Fried_out_Kombi @ Fried_out_Kombi @lemmy.world

embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environ

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There's even an entire book related to this topic, Progress and Poverty

Plus, banks actually serve an important economic role. When you put money in a savings account, the bank can lend it out to someone else as an investment, allowing enterprising individuals access to startup capital to build productive businesses or even just mortgages to buy homes, while also providing a quite safe means of storing your savings. Essentially, they connect those who have spare capital with those who need capital. And sure, there's a lot of tomfoolery that goes on in the industry, but the core idea of banking is good.

I would like it if they at least talked about the real solutions, or perhaps provided incentives for municipalities to institute the necessary changes. Instead, we get them talking about things like rent control (well-meaning but horrible policy) and banning boogeymen like foreign investors (as if native-born slumlords are any less predatory).

If absolutely nothing else, they oughta be using their bully pulpit to get a national conversation going about these things, rather than solution theater that maintains the status quo.

Of course, the biggest thing they could do would be a federal land value tax to replace some amount of income taxes and other federal taxes. Land value taxes are more economically efficient, progressive, basically impossible to evade, can't be passed on to tenants, incentivize more and denser housing (and less sprawl), and reduce upward speculative pressure on housing prices. In theory, there is no limit to how many taxes can be replaced by land value taxes; it has been shown that land value taxes are capable of replacing all taxes at all levels of government.

At the federal level, it seems absolutely nobody cares about pushing the real solutions -- abolishing our insane zoning codes that bake in inequality, abolishing other crazy land use regulations like parking minimums, and taxing land.

Canada has some of the most habitable land per capita in the world, so clearly it's not a shortage of land or a "toO mAnY iMmiGrAnTs" problem (as some people would like to make it out to be). The problem is we have all collectively bought into the same delusion as America -- that we can have government-mandated suburban sprawl for all, and that home values can go up in perpetuity.

But suburban sprawl is thoroughly unsustainable -- both environmentally and economically -- and the land use laws we use to artificially manufacture suburbia are artificially restricting housing supply, choking the economy, and driving inequality sky-high.

And those very same laws we use to mandate sprawl-for-all are responsible for maintaining housing-as-an-investment. But to be a good investment, housing has to appreciate faster than inflation, but if it's outpacing inflation, it by definition cannot be affordable!

Plenty of desirable, high QoL cities have shown that upzoning can stabilize rents. Plenty of desirable, high-growth regions have shown that taxing land can stabilize housing prices. And any new housing -- even market rate or "luxury" -- improves overall affordability.

The housing crisis is a policy choice.

Edit: shoutouts for !yimby@lemmy.world and !justtaxland@lemmy.world

In my ideal world, we'd have a full carbon tax as well as a vehicle weight tax, and we'd use part of that to fund more electrified public transit (e.g., trains, trams, trolleybuses) and bike infrastructure. Plus we need to actually legalize dense, walkable urbanism. The zoning codes and parking minimums in North America make it literally illegal to build anything dense, walkable, and transit-oriented across almost all the urban land, resulting in miles and miles of government-mandated sprawl.

The future of sustainable urban is truly in public transit and micromobility -- car dependency just doesn't make any sense in cities, as no amount of electric cars can make up for the harm caused by sprawling, car-dependent land use. Electric cars are obviously less bad than ICE cars, but just swapping out ICE cars for electric is not actually financially, socially, or environmentally sustainable.

We should still have electric cars for the use cases (e.g., rural areas) for which you truly do need them, but the vehicle weight arms race (especially for trucks and SUVs) is getting out of control and we need the electric cars we would still have to be much smaller and lighter like this. Fewer electric hummers, more electric kei trucks, more electric trains, more electric bikes.

It looks like it might be Lake Baikal. It's a huge lake in Siberia that freezes over like this.

