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Housing again

The top article says that housing in Atlanta, right now, costs the same as in 1990. That's impossible. Please address. ^{— Unsigned, by: 104.222.118.140 / talk / contribs}

On talk pages, please sign your comments using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking on the sign button: on the toolbar above the edit panel. You can also indent successive talk page comments using one more colon (:) for each line. Thank you. Carthage (talk) 02:05, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

That WIGO is also locked behind a paywall. Neat. Carthage (talk) 02:08, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

yeah, as someone who lived in georgia for 10 years, i'm also quite skeptical of this claim. i'll have to look into it later.

also, is there a way we can get gjk to make these entries a little shorter and more concise? this one's way too wordy. The G (talk) 03:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

You can read the paper here: [1] I don't think that this paper has that conclusion. It does conclude that real construction costs per square foot have held steady.

In absolute terms, there is no way that the claim is right. [2] However... per this FRED economic data link covering the "Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta" area (so this includes a lot of exurbs)... it might be close in real terms. In 1990, their "house price index" was around 90. In 2018 (when the paper was written), this index was around 210. I don't know if you can treat this "house price index" like dollars and run a crude inflation adjustment on the number, but if you can... they seem to be "within the ballpark" in real terms.

The problem here is that in the last 5 years or so, there has been a huge spike in housing prices... pushing the house price index in the Atlanta area to around 366. Not at all close to the 1990 index value assuming the "crude real calculation" is accurate (again, I'm not certain of that). If accurate, it might be indicative of there being a "housing bubble" again ala 2008.

Obviously this summary link is missing a lot of data though to help with this conclusion (eg square footage, price of individual areas in the metro area, etc.)... BobJohnson (talk) 19:00, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

So Gee posted a paper that's obsolete by a factor of more than half a decade? Carthage (talk) 19:06, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @BobJohnson and Carthage you guys are missing the point of the WIGO. The purpose was to show that, when you have a large supply of housing, prices won't surge, like in San Francisco. It's an empirical article testing a theory with our best control groups available (for the record they use data from 1990 and 2010). If you think the theory is now outdated, you should test it again. What happened in Atlanta in the last few years, like in the FRED's link suggests (to some extent, the article studies Atlant which is less than 10 per cent of Metro Atlanta's population, while While FRED has data for the entire metropolian area), makes the article's conclusion even stronger. A balanced housing market requires about six months' worth of inventory. Now, in Atlanta the number is about 2.4, below the American national average.[3] In other words, they are not building enough housing anymore. Indeed, while GA is the only the 8th most populous state in the US, it had one of the largest housing undeproduction in the country[4] (and it's tempting to say that we can blame Metro Atlanta for that since two thirds of the state's population live there). GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 19:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

I am not the happiest of bunnies of having an abstract of a paper in the WIGO blogs section - the 'barriers of consumption' is too high. I have a fear that the amount of RW members who'd actually understand the report is under ten, perhaps as low as two. Example; hands up if you know what even FRED is? KarmaPolice (talk) 21:30, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

hence why i suggested shortening the entry and summarizing it more succinctly earlier. it's a good argument, but it's too verbose for the average reader of this site. The G (talk) 06:49, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Original poster again. Sorry for bad form, new to wiki stuff. Thanks for the discussion folks. I unerstand GeeJayK reasoning a bit more now, but it's not clear from the summary. Is there any way I could maybe post this "More Perfect Union" youtube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwlwrZst7d0

Trying to learn rules and etiquette here 104.222.118.140 (talk) 07:44, 29 May 2024 (UTC) Boo

G and Karma convinced me. I won't be posting this sort of articles anymore as they are too longer and technical than blog posts, and I doubt anyone will read them anyway. Regarding OP's question, you can create an account, though you'll also need autoconfirmed rights to post on protected pages so I'll just add this one for you. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 11:34, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

If a few problematic statements and a wee bit of editorializing were eliminated, the WIGO summary is fine, if wordy. A summary of the paper from my perspective would be:

A) Housing land use regulations decrease the elasticity of supply, raising prices.

B) There is a strong correlation between an area's overall household wealth and the amount of land use restrictions in an area.

C) There is a connection between tightly regulated housing land use and inequality, with society implications due to the demographic differences (notably age) between homeowners and renters. Homeowners are more inclined to view higher prices brought on by regulation as a positive.

