I agree that socializing and so-called "third places" are in decline but we have to ask why. I'll spoil it for you: it's capitalism.
Where once a family could easily be supported on a single income and you could afford to send your kids to college, real wages have been stagnant for decades and people now need 5 jobs between 2 people to not be homeless. Why? Student debt, medical debt, mortgage debt.
The time we spend not working is time we spend not making someone else slightly wealthier.
So people don't have the time nor the disposable income to socialize. And even if they did those activities continue to get more expensive because housing specifically and property generally gets more expensive and that's an input into the cost of every real world activity.
But again, somebody is profiting from that.
Additionally people are in for a rude shock. They see light at the end of the tunnel when their parents or grandparents pass and they inherit housing or sufficient wealth for housing. But many of these people won't see a dime thanks to draining long-term elderly care, particularly with Medicaid funding being stripped.
The capital-owning class wants you in debt. They don't want you owning anything. They will want us in worker housing. We are becoming South Asian brick kiln workers with nicer TVs.
People who downvote this need to think very hard about whether their preferred solution is workable, or if they are simply ignoring the problem because they can.
It’s unpleasant to say that people actively desire the current outcomes, but nature does not care how people feel. It is valid to say the purpose of a system is what it does.
This argument presupposes that there is something inherently special about organic human life that can't be replicated with sufficient computing capacity. This is akin to arguing humans have a "soul".
We will eventually reach the point of creating artificial sentient life and AGI and it will absolutely be a companion for some if not many.
The real lesson here is you can use mental gymnastics to interpret the constitution any way you want. As such, judges are inherently political actors.
Civil asset forfeiture should be a direct and obvious breach of the Fourth Amendment, specificially "unreasonable search and seizure" but no, the law has contorted civil asset forfeiture to be OK because money is property and property has no constitutional rights.
The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property. The police as an institution began as slave catchers (ie returning slaves, being "property", to their owners). Even the FBI has its origin in the Mann Act [1], also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. Basically, it was anti-misagenation.
More generally, if you look at any important course case, mainly Supreme Court precedents, just look at a decision with the lens of how the wealthy will benefit and you'll be able to prodict the outcome with at least a 90% accuracy.
The police are muscle that applies violence to advance the interests of the state. They only protect the wealthy insofar as that serves the interest of the state. The interests of the wealthy are generally fairly aligned with the state for various reasons. There is a subtle but important distinction between that and "serving the rich".
The inverse would be to use the monopoly on violence to punish those who wish to use property for their self-interest at the expense of the common good.
Basically imagine police throwing in jail people who declare a plot of land as belonging to them, or someone who has seized the means of production and is now pocketing all the profits.
This "Abundance" nonsense is simply liberal repackaging of Reagan's trickle down economics and deregulation. That's all it is. Reagan's policies were designed to transfer wealth from the young and the poor to the old and the wealthy. Abundance will do (more of) exactly the same.
The very best case fo housing deregulation as per this Abundance nonsense is Houston. And that's only if you have essentially unlimited land.
Private industry simply will not lower house prices long term. We need to stop with this nonsense of looking for market-based solutions and public-private partnerships.
The only solution to housing is for the government to maintain a sufficient stock of quality housing such that the private sector simply cannot corner the market to drive up prices.
The example I always come back to is Vienna where ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. Residents essentially have permanent leases. It's affordable and accessible. Vienna has some of the lowest rents in a European city.
The purpose of the modern Democratic Party in the US is support American imperialism and to not upset their corporate donors. "Abundance" only exists so Ezra Klein can get invited to all the cool parties, get speaking engagements and generally curry the favor of the billionaire class and the Democratic establishment. It's just a liberal face on Reaganism.
"your margin is my opportunity" will lower prices and does so in all areas of the economy that aren't highly regulated. The exception are of course cartels but Thompson shows here that those aren't present
Developers don't build units to lower prices. If prices go down, it's because developers overbuilt or there are other macro factors at play. I suspect it's a bit of both.
