yacht_boy

Uh, you do realize I'm from Massachusetts, right? Our elections are decided in the democratic primary when we pick which candidates will breeze through the general election and take their house seats. The last time we sent a republican to DC was in 1994.

Here in Boston we've got migrants sleeping in the airport, the state transportation building, and now the state owned gym and pool complex across the street from my house. The governor is draining a $600 million rainy day fund plus asking for another $250 million to help manage the inflow of migrants. Meanwhile our housing crisis is only getting worse, and we've literally got no place to send these desperate people. I'm pretty far left, but this doesn't feel manageable to me.

Uh, Biden didactivate the national guard.

I legitimately don't understand the hate. He's done more for this country than any president since FDR. He's a wet dream for progressives. He's doing it all in the face of insane pressure from Russia and Trump. And yet all he gets is a shrug and side eye from the people who are ought to be thanking him every minute of every day for standing firm.

Guy I worked with retired from the Navy as a captain and got whatever very generous pay came with that. Then used his veterans preference to get a job in my agency, did that for 20+ years, retired as a gs 14 so he gets that annuity plus his TSP savings plus social security in a few years. He's still barely 60, so he is working as a consultant. I'm guessing he's pulling down $200k with all the various incomes and maybe working 20 hours a week, and he's got the Healthcare and other benefits for life. People trash talk the military and government but if you work the system right it can be worthwhile. Hell, I wish I'd joined just so I could get USAA.

That's not the real reason housing in Tokyo remains affordable. The real reason is they allow developers to build enough housing to meet demand. Places that were small hamlets filled with single family homes 30 years ago are now very densely populated and filled with midrise apartment buildings. Good luck trying to get anything like that built anywhere in America, or most of the western world.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SE0.FEn5.DUkcV7dCs21X&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Biden is commander in chief. I'd love to see him just order one or two of the smaller bases to relocate to another state, effective immediately. And while he's at it, send NASA HQ back to Massachusetts where it belongs. Then let Texas know if they want to keep playing he can relocate the rest of the bases out of the state.

That's not cynical, they've come right out and said this is what they're doing. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4429211-romney-trump-border-bill-biden/

That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don't see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don't think we Dan just wave our hands and say "corporate buyers" and explain away our housing market problems.

We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we've pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that's nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that's bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.

I'd love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say "disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock" and solve the problem, but it's nowhere near that simple.

First, that assumes the company makes no profit at all. Not a sustainable way to keep a company in business. If they go out of business, 400,000 people lose their jobs and a whole lot of them lose their health insurance. Starbucks is pretty well known for being generous with their benefits.

Second, wages are typically only about 2/3 or even less of the total compensation, and don't account for the employer's share of payroll taxes.

So figure that you think Starbucks should make half their current profits and give the other half to their employees. That puts it at $6250 per employee, which would likely translate to about $4000/ year before the employees' portion of taxes, or about a $2/hour raise. Which would be great for employees making maybe $30k/year, but is not exactly going to vault them into the middle class.

I actually work in the wastewater industry and from what I'm reading, a properly functioning sewage treatment plant already captures a very high proportion of microplastics. This widely cited study noted above 98% removal efficiency at one plant.

We're already at approaching 2 log (99%) removal without actually trying to. It doesn't seem improbable to me that with a few relatively modest tweaks to the system we could get 3 log removal (99.9%). Getting to 4 or 5 log removal is likely where things will get really expensive and challenging. But for now, a 2-3 log removal is probably good enough to focus on other sources like tire fragments/dust that typically pass directly to receiving waters with no treatment at all.

The group think around here is so crazy. Should we be using less single use plastic, especially the thin films? Absolutely. But the environmental impacts of mining all that metal and making all that glass to replace plastic with, plus the added energy for transporting the heavier packages and the cost of increased spoilage and product lost to dented cans and broken bottles, dwarfs the negative impact of the plastic replacements.

Yeah, but those metal tubes were awful. I have been brushing my teeth with Tom's of Maine for decades, and I remember how much I hated those metal tubes. They always split open weeks before the tube was empty and then they'd leak and make a mess and I inevitably wasted a lot of product. When Tom finally sold to whatever corp and they switched over to the plastic tubes that don't leak and let me use all the toothpaste I paid for, I danced a little jig.