A more succinct executive summary could be: "This paper examines the relationship between land use restrictions, wealth, and inequality". An even more vulgar succinct summary would be: "Homeowners: fuck you, renters, I got mine, get out". :) To a degree, it's an analysis of one part of a well known aspect of NIMBY. It's just one paper of course. And it's a narrow form of "regulations" being explored -- certainly I wouldn't want to do away with *all* regulations (think building codes, as long as they are reasonable). But in itself, I see no issue.

I'll add a bit of a footnote to this. At this time, there is a growing interest in institutional investors buying single unit homes for the purpose of renting them out. As housing prices are high in several areas right now, there has been several articles (all over the place, depending on who is writing them) regarding the impact of institutional investment buyout on this phenomenon. But an "interesting postulate" to me here concerns the wealth of the average American. In the past, most American homeowners' assets were *heavily* top-loaded by the value of their home, which dominated all other aspects of their net worth. Renters never build up any equity, so it's easy to see how well-off NIMBY types locking out poorer people from owning homes help cause inequality. Now, what if those well-off NIMBY were not neighbors at all, but even richer faceless institutions? Though there isn't a paper exploring this, my instinct is that "the investor class" has even greater motivation (reduced competition!) to price the "average Joe" out of the ownership market by keeping asset values high.

(PS: FRED = Federal Reserve Economic Data, sorry for the excessive acronym-ing.) BobJohnson (talk) 13:39, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

@BobJohnson I'd guess that the authors also agree that some regulation is good and necessary. Even Ludwig von Mises would say so on Human Action:

There are certainly cases in which people may consider definite restrictive measures as justified. Regulations concerning fire prevenntion are restrictive and raise the cost of production. Rut the curtailment of total output they bring about is the price to be paid for avoidance of greater disaster. The decision about each restrictive measure is to be made on the ground of a meticulous weighing of the costs to be incurred and the prize to be obtained. No reasonable man could possibly question this rule.

The point of the authors was, I believe, show that regulations usually, if not always, raise the cost of production, resulting in less housing. To say which regulations are necessarily despite rasing costs would probably require another study, and I'd guess that this is the reason why they didn't mention it on the paper. It is definitely a good question, but not the one that the study is trying to answer. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 14:16, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

i wholeheartedly agree with the fact that the root of the housing crisis is a shortage of housing supply (and i can't stress this enough). this is seen in places like california, where the demand growth for housing far outpaces the annual increase in supply. supply, in turn, is constrained by red tape (e.g., archaic zoning laws, car-centric development guidelines, the "missing middle" etc.). naturally, investors are taking the opportunity to cash in on rising housing costs. (because why let a good crisis go to waste, right?)

the problem is, people want to blame the all the ills of the housing market on everything (and everyone) else, such as the investors, the developers, airbnb, etc. (even though they are only symptoms of the problem). nimbys, in fact, do far more damage to housing affordability than any of the usual scapegoats do. this level of ignorance does nothing to address the root cause of the crisis, and it borders on denialism. The G (talk) 05:00, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ So when we talk about removing regulations, does that include public health regulations like regs banning the use of lead and asbestos in construction? Carthage (talk) 09:22, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

'Removal of regulations' is the shitty stock answer said by free marketeers; at best, it normally ends up 'solving' the housing issues by building a load of badly designed/built properties on equally shit estates which are not going to be fit for purpose in even 25 years time, let alone 100 [that's assuming that they're even fit on creation]. Jerry-built housing is a 'false economy' for society in general, and must be avoided. Often, regulations are there for a good reason; for example 'limiting new construction' in California might be down to say, lack of extra water, physical space, infrastructure etc to support more homes, while the 'Green Belt' around major UK cities was put in there to stop 'infinite suburban sprawl' which would have resulted in London becoming the size of Delaware and threatening to join up with Birmingham and then Manchester. It's more a case of reviewing regulations to see if they are still fit for purpose. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:58, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

i implore you all to do some reading and research before putting words in my mouth or repeating things you don't really understand. the reason we have a housing crisis is simple: the supply does not meet demand. even though my experiment with free-market libertarianism ended long ago (in the last decade), i still view some regulations as very harmful. karma, maybe it's different on the other side of the pond, but here in the states, the supply of housing is artificially restricted because of zoning policies (some of which were written in the era of racial segregation) — policies such as minimum parking requirements (which waste a lot of space and jack up prices unnecessarily due to maintenance costs), exclusive zoning for detached single family homes, banning the construction of missing middle housing, separating commercial districts from residential zones, limiting public transportation in favor of the automobile, and a host of other rather arbitrary rules that developers have to follow. cities the us and canada (and maybe even australia) are burdened with bad urban planning regulations, which contribute to the affordability crisis and even climate change (because making everyone burn fuel to drive their car around — to say nothing of all the land that needs to be destroyed and paved over for all those roads and parking lots — isn't exactly good for the environment).

