swearwolf

I live in Portland, and I have some friends who work in homeless services. They follow an equity model, which places those with the highest level of intersectional need first, particularly BIPOC people. White, cisgender men are thought to have the least intersectional need, and therefore they receive the least support. In practical, day-to-day terms, this means that BIPOC with marginal housing are given priority over non-BIPOC with no housing at all.

1.) Though this is becoming an increasingly popular viewpoint in many of the American cities that are experiencing these problems right now, it’s far from universally held.

2.) The U.S. is not a monolith, so looking at the prison population of the United States as a whole doesn’t tell you about what’s going on in an individual state or city.

3.) The number of people incarcerated has a long tail. In the U.S. in particular, many people received long sentences during the years following the ‘94 crime bill. Little if any effort is being made to commute these despite policies centered on new incarceration changing.

4.) In the places where reduced incarceration is being tried in the U.S. it’s important to recognize that it’s being tried effectively in a vacuum. In many other places which are able to sustain low incarceration rates, there are a lot of social programs that help make that possible, and also programs to help people rehabilitate after a conviction. The U.S. has little if any of that. Where reduced incarceration is being tried, it’s usually not replaced with something that’s more effective.

Resistance cooktops are fine too, you just have to learn to adjust to them. I’ve had one in all but one home I’ve ever lived in, and it’s second nature at this point. Every time I try to cook on a gas stove I burn whatever I’m making until I remember how to use them.

I shuddered a little bit at the mention of on premise vs cloud. I’ve been whiplashed from one extreme to the other over the last two years. First it was all in on the cloud, now it’s a full scale retreat.

At this point, I’d be happy thrilled if America could at least “get to Canada”, though I’m not optimistic.

In the greater Seattle area you need to travel quite far out to cut the price by any significant amount. There are some very basic suburban houses in Bellevue, Kirkland and Issaquah selling for upwards of $2 million, and those are a good 15-20 miles away from the city itself.

If you don’t believe it, pull up Zillow or Redfin and set a price threshold under $1M and see how many listings instantly disappear. If you want a good laugh, take a look at what’s left.

Pennsylvania? First day of buck season was always a holiday for us.

“Real America” tells you everything you need to know.

That map could almost be an electoral one if you flipped the red and blue.

Which should tell you something about why your friends in SoCal don’t want to live in those cheaper places.

Maybe it’s time to admit that more entities besides private ones need to be building and supplying housing then? Maybe some things just aren’t well suited for market driven development.

I believe the other reason this happens is “extend and pretend” [0].

Basically the bank issues a loan to a developer, based in part on how much income the developed property is expected to bring in. If the expected revenue isn’t coming in (say because the rent is too high), the bank doesn’t always want to admit that it’s a bad loan and call it a loss, so they extend (the length of the loan) and pretend (that the rent the developer is trying to charge is realistic). This incentivizes the developer to keep the high rent as-is even though nobody is going to pay it.

A case of terrible incentives causing terrible outcomes.

0.https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704764404575286...

People are downvoting this, but it’s true. There’s a little more nuance here as well. In addition to fully tolerated public drug possession and consumption, there is also the tolerance of street camping, and the extremely low prices of meth and fentanyl on the West Coast at play here. However a person enters the drug addiction spiral, once they’re in it, it’s easier by far to stay in active addiction here. In Oregon, where I live, people can either scrounge enough cans to take to the recycling center - about 20 will do - or use their EBT card to buy bottles of water, empty them and then recycle the bottles to get the cash deposit. Either way, less than $10 will buy enough meth to stay high for days here. I assume it’s similar for fentanyl. No one will stop you from setting up your tent or RV on street, and at least in Portland you can steal bikes or cars to earn extra money. There’s a chop shop within sight of my house doing exactly that, all day every day out in the open. You can get enough food from the many homeless services organizations and tents are given out by the city. Essentially everything a person needs to completely destroy themselves with drugs is available for free or nearly free, and law enforcement stopped bothering to try to keep things under control. These conditions are fairly unique to Oregon, Washington and California, so I think the high housing price correlation is true, but also incomplete.