I have a pasta maker attachment for my stand mixer, and it makes it surprisingly easy to make fresh pasta. So I'll knead together some semolina, egg, and warm water until I get a nice dough (using the stand mixer, of course), then feed it through the pasta maker attachment to make fettuccine. Boil and make a simple sauce with browned butter, pasta water, a splash of heavy cream, a spoonful of whole grain mustard, a spoonful of garlic paste, then topped with some freshly grated pecorino and a drizzle of olive oil.

Sounds fancy, and it does take a bit more time to make the pasta from scratch, but it's not hard at all and it's ludicrously delicious. Plus, 99% of people are impressed by even the idea of fresh pasta.

If I'm going for "easy" as in "fast", too, I'll use a package of storebought gnocchi and chop in a zucchini instead.

I might even go so far as plant a few policies in their heads. "We are in a climate emergency, and we should address it immediately with policies such as carbon tax-and-dividend, ending subsidies for harmful industries such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, investing in both established and promising renewable energy sources such as solar and wind and tidal and geothermal, reducing our dependence on cars with more electrified public transport and denser urban design, and encouraging better urban land use patterns with land value taxes." One sentence = one thought, right?

Knowing humans, if we didn't use this magical power to guide them to good solutions, a good number of us would conclude, "That's it, we need to nuke China and India to save the Earth!"

In francophone Switzerland, they use septante, huitante, and nonante for 70, 80, and 90, respectively. Much more sensical, imo.

Exactly! Imagine if I said, "If we devalue my car, why did I spend years of toil to purchase it?" I'd look crazy. You buy a car for its innate utility, just like you buy housing for its innate utility. Cars ain't an investment, and neither should housing be. Possession of artificially scarce property should not be the key to free money taken from those with the misfortune of being younger or later to market than you — that's exactly the mechanism speculators and landlords exploit, driving up economic inequality and making life 100x harder for the rest of us.

Ah, I didn't know about the bang syntax when I had done the linking. Changed it now!

I know the YIMBY movement has been growing tremendously across North America lately, but we still have a long way to go to actually eliminate the core problems manufacturing this housing crisis, e.g., mandatory parking minimums, exclusionary zoning, and rampant NIMBYism.

Housing ought to be a consumer good like any other -- you buy it, use it, and it depreciates with use. Nobody expects a car to increase in value once you drive it off the lot. But somehow with housing, we've all bought into the delusion that housing is an investment. But to be a good investment, it has to appreciate faster than inflation, which means it cannot be affordable!

But this delusion is exactly why we have so much NIMBYism. If you manufacture an artificial scarcity to block out competition, suddenly the class of people who own homes or property can milk it for lots of money, at the expense of the rest of us. And almost all our politicians are homeowners.

I've done it with the communities I've made. I agree it should be done more often, though

Or hexbear, the tankie equivalent of those chuds. Terminally online, and a lot of them have been on the fediverse for a while, ever since r/chapotraphouse got the banhammer on reddit. They got real mad when lemmy.world defederated from them the other day.

Yeah, I'm working at a company that traditionally makes digital signal processors for telecommunications, and even we're using AI for actual practical applications. The current project I'm working on is applying an object detection model to detect different signal types in 2D spectrograms. The old way takes like 15 minutes to scan and detect across a wide band. This technique is likely going to be an order of magnitude faster (at least based on preliminary results) and lower-power, as you only need to capture one set of samples, then let the computer vision do most of the rest. The old way to scan for signals required taking a bunch of RF samples, which was very wasteful of time and energy, but there wasn't really an alternative until now.

Anyhoo, all that to say I agree with you. It's crazy to equate AI's capabilities and potential to that of crypto.

It's why I think worker-owned coops should be more common. Research shows that they're a more resilient business model than hierarchical businesses. I think it's because they can largely avoid the principle-agent problem, wherein executives and investors act on behalf of the company, but their personal incentives do not necessarily align with the company's. For example, a CEO has a vested interest in pumping up profitability in the short term, even if it's by slashing R&D funding and alienating customers long-term, so they can get nice numbers to pad their resumé. Likewise, investors just want their investment back.