sure, there's a need for some zoning laws (e.g., to separate polluting industrial centers from residential areas), but a lot of them are very useless. it's time to face the fact that some regulations, especially the ones mentioned above, do far more harm than good. most cities in europe and asia do just well without such frivolous regulations. in fact, most cities that have ever existed prior to ca 1945 relied on organic growth and development — even many american cities. barring pollution and poor sanitation, they were much more livable that way. reconsidering these stupid laws is the first step in solving the housing crisis (and stopping predatory landlords and corporations from cashing in). The G (talk) 00:35, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

A lot of jurisdictions will also ban or restrict the building of affordable housing while being all for the building of luxury flats. That said, while removing some regulations is probably a good idea, what do you with the regulations that prevent expansion of housing for a good reason, like Karma pointed out, and you ignored? It doesn't matter how much housing you build if there's not enough water. Do we also really want excessive urban sprawl? That's really what you're suggesting, that we should let cities expand organically with no planning in mind. Carthage (talk) 01:44, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

even in the most sprawling cities, there's demand for higher density housing. the problem is that corrupt politicians and red tape get in the way. the only people who benefit from the red tape i mentioned above are the mega-corporations and the large developers who can afford to absorb those costs, as the mom-and-pops typically can't, for instance, afford to buy up extra land and bulldoze it to make room for minimum parking requirements. this creates a never-ending cycle of large developers supporting politicians who enact policies favorable to them (as in the article i linked).

all the policies i listed (that should be removed) promote sprawl, even though there is significant demand for dense, walkable infrastructure (if the high property value and housing costs in the relatively few 15-minute cities in the states don't tell you anything). sprawling infrastructure is considerably more resource intensive than high(er)-density development. ironically, you don't typically hear market libertarians promoting this kind of deregulation of urban planning (likely because they're in bed with big oil); it's usually people from the political left who promote this. The G (talk) 02:04, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Except 'repeal regulations!' is the shitty stock answer from ideological free-marketeers, G and you know it. And sometimes, different countries can provide 'how not to do it' examples; you bitch about 'minimum parking requirements' and I in return can show you the parked-car clogged streets in British 'burbs on why those requirements are needed. Which factors into part of the solution; that sometimes, demand needs to be 'managed' away, not simply catered to indefinitely. The free market to some extent does this already; that when prices are high, consumers have to comprimise to what attributes they desire.

We also need to factor economics into this; America might partly end up with shit, low-density single-family homes because they are the most profitable. I know enough about building to explain this; single-story buildings require less foundations, wood panels and drywall is cheap as fuck compared to brick, can be assembled by lower-skilled workers and requires less labour-hours to do so. But again, there sometimes there will be 'method in the madness'; low density means 'more firebreaks', wood construction means 'less likely to be crushed to death in earthquake' and who cares of a building's limited life-span if chances are some form of natural disaster will fell it before it falls apart?

There's also the spectre of 'path dependence'. The above houses sell because that's what's available, leading to the conclusion that they are what's popular, and therefore more are built [aided by the fact homebuilders don't want to take risks in putting up something they fear Will Not Sell]. The consumers themselves may believe that 'they need' to live in that kind of property and/or get pressured by others - such as bringing up kids by choice in a terraced house or a flat [rather than 'a proper house' in the outer 'burbs like everyone else]. Certain assumptions creep in too; for example the general suburbanite might come to believe having a 'walkability' rating of zero is normal and that wanting otherwise marks you out as some kind of eccentric.

