True, but even a hallucinated explanation of where things went wrong added to the context can force the model down a better path over the next few inputs.
This will catalyze efforts to build more east-west energy infrastructure here in Canada, both oil and electricity. The last time the US made a serious run at Canadian sovereignty we built the Canadian Pacific rail to connect the country end to end. The same thing will happen this time, with pipelines and HVDC grid connections.
Short term the US needs the energy we sell as they don’t have sources to replace it with. Long term the pieces are already moving into place for more O&G exports via the pacific and selling electricity to ourselves with stronger grid connections.
Our reliance on US trade will diminish slowly, then all at once.
There are dozens of local CBC news broadcasts all over the country and they all feature someone with similarly strong enunciation and clipped pauses for emphasis. She certainly has one most aggressive forms I've heard, but that's absolutely the CBC news anchor 'voice' and has been for decades. No AI trickery here, just weird Canadian public broadacaster-isms.
I'm hugely in favour of adding non-market housing anywhere it can be added, but the author declaring it a different fix to the housing crisis from zoning is naive at best. Non-market housing is subject to the exact same complex local regulations as market housing, plus all the complexity of government projects, a patchwork of subsidies, grants, and loans to get funding, and even more intense public scrutiny. Trying to get social housing done is playing an exceptionally hard game on nightmare mode.
The single lever he points out is itself a ton of local, regional, and federal regulations and laws that all need modernizing or abolishing, which is far from a simple, single lever at all.
Worth mentioning here that appeals to social housing have over the last 20 years been absolutely classic NIMBY arguments. People raise it because they know significant amounts of social housing won't get built, but if you fix the gating factors for the market, it will.
But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".
Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.
> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".
To be slightly glib: the left has no greater enemy than someone who agrees with them 95% of the time.
> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".
I think a lot of these activists were originally fighting gentrification. Then, over time, the gentrifiers won anyway, and now most housing in hcol areas is occupied by wealthy professionals. But the activists never updated their politics (people have a hard time admitting—or, sometimes, realizing—that they lost), and now they advocate policies that shut out the people they originally set out to protect.
The old school granola hippie left (anti nuclear types who love coal and gas) seem to think that “making things people want and selling them for money” is fine until it’s homes, when it suddenly becomes evil.
There’s also a failure to see second or third order effects. Yes, up zoning means that new homes will be expensive at first, but over time prices fall as demand and supply reach equilibrium. Similarly rent control is a feel good policy to screw the young and newcomers in favour of incumbent renters.
That's like 4-5 principal components back from the first principal component, which is that the places that need housing market vitality the most could not reasonably afford to acquire the housing to support it. The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development.
Worth adding that "public housing" isn't the only or even the most common form of subsidized housing. There's no Faircloth limit at all to public-private subsidized housing with AMI-calibrated eligibility and rent, and that's a much more common form of subsidized housing than a "housing project". But it can't get built in meaningful numbers either, because it's simply too expensive.
> The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development.
Also, if municipal governments "fixed that" by making it possible for more housing to be built and more people to move into neighborhoods served by those currently-good school districts, the odds are good that the influx of new students would make the school district worse. And the people currently living in single-family zoned residences know this - one motivation for NIMBYism is that it helps maintain the high quality of the local school district where your kids currently attend school.
I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school. This reduces the incentive for people who live in a house in a good public school district to resist building any more houses in that school district, lest the inhabitants of that house make the school district less good.
> I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school.
Setting aside the inevitable transportation issues this is an excellent policy that I would love to see implemented, but I think too many suburbs built their identity around “having the (property tax base necessary to create the) good school district.”
Oh, it's a far worse problem than having the property tax base to create the district, but avoiding the students that would need extra support, and might disrupt the classroom because they aren't getting it. Those students are incredibly expensive to handle mainly via the school district alone. The amount of money to provide sufficient support without parental involvement is beyond what even the wealthiest districts can afford. The shortcut to avoid said students isn't to have immense funding then, but to make sure parents that aren't rather wealthy don't even get into live in the district a all.
