5,914 karma · joined January 10, 2011
If there's one thing I've learned in my life, is that a scary-high number of people who are supposed to be on my side, who are theoretically my people, are diametrically opposed to my entire life, and are merely pretending to tolerate my continued existence.
Struggling with this also. It's crazy how "dealing with assets" has been the weak spot for Rails so consistently all these years (even though the specifics behind it have changed entirely 3+ times or more now).
Only because we stole their funding, not because they are under-funded.
> You can't lose the population like you've lost within the actual city limits of detroit or flint (never mind the metro area population might be unchanged due to people flocking to suburban municipalities), and continue to sufficiently maintain infrastructure fit to handle twice the population
You absolutely can.
Infrastructure spending in Michigan is less than ~10% of tax revenue in all townships and all counties across the state. You could double all road spending, and it would barely even be noticed. (Using real numbers, in Kent County Michigan, for example, the entire county road commission yearly budget spend is just ~$9.69 per person per month. It's literally cheaper than the cheapest Netflix plan to maintain all of that infrastructure).
Yes, county roads aren't every road (there's city and state and federal stuff mixed in there) -- but those numbers are just tiny portions of the budget their respective budgets too. And yes, there are hyper-rural counties that have no cities and therefore have to spend more, to service those roads across such a small population. But even those counties only average $20 to $35 a month. (Using Cheboygan County Michigan as an example, comes in around $32/month per person).
It's really not a funding issue. There's zero problems with the tax base, or population, or aging. It's truly-and-only a priority issue. We keep taking money away from roads and other infrastructure, we spend it elsewhere (usually on junk) and then complain that "municipalities are hurting for funding" as if it's some great mystery.
We have plenty of tax base (speaking of Michigan specifically, we've got approximately double the total population and parcels of property in Michigan right now, than we had back in ~1950, when we built half of this stuff). We just keep wasting the public funds elsewhere. (i.e, 'Economic Development Groups' / 'Public Private Partnerships' / Tourism + State Advertising, additional spending on Police, etc.)
Instagram is great, but it only works if you take good pictures. You have to be pretty, or a photographer. It's super great for that, but minimum effort needed per post is high, so engagement sort of has to be low.
Reddit is great, but it's not really 'social' so much as it's a generic-access to monopolized forums. It feels like a catalog of phpBB forums from the 2000's. It's great for general knowledge stuff (if you are like, 'fan of videogame series' or 'long-time active in trains' or such, Reddit's great). But it doesn't feel social, I don't know anyone from reddit, I've never met a person from Reddit.
Facebook is bad, and is also too "real" (pretend real, Zuck's definition of real). If your personal persona, professional persona, immediately-family persona, and extended-family persona are all exactly identical, then Facebook seems great for you. Personally, I hate it, everything I post gets sent to my parents and grandma, and like half of my company org chart, which means I can't write anything real on there, even though ostensibly they are all my "friends". (Am I going to unfriend my work friends or my extended family?). Sure, you can 'scope' your posts, but then people can eventually tell they're scoped poorly and complained. And the people who are on there, are predominantly people full of terrible political views that no sane person should ever hold -- I do not want to have to spend every waking moment telling folks, "yes, humans should have rights. People are not property." and so on.
Twitter is pretty good. It's techie enough that my parents and grandma can't "get it", and aren't tempted to make an account. It's techie enough that most of my professional contacts are on there, but there's a cultural assumption that (as a tiny account with few followers) I can be my authentic self and not get completely in trouble. (I can say something like, "attending a Pride parade" and have that sit next to "released a new version of my cool rubygem" and not get in trouble professionally over it, or have my parents yell at me -- both real things that would 100% happen if I posted that same blurb on Facebook). There's no assumption of Twitter implying friendship (I can follow people I've never met, who I'm not 'friends' with) but close relationships can still grow without having to label it (I can be 'mutuals' with someone, without trying to imply they are my friend).
If your net is too wide, you can set up a private "alt" account and lock it, so your closer friends/contacts can see stuff that might otherwise get you in trouble with the broader community -- and since it's a different account, there's no assumption every follower of the one should see all of the other too (it gets around the facebook/scoping problem that way)
Twitter gives you a really good pulse about what people want to care about publicly which is useful information (so much as you don't mistake it for what people actually care about, or for the sum total of all they're thinking).
Generally speaking, Twitter is the only major Social Network that still feels...well, social.
"Boston saw a historic building boom during the seven years (2014-2021) that former mayor Marty Walsh, a former construction union leader, occupied City Hall. The city’s skyline transformed, and continues to do so. Tens of thousands of new units of housing were created. An entire neighborhood rose from the ground." - https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2021/07/19/boston-mayor...
> Most major metros are experiencing a serious housing crisis right now.