There's also the fact that 'suburban densification' has been going on for decades in places like the UK and coastal/metro USA. Just 'free-market style'; ie shrink the plot size for the same sized house; something seen in episodes of 'McMansion Hell'. Well, you got your wish, didn't you? But the estates they're on are still shit, often because the local government either is unwilling or unable to put in stuff like parks, schools etc to make it 'walkable' and even if they do try to make 'neighbourhood clusters' it doesn't work because folks are conditioned to drive everywhere [or these days, have it all delivered] and the government often doesn't bother in trying to nurture these places. Later suburban infilling poses it's own challenges, most obviously uprating the infrastructure.

This is why I don't believe in your conspiracy theory that it's mainly 'corrupt politicians' and red tape stopping these developments. I put it down to more to cultural norms, path dependence, confirmation biases, lack of political foresight [sometimes due to a ideological hatred of 'planning'], local NIMBYism and the dominance of housebuilding being done for for-profit orgs with little motivation to change and zero to really consider long-term livability of the estates they build. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:38, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

It's funny that Miami Florida was picked as the case study. While I don't doubt the impact of corruption and red tape (especially in Miami)... Florida is an interesting case study in "what to regulate, what not to regulate". Florida, pretty obviously, has "interesting challenges" for the future. One, the fact that hurricanes are quite common, is already reflected in most building codes. The other one... climate change... isn't. Already, around where I live, the most flood prone neighborhood, Shore Acres, has gone to "it floods during a really bad storm" to "it floods at high tide" over the last 40 years, in part due to the sea level rise (an estimated 6 inches in the last 15 years, for some reason the Gulf of Mexico sea level is rising faster than most places) that climate change has brought. It's only going to get worse.

While Ron DeSantis may be sticking his head in the sand, some local governments do know the above already. As do insurance companies (who have either mostly pulled out of Florida, or made home insurance rates insane). Honestly, the above issues have been known for the last couple decades if not longer. So, from my perspective, there are two ways one could have tackle these sort of problems. One is to use some sensible regulations to help address the problem beforehand (which has largely happened for hurricane codes, though sometimes it has taken a hurricane to drive that point, as Hurricane Michael did for the Panhandle area). It's more expensive to make houses that can stand 100mph+ winds, but it's better then having someone's life upended and having their house destroyed by a mere storm. (And of course, insurance companies might actually be willing to... you know... insure this sort of home.) The other is to simply let the "free market" take its course... which has benefits in many other areas... but when 1 in 4 of this nation don't even "believe" in climate change, it's bound to piss some people off along the way because they didn't fully research the house they bought. I've lived in the Tampa area long enough to avoid buying a Shore Acres home... transplants aren't so lucky. After Hurricane Idalia seriously flooded that neighborhood even though the area hardly got the worst of the storm (the eye was well offshore), there's a lot of pissed off people there and in other locales with similar flooding issues... and a lot of 'for sale' signs. Buyer beware, I suppose? A good question in my mind... BobJohnson (talk) 19:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

karma, you're so close to getting it. so close.

i don't know why people here keep strawmanning that i support repealing any and all regulations when i clearly stated which ones need to go in order to address the housing in the united states (and canada; do note that these aren't universal solutions, and that ymmv if you live in another country). you know it's a problem when (1) there are minimum parking requirements but no minimum housing requirements, and (2) they result in parking lots that take up whole football fields (here's just one example of a random parking lot in nashville; this isn't even one of the larger parking lots i've seen). now, i can see a need for minimum parking in some instances, but most parking minimums in the us and canada are subjective, which results in large swaths of land being paved over for parking lots that seldom reach even 50% capacity at their peak. that's land that can be used to build more homes and/or businesses, instead. what's worse is that doing that costs money, and those costs often get passed down to the consumer — even when the parking is free (via hidden fees) — regardless of whether someone actually uses that parking lot. even rent goes up because of excessive parking spaces (again, regardless of whether you own a car).

and this is just one regulation that screws with housing supply here in north america. i haven't even gotten to the problems with euclidean zoning (which is one reason why most american metropolitan areas require a car just to get around in a reasonable amount of time), and how the idea was originally conceived to promote racial and class segregation (and still is, to an extent); nor have i gotten to any other regulations such as height restrictions and the missing middle (that serve no other useful purpose than to constrain housing supply). so why do we have all this if we know they're objectively bad for our cities? thank the nimbys. edit: so, in my previous post, i said that only developers and mega corporations benefit from these regulations. i was wrong (kind of). it's the nimbys who benefit from these more than anybody else, while large developers can more readily absorb the costs.

anyway, this is a lot to fit into one discussion post, so if you wish to learn more, there are entire youtube channels (and organizations dedicated to this topic. if your time is short, this video summarizes things pretty well. The G (talk) 00:18, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

My point was that as 'repeal regulations' has become a stock line for the market extremists, so it's best to avoid using that line otherwise. If you use their talking-points, you cannot hugely bitch about folks mistaking you as a strawman [though I have not].