Have you ever considered that maybe the reason there’s always a Democrat or two willing to block progressive legislation is that the Democratic Party wants it that way? That way they can have their cake, by promising progressive reform, and eat it, by not delivering that reform and thus, not pissing off their donors. I’ve been hearing about these one or two non-compliant Democrats my whole voting life (remember Joe Lieberman?), and yet the party never invests resources in primarying them.

Just a thought.

You need someone who gives a shit with the power to spend money. That's pretty much it. Every single year, a company costs more to operate than it did the year before. Every piece of software you buy costs more over time. Same thing with hardware. Same thing with leases. Same thing with desks, chairs, trash cans, pencils, paper towels, and on and on. Yet I've watched many companies try to implement a "flat" budget, meaning no additional spend compared to the year before. Works fine if you've got room to cut, but do that over a long enough period of time (really not that long, two or three years max), and you'll end up with a situation where critical infrastructure is running on hardware that's so old it wouldn't survive a reboot or a gentle move from one rack to another. You can have great leaders up and down the chain, all of them saying, "Hey! This thing is probably going to break soon and it's going to ruin the whole year's sales forecast 'cause we won't be able to ship a damn thing!" but if that messages gets to the CFO, and they'd rather roll the dice on one more year of "lean" operation before they jump ship well...that's pretty much that.

Also, no company I've ever worked for makes their budget after asking people what they need. Instead, the Finance team just copy-pastes last year's budget, usually with a little haircut off the top for "efficiency." So let's say you run a team that depends on a handful of servers. You bought the current ones five years ago, and it cost $500k. Now it's time to replace them. But since you didn't buy $500k in servers last year, it's not in the budget for this year, so now your entirely reasonable request is being scrutinized as "unplanned spend". Several times I've seen teams try to build a plan for the upcoming year, only to find that there's nobody to give it to, because the "budgeting process" is done in about a week's time, usually two or three weeks after the fiscal year starts and with commensurate effort.

You play like you practice.

For the most part, it’s the same way in Portland except that instead of anger and hostility it’s utter apathy.

“ Taking cover behind a fence down the street, Officer Daniel Sanchez yelled “drop the gun.” He began firing before he finished the sentence, body camera video shows, hitting Mr. Moonesinghe four times, according to a preliminary autopsy ordered by his family. The Travis County Medical Examiner’s report hasn’t been released.”

This one paragraph is an incredibly succinct encapsulation of what’s wrong with our police in the U.S. these days. Either this officer already knew he was going to shoot before he opened his mouth, and the order he shouted was entirely pro forma, or he had so little control over himself that he accidentally pulled the trigger before he finished the order.

When I was younger, I worked in the theater industry. We all knew that the IATSE stage hands were making great wages, but the options we had to join were:

1.) A grueling apprenticeship period in which you would work very long hours for very little pay. I could be wrong but I think this was a several year long process.

2.) You could skip that process if you were vouched for by an existing union member. In practice, this often meant that membership was passed down through families.

I understand that it’s similar for firefighters.

Maybe that’s the point though - maybe we should kill some lifestyles because they aren’t sustainable at scale.

In many of the places that are the hardest to build in, like California, they are intentional. Those regulations were out there to slow down development as much as possible. The motivation behind doing so varied some; sometimes it was hippie’s concern about the environment, sometimes it was homeowners seeking to protect the character of their neighborhood, and sometimes it was the latter masquerading as the former. All of it was intentional.

This has become a big problem for people in a niche community I participate in - guitar collecting. A lot of people in that community like to buy guitars, use them for a while, then sell them on Reverb or eBay to fund the next purchase. Typically we sell them at a slight loss, because we’ve usually made some kind of improvements like new components or adjustments to the setup.