Completely agree. But your reasons are off. Most high prices have literally nothing to do with supply or demand in any traditional (person-based) sense. Boston certainly fits that model -- it's price problems have nothing to do with any shortage in construction (construction is booming) or 'housing ban' (obviously there's no meaningful ban, because construction has already happened in large numbers for over a decade)
Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly.
And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.
This isn't really true though. Housing is expensive everywhere, even in unpopular cities, even in cities losing population. (Except for a few specific cities), housing is not scarce, we just pretend it is because we pretend all these fake financial transactions count as valid 'demand'.
> we're focusing on foreign buyers in 2022. And blind-bidding in 2021. And investors in 2019. And money-laundering in 2018. And Chinese money in 2017. All of these things should be addressed, but every one of them has provided political cover for the real reason that housing is so expensive in popular cities, which is scarcity
And why is housing "scarce"? Because we waste housing on fake buyers (every single thing you just mentioned). That's why it's all in focus so much.
My midwestern city has built 2x to 3x more housing units than it's received in new residents, for almost 15 years straight now, and housing still goes up 15% each year like clockwork. You can outbuild new resident growth (many places already do), but you can never outbuild investor demand while housing is federally forced to appreciate like this.
I'm so sick of people bullsh*tting that 'zoning' and 'nimbys' are why housing is expensive, when we have dozens of major cities with no meaningful zoning restrictions, no 'nimbys', and no restrictions on growth or construction of any kind -- and even in these cities, housing is shit and expensive.
I mean, that's basically a bribe too, we just don't call it a bribe when we do it on our side.
"Woah, woah, woah. You can't just hand government officials money! That's bribery! You have to do business within their specific jurisdiction and trade favours on the planning and setup of your business (favours none of your competitors or existing other business will receive) all on the promise of future increases in tax revenues in exchange, *that's* how you hand government officials money!"
I don't know if that's everyone at Adobe on Photoshop or not, but there's 50-ish or more names on the splash screen at launch. - https://natashashaneek.com/adobe-photoshop-splash-screen-202...
Which is weird, because (until last year anyway, when used car pricing went crazy) cars were by-far the cheapest major expense an average American has. Most Americans drive, in large part because the car is free money -- the drastic housing savings and occupational/educational/commercial opportunities more than make up for the small amount of cash it costs to own and operate one.
Just on rent savings alone, my car pays me to drive it. (The car costs me about $400/month in full TCO, but that car easily saves me $800/month or more just on rent alone, not to mention trips or kids school runs or visiting friends or shopping or so on). And that's not even factoring in that people's time has value, and any alternative form of transit easily double-to-triples the amount of time a given trip takes.
> I was able to reduce my monthly expenses by about 20% just by going car free, and I refuse to ever own a car again.
That sounds nice, and maybe it's just the midwest in me, but I've never seen a person who can actually save money by not-owning a car. Many people claim as such, but then you dig a little and find out they were already wealthy to begin with, which is the only way they were able to get away with it.
(e.g., "you should totally sell your ~$20k car, and with the money you save, you could totally move your family into a $600k-more-expensive half-the-size downtown condo and go car-free. You can just pay a small $50/trip for an Uber whenever you really need that car" -- like, it sounds nice, but the math here doesn't check out at all).
They mostly did. They've been warning about this for 3+ years now (see this report from the FCC back in September and October 2019) https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/102214765103/AVSI%20RA%20Interi...
They couldn't have warned folks about more than a year or so sooner than that, because the spectrum bands for 5G hadn't even been fully decided prior to it. (The public notice of band reconfiguration only got announced back in May 2019)
If it wasn't expensive and crappy, I'd totally do it. We're at the mall twice a month anyway, the mall has the best local stores, there's fun extras for the kids (carousel, arcade, a gym) and adults (bookstore, coffee shops, etc), it's heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer so you don't have to carry coat+hat+mittens+boots everywhere, there's a decent food court with some variety and it's cheap, it's the only place nearby with a reliable bus stop (and it's also mostly enclosed and protected from weather), it's got great ADA-appropriate accessibility, and it's got lots of parking and convenient freeway access, so visitors can stop by easily with no fuss.
Of course, these apartments will be like $2500+/month and be tiny. But like, hypothetically if they built family-appropriate condo-style housing at family-appropriate prices on a mall, I'd totally do it.
This is also me. Except I really like it. But I'm not sure what to do about it, it can reflect super poorly on a resume for some reason.
