Certainly, building new housing works well at a policy level. But calling for new housing doesn't seem to work at a political level. We've been fighting this fight ever since the financial crisis and every election cycle brings us a few victories with an equal number of reversals. And it isn't only within the left that the opposition arises; it wears red in progressive neighborhoods, but it seems to have a taste for brown when that's convenient.
I don't think that the urbanist movement can succeed if it is driven by policy wonks who want to throw out the rulebook and impose reforms from the ivory tower without a real small-d democratic political strategy. Many of us are used to fighting the political battle against climate change by being Absolutely Correct and expecting that Science with her indefatigable armies of Reality will guard the flanks. A fully economic fight like this one just doesn't have the same kind of inevitability. Every step forward on the ground weakens the sense of urgency in the legislature, leading to an equilibrium trap without a vigorous political movement that can hold momentum.
Nerds do not usually want to do politics, but in housing you have to do politics.
IMO, this is largely because the government's job is to stay out of the way, and people who hold elected office in areas where this is a problem (the Northeast Corridor and West coast generally), mostly have a certain something in common that indicates they are likely to think they need to "help" the market along.
It's not a coincidence that the "housing crisis" continues unabated in places like NYC that are losing population, yet appears to be solved in areas in the south that are absorbing those people.
Does this not have more to do with desirability? It's kind of hard to compare property prices in NYC with Alabama. Like no shit housing will be affordable in places that, no offense, are kind of a shit hole. In Canada, housing prices are crazy in beautiful in beautiful Vancouver, but are totally "affordable" in the arctic circle. It has nothing to do with legislation.
NYC rent being unaffordable is due to legislation that keeps apartments off of the market due to not being financially viable to repair to habitable standards in addition to legislation overly empowering local groups to block new construction.
That's funny because a lot of people in Huntsville, AL would consider San Francisco, CA to be a literal shit hole. And yet SF real estate prices are much higher. It turns out there are many factors: local government development policies, weather, jobs, geography, etc.
Housing prices represent a tradeoff between affordability and desirability in most cases (with a major aspect of desirability being access to desirable employment).
It's not hard at all to compare property prices in NYC to Alabama using a cost of living index (and to some extent a quality of life index, though these are fairly subjective).
People are voting with their feet every day, and they largely aren't moving because they are looking for a decrease in their standard of living.
Many, many, many people think NYC, SF, Vancouver etc. are shitholes. The good news is that people are currently allowed to choose where their surroundings look like, though many politicians and bureaucrats seem hell-bent on changing that. And now we're back at the start of this discussion...
Another big surprise is Mexico. It seems like every day there's another gory story about a bunch of people disappearing or getting shot in a gang war. But they're the second-highest ranked in North America at #12, behind only Costa Rica.
Israel I think is similar to Costa Rica in that whatever problems Israelis have, they look around at their neighbors and realize how much worse it could be.
I have been thinking that this is a reason why the megacities are winning. In the largest cities, a couple can cohabitate and both find jobs. In smaller cities, you have to get lucky, and if one partner's job falls through (which may be unavoidable) then you might have to move! In a one-income household you can live in a city with one industry. Two is a coordination problem. The eleven largest cities have reached escape velocity. Detroit is hovering right on the edge. Seattle has favorable climate and a port. Other cities are boom and bust.
I associate it with cool summers which are rare in the US. The rain and dark won't be everyone's cup of tea, but other places with similarly cool summers either have very harsh winters or rhyme with "Nabisco".
Yeah, I never understood what Beyond's core innovation was. Impossible had that whole synthetic heme thing going on. Beyond seemed almost like opportunistic mimicry. But Impossible turned out to be pretty expensive IIRC.
In my opinion as a mostly-vegetarian who used to adore burgers as a kid, the Impossible brand was by far the most realistic (and my beef-loving partner would agree, they made stroganoff with it and loved it)... but the price truly is ridiculous at this point. It started out just barely justifiable, and it's simply too high now.
I am more than a little bit outraged that animals who were raised in miserable industrial production facilities to meet an ugly end are having their parts sold for less than a decent alternative simply because of subsidies distorting the market.
If I look at walmart right now, they have Impossible 'ground beef' for $9/lb and real ground beef is more than $7/lb. So the price isn't too high everywhere.
Agree. Impossible is on a different planet in terms of being very very close to the taste of real meat. Unfortunately still premium priced.
It’s a pity that Beyond is getting so much attention because they’re not the best ambassadors for meat alternatives. People will try it, and then decide to wait another 5 years before trying again.
I still eat impossible sausage as a substitute for pork and find it pretty dang good. I grew up in appalachia so we know our pork sausage and impossible seasoned well comes close.
Aldi in Germany might be very different for all I know, but I've been vegan or vegetarian my entire adult life and I think every burger alternative besides Beyond/Impossible is quite awful, though I usually don't eat meat alternatives in the first place.
Beyond was available well before Impossible was. I used a combination of Beyond and Boca as my primary substitutes for ground beef, until Impossible came along, and now I use almost exclusively Impossible.
I don't feel like they have a niche anymore, but there was a time I considered them my top choice, before impossible dethroned them.
The key difference between the old vegans and the new vegans is hiding in plain sight. It's the Internet. It used to be that vegans went to vegan restaurants and had their own particular tradition of vegan cookery. People didn't just become vegan in isolation like they do today. The acculturated vegans still exist and I think that's who gp is referring to in that statement. The Internet vegans are different but they aren't that numerous — few people even today would make such a change in their life based on something they read online.
