Ryan

You can't force people to take a lower rate of return. They'll just put their money elsewhere. Frankly, even if we could convince people to sell/rent homes at cost, it still wouldn't make things affordable. We make housing more expensive than it needs to be, and we need to fix that.

People think that IZ requirements force developers to take lower profit margins. In reality, developers have to deliver competitive returns to investors so IZ means nothing gets built until market rate rents are high enough to cover development costs *and* the necessary cross subsidy for BMR units.

"We're no stooges of developers (we're inadvertent stooges of landlords)"

Yep, just to add even more color for how bad this is—there are tons of American made vehicles that are basically only exported to Canada because they’re too expensive for most consumers in Mexico and too big for consumers in Europe/Asia. One of endless reasons it was dumb to start this trade war.

the core point of the pedocon theory article is that some people are looking for unequal relationships--people who are easier to control and manipulate--and one very reliable way of achieving that is to go after young people

Going all in for an antichrist not giving you everything you dreamed of, huh

A growing population (including one growing via immigration) needs new buildings for people to live.

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

People who think speed or red light cameras are a “money grab” or some effort to raise revenues believe that speeding is just, like, an unavoidable necessity? It’s not! If you simply drive the speed limit (or less) you won’t get tickets! If everybody did that, the city revenue would be zero!

in other words, white democrats are afraid of being treated like racial minorities.

Saudi Arabia (majority stake) and Jared Kushner (minority stake) buying Electronic Arts is one of the underrated instances of oligarchic media consolidation. Should be considered along similar lines as the Ellisons taking over Warner Bros.-Discovery or Musk taking over Twitter.

“Three out of four disabled people don’t drive. Stop using us as an excuse for car dependency.” — Anna Zivarts @nondriver.bsky.social in collaboration with The Urban Truth Collective. Mobility freedom comes from mobility choices. #UrbanTruth

In my most curmudgeonly moments, I don’t see why presenting the prose output of a machine built on mass theft as your own scholarly work should be evaluated less harshly than old school plagiarism. Traditional plagiarists at least had to identify and evaluate the works they were going to copy.

Making it cheaper to build new buildings helps affordability by making it possible for developers to deliver competitive returns to their investors at lower rent prices.

She was murdered by transphobia 😥😥😥

I hate our country's King Canute-ass transportation system

No Kings. No Ice. No Wars. 🚫 👑. 🚫 🧊. ☮.

Temu Charlie Kirk breaks after five minutes.

Man, obviously I'm not in Michigan and maybe AES and I might have different policy preferences on, like, the right marginal tax rate but damn is it hard not to like the guy and the way he wraps himself in the Constitution, in our best traditions here is how all of our politicians should sound.

As a Muslim who has been accused of dual loyalty and asked to denounce everything from ISIS to the Iranian state, I breathed a sigh of relief that I think I’d been holding in for like two decades watching this.

NEW: ICE is trying to deport a mother of 4 while her husband is at Fort Benning in Army basic training. When she went to pick up the family's military IDs, Navy personnel turned her over to ICE. She's been in the US since age six. With @nancyayoussef.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

An aspect of fascism is a nihilistic violence — not strategic, or really designed to achieve anything, besides the violence itself, and insecure men's feelings. Like Hegseth sharing video of boats blowing up. Or trying to do a livestreamed execution. Very good piece by @garethwatkins.bsky.social.

I think it’s even worse than this. This often means, “after I deduct expenditures *and savings* from my cash flow, my cash flow is net zero.”

This kind of thing is why I am so adamant about being out in public.

If California's rents fell to the national average, its poverty rate would drop 30%, Pew finds. Rents absorbed 78% of CalFresh's $13.1B benefit growth since 1989. Austin and Minneapolis saw rents fall about 20% after reforms, Pew says. calmatters.org/newsletter/w...

It's Mariame Kaba's "knowing who to be mad at is praxis" and more. Knowing who to be mad at IS praxis. Then you gotta know what moves the person you're mad at to do things differently. You gotta know who THEY listen to, and how to get to them. Anger alone isn't a vision, strategy, tactic or goal.

It's almost a joke at this point, but the entire story of Mamdani's mayorship really has been "it turns out we can just turn off the orphan grinding machine, the switch was right there the whole time."

Almost like the boat strikes are just performative murder and not a serious counter-drug tactic. www.wsj.com/world/americ...

SDPD's union opposing the proposed AI police report software makes me wonder whether they are finally feeling pressure from the city's budget crisis and expect that any increase in software expenses will come at the expense of the police payroll one way or another.

Robert bought a restaurant with zero operating capital? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since buying it involved the confluence of stealing Jimmy's money, Gabby's illness, and Gabby's guilt. #Emmerdale

I'm really glad to see folks outside of my nerdy corner of the world highlighting the way Trump may be using Venezuela to create a self-funding Pentagon. Trump's effort flies in the face of the key reason Congress has the power of the purse -- to keep the executive from self-funding the military.

Key pt for those who want to cut transit funding because agencies are "inefficient." A big growth in transit costs since 2020 has been security, partly due to pressure from some of the same people who now want that to be evidence of inefficiency. By @idothethinking.bsky.social. Link in 1st reply.

A lot of people don't seem to realize that absolutist claims are disproven by a single counterexample.

I said this in a thread last night and in a thousand threads before it, but you really are doing the work of those who would destroy democracy and the rule of law when you are a doomer. You can be aware of — and vigorously oppose — the lawlessness of this administration without insisting on doom.

This really sucks. Rest in peace, sir.

It never works because fascists often aren't being hypocrites. They believe that different groups should be treated differently. It's a direct implication of their evil, bigoted ideology.

A big part of politics is people looking for signals about the relative strength of various factions so they can decide what risks they can take. This means that it's important to create signals of strength to influence others. This is one of those signals of where the balance of power is.

It's fair to worry about what Trump and his allies might try to do to attack the republic, because we know they'll try anything...but yeah their ability to actually do anything successfully is, as Arlen Specter would say, not proven.