drphungky

Did no one read the article? All of his complaints are correct! Replacing old city pipes, that are almost assuredly covered in years of internal layers to mitigate lead leaking, will have a negligible to possibly even negative effect on lead at the tap. Even Brookings said so in their study! Buttigieg is getting a total pass here ignoring the real issues raised by just rebutting about how lead is bad, when they're both saying that. So tired of people scoring cheap political points on soundbites, and Buttigieg doesn't usually fall prey to that sort of thing.

Yes, the funding should have been higher, but if we've only got 15 million to work with, it might actually make more sense to do targeted fixes in low income communities in old residential buildings, where you're most likely to have lead effects actually being felt at the tap from (relatively) newer lead pipe still in walls. But that would be expensive and much harder than just replacing water mains, so they're doing the easy less-important work first, rather than getting the biggest bang for their buck.

The problem with that is there is a very clear policy purpose and interest in making housing an investment - the vast vast majority of people will eventually own a home, and it is a forced savings vehicle because people are REALLY bad at saving for retirement. Even if you fix our lack of a social safety net, home ownership is generally seen as a public good because it encourages people investing more in and caring about their community, being willing to pay higher taxes to support more services, etc. It's not a no brainer to make housing an investment (there are arguments against in a society with a good social safety net), but it is very purposeful through good public policy. It has little to do with the recent (very recent, relatively) buying up of single family homes by investment banks, etc, despite people implying all the time it's some secret cabal and shadowy wealthy figures doing it for their own benefit. Everyone sees conspiracies everywhere these days.

Of course, if we're going to say that home ownership is "good" and keep doing all the tax incentives for it, we do need to stop corporations speculating and driving up housing costs, and could do so by some targeted taxes on unoccupied properties in the same portfolio. But there's an argument to be made that that's a relatively small portion of the problem, since a lot of our housing stock issues can be traced back to single family zoning issues, as well as road and highway funding leading to suburban sprawl and unaffordable newly developed subdivisions while cheaper starter homes don't exist anymore...but either way affordable housing stock just hasn't kept up.

Wealth tax is a terrible idea. People think it will solve the problem with billionaires taking out loans collateralized with their stock and not paying income tax, but the solution for that is far simpler - just treat loans as income. You can even add an exception for an owner occupied mortgage if you want to keep encouraging forced savings into property. We have existing solutions that don't have the massive disincentives a wealth tax would create.

A wealth tax actually discourages investment through stocks, which is what keeps the economy moving (and before anyone says publicly traded companies thinking about short term profits is destructive, that's a separate, but serious, issue). Worse, it discourages savings of any kind. The problem with saying "oh we'll just start it only a billion dollars" or whatever is that allows for later expansion of the tax to 100 millionaires, 20 million, and boom suddenly you're taxing people with 5 million dollars which is what you'd expect a middle class elderly couple from a high cost of living area to have squirreled away for retirement. And if you don't think that would happen, you should look at the history of the income tax - because that's exactly what happened.

Also, a wealth tax is really hard to enforce, and would require a huge increase to the administrative state that itself would create a need for more taxes. That's not inherently a problem (obviously we have legions of IRS agents, etc) but we already have that infrastructure set up for income taxes and are just underutilizing it. Take how many lawsuits and hearings we already have JUST with tax assessors for property, and then try adding that to cars, boats, art, luxury clothes, appliances, privately held companies, anywhere you can hide money or that has a questionable value. It's a boondoggle we don't need to mess with when all we have to do is just reclassify collateralized debt as income because it is functionally the same as selling something.

I like taxes. I even like my high taxes because I know they pay for good services since I live in a blue state. But a wealth tax is a bad idea when we already have income taxes and can add VAT taxes for luxury goods.

For example, each vote in the electoral college for California represents 703,000 people. In Montana, on the other hand, each electoral vote represents closer to 250,000 people.

On the other hand, more conservatives voted for Trump in California than in Texas. That's a LOT of conservatives who are having their voice drowned out. This is also why a few red states have signed on to the national popular vote amendment. So many people in deep blue and deep red states stay home on election day, we don't actually know how the popular vote would play out. People like to say we have way more democrats but that's not necessarily true - it's just a matter of current vote totals.

Well for one, this isn't newly released: this is from 2016.

But to address your point, the reason it isn't hypocritical is because (like he said in the article) power and culture and conventional wisdom flows from the cities. It's the difference between punching up and punching down. Yes, rural people often have shit attitudes about cities, but it is culturally nearly homogenous to have negative opinions about rural people. The amount of people and the weight of the opinions they hold are not even close to balanced. Plus, and this is the more important bit: it's not just their shitty attitudes. They also have, as he outlines in the article, legitimate complaints and cries for help that we wrap up with their shitty opinions and ignore. It's not helpful.

I liked this article when it came out, and I still like it. I too moved from an area just like his to the city, and I couldn't agree with his points more. I have friends that have spent their whole lives in cities that continually miss the mark on this stuff because they have no concept of what rural people are like or actually think.

Atlassian is flashy?!? Jira is soooo bad.

How do I get to my messages? Who knows?! How do I see the people on the server that used to be an easy swipe away?

They changed functionality. I don't mind a refresh, but they actually got rid of things and moved them around. It's really annoying to use.

The idea being you can get an hourly job and an apartment just about anywhere. The only real expense is moving your shit. Most everything else is time.

Edit: Jesus Christ this place is cancer sometimes. Imagine being downvoted for explaining someone else's point because people don't agree with it. Just reddit with angrier voices.

It's a shame "the golden rule" was already taken. You've summed up so many ideologies!

You should because that's how tipping works. No one likes tipping (as a customer anyway, plenty of servers and owners do), but until servers are provided with a living wage that's how it works. You're not changing the system by tipping less - you're just being a dick.

And not for nothing, but there is a slight difference between soda service and a simple pour service. Actual liquor service usually comes with someone asking how you like it (e.g. on the rocks vs straight vs three drops of water) whereas a soda is just a soda. Sitting at a bar, no one is gonna get pissy if you're not tipping 15-20% on opening beers or straight pours, but that's just how table service works.

You have clearly never worked in the service industry. They make the same sub minimum wage as every server unless there's a local ordinance otherwise.

I mean I was being flippant, but finding interests or passions and then finding affinity groups that do those things is a great way to meet people.

But also I just