That's the real dirty problem of the suburb + school district marriage: You turn parents just thinking of the school district of their children into raging NIMBYs that end up wanting just rich people that speak perfect english nearby.
I’m from a country with such a system. You end up with your children all going to different schools, attending parent teacher meetings all over the country and spending lots of time dropping of the children at multiple schools.
Seems pretty straightforward to implement a rule saying siblings go to the same district by default. I’m sure there are a bunch of edge cases, but the assignment process doesn’t have to be totally random.
For centuries, Roman Catholics belonged to territorial parishes. That is, wherever they lived determined which parish they attended, and they also had obligations to support the material needs of this home parish, and their home pastor had a significant influence on whether these folks could marry or pursue a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. Of course, any family with children would send them to the parochial school where they belonged (there were often regulations that prevented the kids from going anywhere else.)
However, the popularity of cars, highways, and general mobility all over the place, has caused many bishops, particularly in the United States, to sort of supersede these territorial rules. Now in my diocese, a Catholic can go attend any parish they want to, and register in that parish, and for all legal purposes they are an official member of that parish, as if they lived within the territory. There have always been parishes like this, called "personal parishes" but they were often defined by certain ethnolinguistic qualities, like everyone from Poland, or Vietnam or something.
So now this leads to some crazy situations. For example, my friend was received into the Church from Lutheranism, and when this happened, he lived in a particular place. But he's moved away--far, far away--twice, and yet he still "commutes" to that parish where he became attached and still loves, and still has commitments and responsibilities there, which he upholds.
There are also people who, for liturgical or doctrinal reasons, will drive for hours on Sundays just to reach a church that agrees with their personal beliefs and preferences.
I am not sure this is sustainable or realistic. If eventually you have Catholics driving all over creation, literally, to get to their preferred parish, then some parishes are going to languish, if they cannot attract or retain people who are willing to volunteer there, support their material needs, and send their kids to the parochial school. That means schools are going to close. There are also independent schools popping up, that are not parochial, but approved, and Catholics send their kids there. Failing that, they get homeschooled.
I think this extreme mobility thing is absurd. I can't keep up, obviously, having no vehicle. It was actually easier for me to commute to a parish I didn't "territorially" belong to because of the way public transit works, but eventually I decided to stop commuting, and be honest, and live up to responsibilities of the parish where I belong, territorially, even if that is now a de jure thing of the past.
As I understand stuff, "abundance" is perceived as a threat to, a means to neuter, YIMBY urbanism advocacy (a la , Strong Towns, Sightline, War on Cars, etc).
Criticisms I've read are:
1) guilt by association
2) exasperation with neoliberal faith in markets, to the exclusion of other strategies
3) punching left, while ignoring the perfidy and obstructionism of the right, as though only "the left" has agency
4) being anti-democratic, by ignoring (or underplaying) the necessity of rebuilding state administrative capacity
Wanting a lot more housing, I'm pro "abundance" by default.
Even so, I've been hurt before. So I try to remain cognizant of "the left's" criticisms. Being confused by the food fight over abundance, I'd describe "the left" as being wary.
> Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.
If we’re thinking about the same essay it’s a criticism of capitalist YIMBYs who are only interested in building McMansions and the like. It is both anti-NIMBY and anti-some-YIMBYs, which seems reasonable to me.
EDIT: Historically, some YIMBYs have not opposed—I guess we’ll call it instead—unaffordable housing. So-called “capitalist” or “libertarian” YIMBYs in particular. Robinson’s article describes this. Leftists are skeptical of “all housing construction makes housing more affordable” arguments, and there’s evidence presented in the article to that effect.
Capitalist YIMBYs oppose McMansions. They're like the central thing we oppose. The whole point of the movement is replacing large-lot-coverage single-family-homes with multifamily. The whole point of YIMBYism is multifamily housing.