What you're describing re: parking is not really 'repeal' but more 'reform'; often regs can be decades old and based on assumptions on 'how people live' which no longer apply [or perhaps never did]. But the parking issue is something which is seen in the UK [but in a totally different way]; here there is the 'out of town' big-box stores and supermarkets with their acres of 'free parking' which tempts car-bound shoppers because they don't want to have to pay £2 or so for the car park in the town centre. The moral of the story being; hidden costs decieve many, exp when it's difficult to actually compute how much said costs would have been if paid by the consumer directly - part of the high parking costs was due to it being in the town centre [and thus more valuable land] than the out-of-town location [which is likely to have little to no possibility of other use].

Ultimately, I think the crux of the issue is not 'regulations' per se but the fact the Anglosphere has [as a rule] left it to the free market to plan and build since the 1980s. And they don't do the former much, because there's normally no money in doing it [though you might occasionally find a high-end homebuilder doing it as it's the 'mark of high-spec homes']. At least here in the UK, the provision of services/ housing is done arse-over-tit; as in the housing is normally thrown up first and then later [sometimes much later] do they even start to think about service provision - which half the time ends up not being done at all because the new community has fallen into a style of living which is minus them, which is very car-dependent, coupled with the simple fact retrofitting even simple improvements can be prohibitively expensive [example; I live on an estate built in the 10s, off an estate built in the 80s. If the 10s homebuilder had given a fuck and put in a public pathway between the two 'backs' the walking trip from my home to the local primary school / shops would be 10 mins rather than 25].

Yes, this sort of thing wasn't needed before the advent of the auto age but the issue is, well we are in the auto age and like our shitty diets, the 'default option' has become so shit active measures are required [though I also think there's a tendency to forget the original 'push reasons' for folks going to the suburbs themselves; for example getting away from all the 'old-fashioned' urban areas with zero parking provision, properties unsuitable for 'modern' life, surrounded by the pollution and less privacy]. Which is where regulations have their place. It's a legal manner to make builders 'give a fuck' about stuff which isn't their bottom line for once - for example, here in the UK new estates built since 2003 have to include 'sustainable drainage systems' aka detention basins/ ditches so there's less flash flooding. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:57, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Our World in Data

That link honestly belongs in the clogosphere. The problem is that it defines "poverty" as making less than $2.15 a day, as if that is a reasonable amount to live on. Under that definition, a country like Argentina has essentially a 0% poverty rate, which is ridiculous. Plutocow (talk) 20:03, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

poverty is relative. some extreme or abject poverty definitions are a lot lower than $2.15. one should look at poverty within the context of the specific nations for nation specific poverty rates. argentina probably has zero poverty by such definitions of extreme poverty. challenges for its impoverished are probably less extreme than those faced by the impoverished in gaza, but that doesnt help them none. poverty still exists even if its not of the most extreme variety. it doesnt make sense to compare such places to literally some of the worst poverty on this planet unless they are falling to comparable levels.

the wigo is dumb not because it has a particular metric of poverty but because while china did drastically reduce its extreme poverty rate while the the rest of the world did also, its an inane refutation of an inane claim seemingly in response to someones arguments elsewhere on the internet no one really needs to hear about. its doesnt even merit a clog. AMassiveGay (talk) 16:35, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

A little quibble

“”Price rises in these products for consumers in rich countries at the end of the supply chain are minor inconveniences. Coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate between them make up comfortably less than 1 per cent of the consumer price basket in the UK, for example. Sharp price rises in those products last year didn’t stop overall British consumer price inflation going down — as indeed it has in the US, where consumer food price inflation is now below the overall rate.

As usual, this ignores the human element. You can bet your ass off there will be mass shootings if people don't get their coffee. We live in a high stress world, and many people need coffee just to make it through their bullshit job.