With the new reporting rules, it’s now far more complicated to do this. You need to have a receipt for each purchase, otherwise you’re on the hook for the tax on the entire amount of the purchase. Problem is, a lot of gear is purchased through face to face cash sales, where no receipt is generated. Or, the gear was purchased so long ago that the receipt is long gone. And if you make any improvements, better hope you have the receipts for all of those, plus some way to figure out how much value to assign to your time, and the patience to either figure all this out on your taxes or the extra money to pay someone else to do it.

It’s just not worth it anymore to sell online. For now, we’ll head back to Craigslist. It’s really a shame because for a while their Reverb really had a neat thing going.

Good thing we have this completely legitimate apolitical institution doing the important work of enforcing checks and balances on the other branches of government!

There’s a well known wreck (SS Kamloops) popular among divers that has a body in the engine room. Divers call it “Whitey” because it has saponified, and thus appears similar to a bar of soap.

Can you imagine the horror of being on the bridge, thinking that the bow has just submerged into a wave, and only realizing it’s not going to come back up when you feel the ship slam into the lake floor?

No, the author’s hypothesis is that the professional middle class carved out a space for itself between the working class and the rich, using their specialized knowledge as the differentiating factor, and that they use all kinds of gatekeeping mechanisms to make sure that anyone who wants to enter their professions has to be credentialed, which typically involves dedicating the first third of their lives to education. The purpose of this gatekeeping is to ensure that there is enough of a scarcity to ensure good wages for those who have the right credentials, and to make sure that self taught or informally taught amateurs can’t enter the field.

Within that context, Organic Chemistry is put forth as an example of one such gate that all aspiring doctors must clear, even though they promptly forget the material when the class is over. The admission policies you pointed out are another such gate.

The book was written in the 1980s, and in the later chapters the author explores how the events of 20th century have impacted the system described above. For example, the substantial cuts to government spending enacted during the Reagan administration, and worsening prospects for jobs like professors and social workers, caused students to switch the focus of their college education towards getting a degree that would enable them to enter a field that would allow them to make a lot of money, rather than one they may have been intrinsically interested in. The distillation of this effect is, in my opinion, what we’re seeing here with the NYU students.

I happened to read about this case while I was in the middle of Barbara Erinreich’s book “Fear of Falling”, which is all about the American professional middle class. Part of one chapter talks about how the professions organized to create credentialing systems that kept anyone who couldn’t afford the expensive and time consuming education out. Organic Chemistry is specifically mentioned for its role in weeding out potential medical students who might very well turn out to be good doctors, while simultaneously being irrelevant to the day-to-day practice of medicine. All of this serves the purpose of making sure the supply of doctors is low, and that their wages are therefore kept high.

Since the 80s, American society has shifted towards a ruthless form of capitalism that leaves fewer and fewer occupations capable of providing their practitioners with a middle class lifestyle every year. To me, it’s no wonder that students have become ruthlessly mercenary in response. They’ll do what it takes to make a good living, and they won’t tolerate gatekeepers getting in their way without a fight. This is exactly the behavior we (as a society) have incentivized in them.

There’s a word for what you’re describing: gaslighting.

As an Oregonian, I think the reason it’s infamous is that Oregon schools are terrible and many people blame the kicker for taking surplus budget that could have been spent on schools and giving it back to the taxpayers instead. It also gets a fair amount of criticism for proportionally distributing funds based on how much a person paid in taxes, so the wealthiest get the most money back.

Can’t say how much the kicker really does impact these things, but I can say that when you compare state funded resources between California, Washington and Oregon, Oregon’s usually come out looking worse. For example, if you take a road trip up i5 from Los Angeles to Seattle, you’ll notice that the rest stops in Oregon are far worse than those in California or Washington. It does seem that there’s an austerity in Oregon absent in those two states, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s imposed by the requirement to send back the surplus.

Very nicely put.

It’s very unusual for companies to own the buildings they have offices in, so this strategy would be non-applicable in most cases.