Yep, that's why substitute teachers' interests are more zealously guarded by Congress than the interests of billionaires are. Teachers have wielded the enormous power they hold to get a <= $250 deduction for school supplies they purchase with their own money.
> consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all.
To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.
Yes, our tech leaders would rather send america into fascism that have any impediments put in the way of their business plans. It is disgusting, and sad.
The $580MM transaction described in the article is already 1,000 times larger than the alleged congressional insider trading by Paul Pelosi that caused Sen. Hawley to introduce the PELOSI act.
Honestly the PELOSI act is a step in the right direction, and should be extended to include all kinds of cryptocurrency and real estate. Also the president and his extended family should be included in it.
The only problem is in the name. It's clearly just to score political points. I'd be surprised if it gets approved.
There are more recent versions with better names, like the Restore Trust in Congress Act[0], and one introduced a few days ago to ban congresspeople and the president (as well as their immediate family members) from betting on prediction markets[1].
I can only imagine the GP mentioned the PELOSI act (which, as I recall, was cosponsored by Nancy Pelosi and blocked by Republicans) because it was designed to be partisan messaging.
> I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no?
It's a commons problem. In your scenario, you have absolutely increased the value of your property. 20 apartments is more valuable than a single family home. However, you have also reduced aggregate demand by housing 20 people. That reduced the value of your neighbors' properties (or at least reduced the rate at which their value increased).
NIMBYism posits that values will continue to increase without forcing any property owners to invest in improvements so long as they collectively block any efforts to increase supply.
Are there any real examples of this actually happening?
Local to me, Arlington and Reston VA have both seen massive building sprees over the past 20ish years (mostly adjacent to the Metro). Home values have never been higher in either location.
My own personal example... I live ~1 mile from the Metro, so just outside the building boom zone. There was next to zero housing in that zone - it was all office parks - and now it's a mix of $1+ million townhomes, $1+ million luxury high-rise condos, and dining/retail. My own home value is up 50% since COVID and that's true for just about any house in my zip code.
And without the redevelopment/infill, I posit the whole area would be less desirable. NIMBYism feels more about "change is bad" than property values.
Literally the entire peninsula of the bay area is an example of this happening. You have people voting to "keep their small town feel" sandwiched between San Francisco and San Jose.
Ah, well I still think it applies as a counter example. Avoiding density makes values rise, especially when combined with increasing office space density/local job growth.
In general I don't think it requires all that much thought in terms of why/how price changes happen. Housing demand is inelastic, and you can find examples of that causing both rapid price increases (metro areas with high friction building requirements) and rapid price decreases (metros with population declines) when out of equilibrium in either direction, which is exactly what you'd expect of a good with inelastic demand.
Yeah, I live in Falls Church, which has seen more build-up than other areas in Northern Virginia because the city has never had the kind of restrictive zoning that the anti-"Missing Middle" campaign is still fighting in Arlington. The value of my single-family home peaked in 2024 and has dropped slightly since. To my understanding, this is generally true of my zip code and not true of comparable zip codes in the area.
But Falls Church is much nicer now that a few mid-rise apartment buildings with ground-level retail have gone in! As a resident, I am very happy about all the new development. I expect that over time, that will have a positive effect on property values, but there is an observable short- and medium-term effect working in the opposite direction as the increased housing supply eases demand on the existing housing stock.
Do you believe that small drop is a result of new development or just a blip in the market? Price increases near me definitely slowed as interest rates increased, but we haven't yet seen a drop. But, as far as I know, this is one of the only walkable areas outside the Beltway, so there's a lot to like if you want to be untethered from a car for much of the week. It's also a relatively affordable area (vs inside the Beltway and some SFH neighborhoods) - my TH 1500sqft (1800 if you include finished basement space) would currently sell for ~$700k. The new-build THs are 2500sqft, with a garage or two, and sell for just over $1 million.
> Do you believe that small drop is a result of new development or just a blip in the market?
I don't know, and I don't believe it's possible to know in a specific instance. Like I said above, I believe that in the long term, denser towns raise the property values of their suburbs by making the area more desirable.