Look at how people reacted to such a minor inconvenience as wearing a mask during a literal apocalypse plague. You think people won't riot over coffee being more expensive and/or scarce? That's absurd. Carthage (talk) 22:44, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

This isn't hard to grasp, the answer is in your quote. If that was the case, then people would spend more on coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate than 1 per cent their income (see budget constraint, consumer choice, substitution effect, Slutsky equation and monotone preferences). Also comparing wearing masks with this sounds ridiculous to me since as far as I'm aware people just opposed to them because of propaganda. If people will "'riot over coffee being more expensive and/or scarce", where are the riots? I am a coffee addict (kind of) and I haven't seen any. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 22:59, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

How much stress are you in? Minor inconveniences add up. Do you seriously think that, if, say someone who's already armed, is in a lot of stress, is in a society experiencing severe challenges, say that it's a record heatwave outside and people are dropping dead from heatstroke, you think that person wouldn't snap under that pressure? Carthage (talk) 23:02, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I don't doubt they add up. But has the rise of the price of coffee resulted in such stress? I'm not saying that this isn't possible, just that we don't have evidence that this happened. I think the that the best way to see if this issue actually affected the lives if to see if coffee now represents more of average price basket than it used to. Since, along with tea, cocoa and chocolate, it represents, according to the FT post, less than one per cent of the their price basket in the UK, I doubt this is a major issue for most people. Another way to test this hypothesis is to see if there were riots, as you suggested yourself. In 2022, when global supply chains were disrupted, we did have riots (Wikipedias has a list of them [5]). I'm not aware of any riot that was caused by the rising price of caffeine, but even if I'm wrong, I doubt that disrupting global trade would make prices go down. If you want my opinion, the price of olive oil is far more concerning[6] and the most serious omission on the article, especially considering that it's possible that prices won't go down due to the effects of climate change in Spain. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 23:42, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Maybe not right now? But in the future? The climate's only gonna get worse. Labor rights here in the US at the very least seem to be getting worse. The rich only keep getting richer. There are more mass shootings every year. Democracy is on a backslide. All of that is pretty stressful. Stress, plus guns? That's a recipe for disaster already. I don't see it getting better in the near future. Carthage (talk) 00:56, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

I call this the 'Falling Down' effect; that a small shitty thing [refusal for change for the payphone] tips someone over the edge into doing something major [wrecking the shop with a bat]. It's one of the reasons why poorer people have more stressful lives; that their poverty means they've got more 'small shitty things' on their backs constantly - stresses about being cold, poorly nourished, in ill-fitting clothing, bad feet due to worn-out shoes etc. While I agree with Gee that shortages of coffee alone is hardly going to cause disorders, if it was a part of a backdrop of general privation where everything seems to be such a fucking chore to achieve [and success is doubtful at best] and they are aware of 'better times' you will end up with a population who are pretty short-tempered - even more so if it's a society where some are still enjoying that SoL. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:56, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Coffee production is being negatively affected by climate change: [7] Carthage (talk) 08:44, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Political lesbianism

Has anyone noticed?

Maybe the post should read "NPR reports some people on social media are talking about political lesbianism over the last few days". London Grump (talk) 20:42, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't be so flippant. The existence of phenomena like the alt-right shows that what happens on social media can have very real consequences for meatspace politics. Carthage (talk) 20:50, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

There is little comparison between the well organised, billionaire and autocrat funded, alt right and a grass roots progressive movement. Taking an optimistic stand, let's report it when it actually happens. Until then, let's avoid hyperbole. This is RATIONALwiki. London Grump (talk) 10:06, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Newton's Third Law as applied to politics/culture - 'every action shall have an opposite and equal reaction'. Just like a group of men have become convinced that 'most women' are manipulative, cock-teasing shrill bitches who simply want to use you, a group of women can become equally convinced that 'most men' are violent, bigoted fuckwits who can't ever think of a woman as being anything approaching an equal. In some respect they get high off each other, as they use the other's mere existence as 'proof' for their fuckwit views.

I'll add the 'Camus Corollary' to this also; 'the slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown'. There has always [esp in British second-gen feminism of the Greer stamp] been a distinctly misandric tone to their views - 'all men are rapists' etc - to the point they end up orbiting somewhere close to Female supremacy [this is why so many of them are TERFs; they cannot compute even the possibility that 'a man' would want to 'become a woman' which wasn't sexual in motivation].

