yterdy

You've given individual solutions to try to fix a systemic problem, which of course does not work. They are good ideas; they are also not enough, and don't even begin to address the issue at-scale.

What does is recognizing that the "be realistic" bluster is just that: a bluff, from people who hold real power in the status-quo, but who realize that that status-quo can be changed, if only the walls would fall and nature could take its course. The reality is that older generations have created a zero-sum situation, and the only way for the younger ones to thrive is for the older ones to give up some (many) of their advantages. The reality is that this happens when political and economic forces are finally incentivized to stop protecting them.

One last thing I feel the need to mention whenever it comes up:

>At that time, there were many subprime mortgages floating around that should've never been written.

This is true, but not because they were written for people who were financially unfit to be homeowners. It's because these loans were written intentionally to fail, knowing that banks could steal the homes back in illegal foreclosure proceedings, knowing that the mortgages would be wrapped up in financial vehicles and sold off at profit, knowing that the government would backstop them when it all came crashing down. Given fair loans, most of these mortgage-seekers would have been able to keep up their payments - but that woukd have been less profitable for banks than what ended up happening. Instead, these financial institutions were able to siphon billions from the middle class, and buy up the remains of their failed rivals for pennies on the dollar. Which is despicable, of course. But to understand this, you have to reject the notion that we're living in a just world whose past mistakes can't be corrected. It isn't and they can be.

Monetary expansion underlies and significantly influences if not drives, everything you mentioned (save the nature of US mortgages, which is still related in the sense of it being a part of financialization of as much of American life as possible). The QE boom drove immigration, and low interest rates drove hiring and wage inflation; the COVID bust dampening immigration, and the extremely low interest rates driving a hiring frenzy that was itself followed by mass layoffs when the FRF was raised, essentially proved this.

>Underutilized RE is a red herring.

So you've stated. Please prove it, at the very least showing how RE isn't underutilized (this is going to be difficult, because it is).

You're comparing ideal to ideal, not practical reality to practical reality. Here's a fact: the Chinese middle class is the size of the US's entire population. The whole thing. Citizens, residents, undocumented immigrants. That's an economic freedom that Americans would - and sometimes do, if you consider law enforcement and the downstream effects of the actions of financial, medical, and industrial professionals - kill for. Which is actually a part of the way American censorship works: empower a buffer class who is preoccupied with maintaining (and lecturing the rest of us about) their political freedoms while most can't access any practical benefits from those freedoms because we can't afford to, in this society where money is speech. This isn't even getting into the more overt and baldly authoritarian ways Americans have their nominal rights infringed upon, simply speaking to the way economic/class-shaping does much of it for us.

Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh memes say that you're ironically buying into the overstated projection of Chinese control.

But to get back to the crux of the issue: "bad actors" in America (like Google) are not unlike Chinese censors in kind, only degree. That is the conclusion an honest assessment and comparison has to come to. And however much you may want to turn this into some sort of geopolitical pissing match, my message is not, "Let's be more like China," it's, "Let's be what we say we are instead of becoming more like China."

>Deflating prices on existing housing means either the lender (ha!) or the homeowner takes the loss.

Okay.

(Expand or they're going to flag you for snark.)

The cohort that is currently at prime home-buying age (and, really, most people under the age of 50) have had the wealth that was generated by their labor and productivity systematically siphoned to mostly-older higher-earners, in order to shore up unsustainable compensation and retirement funding for the professional managerial/executive class and Silent Gen, Baby Boomer, and Gen X workers. The value of the overbuilt, low-density, transit-access/amenity-access-poor housing that they've built or speculated on plummeting would be not only economically healthy (as it would act as a stimulus for non-asset-speculation activity and finally incentivize density and transit access, while disincentivizing the socioeconomic/racial exclusion that characterizes most American suburbs and which drives so many of our objectively terrible NIMBY-focused municipal planning decisions), but also just deserts.

Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)

Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.

Again, some things aren't worth fixing, and they build up. The fabric on my headliner detached. Quickly went from "foam slightly exposed" to "sagging across the width of the backseat". Car is worth less than 5 grand, would be almost 1 to fix. It's a good thing I didn't, because brake troubles cost about as much and were necessary to fix.

I think a lot of waste goes into maintaining cars cosmetically.

It would be nice if I could "work with" a mechanic. Pay 1/4 the labor cost and she guides me (I also rent tools and shop time from her so it's more like 1/2).

Exactly. Its failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy imposed by PE (and other malicious financial actors). Like Toys R Us and many others, it was a stable but unremarkable business that might have been in dire straits at some point in the future if changes weren't made to update its approach. It was not, as others allege, "failing" - at least, not until PE came along and forced it into an untenable position. But that's what they do.

>Property values keep increasing because demand is exceeding supply.

Not quite. Property values keep increasing because the monetary supply keeps increasing, one effect of which is that large property owners can corner markets by buying up properties and warehousing them until they see the prices they want to sell for. This appears as a lack of supply (not enough houses) when it's really a lack of market forces forcing sales (not enough houses on the market). The remedies to these two situations are very different.

It should be noted that "told they must" is not simply bad Boomer advice, but a reflection of the reality that the vast majority of white-collar work (even work that must mostly be trained on-the-job, due to the particular policies and protocols of any given business) requires a Bachelor's degree be on your resume if you don't want your application binned immediately.

>But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?

It does. The reasons you cited just makes it worse in medicine.