But there is definitely a plausible case that increasing the supply of housing immediately lowers or slows the growth of property values by reducing scarcity. It's the argument made by both sides of the "missing middle" debate in Arlington -- the pro side says it will make housing more affordable, and the con side says it will lower everyone's property values. The article we're commenting on found that at least some version of this is true for the Austin, TX -- increasing housing stock lowered rents, even if the new stock is luxury units.
But rents aren't the same as property values (though they are linked). Rents could go down while the value of the underlying land goes up (extreme example - build a high-rise apartment, land and building value goes up, even though the rent for each unit comes down). And the apartment market and SFH market are linked but also not exactly the same.
Also agree it's difficult/impossible to know for a single piece of real estate. And impossible to know for sure since the market is complex (impacted by rates, other policy decisions, etc)
You're right, but I think everyone is looking at second-order effects where causal links are impossible to prove. [0] is recent research on how expanding housing stock (even just at the top end) will "expand affordability," although they, too, are mostly looking at the effect on rents.
The most overt statement of "we don't want to build more houses because it will decrease the value of existing houses" in recent memory was Trump[1], who is not exactly a reliable source (and whose whole brand prior to politics was destroying the character of established neighborhoods by building giant condo complexes).
It's not a common problems in Austin at least. You (a property developer) buy a single home in bad shape on a big lot in the city. Then you redevelop the single home into 20 apartments, greasing the wheel appropriately (of the local government) to get the needed rezoning and permits. No one else can do this because they don't have the connections and monetary resources you do. You pocket the increase in value of that property (minus the cost of grease) by selling it off as "condos" which have dubious maintainability going forward. You never lived here anyways, you have a ranch in Bastrop.
Are you saying there is no difference between the aggressiveness shown by the Department of War since it was renamed vs the years prior to the renaming?
Because it sure looked to me like they renamed the department and immediately started bombing fishing boats, then affirmatively decided to start a war with Iran, all while the guy who came up with the new name goes on TV and screams about how we're free to kill more people now.
In the FAQ at the bottom of the post, the author mentions that this proposal is just the AT protocol (BlueSky) without the active, "firehose" component.
I don't think this is a real proposal, but more a thought experiment about how a static site could integrate into BlueSky. I saw a few similar efforts to integrate the "passive" components of ActivityPub into static site generators so that you could make your static blog consumable via the Fediverse.
In reality, if you really wanted to publish your static site blog posts on BlueSky, this is probably a good place to start! As you mention, there are some serious usability issues with doing everything by hand, but you may find that acceptable or invest in workarounds. Maybe it's possible to use your BlueSky identity so that you aren't in the business of managing keys. Or maybe you could use a script or static site generator plugin to pull credentials from somewhere.
Perhaps CZ's prosecution was generally regarded as political among the people you talk to regularly, but the contemporaneous media consensus (at least to my recollection) was that Binance had openly flouted US law for years and was finally being reined in. E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/binance-crypto-c... was representative.
Beyond the reasonable suspicion of a threat to their life, the officer must believe that: a) the threat is imminent, and b) the threat will reasonably be mitigated by the application of force. An officer cannot, for example, immediately shoot someone who plausibly promises to murder them in 36 hours.
Just because some people who say "no one is illegal" also say "no more borders," that does not automatically mean that the former implies the latter. If that were the case, we could paint everyone who agrees with Nick Fuentes on any point (including, in the extreme, "nice weather we're having today") as a antisemite. The old joke linking dietary choices to Nazism ("You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!") is meant to make light of this logical fallacy.
The grandparent post accurately captured what I have understood people to mean by "no one is illegal" -- it is meant to protest a dehumanizing way to describe a class of people.
> What is a border when crossing it without permission is not illegal?
There aren't good statistics on how many undocumented immigrants overstayed a visa (and therefore legally crossed the border) vs how many entered without a visa, but experts estimate that it's somewhere around 40-45% [0]. It's not a criminal act to overstay a visa, though you do become subject to deportation. So a good chunk of "illegal immigrants" are doing something less illegal than, say, driving a car whose registration has expired (which is a criminal act), but, as another commenter noted above, we don't refer to "illegal drivers" on our roads.
The traditional term for someone who has not fulfilled a positive legal obligation like renewing their car registration is a "scofflaw," and I would not object to anyone referring to "scofflaw immigrants" the way I object to the phrase "illegal immigrants."
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