Despite being a vegetarian and former vegan, this is not me wading into this debate to defend the figure provided by the OP of the original comment, but this is usually the source for the statistic AFAIK: https://scet.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/CopyofFINALSavi...
Regardless, it goes without saying (from other, more well-sourced research) that the disparity of subsidies and government assistance provided to industries that ultimately exist to produce meat compared to industries that produce fruit/vegetables is fucking absurd.
I'm struggling to understand the point you're trying to make well enough to know how to respond, other than to say vegan cooking traditions continue to exist and existed before the internet (though there were fewer vegans at the time)
People did indeed become vegan in isolation before the internet, just as they do today.
What exactly is the distinction you're trying to draw between "old vegans" and "new vegans", and how do you see it pertaining to this conversation (especially under a comment pointing out that plant-based burgers struggle to compete with traditional beef because of beef subsidies)?
Yeah, I generally think people make adult diet choices on their own.
People regularly cut out meat, alcohol, sugar, dairy, gluten, caffeine, fats, etc. based on things they’ve read, moral considerations, medical recommendations, and personal health observations, not because they’ve joined a community that eschews such things.
For one thing, it's fairly uncommon for children to purchase operating systems. As long as there is one major operating system with age verification, parents (or teachers) who want software restrictions on their children can simply provide that one. The existence of operating systems without age verification does not actually create a problem as long as the parents are at least somewhat aware of what is installed at device level on their child's computer, which is an awful lot easier than policing every single webpage the kid visits.
So I agree that operating systems and device developers should not be liable. That's putting a burden on an unrelated party and a bad solution that does possibly lead to locked down computing. I meant that liability should lie with service providers. e.g. porn distributors. The people actually dealing in the restricted item. As a role of thumb, we shouldn't make their externalities other people's problems (assuming we agree that their product being given to children is a problem externality).
>The attacks, seen in videos circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times, appeared to be the first on Iran’s energy infrastructure since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran last weekend.
Hey, FLASH finally hit Hacker News! I remember my professors talking about this in graduate school. It's a fairly well-established effect: the tumor selectivity of radiation is much better at ultra-high dose rates. It is still unclear exactly why. But there are a lot of studies about it:
I was starting to infer there was a better focusing ability so it could start and exit as a broad cone of radiation and keep the peak intensity at the tip of the focal cones at the tumor-tissue, and the short pulse also helped the healthy tissue.
But the way this sounds, it's more like a straight beam delivering similar intensity to healthy and tumor tissue but the biological effect strongly differs between healthy vs tumor tissue?
Yes, the radiation dose under the conventional metric (energy divided by mass) is the same, but the effects on biological systems change. I included a little speculation on the chemistry in my response to a sibling comment.
My guess would be that the radiation doesn't itself care but that tumors have some other characteristic (like multiplying rapidly) that makes them more susceptible to it. Similarly to how you can sometimes attack them with medication that inhibits cell division.
Yeah that's the conventional dose rate effect, not the FLASH effect. The FLASH effect happens on timescales so short that ordinary considerations like the cell cycle or DNA repair mechanisms are inherently ruled out. Instead it might have to do with the type of radical species that form in normal cells versus tumors, possibly related to oxygenation, pH, glycolysis byproducts, etc.
The first interaction of radiation with tissue is usually this:
H2O + ħv >> H2O+ + e- (fugitive)
The radical ion H2O+ is extremely reactive and usually protonates another water molecule immediately:
H2O+ + H2O >> H3O+ + OH*
The hydroxyl radical has a half life of about a nanosecond and will usually be the main "reagent", diffusing until it runs into an organic molecule which will be oxidized and thus degraded. At high enough dose rates, the peak concentration of hydroxyl radicals and more stable radicals like superoxide could be much higher, leading to "nonlinear" effects, i.e. byproducts of multiple radicals interacting with each other or a protein.
One thing I found confusing about the nature article is that it mostly discusses conventional linear accelerator + bremsstrahlung X-ray radiation versus very high dose rate FLASH in the form of electron beams, proton beams, or even carbon ion beams.
Do we know that what the chemical mechanism for damage from charged particle beams is? Is it similar enough to compare directly like this? Are the timescales short enough that charge deposition might matter?
The article is a bit unclear, but we have both a very wide range of X-ray vs charged particle studies, and increasingly of conventional vs FLASH studies with a range of modalities (e.g. the seminal FLASH paper was FLASH electrons vs conventional electrons). FLASH photon vs conventional photons are also increasingly being generated, although they've been more of a pain to generate.
So it's clear there is a temporal FLASH effect, which is not purely a question of radiation type.
That's not to say it's necessarily exactly the same effect - we still don't have a perfect quantitative understanding of the effects of different radiation types even at normal dose rates, let alone when FLASH differences are added into the mix.
I don't think that the urbanist movement can succeed if it is driven by policy wonks who want to throw out the rulebook and impose reforms from the ivory tower without a real small-d democratic political strategy. Many of us are used to fighting the political battle against climate change by being Absolutely Correct and expecting that Science with her indefatigable armies of Reality will guard the flanks. A fully economic fight like this one just doesn't have the same kind of inevitability. Every step forward on the ground weakens the sense of urgency in the legislature, leading to an equilibrium trap without a vigorous political movement that can hold momentum.
Nerds do not usually want to do politics, but in housing you have to do politics.
reply