Sounds like any post-secondary, graduate student, or management consultant out there being there are, very often, page/word count or hours requirements. Considering the model corpora, wordiness wins out.
TL;DR: this is all fucking bullshit and the entire system needs to be scrapped as its been optimized to increase the number of stops, not correct wrong-doing.
Summary:
1. WhatsApp chat group alerts sheriff's deputies in Texas (known as the interdiction group) as to 'target' vehicles based on their travel history as collected by traffic camera/license plate readers (LPRs).
2. Stops from the 'interdiction group' have gone up over two years w/suspicious reasoning for stops, based largely on the myriad of reasons Texas law enforcement officers (LEOs) are free to stop vehicles. The results of these increased N in searches have resulted in fewer (percentage) of findings of wrong-doing.
3. Dashcam footage from the citizen stopped counters the LEO's claims that he went over the fogline several times. Bodycam footage of the later search show no evidence to support drugs that were supposedly indicated on by the K9 unit dispatched. Said K9's reward system has allegedly been altered by its handler to alert for reward, not for the presence of drugs.
4. Fictitious reasoning for stops are glossed over with a 'warning' or no-action which appeases most. This particular person sued, even though they were free to go, and it started a chain of events which uncovered the wrong-doing by LEOs.
5. This is all security theatre, at the expense of the citizenry.
Fun fact - there is a national register that PDs can use to track officers who have been terminated elsewhere, or resigned in order to avoid termination.
Additional fun fact - a huge swathe of Police Union Collective Bargaining Agreements forbid the use of this register in hiring decisions...
Less popular because it’s not feasible for many. I live in MN. Biking 20mi to work when it’s -10F and in 6” of fresh snow on top of the 12” received so far this season just isn’t something that’s safe to do.
Please don’t make it seem like it’s a “popularity” thing; it’s a necessity thing.
Finland is a cold country with similar population count and larger area. For national domestic trips, 55% of people there use cars[1]. For MN i only found stats for MN metro area, but I’d expect public transport to be more developed there. The car usage is still 83%[2].
I bet the local community plows the roads but not the bike infrastructure, though? I get why, people probably drive more than bike.
But, in Canada, there are local communities that plow bike infrastructure and locals bike in their deep winter.
It's a chicken or egg problem of building infrastructure for users and users demanding infrastructure. It's not some fact of nature that it's impossible. Different communities have different priorities. So, necessity is a bit strong of a word.
Hardly anyone lives in MN - half the poulation of New York City alone.
The vast majority of Americans live in cities. Half live in just 8 metro-areas, just as the vast majority of Europeans live in cities. Europe is far more dispersed though.
I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my interest further, I would dig into the actual article.
I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR.
I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
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For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what anyone else wants.
Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
> I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly.
My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
> I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it becomes a self-solving problem.
I echo the parents sentiment - I don’t need to be there for a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no.
My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made, and if I can’t delegate that then I need to go myself. Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail but 95% of the time making my priorities clear to my team and being consistent in my them has the correct outcome.
This can lead to weird dynamics. A lot of workplaces, no one seems to have direct power (or incentive!) to say "yes" to anything but lots of people (including 3 teams you weren't even aware existed) are able to "provide feedback" or say no.
This leads to all progress being achieved very slowly if at all, or by using the element of surprise and then seeking forgiveness.
While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irreversible, and everything will almost always work out in the end despite how it feels at the time -- but letting people fail, then making them clean up after themselves, is possibly the absolute best teaching method out there.
I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do this without me there.
Blindly allowing someone to make a bad call without questioning it is as bad as overruling their call without any explanation!
> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
If you are the one responsible for the work to fix something, you need to be the one driving the meetings or pushing alternative communication.
This is why all of the generic “just say no to meetings” advice is useless: It’s all dependent on the context. You can’t just decline meetings from your boss’s boss without good reason, for example.
A lot of snarky internet advice about saying “no” at the office is just people venting or doing imaginary role play. In a real office you have to push for communication, pull details out of people, identify who you need to report to and who you can safely decline.
If you get in a situation where you’re declining meetings and the responsibility for content of that meeting lands in your lap, you have made a severe misjudgment. These things are easy to clarify with a little proactive communication, but you get nowhere if you just say “no” or send off a singular “agenda plz” email and then forget about it. People are busy. You have to push and make it clear what you need from them, following up if it doesn’t come.