"Oh, your applying to be a Senior Engineer? Look at all this product management and developer manager experience on your resume, you must not really be serious about coding, you aren't strong enough technically, the developers won't trust you"
"Oh, your applying to be a Product Manager / Product Director. Look at all this programming and tech experience on your resume, you are really just a developer, you should just be pulling tickets from JIRA/Asana/Linear, you probably wouldn't be able to speak in non-technical terms in front of customers/clients/etc"
(loop on repeat)
I've not heard of a job name/title/role that accurately represents this sort of work, even though companies generally seem to like it, if I can somehow get through their application process.
In a more ideal world, we want mortgages to get more expensive (so that housing itself would get cheaper).
Is that true? As someone who was also doing native Windows desktop applications back then (C# and VB in .net from 2006-2010), ClickOnce handled everything pretty reliably for Windows XP/Vista/Server (even with weird DLL requirements -- for example, I had to ship a QuickBooks Desktop API wrapper and propritary Epson drivers in our .net desktop app)
Yes, it's not quite as reliable as "go to my-app.com". But it was way more reliable than Electron's current self-updating (.net ClickOnce loaded in a tiny fraction of the time that Slack and Discord's Electron apps take to check for updates on every launch)
Regular people generally can't afford new homes. Working class professionals usually get shoved into apartments (usually small ones) with small kitchens in 5+1 buildings or renovated industrial buildings.
Stuff like this is pretty common - https://images1.apartments.com/i2/5Wguguo1YZBzaUo30bfX2jUIY6... or this one https://images1.apartments.com/i2/PuDTEuad8QYuGVJfUJAbGHCZIS...
It's not impossible to cook here, of course. But it's designed around the idea that most of your big meals will be "out" somewhere else.
Except they aren't obvious 99% of the time. They aren't even "obvious" like 60% of the time. They aren't even "obvious 99% of the time" for cis-straight (non-LGBTQ) folks.
"Hi, Sam Shepard will be on the call with you today, and will be joined by Alex VanBeckran and Kegan Marton" -- are these folks hoping to be addressed as men, or women, or non-binary? There's no way to tell, and it's kind of disrespectful to be wrong.
> It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious.
Form of control? What on earth? It's literally just a tiny amount of human dignity. It's basically no different than being asked to address someone as "Mr. / Ms. / Mrs. / Mx." from decades prior.
> Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my preferred pronouns at all times.
It takes literally almost no extra effort, you just file it along with their name (or phone number, or timezone, etc). If you are thinking that hard about it, your probably doing it wrong.
It's not obvious what counts as a "faint line" -- is this too faint? Is it not really there? Am I misreading natural variations in the colour of the test strip?
It's not a matter of reading instructions -- even intelligent adults who have followed the directions 100% correctly can still struggle with knowing what counts.
Anyone who has ever taken a pregnancy test (or seen someone else take a pregnancy test), can tell you about the major amounts of stress possible attempting to read a "simple faint line" -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/ for one example.
I'm not saying that every test strip needs $20 of Bluetooth gizmos and e-waste. Just that normal, intelligent, fully-instruction-following adults can reasonably be expected to not always know how to read "any faint lines" accurately.
How can you possibly have "good health" without also ensuring housing? Isn't it kind of impossible to be truly healthy if you are homeless.
Really? The Wii U lineup is like a perfect Dreamcast-like example of a "good failure". It was so good, that half of the best selling Switch games from it's first two years, were just past Wii U exclusive games (or 3DS games), ported up to the switch.
Zelda: BotW, Mario Kart 8, Lego City Undercover, Pokken Tournament, Bayonetta 2, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Hyrule Warriors, Super Mario Brothers U, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Wonderful 101, Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World, Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water, Super Mario Maker, and Xenoblade Chronicles (1).
All of those are either Wii U / 3DS exclusives ported forward, or planned to be exclusives and got last-minute ports near the end of development cycle (like Zelda BotW).
I get that they weren't large hits in the general market, I get that they were not financial successes.
But for dedicated folks, these consoles represented some of the very best design and product packages that Nintendo had ever offered. (A good chunk of which was lost in the transition to the Switch, like proper Virtual Console support, or Nintendo Mii's getting heavy usage, or StreetPass).
Yes, they also offered backwards compatibility, but that's not "why" they had success -- they were successful as products entirely in their own right.
In normal states -- people oppose up-zoning, because if their lot becomes more valuable, they instantly lose a lot of money. Sure, it's on-paper higher, but if they stay, that just means higher property taxes instantly (it's not uncommon for taxes to double or more after a few years of gentrification have occurred), along with higher cost of living (every other thing around them, like child care and restaurants and such will all get more expensive, to cover the higher rent and higher cost of living for those folks). And that's before getting to all the other minor annoying issues (extra noise, less infrastructure per person, income inequality, etc)
And sure, in theory they could sell out. But how, for what? Sure, in California, you can always just assume there's a boring midwest/south place to escape to -- but for everyone already in the midwest/south, no such escape option exists. If those folks leave, they'll have to buy a new place somewhere else, and they're all expensive too. If your $50k house is now worth $500k on-paper, but every other place to live is now $800k and up, you can't afford to stay (property taxes + cost of living are eating your income) and you can't afford to leave (everywhere else is getting even more expensive, there's no where to 'sell out' to). And that's before getting to the fact that the average person literally can't move anywhere meaningfully different. (They have a job that forces them to stay in market, or are going to a specific university, or have kids, or have kids with divorced ex-spouses, or are caring for elderly parents, etc, etc)
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This is of course, just for normal/boring states. California has this "never charge people actual property taxes" law weirdness that complicates things.
