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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Not quite. From what I’ve been able to gather, housing in the postwar era was made fast and cheap to ensure everyone could have a place in the immediate aftermath of the devastation. Then, in the sixties, they came up with better building standards, more regulations, and evaluated the lifespan of typical housing. I don’t remember the exact number, but they determined a conservative lifespan to be like 20-30 years. With this in mind, they started to constantly update building codes to make new construction safer and more resilient to natural disasters. So, what would end up happening is old homes stay cheap because not many people want to buy at the end of its life, and it’s less expensive to build new to modern standards than rehabbing an old home. Side note: recently the old estimated lifespan was re-evaluated and they determined that housing lasts, again I don’t remember the exact number, closer to 50 years.

    Now, while all this is happening they have a different relationship to zoning than, say, America. What’s in America? It’s mostly single use zoning. They have a lot more mixed use zoning that allows for building housing where it would be illegal in America like commercial zones or light industrial zones. Side note: America used to build like that too until suburbs were invented and pushed as THE solution to housing people in our postwar era. Think of the older parts of towns with stores on the ground level and housing being 1-4 floors above them. With this freedom to build, they have built way more housing than is actually needed and in places people want to live.

    The last point, which was already mentioned above, is that they don’t view housing as an investment. It’s a place where you raise your family, you store your belongings, and sleep. You don’t buy a home with the idea of selling it to make a ton of money in a few years or even decades. With that, there’s no incentive to buy up housing and leave it sitting empty for the right time to maximize the investment. It’s sort of like we view cars. Cars don’t typically increase in value, and the ones that do it’s because they’re rare, beautiful, or historic. MFers are out here trying to sell the housing equivalent of an '80s Ford Fiesta at 2024 fully loaded Toyota Camry or even Mercedes S Class prices.

    Summary: Housing has a shorter lifespan, can be built almost anywhere through more mixed zoning, and it isn’t an investment, it’s just a place to live.


  • Here’s a fun thing that happened at the state level when Republicans cut taxes.

    The Kansas Experiment

    Essentially, the Republican dominated state government in Kansas significantly cut taxes, the ‘expected’ increase in revenue didn’t materialize, the quality and quantity of public services decreased, the state’s credit rating went down, and everyone got mad. After a few years, the governor was voted out of office and Republicans ‘saw the light’ and put the old taxes back in place. What’s wild is there are still conservatives who look at that and say ‘Well, you guys didn’t do it right. I still think it’s a good idea.’ If it were up to me, we’d go back to the tax levels we had when that antifa commie Marxist-Leninist far left extremist Eisenhower was in office.

    Marginal Tax Rate on Regular Income over $400,000: 92% - 91%

    Maximum Tax Rate on Long-Term Capital Gains: 25%

    Romney’s Approx. Tax Bill: $5,250,000

    During the administration of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a 92 percent marginal income tax rate for top earners in the United States remained from the previous administration of Harry S. Truman. At the time, the highest tax bracket was for income over $400,000.

    This was nearly the highest tax rate for top earners in the century, just under the 94 percent rate for income over $200,000 instated during World War II under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.

    In 1954, the 92 percent marginal rate decreased to 91 percent under Eisenhower. The maximum tax on long-term capital gains was 25 percent – a rate that remained in place for a decade.

    And-

    Eisenhower explained it this way: The super rich could avoid the high taxes by investing their money in things that make America stronger. If they wanted to avoid high taxes, he said they could invest in business expansions and higher employee wages. They could give a million or two to tax-exempt non-profits that feed, house and clothe poor people of America, among other things.



  • Tally Gotliv, a Likud MP, told MEE: “We need to occupy the complete land of Israel. There are no innocent people in Gaza. Everybody who has refused to leave the north is a collaborator.”

    Monday’s event took place against the backdrop of an escalating military assault on northern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remained trapped and subjected to daily air strikes.

    The assault came amid reports from Israel that the military has started to implement a strategy known as “the Generals’ Plan” which called for the ethnic cleansing of the north of the territory, and condemnation by aid groups who warned last week that northern Gaza is being “erased”.

    This is their plan. They’re doing it right now. I can’t imagine how folks will deny this, I guess they’ll move onto justify.



  • How naive of me to think “That can’t be a real article. Surely they wouldn’t publish themselves saying they crushed living and dead people by the hundreds with an armored bulldozer. They must know how abhorrent, insane, and shocking that sounds. Right?”

    No. Of course the worst excesses of violence which had never crossed my mind are being done by the IDF. I’m… I have no words.






  • I really miss the Voter Handbook with all the information I could need about laws or propositions, the candidates in the ballot, where and how to register, and I think where to vote.

    The full text of laws and props are present along with calculated 10 year cost, and a statement from proponents and a rebuttal to that statement from opponents, and a statement from opponents accompanied by proponents’ rebuttal. For candidates, they submit statements which are usually a brief biography and things they say they support and oppose, why they’re running, and whatever else they think is important. There’s a sample ballot showing exactly what you’ll see on election day. It tells you how to register and where to go, about provisional ballots, mail-in ballots. It was such a fantastic resource.

    Here in Texas, it isn’t easy finding information about the candidates besides their names and party. For any laws, good luck finding anything except for the name the dang thing. The plain text will be buried in a messy state website with nothing else presented. It’s like they don’t want us to know a damn thing about who or what we’re voting for.



  • This

    Rundle acknowledged that studies have raised concerns about the technology’s accuracy and fairness. “You cannot rely on this for probable cause alone,” she said.

    However, her office said it could not commit to reviewing all 186 cases identified by The Post. In an email, Chief Assistant State Attorney Kathleen Hoague said “it is more important for us to work on a policy moving forward.

    and this

    Despite a New Jersey appeals court ruling that Arteaga had a right to information about his AI match, the NYPD, which conducted the search for police in New Jersey, declined to provide it. Prosecutors in New Jersey reduced the charges against Arteaga as a result.

    By then, Arteaga had spent four years in jail awaiting trial. Though he maintains his innocence, he said he pleaded guilty to second-degree robbery to get back to his two children. Caitlin Mota, a spokeswoman for the Hudson County prosecutor, declined to comment.

    got me. My disappointment with the legal system continues to grow, seemingly, endlessly.



  • Here’s a list of states that have effectively banned adult films websites by requiring sites to verify a user’s age:

    The states are:

    How age is verified:

    While the specifics vary between states, in general the new laws mean users are required to provide a pornographic website with a copy of their ID to obtain access or by sending it to a third party.

    Project 2025 and “adult conent”

    Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

    What does this mean? Well it seems to mean that the far right want to define a book that features a same-sex couple as illegal pornography and throw the author of the book and any distributors of the book in prison. It seems to mean that a book talking about sexual violence could be classified as porn and banned. It seems to mean that talking about the existence of trans people would be “porn” and criminalized. In short: anything that goes against normative gender roles and hierarchies, or interrogates those hierarchies, could be considered obscene and criminalized.

    These are the kinds of laws they have in theocracies. These were the kinds of laws they had in the Soviet Union. This is where they want to take us. And that is where we will go if we let them.