I’m not sure if this is more bad advice, but it seems like we’d all be better off if people just shared their experiences, rather than trying to proscribe them for others: you telling me to decline meetings is worthless, but you describing how you did, and what the effects were has value.
> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.
As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your image to promo panels.
If you’re just a junior engineer, it’s not like it will be held against you, but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs.
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.
Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.
> Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message.
If you have a good manager you can often CC them or quote them in your response as well "Sorry, I'm busy with project work and Sarah wants me to stay focused to hit our deadlines. If we're going to need to budget time outside of it I'll need a clear agenda to offer as a rationale to my stakeholders."
I think it really helps to sell this if you've got casual impromptu voice calls as a norm in the company. If it was really just a quick thing then throw up a hangout for us to chat - if it's worth scheduling a meeting for it's certainly worth actually putting together an agenda.
As an aside - my company recentlyish switched from google to ms for calendar management and (among many things MS is terrible at) the fact that agendas aren't immediately visible in meetings on your calendar is the absolute worst UX decision.
> My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
But the thing is, in big companies, you can keep climbing all your life and never reach that level. You can be a VP and it still doesn't matter, because you're one of several hundred VPs in a company that values lawsuit-proof consistency over giving executives infinite latitude. You're still dealing with the same spreadsheets, processes, and meetings as everyone else. At best, you might be able to send your minions to some, but that doesn't solve the issue, it just messes up someone else's day.
In a company of several hundred people, on the other hand, you don't really need to climb far because relatively little is set in stone. So to folks who are at Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, and who're waiting for the day when they're finally free to say "no" to overhead, I have bad news.
I’m a Senior Director. I can and do say no. But, let me tell you, it doesn’t go over well—especially for declining meetings.
Sure; they can go to my boss and he’ll largely cover, but it’s still not enough. I imagine unless you’re the CEO/equiv, this isn’t a thing you can do without fallout.
Worked at Sonos for several years. Was an IC4. My boss empowered me to say no to meetings whenever I wanted, and she was a new manager!
Sometimes all it takes is someone with a tiny bit of courage.
Literally nobody but people who want to waste their time and not do work or PMs who don’t know how to communicate want to have all these meetings.
I zealously avoid meetings and now that I’m a team lead at my new job, I’ll be encouraging my team to do the same and covering their asses when needed.
I assume this works nice to get you out of any meeting they didn't want you to attend, but couldn't just remove you from.
If they plan to move resources out of your team but need highers approval, having a meeting that you refused to attend sounds like a good first step. You might be there on the next one, but the terrain is already prepared. And as it's a sensitive subject, a vague agenda would also be natural enough.
"Go to every meeting that has a vague agenda just in case it's the one where they talk about their plan to downsize your team" is not a good strategy. (And probably by the time it's come to a meeting that you're invited to there's already nothing you can do)
Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_ annoying.
Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
Yeah, in my experience "attending" a meeting is almost never a choice. I think a better slide title would have been "Scheduling a meeting is a choice". I see so many meetings are created (with a default time slot of 30 minutes), for what could have been a 5 or 10 minute phone call or even just a quick email.
Yea like having 20 people on a project update call may be a poor of their time, but for boss man it's a great use - everyone he needs in the same room! Don't need to chase anyone down and someone can chime in if something inaccurate is said
Way too much upside for this kind of "low value" meeting to disappear
> Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice;
I am pretty aggressive about declining meetings and protecting my time. And I still agree to what you say. No matter how you structure meetings, there’s always a chance that items unrelated to the agenda are discussed, decisions are made when they’re not supposed to be made, incorrect information is conveyed or misunderstandings are not addressed. Unfortunate reality of corporate world is that you’re more likely to ask yourself be included than you decline meetings.
This of course doesn’t even touch the performative parts of corporate bs where “yOu NEeD tO Be MOrE ViSIblE”
- regular reports sent to all stakeholders with relevant detail
- videos that demonstrate important features that folks can watch on their own time
- scheduling small, focused meetings with the most important stakeholders so they can actually get what they need
It doesn’t look like going to meetings and never talking, or worse, going to meetings and blathering on so someone knows you were there.
Interestingly, both of your points could be addressed by adopting a company-wide policy: if a meeting has no agenda attached, it is optional to join. Or, in short, "no agenda - no attenda."
> "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
It is completely valid to say "no" to meeting in our company. Not to all of them, but to most. Or to ask "Do I have to be here? Why was I invited, it seems out of my scope" and move from there. I see people doing that and I was doing that.
> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
Because meetings have become part of the job for many office workers, I'd say the majority of them, they (the meetings) are not sees as a means to an end anymore (as in "we hold this meeting in order to solve a specific problem"), and I'm not even sure that that hasn't always been the case, meetings are seen as a mainstay of holding an office-job, as means in themselves: "We go to (office) work so it's only natural that we'll hold meetings".
> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
One approach that I've seen work is start the meeting by having everybody read a document (see https://www.sixpagermemo.com). It's fresh on everybody's mind, and everybody just read the same content.
We do so much on slack I can safely ignore email at work and just look at meeting notes on Google calendar. I would expect that to include these notes but I’m not sure. Also I agree people won’t read them anyway.
That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.
I’ve had multiple managers over many jobs who’ve said they were on board with this. I’ve had CEOs saying from the top down “decline meetings without an agenda”, and yet somehow it never changes.
I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.
Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.
Intel in the 90s-2000s did. I did customer research on them (worked on powerpoint at the time). I was amazed that the CEO gave a mandate to the company that if an agenda was not posted to a meeting 24H before the meeting, you did not have to attend that meeting. They also had other crazy strict meeting rules that I forgot.
> There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.
Exactly. Love the deck. Like you, agree with many things.
My similar suggestions (but a little looser):
1. Long meetings need agendas. But don't expect perfection. You can get away with no agenda in a short (30 or less) meeting.
2. Very large meetings need a DRIVER (person). I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no. I don't want free-form conversation in a large meeting. I want someone to drive the hell out of the meeting. Keep people in check!
Most important:
3. Do what you can to discover the underlying motivation of the meeting organizer and solve their motivation some other way. Recently sat through a disastrous JIRA-focused meeting. Talking about tickets, their purpose, their descriptions, etc. But I knew the person needed the data for executive-team reporting. So I offered to help fill in gaps (without a call) to improve their reporting. I saved myself future time, he got better reporting - a win.
Constant and outright decline behavior will probably backfire.
I don't think most folks are both interested and trying to sit in mindless meetings (like my JIRA example).
That JIRA example is particularly annoying. It's a product team (with an external consultant) using JIRA to track progress. But like anything with a reporting component, people are now optimizing toward what's reported - not toward real work. Success in a week (or sprint) is number of tickets closed not whether anything actually happened.
I declined several of these JIRA update meetings. At least two invites popped onto my calendar as agenda-less hour-long blocks.
Then I joined one, asked all the questions around purpose, and suggested what I would do to help with less overall effort and a reduction in pesky meeting invites.
> I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no.
This makes the meeting end really quick when nobody has anything to discuss right? For some people the only way you are ever going to get them to bring something up is by asking in a meeting.
I support the idea of bringing something to table. Instead maybe ask for simple 1-sentence ideas over email (or chat/etc.) in advance and then you use those as the driver of the meeting.
In a functional organization, it's almost certainly going to be absurd to argue that you can't provide value to any of the meetings that you are invited to.
I can provide value to any meeting that I’m invited to. That doesn’t mean it’s the most valuable thing I can do with my time (especially given how tragically frustrating most of them are).
The context I'm pulling in is by the caps in the comment I initially replied to, would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING. Note the caps.
As far as the GP, what I'm getting at is that they are tediously nitpicking my phrasing rather than addressing my point. If there are some meetings that make sense to spend your time on, (in the context of my comment) what the fuck does it matter if there are also some that it doesn't.
If they think they have never spent their time well on a meeting, an explication of that would be more interesting than saying that they can find better things to do than attend some meetings.
> wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines
Well yes, if the culture doesn't allow it then it's not going to happen. That doesn't mean those cultures don't exist or that they can't be created, even if just in a pocket
I’m interested to see what this does to rents overall. I assume these will not be as affordable as everyone would like/assume, at least not in the next few years, and will drive up rents in larger spaces.
But I’m glad we’re trying SOMETHING in order to combat the problems with affordability; let’s just hope we don’t even up reviving how the other half lives.
Why would they drive up the rents in larger spaces? At least part of the demand in larger spaces is from roommates who would prefer to live alone, some of them might decamp for options like these, or studios and one bedroom apartments, etc., if they are available.
As with all types of housing, there is no one type of housing that solves the problem. Whether we live under capitalism or socialism, the only way we solve housing is when everyone who wants to live in New York, can, everyone who wants to live in Kansas, can, everyone who wants to live in Fort Myers, can.