And yes, we have to remember that online is a partial mirror of 'actual society'. And they influence each other. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:42, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Newton's doing some heavy lifting there. Apparently there's been a 450% spike in discussions of 4B online. What's 450% of not a lot?

Point zero of 4B is the 5th century BC: Aristophanes' Lysistrata. One of my best friends was a political lesbian back in the 1980s (and yes, there was a definite misandric element to her thinking. She shifted because she missed het sex.). It's 2024, the age of the individual. The idea is unlikely to snowball on social media, with its targeted segmentation, where it failed to gained traction in more collective times.

I could be wrong. But let's report the comeback when it happens. London Grump (talk) 10:06, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, this stuff isn't going to get half as far as the manosphere crap because there's currently not a lot of money behind it but never say never - as Orwell noted, Christianity was once a tiny fringe religion and the Nazi party had about 20 members when Hitler joined it [which I extend to noting that a lifestyle of vegetarianism, no booze/smokes and frequent trips to the gym was in Orwell's day to be the signs of a crank]. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:42, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

At present, the other Wiki estimated that the number of participants numbered, at most, 4000. (Though this estimate was from 2019, I bet the movement is still tiny.)

One of the things that is becoming more obvious in American politics (should've seen this after Gamergate I suppose) is that, in a more diversified America, tilts to the manosphere are one of the ways the Republicans are replacing / enhancing the Southern Strategy of getting the rubes to vote against their own economic interest. Hence the ruling class is very much into keeping the manosphere smoke-and-mirrors going. This mirrors South Korea at least to some extent; politicians like Yoon Suk Yeol leaned on anti-feminism in order to get into office. (That being said, I'm not familiar enough with South Korea politics to know if there's quite the same dynamic, e.g. if the People Power Party is in reality the political party of the authoritarian capitalism leaning corporatists, like the Republicans are. Wouldn't be surprised though.)

"Never say never" but, many of the radical second wave feminists ended up finding an Other to occupy their time and thus became TERFs, of whom ironically are half-aligned with the alt-right these days. And the Wiki article on the 4B movement notes that the radical South Koreans in that movement there tend to *also* be transphobic and homophobic. It's hard to be an effective opposition movement if you half agree with your "enemy". BobJohnson (talk) 14:53, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Trump's Mass Deportations...

@Carthage. Not happy that the desc for the last link is like 25% of my PC screen, hate to think how much screen-space it takes up on a phone. If you don't condense said description to say, half or less of current, chances are I will do that cutting when I'm a bit less pissed. Pretty please? KarmaPolice (talk) 22:45, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

That Times article

That is a normal, conventional political message. Trump’s ads attacking Harris’s past support for taxpayer-funded transition surgery for people in prison and immigration detention were also an appeal to the mainstream, an effort to label Harris as extreme.

It's hell-world where bigoted spew can be described as an "appeal to the mainstream." A "normal, conventional political message." The guy who wrote this piece, David French, is an self-confessed homophobe according to his Wikipedia article. Why are we platforming this clown? This should be in clogs, not blogs. Carthage (talk) 13:16, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I didn't know that he was a homophobe. I still liked the article, but I'll remove it from the page then. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 13:34, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. We all make errors. I know I've added a few shitty WIGOs. Carthage (talk) 13:37, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, apparently the guy used to write for National Review before going to the NYT last year. Hiring this guy was just more MSM centrist stupidity. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 13:47, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Alas, 'opposing taxpaper-funded transition surgery' very well could be 'mainstream opinion' in America right now, if the polling I've seen is correct - I'd define it as somewhere around 'cool tolerance' because they showed that while they were okay[ish] with private transitions and not actually harassing trans folks they weren't okay with them actually having to do anything, and 'paying more taxes for it' would cross that line. Which bodes well in Sarah McBride's ability to use the ladies when she rocks up at Congress next year, bad for that trans person currently 'in flux' and the whispers at work say said flux and 35% monthly premium increases are directly related.

Plus, as factcheck points out Harris did support this. This is actually kinda rare that something the Orange One actually said did have basis in fact. But as factcheck notes, is utterly missing all context and details, such as how many trans people actually exist. While I don't have stats, I bet the vast majority of 'trans costs' in prisons and deportation camps are in fact the supplying of hormones to people who went into there already on them. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:30, 21 November 2024 (UTC)