Does this actually happen though? I'm not sure I've ever seen a President or CEO of a company be held accountable for bad behavior or bad decisions in any meaningful way.
Best case scenario, you mess up and get "fired" (with a million-dollar-or-more severance/contract payment attached, or similar in stocks -- enough cash paid out that you can basically retire for life). Worst case scenario, seems to be that you get hauled in front of Congress to answer questions and/or get teased on the internet for a few days -- stuff that has almost no lasting effect.
Yes. Of course we do. Housing is a basic human need (without which, you are homeless by definition). We should expect all people to easily afford housing in all economies, at all times.
We should expect housing to be as affordable as water or food or electricity is, at all times, in all economic conditions. It should never be "tough" for anyone to afford housing.
This is a enormously inaccurate. Speaking from experience, housing affordability is one of the top-5 concerns for most people in the vast majority of Midwestern cities right now (and even some Southern cities). There's crisis-level problems in housing in places like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Louisville, Most of Urban Michigan (Grand Rapids, Traverse City, Ann Arbor, Detroit), etc, not to mention all the obvious issues in major places like Atlanta or Austin or such.
Housing is affordable in dying small cities with no jobs. Housing is expensive "for most people in most parts of the US". In the Midwest, a huge chunk of the 20-40yr-old aged folks here are literally begging for a entire nation-wide housing crash, so they might not have to rent for the literal entirety of their lives.
We stopped enforcing the law against large companies. :(
Apple's behavior today on iOS is clearly worse than 90's era Microsoft Windows, but we had a semi-functional FTC back then, and we mostly don't today.
These weren't generous. They barely covered half of rent in the cheapest Midwest towns.
I know programmers on HN could just work remote and code their way through the whole pandemic without an issue -- but for the majority of regular folks, COVID represented an overall wealth cut of some amount (even despite some folks getting some minor extra unemployment). Even for folks who didn't lose their jobs at all, prices went up for literally everything, wages have been frozen for years prior, and (since they didn't lose their job) most of the support programs never helped them.
> If you look at the person savings rate in the US, you'll see two huge spikes around the time of the transfer payments
Yes, financially stressed people tend to cut all optional expenses as fast as possible. Have you never been laid off or fired before? A spike in savings rate doesn't mean people got wealthier. For regular working-class folks, a spike in savings is what you see when you expect your paycheck may vanish with zero notice, it usually indicates that people got poorer and panicked.
> Strange it wasn't mentioned as a possible cause.
Because there's an approximately 0% chance it's the cause. This "everyone is lazy now because the government helped them slightly once" excuse is a conservative talking point, not a real thing that actually happens.
> The reason that its important is that a lot of articles talk about "supply" or "worker" shortages as though its some naturally occurring innocuous condition, and not a result of policy
Well, there's also almost a million extra dead people from COVID, not all of whom are retired seniors, some of whom presumably held some kind of job. There's also a lot of people who were forced to live for the past two years on severely reduced or unpredictable income, now realizing they don't have to take a shit deal from their employers.
As far as I've seen, there's no "worker shortage" anywhere in the US. There is a "companies that won't treat employees like dogshit" shortage. That's been building for decades now, and having a bunch of people forced out of work anyway has taken some of the fear away, since many folks have now been unemployed anyway and can better handle that worst case scenario.
> But it ignores the introduction of 12 trillion dollars into the system (or around 30% of the current money supply). Its unprecedented and it's the reason you've seen financial assets rally to well past pre-pandemic levels.
The vast, vast majority of that money went straight into wealthy peoples hands (via things like PPP giveaways for businesses only). Actual regular humans got only a tiny portion of that cash. That's also why asset prices are sky high, workers generally can't afford to buy assets at all, wealthy people buy assets, to hoard their money. Assets are high because wealthy people got a huge injection of cash they've never needed, and are trying to retain it ASAP.
It's certainly not because an unemployed concert hall worker got an extra $200/month unemployment for a few months or because a working nurse got $200/month (3 stimulus payments divided by 18 months) or whatever. That kind of cash can't even buy a used car anymore, much less any kind of meaningful asset.