With markets, a shortage results in high prices and rates. Without markets a shortage results in long waitlists. There’s no way out, without quantity.
If we want people to live in large indoor spaces, and not SROs, we can’t get there in 99% of our land use regime is focussed on limiting the total amount of floor space that is allowed to exist within a given area. Legalizing SROs is insufficient, but necessary, just like legalizing larger apartment buildings in more places, abolishing single-family zoning, etc.
I think the whole problem is that global market access plus nearly limitless product replication (software, media) has resulted in extreme differences in money availability for different subsets of the population. So we have some people who can buy many properties, and some people who can’t buy a single property. This low level of product sales friction and reach hasn’t really happened before in human history, and I’m not sure classical free market economic theory accounts for it. Back in the day there were only so many boats/shoes/whatever one company could physically sell.
Continuing to grow the population under these conditions doesn’t help either.
If this was true, it would be true of other durable goods like appliances and cars. But people with lots of money know that investing in appliances and cars is pointless because millions of new ones are created constantly. There is no scarcity to benefit from as an asset owner.
Unfortunately, in North America and other Anglosphere countries, we have decided that a scarcity in residential floor space is a public good and our planning rules tend to create such scarcity and enforce it. This allows incumbent homeowners to profit, and they fight for vociferously to protect that profit. Of course, if a company also invests in residential floor space they can also profit, but it’s not clear why we are so concerned with who profits, rather than the fact that we are enforcing the scarcity that produces the profits.
Land is fundamentally scarce, though, unlike other durable goods, so what you say does not follow. And by land, I mean land situated near geographically and/or economically useful areas. To make land like other durable goods, you need to convince people to treat all land equally, which is against human instinct (ie good luck with that).
This doesn’t mean nothing should be done and things are great, but if we mischaracterize a problem we have little hope of solving it.
Land is scarce, but we are making residential floor space far more scarce than it needs to be through restrictive planning laws. Simplifying it a little but, say all 20M people in the greater New York area want to live in Manhattan, which has a population of about 1.7M. That means that people will bid up the price of housing until only the top 1.7/20=8.5% of people can afford it. We can pack manhattan full of sky scrapers and get a lot more people in there.
On affordable housing: there’s no such thing. There are enough millionaires around that will live in a 600sqft apartment if it gives them the lifestyle they want.
In fact, it might blow your mind to know that building luxury accommodation actually lowers house prices as well as affordable housing, because wealthy people have to live somewhere, and if all that’s available is mid-range housing then they’ll live in that. That will push the middle into the lower income housing, pushing the lower income people out of the city.
Additionally, if you only build cheap housing to make it affordable, you end up with a city of cheap housing. If you build a ton of luxury housing, then in a few decades you have a ton of older high quality housing coming into the more affordable range as “luxury” buyers follow the new luxury construction around.
People do not live in land, they live in floorspace.
Of course well located land is special and will never behave like a durable good. But whether there exist 250 sqft of livable residential floorspace or 250,000 sqft of livable floorspace on that land is at the moment, an entirely political decision that we can reverse at any time.
There's basically no evidence that big companies own enough property to matter in the market. Even if every individual unit was owned by a different person, you'd see exactly the same outcomes we do today.
Because the law of unintended consequences is always at play in the public sector. In this case, the threat of too much regulation will kneecap the governments ability to eliminate the cost structures that will end up happening because of the drive for increased revenue per sqft.
The core reason SROs threaten larger spaces is that landlords can often extract more total rent from a single apartment by chopping it into pieces than by renting it as a whole.
Hypothetically: A landlord rents a 1,000 sq. ft. 3-bedroom apartment to a family for $4,500/month.
In order to extract more value, the landlord converts that same space into 4 separate SRO rooms with a shared kitchen. Even if they charge a "cheaper" rent of $1,500/room, the total rent roll becomes $6,000/month.
The Result: the SRO format is more profitable ($6,000 vs. $4,500). If landlords can legally choose between the two, they will naturally favor creating SROs over family-sized units.
Then there’s the potential for cannibalization of supply:
If SROs become the most profitable way to use residential space, the market may see a "cannibalization" of family housing.
Landlords of market-rate buildings may subdivide existing large apartments into SROs to capture the higher yield.
Seeing this, developers then planning new buildings will design them with fewer large family units and more micro-units/SROs to maximize revenue.
