For real though, if you are reading this, are a YIMBY, and are a person of means, why not try to generate a test case for this? Have someone set up a tent encampment on their own private lot and force the case. How can it possibly be legal to set up a tent in a public right of way, and not on your own property?

I'd think you'd be surprised, the prevailing elite opinion in progressive circles seems to be that application of coercive force (which is what makes a government a government) must be avoided at any and all cost. I don't think this is the opinion of most people, but it seems to be where many policy makers and "thought leaders" (:eye-roll:) are at.

AND, the current law in place is that ZERO coercion/force can be applied to homeless people. Just read what Mayor Breed said, it sounds like they cannot enforce any type of nuisance, public safety, or sanitation laws against homeless people.

Imagine not letting someone build cheap housing that could keep someone sheltered with a roof over their head because of your own idiosyncratic opinions on housing style.

I think letting people build the housing that people need would be 1000x the life saver compared to letting them have a dog once they're already out on the street. This is like the "let them eat cake" of homelessness policy.

I am not an expert on homeless shelters and the exact pros and cons. You seem to have thoughts that getting someone into a shelter would be overall net negative, which is fine for you to have that opinion.

But in the context of the discussion, if we take for granted that doing X for homeless people is good, whatever X may be (e.g. moving them into a shelter, attending an AA meeting, seeing a doctor, whatever), my point is that you may need to apply moderate, reasonable and proportionate levels of force and/or coercion in order to achieve X.

That may be the case, again it is my original point that many liberals (which I consider myself one for the record) want to believe that all of our problems can be solved without any coercion or cruelty. But beloved pets are taken away from their owners all the time in the US, every single day, for a variety of reasons. The idea that it is "beyond the pale" to remove an animal from a family who cannot properly care for it is exactly the problem I'm pointing out.

We are in the current mess wrt housing because many of the solutions are political non-starters, but I am not trying to advocate the most politically acceptable solutions on HN, but instead encourage people to examine whether or not their genuine, well meaning intentions may be counterproductive in some cases.

And also, I am not trying to assert that but for euthanizing homeless people's dogs, all of CA's homeless issues would be solved. Clearly that's not the case.

I can only speak for myself, not "certain parts of this site", but I did not use the words liberty or freedom anywhere, or even invoke those principles in broad terms, I don't think.

These sound more like complaints with shelters than anything I said. If getting someone into a shelter bed is not overall a net positive for them and society, why are we even doing it in the first place? You're pointing out a lot of other issues that have nothing to do with what I talked about. I'm sure there are lots of ways shelters could be run better and improved. It's an imperfect, partial solution to a huge problem.

Yes, I'll accept the incremental progress. I hope we can have similar solutions put in place where I live (TX).

I think what’s incredibly cruel is blocking people from building additional housing on their own private land that could help affordably house people at ZERO cost to the state.

> Imagine being a young child, already traumatized by ending up homeless, and now the pet you've been growing up with gets dragged off by the authorities to be executed.

Im sorry but pets die, it’s a part of life. It can be traumatic no matter what the circumstances. But so is living unhoused on the street, I’d imagine.

And this is exactly the attitude I mean. You, a well intentioned liberal, like to think that we can regulate society and enforce laws without causing any trauma to anyone involved.

Sometimes you have to take away a pet from a family in the name of the greater good for society as a whole, for instance if that pet is a danger to others.

And I did not say that forcing people into shelters will fix everything. There are a lot of other problems including drug addiction and mental illness. It’s incredibly sad how far we’ve allowed the situation to degrade, and the climb out of here will be difficult.

You may have to euthanize that animal if no one wants to adopt it.

Sorry, but there are worse things in the world than putting down animals.

And don’t even try to come at me if you eat meat! Every one of us who eats factory farmed meat (y.t. included) is participating in far worse atrocities than a shelter humanely euthanizing a relative handful of dogs.

CA’s deregulatory moves have been great steps in the right direction, and progress is usually incremental. But realistically the whole Bay Area should be at “if you want to build a 10 or 20 story apartment building on your own land, go for it.”

Allowing duplexes on smaller lots is great, but doesn’t go far enough. I actually think the momentum is in CA’s favor and they will be in a better position than, for instance, TX in 10-20 years, as it relates to housing affordability.

Right, that’s what I mean. Why is enforcing it in either case ok under that reasoning? Clearly building a structure to house an additional person on private land would help keep people off the streets, even if it’s a shanty town. (Which is what we currently have except it’s on public land!)

I think well meaning liberals want to believe that all of society’s problems can be solved without any form of coercion, and that is simply not the case. If someone is homeless and has a dog, and there is a shelter bed for them, you may just need to force them to give up their dog and move to the shelter (or else face arrest). There are overriding concerns greater than letting people keep their pets.

I recognize the solutions are more complex than just force people to give up their pets, but most of those solutions involve some application of coercive force.

Edit: I did not explicitly spell this out, but clearly if you take away the dog it should be put up for adoption, not executed on the street while the owner is forced to watch, for maximum cruelty. Some people seem to think I was advocating something like the latter.