Understand: there isn't regulation against large single family homes. You can build a McMansion anywhere you want already. Your analysis makes no sense: nobody needs to organize anything to allow McMansions; they're the regulatory default. But suburban progressives genuinely believe stuff like this! It's a real problem.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
There is at least some truth to induced demand with new housing driving an influx of new residents, especially in cities with economic opportunity.
Just like transportation induced demand, the solution is different style of infrastructure. High capacity metros, bus lanes, and regional rail to get people out of cars and use limited transportation corridors more efficiently than single occupancy vehicles. One more lane bro doesn’t work, but adding new forms of more efficient transportation does.
New, denser housing with mid rise and high rise buildings and a mixture of unit sizes in walkable neighbourhoods with good transit access absorbs new residents and drives down housing costs for everyone. Single family sprawl doesn’t work, but density can.
We have under-built for decades, so it’s easy to misunderstand the signals. More housing gets built and prices still go up, and many people are concluding more housing just increases prices, leading to people with good intentions decrying “luxury housing”. There are plenty of nimby actors in the mix too, tossing in all sorts of misinformation and bad faith arguments, muddying the water.
The reality is areas with strong economic growth are all failing to add enough new housing and demand continues to outstrip supply, leading to higher prices. Many studies have shown even new high end housing helps manage prices, as someone rich enough upgrades, leaving their unit empty for someone else to upgrade into. That chain continues all the way down into the lower cost units, each time freeing up space someone else can afford. Large migration into a region can mess with how much prices can be affected, but studies still show even high priced new units do slow down growth in prices. Supply and demand does apply, we have just massively underestimated how far behind supply is for the demand and need to add so much more housing.
Taxing unrealized gains is a terrible idea, but I do think we need to expand the definition of realizing a gain.
0.1%ers borrowing against stocks and others assets and paying little more than minimum interest is a system-breaking loophole that has exploded the wealth gap. It needs to stop. Taxing unrealized gains isn't the fix. Leveraging an asset needs to be a realized gain.
People should be paying capital gains on the delta between book value vs the asset valuation at loan time. They are gaining from the asset appreciation to have access to more leverage and that gain should be taxable. This would re-set the book value so people don't pay capital gains multiple times on the same gain, but they shouldn't be able to defer the gain forever while using debt to avoid tax.
There should probably be a lifetime exemption of around $1 million to allow the middle class to leverage their home and other key assets in a way the richest have benefitted from for so long, but once you use up your exemption no more tax-free leverage.
Maybe in 1942. Modern tanks cannot be built on highly specialized production lines that build road vehicles without years-long re-tooling. M1 Abrams tanks don't even use piston engines, they have turbines.
A older, but well documented example how specialized modern automotive production has become is the Mercedes Benz 500e. In the 90s Mercedes wanted to build a more powerful, wider version of the E class. They added 56 mm to the front fenders and discovered it wouldn't fit through the production line properly. MB contracted for Porsche to handle the low-volume 500e on a different production line.
Another option is just stick to a smaller circuit.
80% of 15A x 120V = 1.4 kW
80% of 20A x 240V = 3.8 kW
Just going from a standard 15A outlet to a 20A/240V nearly triples the amount of power, and many homes that would need a new panel for a 50A charger have room for one more 20A circuit. Cars typically spend 8-16 hrs per day stationary in their own driveway, so 3.8 kW translates into tons of range.
While 40A or 50A is nice to have, it's far from necessary.
30K would be on the higher end for air source. My install this year was 25k CDN including a lot of duct work.
40K is also on the low end for geothermal. I'm guessing you were able to trench instead of drill?
If you can afford ground source it's by far the best option in cold climates. Steady ground heat means you get the same efficiency all year round. The install can be eye-watering though.
Yes horizontal loop, 200 metre trench ~2m deep with 6 pipes at the bottom. Took 3 days for a 20 ton excavator to dig and fill in the trench. Maybe I got lucky with the installer but it wasn't eyewatering. Vertical loops do cost a lot more. Repairing the lawn with turf or professional landscaping would have cost more than the install, so I did it myself with a tractor, some spare topsoil, and a few bags of Costco grass seed.
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