This reduces the supply of 2- and 3-bedroom apartments. If the supply of family units drops while the number of families needing them stays the same, the price for the remaining large units goes up.
This will then potentially lead to increased land value as real estate prices are determined by the potential revenue a property can generate.
If a plot of land can now legally host a high-yield SRO building (generating $100/sq. ft. in revenue), the value of that land rises.
A developer who wants to build a standard family apartment building (generating only $60/sq. ft.) can no longer afford to buy that land because they will be outbid by the SRO developer.
To compete, the family-building developer must raise their projected rents to justify the higher land price. This raises the "price floor" for everyone.
> The Result: the SRO format is more profitable ($6,000 vs. $4,500). If landlords can legally choose between the two, they will naturally favor creating SROs over family-sized units.
Yes, this is the whole point! And the reason it's more profitable is that there is pent-up demand for them. There aren't enough of them. We want them to be more profitable, so more are built/converted.
Here's the thing, though -- that's a temporary situation. As supply goes up, demand gets met. Once enough are built/converted, the price comes down, and an equilibrium is reached where a landlord will make the same profit whether it's a 3-bedroom or 4 SRO's. This means the market is now maximally efficient for both types of tenants.
In a free market, the most efficient balance of apartment types will naturally come into being. By prohibiting smaller units, we prevent that balance and discriminate against people who can't afford a full-size studio with bathroom.
So it's not cannibalization of family housing. It's just reducing the proportion of lots of other types of apartments a little bit -- including studios and one-bedrooms. Because this is desirable.
Except it isn't a free market. It is a heavily regulated market that favors corporations. The regulatory bodies have been corporate captured. In addition, the corporate bodies collude on things like rent, and have a near infinite runway to leave units empty.
With the collusion of corporate entities setting prices, it raises the overall market prices of properties. As small-time landlords observe the markets, they naturally also raise their prices to increase prices.
Additionally, because of corporate capture and collusion in other markets, prices broadly increase for owning property. This forces everyone who keeps rent lower to raise rents.
The way to fix this is simple. Stop the corporate collusion by making laws that make it functionally impossible.
This can be done by the following:
- tax the hell out of corporate ownership of residential properties
- an increasingly expensive multi-home tax. First home is tax free. Second has yearly taxes and those taxes exponentially increase for each additional home.
- a vacant home tax. On top of any second home taxation, for homes besides your 1 home, there should be a vacant home tax. If a home does not have a resident in it, it should be taxed. That tax should be around what it would cost to rent the unit out.
There are some other additional factors such as penalizing foreign non-resident owners, but this covers the bulk.
Being a landlord should not be easily profitable. It should be a job that you work your ass off at.
Then and only then will the free market begin to function and optimize.
I think your attitude (landlords are the problem; we must make life harder for landlords) is a big reason housing is so expensive because it creates a situation in which not enough people with money or access to credit want to become landlords.
You say that the landlord industry has captured its regulators, but you give no example of any action or ruling by an regulator that benefits landlords at the expense of tenants.
Collusion on rent is a relatively new phenomenon around RealPage and is being banned. Meanwhile, regulations like rent stabilization in NYC benefit existing tenants, not landlords.
And the taxes you describe having nothing to do with collusion. Collusion is fought using anti-collusion laws. What could possibly lead you to believe that multi-home taxes would reduce corporate collusion?
Yes, obviously RealPage should be banned everywhere. But corporate capture is not the underlying economic issue at all behind high prices. Lack of supply is.
Anti-collusion laws are ineffective. Legislation that targets easier to enforce vectors with desirable side effects makes more sense.
Whether my theory on what is occurring is true or not, the proposed solution would solve it along with countless other issues, while have very little downside for anyone but a tiny group of lazy parasites.
I don't know where you're getting your ideas. None of what you say is true. You're taking some kind of bizarre ideological stance ("tiny group of lazy parasites"?) that isn't supported by any kind of evidence. You can look up the great success of many anti-collusion laws, and your solution would be economically harmful and inefficient in a large number of ways. All I can say is, I think you need to study economics more. Landlords provide a valuable service (making rental properties available to people who prefer to rent rather than buy), and they're not making extraordinary profits relative to other industries. Remember that as demand goes up, so too does the price they have to pay to acquire their properties, and therefore the mortgages they are paying to banks. If landlords made extraordinary profits relative to other businesses or investments, everybody would be rushing to become a landlord. But they aren't, because it's hard work and involves significant financial risk.
