aggronn

Projects can still effectively be denied/delayed from discretionary environmental review. State is working on pre-empting or expediting that as well for these affordable housing projects.

The definition of inflation is nominal changes in prices. This can be caused by supply/demand shocks, which is where the term "transitory" comes from--inflation during a period of economic transition. The alternative to this is persistent inflation, which is largely the result of monetary or fiscal policy, and not due to supply/demand "issues" (well, or you could say, the only market where there is an issue is the currency market)

If we had high persistent inflation, we would expect long term, consistent increases in prices. This is compared to "normal" persistent inflation, which we typically target around 3%. This target is set by the Fed.

If we wanted, we could target 10% inflation on a persistent basis by using monetary policy that was deliberately inflationary.

The argument being made by the government and by the media is that our current inflation (40% for cars, etc) that weighs out to 7.5% is the result of a supply/demand shock, and which must be resolved by working out these short term market inefficiencies/failures.

There are real arguments for monetary inflation (especially wrt asset inflation), but the fact that cars are up 40% and housing vacancy rates are so low and our supply chain is so backed up makes a very tangible case for us being in a transitory period of inflation which can not be dramatically improved by monetary or fiscal policy.

Yeah, I am sympathetic to people concerned about inflation right now, but the basic Econ 101 explanation you give is just too compelling to alarm me (and apparently the Fed and others who do this for a living).

There is a clear mismatch in demand and supply. Supply is booming and its taking time for supply chains to catch up because of the structural damage that was caused by COVID. It takes time to fix that. This is short term angst, not a monetary crisis.

If there's a monetary crisis occurring (asset inflation?) its been going on for almost a decade now, and its not reflected in the CPI.

I'd be interested to see the land use code where this 10 duc with one allowable parking spot is going. This must be a HUUUGE townhouse to go there if its only permitted to fit one car.

is it 1 car garage or literally, a garage with no driveway? if a link to a specific example was mentioned above in this thread i missed it

10 units per acre is 1 house per 5k sqft lot--this is plainly single family detached housing. No one in that zoning is having parking issues. When you start talking about 35duc then you start having parking issues--but at 35duc, you're totally within the realm of being able to justify more frequent bus service for a town with 200k+ people. But if you're in a small town with very progressive density allowances like that, then the solution is simple: improve zoning to encourage more neighborhood commercial. No need to worry about transit in that case.

The solution isn't to build more parking, its to reduce the need for car trips. Improve transit and support commercial development in the neighborhood.

The fact is that we're in a housing affordability crisis. We need builders to build "cheapest thing they can" right now because housing is insanely expensive in most urban areas. Parking minimums make housing more expensive, and the fact that people are buying these homes is saying something important: housing is more important than parking.

Yes parking is nice, and there are costs associated with not having a dedicated parking space for each person. But those costs pale in comparison to the costs we pay for having a severe housing shortage. The economic costs, the costs paid in rents, the costs paid in health.

There isn't a world where you can have it all. But its clear that we need more housing, not more parking, and there is an unavoidable trade-off between the two.

I think this makes sense, and I might have agreed before I married someone working in a public sector union and saw how awful working in the public sector is compared to private (for many, but not all, professions). My perspective has been challenged over and over again by her experiences and now that point of view is just not compatible with the reality of how things work.

So I'm going to make the case for why public unions are _more_ necessary than private union--public unions are needed to make it possible to provide competent, professional public services--, and rather deflect the conversation to a bigger question (with to me, a very clear answer), which is whether there should ever be non-market-driven revenues.

There are some very hard-to-believe dynamics that occur in a public sector job. For teachers, air traffic controllers, police, etc, there is no competition in the labor market. If your boss is abusive, if you don't get paid fairly, etc, your only option is to change your career or leave your community. You cannot go to another employer. Management does not have the resources to provide relief when its objectively needed. Government effectively has a monopoly on that job, and if there are other jobs, they usually pay even less because of a compensating wage differential for the workplace being more tolerable (private schools, for example)

There is also no profit motive. Good, effective leadership does not have a natural system for "floating to the top" like you find in for-profit settings. It doesn't happen just by chance, but as bad as leadership is in large corporate environments, its even worse and even less accountable in the public sector. Nevermind that good leadership is expensive--the best leaders do not go into public service, unfortunately, because it pays a lot better in the private sector.

No profit motive also means that there isn't a single metric that aligns workers and management. Amazon may be abusing workers, but at least they can respond to clear issues by giving raises or bonuses. At least when a business succeeds, someone is getting paid and its about who should get that money. School teachers and police officers don't get more revenue if they succeed. Administrators and management don't get more money when they succeed, or when their workers succeed. Success does not feed success, in a financial sense (with exceptions, of course). If they fail, there is not a natural incentive structure that reflects that.

Ultimately, revenue and accountability for public sector work is driven by voters, many of whom don't feel like they benefit from the service directly (whether they do or not is a separate conversation). Voters want to minimize costs and maximize services, but there is not a market mechanism that defines the equilibrium there. Voters (like you) don't know what it takes to deliver the quality of service demanded, and the systems don't naturally align themselves in a way that efficiently executes on those demands anyways. Public services will always be less efficient than you would expect--but many times they're the only way to provide the service in the first place.

So you have poor leadership. You have totally decoupled funding from performance, and therefore compensation from funding from performance. Since there isn't a profit motive, aligning individual workers with the mission is a challenge. You have cost-sensitive, captive, and hostile benefactors and service users who have a dual demands: high quality of service, and lowest possible cost.

This is the perfect environment for abusive leaders to make unreasonable asks to people who provide services at a rate well below its social value, using resources that don't reflect the real cost to provide the adequate, competent services desired.

Unions are the only mechanism that exists for these people to protect themselves from that. Not only does the market have no power, it doesn't even exist.