A core tenet of capitalism and neoliberalism is private property. We're rapidly approaching a point of land reform. I think private property is a mistake. Note: this is distinct to personal property. You can own your own home, maybe even a second home. Anything beyond that should be outright disallowed or taxed into oblivion.
We should simply not allow people to hoard property. It is state-sanctioned violence to deny people shelter by intentionally driving up the price of a basic need. Housing unaffordability is the number one contributor to homelessness, which I think is up 18% last year.
I realize that's a pipe dream. What can we do instead? Do what Vienna does. Austria is a social democratic country that's still capitalist in nature. Yet ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. It is remarkably cheap to do so.
Public-private partnerhips or simply looking to the private sector to solve these problems are nothing more than wealth transfer from the government to billionaires.
Private railroads are a mistake. Let's see what the private railroad industry has done.
The railroads kept reducing their workforce to get an uptick in profitability, so much so that there wasn't enough spare capacity for railroad workers to get paid sick leave of any kind. The railroad workforce were taking industrial action to get paid sick leave. What happened? Congress stepped in to use legislation to end a labor dispute for essential workers to side with the company. Oh and this was under Biden. As an aside, a later deal was made to give them a handful of paid sick days, quietly.
If the railroad caved to 100% of the union's demands it would've cost 6% of the company's profits. Not revenue. Profits.
The other is an industry wide effort called Precision Scheduled Railroads ("PSR"). Basically this means having trains with twice as many carriages and skipping safety chcecks because that costs money.
There are over 1000 train derailments a year. Most of these aren't a big deal. Others are like East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago, which caused a toxic spill in a populated area, something that continues to be an issue [1]. A lot of toxic chemicals are transported by rail. What was insane was the media didn't report on the East Palestine derailment for a week to 10 days despite there being a black toxic plume that could be seen from space. They were finally embarrassed into covering it by social media, particularly Tiktok.
All railroad companies do to maintain and increase profits is cut costs, pretty much like every other company. That means suppressing wages, skimping on maintenance and safety and not investing in fixing anything.
They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them.
Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year.
If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.
No surprise when the rails are utter dogshit. Something like [1] - you can clearly see how incredibly uneven the track is - which flies over my youtube feed way too much for my liking would yield immediate regulatory action here in Germany.
I really don't understand HN's love affair with nuclear.
Uranium mining produces significant toxic waste (tailings and raffinates). Fuel processing produces toxic waste, typically UF6. There is some processing of UF6 to UF4 but that doesn't solve the problem and it's not economic anyway. Fuel usage produces even more waste that typically needs to be actively cooled for years or decades before it can be forgotten about in a cave (as nuclear advocates argue).
And then who is going to operate the plant? This administration in particular is pushing for further nuclear deregulation, which is terrifying. You want to see what happens without regulation? Elon Musk's gas turbines in South Memphis with no Clean Air permits that are spewing pollution [1].
That's terrifying because the failure modes for a single nuclear incident are orders of magnitude worse than any other form of power plant. The cleanup from Fukushima requires technologies that don't exist yet, will take decades or centuries and will likely cost ~$1 trillion once its over, if it ever is [2].
And who's going to pay for that? It's not going to be the private operator. In fact, in the US there's laws that limit liability for nuclear accidents. The industry's self-insurance fund would be exhausted many times over by a single Fukushima incident.
And then we get to the hand waving about Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mise Island. "Those are old designs", "the new designs are immune to catastrophic failure" or, my favorite, "Chernobyl was because of mismanagement in the USSR" like there wouldn't be corner-cutting by any private operator in the US.
And let's just gloss over the fact that we've built fewer than 700 nuclear power plants, yet had 3 major incidents, 2 of them (Chernobyl and Fukushima) have had massive negative impacts. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is still 1000 square miles. But anything negative is an outlier that should be ignored, apparently.
And then we get to the impact of carbon emissions in climate change but now we're comparing the entire fossil fuel power industry vs one nuclear plant. It's also a false dichotomy. The future is hydro and solar.
and then we get to the massive boondoggle of nuclear fusion, which I'm not convinced will ever be commercially viable. Energy loss and container destruction from fast neutrons is a fundamental problem that stars don't have because they have gravity and are incredibly large.
