postpawl

The dark fiber analogy doesn't quite work though, because unused fiber just sits there harmlessly. Nuclear plants have massive decommissioning costs ($280M-600M+ per plant), ongoing waste storage requirements, and if the companies go bust, taxpayers are likely on the hook. The EU alone is underfunded by €118 billion on decommissioning. Meanwhile batteries and solar keep getting cheaper every year without the “who pays to clean this up in 50 years” problem. Seems like a very roundabout way to hope for public benefit.

You can substitute cocoa sources globally, but you can't substitute a house in Charlotte with one in Phoenix.

If cocoa prices spike, you buy less chocolate. If housing prices spike in your job market, your options are: pay more, endure a brutal commute, or uproot your life. The demand is far more inelastic.

Most people can't build their own home (time, skills, land access, upfront capital for materials). It's like responding to “healthcare is too expensive” with “I just treated my own broken arm”.

A mom and pop landlord with 5 rentals doesn't have pricing power. A firm owning 1 in 5 homes in a neighborhood does. That's why antitrust thresholds exist in other industries.

Building helps, but without addressing who gets to buy the new stock, you're potentially just building inventory for PE portfolios.

The national average obscures that institutional investors own 1 in 9 rental homes in Charlotte, 1 in 10 in Tampa, and one-fifth of all houses in some Atlanta neighborhoods. It’s likely to get worse too.

Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.

The worst customer service is usually for things where you don't have a choice, like when your mortgage gets sold to a new servicer.

I think you're conflating the Democratic Party with "left-wing philosophy." Actual left-wing ideology (Marx, Lenin, the socialist tradition) focuses on material conditions for workers: who owns the means of production, labor power, class relations.

From that perspective, the problem isn't that Democrats have the wrong messaging about masculinity. It's that neither major US party offers politics centered on workers' material interests. Both parties abandoned class-based politics in favor of cultural appeals.

If you're a young man struggling economically, being told you have "privilege" feels disconnected from your reality of declining wages and diminished prospects. But the socialist response isn't "better messaging about masculinity," it's organizing workers to gain power over their economic conditions.

Boeing was the prime contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stages, and Northrop Grumman builds the solid rocket boosters. The entire rocket was outsourced to private industry.