One of the problems is that homelessness is a flow problem, not a stock one. If there are X homeless people in a year, then next year something like 50% * X will be newly homeless. So you could house everybody currently homeless, but you’d be back to square one shortly.

Nevertheless, the current strategy does not seem particularly effective.

What I don’t understand is that if making it illegal to build whatever living structure you want on public land is “cruel and unusual punishment”, why is it still illegal to build the living structure of your choice on private land that you own? Isn’t such a law even more restrictive?

How have we willingly ceded so much authority to bureaucratic busybodys who have nothing better to do than micromanage the size, shape, and even color of private housing? Regulating for safety is one thing, but the current state is absurd. California, and many other states like Texas, need to drastically deregulate their housing markets.

Also I hardly think the WSJ editorial board is really interested in solutions here. They just enjoy throwing punches.

You seem not to understand the difference between consuming a good or service that someone else has agreed to pay for, vs not paying for it at all.

I should probably be fired for my prior answer because things like pn-junction diodes can definitely have an exponential-like dependence on temperature.

In my head I was thinking of pure elements, like bulk metals. But there definitely could be more interesting things going on in the sample, like diode formation (internally or at the contacts) or weird doping profiles. That may be part of why it's hard to measure the properties!

Not a superconductor expert, but resistance exponentially decreasing with temperature is not a normal phenomenon in most cases!

Yes, there was a paper published on an unsuccessful reproduction attempt from a Chinese team

There is a house—excuse me, “museum”, in my neighborhood for some guy’s hunting trophy collection. Private tours available on request, of course.

What a sham!

Probably not, because they don’t come with the string attached that “you must build a new building and name it after me to receive this donation”.

Awfully convenient that their due diligence results in everyone spending a lot more money!

Seriously though I have no problem with them setting a minimum quality bar, but the idea that poor people would be rich but for their ability to shop at Costco is just wrong.

IME Costco at least is not price competitive with typical grocery store private labels brands. Better quality? Sure, maybe, but they really don't compete at the "bagged discount cereal" price level AFAICT. In general Costco is usually 60% - 100% more expensive than my local HEB's HCF products.

Maybe our Warehouse Stores are run very differently? Not sure. Been awhile since I've gone to Sam's, maybe they compete in that price range.

And I just checked Chase, they charge $12 / month* for basic checking. (*Waived with just $500/month direct deposit, but let's ignore that.) If you're cashing more than $400/month, you should just sign up for it. ($400/month is deep, deep poverty level, like panhandling.) I'm sure there's people who don't get a real checking account and could benefit from it, but the reasons are probably more along thines of "ineligible to get a bank account" or math illiterate, not "too poor for the minimum balance requirements".

The whole idea is just ridiculous. The main consumer good people get screwed over like this is housing, but that's 60% screwing over the other 40%, not the top 1% vs the 99%, so most people don't see themselves in those terms.

I bet the people that can only afford to fly Spirit are happy once they get to that exotic, faraway place that they couldn't otherwise afford to travel to. We'd all love to fly first class everywhere if we could.

(The drip pricing is a problem and probably needs some tegation or something, and more gates, noreairports, and more route competition. But that is a aseparate issue than deep budget airlines, which you see even in highly competitive markets.)

The tax prep software companies (Intuit, H&R Block, etc.) have successfully lobbied to make such a system illegal and keep the system as complicated as possible. There has been some movement to make this simpler but I don’t have much hope it will actually bring about meaningful change. Free file forms is a joke and hardly better than filling out PDFs (or paper) manually.

Sure but that's an appeal to the employer setting the wages, not the worker. (Or is he talking about executive pay for themselves? I couldn't read the article.)

This is probably the closest example, and he is toeing the line there on a direct appeal to workers. But it also seems like broad expectation setting to both workers and employers that high inflation will not continue, so you don't need to price that in. It is a bluff on his part, but one that (in theory) works out if everyone believes it.

Right, but the central bank knows that IT is the one forcing the lower wages. They're not standing up there asking employees to shred part of their paycheck, because that is obviously dumb. The original person was talking about what workers should do "out of the goodness of their own heart." But no central bank is asking workers to take action, they are forcing workers' hands, explicitly.

You may think that is better or worse, but it is not appealing directly to workers to throw away their pay check.

All of those things are independent from nominal price/wage increases. If higher pay was such an unalloyed good, why doesn't the government just pass a law saying "Whatever amount you were getting paid on 6/26/23, now you're getting paid double that, and you have twice as much money in your bank account."?

Because no one would actually be better off. Prices would instantly double. It's just a change of units, like going from getting paid in $ to getting paid the same amount in ¢.

So the one exception that I considered putting in would be cases where the government is the employer and is negotiating with their employees. And yes of course, they will use whatever arguments they can to come out ahead in labor negotiations, like any employer.

I didn't see any mention of calls for workers to accept lower wages in the first article. In the second article, such calls were mentioned but not explicitly referenced or quoted. (Maybe they would be familiar to a British audience.)

But I would say that is different than asking for private sector workers to accept lower wages as an inflation fighting strategy. And note that the actual fiscal policy that the UK has pursued is wage subsidies, as much as 650£ - 1000£ annually it seems. (As described in the second article, not something I'm familiar with beyond that.)