I have no idea where this blind faith in nuclear comes from.
Wow. So you really know nothing about the technology and are just spreading fear. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is mostly safe for people now outside of the fact that Russia is current bombing Ukraine.
The issue with cleanup at Fukushima Daichii is one of money and political will, not one of technology. We've had the ability to clean up nuclear accidents since the 1950s.
Also, the future of power is increasingly looking like LNG plants which pump only slightly less radioactive carbon into the atmosphere than coal plants do.
To add a small note here: the background level of radiation is fairly safe in most of the region. The danger (including in the Chernobyl region) is more about concern of small radioactive particulate. Things like your vegetables in your garden could become deadly because they formed around a hot material that was buried in the ground. Same can happen with rain runoff.
These are manageable, but expensive and still take care. You'd still want to arm everyone with a detector and get them to be in the habit of testing their food and water (highly manageable for public water or food).
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is relatively safe... to short, limited tours. There are radioactive and toxic particulates all over the place. Things like Cesium-137, which is both radioactive and toxic. Artifacts irradiated in the initial meltodwn and radioactive release (eg vehicles, buildings) remain dangerous to this day, like there are machine graveyards that are absolutely forbidden to entry for safety reasons.
> The issue with cleanup at Fukushima Daichii is one of money ...
Yes, about a trillion dollars. That's the point.
As for technology, I believe the removal of fuel rods and irradiating sand bags has only begun (with robots) in the last year. I don't believe they've fully mapped out what needs to be removed. It's not just the fuel but also the structure, such as the concrete pedestal the reactor was on (and melted through to).
Otherwise, you kinda make my point: hand waving away serious and expensive disasters with fervor bordering on the religious to essentially dismiss me as some kind of heretic.
Money and political will are in short supply everywhere. Who's to say you'd find it in the US after an accident? And why even bother when solar is cheaper and doesn't come with the same risk?
I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.
What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?
When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.
Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.
> I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.
That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.
Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.
> You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
Not sure I agree with that. I think it's probably true that adopting even a minimal exercise regimen is easier than adjusting diet, for most people.
But actually turning that new exercise regimen into a calorie deficit is significantly harder. Not only do you have to exercise probably quite a bit per week to get you into a deficit, you have to actively work to not eat more. If you start an exercise regimen, I guarantee you're going to be hungrier, and unless you're very strict with yourself, you can easily eat enough extra to wipe out most or all of the new calorie "savings".
The debt has ballooned because massive tax cuts have been given to the already ultra-wealthy.
In the most recent bill, the rules for writing off private jets changed such that you can take the entire write-off in one year instead of over the life of the plane. This alone is set to cost hundreds of billions of dollars [1].
Of the ~433T in debt over the entire life of the US, ~$8T of that came from Trump's first term [2].
Some people physically break their bodies and risk their lives doing necessary but relatively low-paid work. But telling baggage handlers, construction workers, agricultural workers, firemen, commeercial fishermen and agricultural workers that they need to work to 70 instead of 65 so the debt doesn't balloon while allowing Jeff Bezos a much bigger tax break in buying his 3rd private jet is utterly bananas.
Where once a family could easily be supported on a single income and you could afford to send your kids to college, real wages have been stagnant for decades and people now need 5 jobs between 2 people to not be homeless. Why? Student debt, medical debt, mortgage debt.
The time we spend not working is time we spend not making someone else slightly wealthier.
So people don't have the time nor the disposable income to socialize. And even if they did those activities continue to get more expensive because housing specifically and property generally gets more expensive and that's an input into the cost of every real world activity.
But again, somebody is profiting from that.
Additionally people are in for a rude shock. They see light at the end of the tunnel when their parents or grandparents pass and they inherit housing or sufficient wealth for housing. But many of these people won't see a dime thanks to draining long-term elderly care, particularly with Medicaid funding being stripped.
The capital-owning class wants you in debt. They don't want you owning anything. They will want us in worker housing. We are becoming South Asian brick kiln workers with nicer TVs.
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