With a coop, overall control of the company's decisions is guided more by the long-term health of the company, as that's what is best for the workers. It aligns incentives, avoiding the perverse incentives that cause hierarchical businesses to make unsustainable, short-term business decisions.

Do you have a fridge? If so, you can just stick half an onion (not minced, obviously) straight in the fridge for a few days just fine. The exposed surface will dry out slightly, but that's not an issue if you're just using them for sauce. I usually use a whole onion per dish anyways, since I love onions, and they're a dirt cheap way to add flavor and some semblance of vegetables to a meal.

If you have a freezer, frozen peas are also really cheap and nutritious, and they basically only need to be thawed. Plain pasta with salt, little bit of butter or oil, splash of vinegar, some of the pasta water (all those starches in the pasta water will help a simple sauce come together), and frozen peas is really cheap and easy, yet somehow really tasty.

You can also bulk it up if you add beans. Beans are cheapest if you buy a bag of them dry at some place like walmart (I prefer pinto beans and chickpeas, but you can go with any beans you like) instead of going for canned. Just soak the dry beans in a bowl of water overnight on the counter, replace the water, then boil them on the stove for about an hour (until they're soft) and strain. Chickpeas also taste pretty good with pasta.

Other options if you have a fridge is to crack an egg into the pasta right after you've strained it and mixing it so it can cook in the residual heat. You can also chop up a hotdog and put it in your sauce. Surprisingly tasty.

You can get by without tupperware to store leftovers if you eat just one or two big meals a day; it allows you to do more in bulk with a one-pot meal, with less preparation, and you just eat it all in one go. I also find I can get away with leaving it on the counter for up to a couple hours and then finishing it if I don't want to eat it all in just one sitting.

Also, the cheat codes to making food taste good, even if not fancy, are salt, fat, and acid. Even plain pasta tastes really good if it's properly salted and given a generous drizzle of oil and vinegar. Bouillon cubes are also a good cheat code to making things taste better for cheap. Heck, you can even buy a cheap bottle of vinaigrette salad dressing (e.g., italian or greek dressing) and pour that on your pasta for a basic pasta "salad".

Approved those permits because they wanted to or because of court rulings?

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-climate-change-environment-and-nature-business-9751c4909a8b1baba28f3bcff9d5fa6e

Republicans have a storied history of abusing the court system to get what they want, making Dems look bad to us common folk in the process.

https://www.vox.com/2023/5/11/23719914/texas-judge-shopping-national-policy

In addition, multigenerational families can help a lot. Once my partner and I have kids, it's gonna be a huge help because her cultural background is from South Asia, so her parents fully expect to (and want to!) be significantly involved in raising their grandkids, especially while we're working.

The Phillips curve is an economic model, named after William Phillips, that predicts a correlation between reduction in unemployment and increased rates of wage rises within an economy.[1]

While there is a short-run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, it has not been observed in the long run.[5] In 1967 and 1968, Friedman and Phelps asserted that the Phillips curve was only applicable in the short run and that, in the long run, inflationary policies would not decrease unemployment.[2][3][4][6] Friedman then correctly predicted that in the 1973–75 recession, both inflation and unemployment would increase.[6][failed verification] In the 2010s[7] the slope of the Phillips curve appears to have declined and there has been controversy over the usefulness of the Phillips curve in predicting inflation. A 2022 study found that the slope of the Phillips curve is small and was small even during the early 1980s.[8]

Most economists no longer use the Phillips curve in its original form because it was shown to be too simplistic.[16] This can be seen in a cursory analysis of US inflation and unemployment data from 1953–92.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

It would seem economists would agree that the Phillips curve is simply a model and not some oracle of economic forecasting. If you take take simplified economic models out of context and ignore the whole empirical side of economics, then of course you can portray it as pseudoscience. You can portray anything as pseudoscience if you reduce it to its abstract, outdated models devoid of context.