If people able to live in a home they own harms the economy, sign me up.
Houses are not investment instruments. They are spaces where people can freely exist as they are. A domain that they have full dominion in to authentically explore who they are, who they want to become, and what they want to share with others. A place to raise a family, to rest without a mask, and to be safe as they are.
Notice how I didn't mention economics at all?
Just because you have a house / houses doesn't mean others don't. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be homeless? I dare you to try it. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be a renter under the thumb of a landlord with no hope of ever having your own home?
My "policies" originate from empathy for real people. The majority of people, actually. It does not give a single shit about economics only benefiting the rich.
But that said, if you give most people the ability to have a true home, the economy will explode in activity. Instead of spending money on rent, people would spend on goods and services. They'd be happier, so they would spend money on having fun.
Making housing affordable is a no brainer.
The nice thing is, we already know what the alternative is. The economy is collapsing right now, in no small part due to the housing crisis that has been going on for a long time.
Since my policies won't be occurring now or ever, let's both sit back and enjoy the lack of these policies, and see how wonderful a world that is.
Except the exact opposite thing is happening in the regular housing market. Small houses (e.g., townhomes) were intended to maximize land and reduce cost, except they’re now not even affordable.
It's the same problem -- you need more. Zoning regulations continue to prevent enough new construction, and the conversion of large lots/units into smaller ones.
I honestly don't know what you're proposing instead. But for some reason you're pessimistic about what all traditional economists agree on what is the solution -- remove more zoning regulations that constrict what can be built.
It's literally just supply and demand. Prices come down when you increase supply to meet demand. Just because increasing supply a little bit doesn't work when demand is increasing even faster, doesn't mean the basic principle is falsified. It's just that you need to increase supply much, much more.
Demand for floor space in these places is very large, no doubt, but it is not infinite.
If you don’t believe we can or should allow private landowners to build as much floor space as they want for everyone who wants to live in these places, then somehow you’re going to have to have a mechanism to control who is allowed to live there. What will it be and who will get to decide who is worthy?
You can only chop up a larger space for smaller spaces when there is more demand than there is supply. The point of building housing is to have more supply than demand, or at least as close as we can get to that point.
By new you mean they’re making a 1980s all-in-one keyboard/computer with the 10 key on the wrong side of the keyboard running a version of a familiar-to-most-of-us OS that isn’t at all new looking?
I’m sorry; none of this is new to me except the absurd price tag.
While I agree with your general sentiment, the 10 key being on the "wrong" side could be good, perhaps, in some cases?
Historically I've done some heavy spreadsheet work where the resting position of my hands which minimizes movement is right hand on the mouse, left hand on the 10 keys. On a normal keyboard that has the disadvantage of causing a "closed" posture which isn't entirely comfortable.
Outside of that kind of niche use case though, it definitely feels like a strange choice for developers.
Experienced Data Scientists and/or those straight out of school are EXTREMELY lacking in valuable SQL experience and always have been. Take a DS with 25 years experience in SAS, many of them are great with DATAstep, but have far less experience using PROC SQL for querying the data in the most effective way--even if they were pulling the data down with pass-through via SAS/ACCESS.
Often they'd be doing very simplistic querying and then manipulating via DATAstep prior to running whatever modeling and/or reporting PROCs later, rather than pushing it upstream into a far faster native database SQL pull via pass-through.
Back in 2008/2009, I saved 30h+ runtime on a regular report by refactoring everything in SQL via pass-through as opposed to the data scientists' original code that simply pulled the data down from the external source and manipulated it in DATAstep. Moving from 30h to 3m (Oracle backend) freed up an entire FTE to do more than babysit a long-running job 3x a week to multiple times per day.
The focus of SAS and R were primarily limited to data science-related fields; however, Python is a far more generic programming language, thus the number of folks exposed to it is wider and thus the hiring pool of those who come in exposed to Python is FAR LARGER than SAS/R ever were, even when SAS was actively taught/utilized in undergraduate/graduate programs.
As a hiring leader in the Data Science and Engineering space, I have extensive experience with all of these + SQL, among others. Hiring has become much easier to go cross-field/post-secondary experience and find capable folks who can hit the ground running.
It was a great language, but it was/is extremely cost-prohibitive plus it simply fell out of favor in academia, for many of the same reasons, and thus was supplanted by free alternatives.
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