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So yes, public unions serve the interests of workers, and "extort[ing] money from the citizens". Public unions cause some very obviously challenging circumstances--but the alternative is that public service workers are being asked to work in offend difficult, degrading circumstances where they are resourced in a way that sets them up to fail, asks them to make professional commitments to an employer who serves whims of public opinion rather than direct stakeholds are invested the complexities of their job, and which ultimately leads to a cycle of cynicism and further removal of resources. Nevermind that the nature of their work is inherently highly regulated and high-stakes.

How do you run a public institution successfully in the long run with these core dynamics?

This is an inherently messy world, and there is not a singular, cathartic solution for providing low cost, high quality, individualized, egalitarian public services. There needs to be some mechanism for finding a balance. The market is not an option. Privatizing all large scale government services doesn't change many of these dynamics, unless you remove any requirement for equal access or standards for quality of services provided.

Public unions are the best on a field of bad options.

I wonder if you (and OP) are conflating "anti-homeownership propaganda" (perhaps some exists) with anti-single family housing zoning "propaganda"? I follow land use topics pretty closely and I'm not sure I've seen any movement I would describe as "anti-homeownership" so I'm wondering if this is a perspective i'm just not familiar with.

Picking this new world order climate hysterics cabal conspiracy theory malarkey apart a little bit....

> Climate hysterics want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their carbon-neutral policies are going to have on society.

Not a great start. I don't know of any clean energy policy advocates who _arent totally enthusiastic_ about an opportunity to take full responsibility (and credit) for migrating to a clean economy in the next 10 years. Who, at this point, is ignoring the economics of climate change? Nowhere in here are you even claiming that there is a specific, agree'd upon "consequence" of transitioning to renewable energy, you're just raising a vague spectre of economic collapse, which only implies that policy-makers haven't considered that possibility...which is provably false.

> Many of the most ardent callers for climate action are themselves not even climate scientists, but merely offload their thought processing to the intellectuals who are.

Sounds like a how functioning, science based democratic society should operate, right?

> Almost without fail, neither them, nor the intellectual are educated in economics.

Absolutely right--scientists aren't politicians aren't economists. Multi-disciplinary public policy requires input from many kinds of 'intellectuals' (also, hn is a weird place to be calling people who trained in, and do, a science professionally 'intellectuals', as if its a bad thing).

The alternative is that we live in a fictional autocracy lead by a god-like genius who is singular, all-knowing, and benevolent.

> The reality is that nobody can work out the second and effects and so on for these drastic changes, because they have incomplete information.

Semi-valid criticism. Implies no one has _any_ idea, but its true no one an predict the future with absolute certainty.

> The intellectuals and 'thought leaders' themselves have a fraction of a percent of the actual tacit knowledge that drives economic activity. The knowledge is very widely distributed, which is why central planning is less efficient than the market almost all of the time.

Ah... here is the god you're alluding to--anarcho-capitalism? The distributed knowledge of the market economy knows best.

There is even an anarcho-capitalist case _for_ renewable energy. If you could just price in the cost of emissions and remove subsidies of oil and gas, we would be decades ahead of where we are today on this issue.

> it is misplaced fear due to grossly exaggerated climate scare claims, drummed up by the status-quo.

So "climate hysterics" are the powers that be, and oil and gas is punk-rock. I guess on a millenia scale this is true.

> They won't put their own money or action where their mouths are, but demand it of others - many of whom are not in such fortunate positions.

Waiting to hear about the "climate hysteric" who thinks the solution requires higher taxes (or even, significantly higher cost of living) for people who make under $30k/year. The only reason this would be part of a proposal by a reasonable person is because they know they are negotiating against cynical "ideologues" who personally benefit more from the status quo of an oil and gas dependent economy, who will require this provision for a vote, because they know it sabotages the underlying goals. Why vote no when you can pass intentionally hamstrung legislation?

An overarching criticism of parent's point of view: The general theme of their criticism is that "climate hysterical intellectuals" don't know better than the singular, all knowing free market. It barely leaves room for any public policy position at all--which ignores the fact that the current market status quo is driven massively by public policy that has been in effect now for several generations. To say the current place even approximates a "natural, optimal equilibrium" is a gross misunderstanding of 300 years of carbon policy and political and cultural entrenchment.

Alternative is to not subsidize inefficient suburban land use. That doesn't mean everyone lives in apartment buildings. It doesn't mean "ban the suburbs". It just means, if you want to live in a subdivision, you'll have to pay your share of the cost to maintain it (which is more than what you're paying now).

I'm also doing this in chrome. I have about 5 different profiles, aliased to things like `chrome-work`, `chrome-personal`, `chrome-dev', etc. I would love to use FF, but iirc FF doesn't provide something like `firefox --profile=someIdentifier` that opens a new window in my desired profile.

edit: Apparently this is bad info. I'll have to give it a try again.

Yes, there's a lot we need to be doing to put pressure on the CCP that we aren't currently doing, and it also doesn't need to be binary. There's a difference between Apple doing business in China, and a Chinese company doing business in the US. China has considerable influence on Apple, but not as much as it does on TikTok. Tim Cook's family isn't at risk of jail if he criticizes the CCP.

The issue isn't whether TikTok is currently doing it or no, its whether this is a national security risk in the future, which is absolutely is. I think he's an idiot and he's using the issue to distract from Russian interference, but its a concern that if you only wait to address this _after_ its already a problem, it will already be unaddressable for the reasons enumerated in my comment.

Taking this as true, are you suggesting we should have, instead of our (expanding on what I think you're saying) "non-democratic capitalist ologopoly", have our important companies and institutions be run the by the CCP?

Two wrongs don't make a right. Work to improve our system rather than using our failures to normalize CCP oppression and violence.