Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Discussion in 'SBAF Blogs' started by purr1n, Dec 26, 2018.

  1. Taverius

    Taverius Smells like sausages

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2017
    Likes Received:
    3,026
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Rapallo, Italy
    You were talking around you in FL so that's what I was asking about.
     
  2. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

    Pyrate Contributor
    Joined:
    Apr 1, 2018
    Likes Received:
    10,474
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Palms Of The Coasts, FL
    $375k can get you a lot of places, and ATM that might be the average selling price for a house right now. The issue is able to afford it. My buying power right now is only $250k after calculations.
     
  3. ushanka

    ushanka Facebook Friend

    Contributor
    Joined:
    Nov 30, 2020
    Likes Received:
    121
    Trophy Points:
    43
    Location:
    PNW
    These two points really, and then we can add influx of foreign money combined with a weird narrow special 'new upper middle class' (read techies in SF / Seattle for example, but that group is popping up everywhere now).

    The focus on single family homes and associated economics of condos produce insane effects. I looked at buying a flat in Seattle originally, and it just made no sense - it was only somewhat cheaper than just buying a house at face value, but you were locked into very high HOA costs (1k+ a month). So, condos make no sense, house are limited in supply if you want to have a decent commute, a lot of employers insist in staying in large population centers, and throw in the growing "special" class (and it seems to be growing faster than house supply), and tadaa - everyone (90% of the people) are priced out of ownership in the area. SF bay area and Seattle are case studies on how this looks - now you can look at the situation in your local city and guess what's coming. Minneapolis, DC/Arlington, Boston, Denver, Austin, LA, SD are already well on their way in the same direction. Got a small local Google or Amazon office? Writing is on the wall.

    I am curious how things are going to change with remote working options slowly opening up in the tech industry. I bet we are going to see even more stories like Bozeman.
     
  4. Pancakes

    Pancakes Friend

    Pyrate Contributor
    Joined:
    Aug 13, 2020
    Likes Received:
    1,413
    Trophy Points:
    93
    Location:
    Atl
    Atlanta's been headed down this path for the past 7-8 years. As more and more companies move into town because of business friendly incentives, more and more people move here. My previous house was bought for $260K in 2012 and sold for $420K in 2017.

    A large part of the problem is that new housing is not as simple as just building. We have some of the worst traffic in the nation and building more housing simply means more cars. 20 years ago rush hour was literally an hour. Now it starts at 5am and ends at 8pm. In the burbs where I live now, any hint of more housing is met with fierce resistance. People simply are not ok with spending their lives on a 7 lane parking lot.

    Long story short, you can't just build more new houses. You have to also build out the supporting infrastructure for all the new cars, people, stores, gas stations, etc., etc.
     
  5. Taverius

    Taverius Smells like sausages

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2017
    Likes Received:
    3,026
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Rapallo, Italy
    Ok, I'll be the stereotype european here.
    :drunk:
    There is a way around that traffic issue - to a degree - and its called comprehensive integrated public transport.

    Traffic in Milan - 1.4m City pop, 3.2m metro pop, incoming daily commuter pop even higher - was an utter nightmare when I was growing up there in the 90s because city and metro administration were convinced that just increasing bus/tram/subway lines and making incoming highways and freeways wider was enough to solve the issue.

    It wasn't, because traffic has to go through the same roads which caused recorded multi-hour gridlock in the late middle ages.

    Eventually they ponied up and built underground train lines which connect the suburbs to each other across the city center, and a network of car parks on the outskirts of the city at the outer train stations next to highways, and underground train stations which connect directly to subway stops, and rearranged tons of bus lines on the basis of getting people to/from the subway stops to other city areas.

    Trams/light rail lines are basically historic at this point and they do what they've always done.

    The end result of all of that mess was that, finally, taking public transport from your outer Milan home to your job was significantly quicker than driving, and utilisation shot up, because the #1 fundamental driving force behind human actions is lazyness.

    Once taking the train, and then the subway, and then the bus, was quicker than driving people started doing it because everyone wants to sleep more.

    This was then coupled with banning the most polluting vehicles from entering the city center - euro 0 and euro 1 petrol, euro 0-4 diesels without particulate filters, euro 0-3 with particulate filters - and living in Milan went from "smoking 2 packs a day" when I was growing up to "half a pack".

    Similar solutions implemented (sometimes partially) across Europe have shown pretty conclusively that unless you're willing to do the whole program its a waste of tax money and you're just pretending to get votes.
     
  6. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

    Staff Member Pyrate BWC
    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2015
    Likes Received:
    89,623
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Padre Island CC TX
    ^

    The blessing or curse of the USA has been plenty of land so we build sideways instead of building up. The eventual result of the sprawl is metro Los Angeles where every building or home is at most two stories high. It will take a cultural shift to build up. if you can afford a car in El Lay, then you drive a car, even if you sit in your car for 2.5 hours each day. There is a stigma against public transportation in the USA, e.g. "only losers ride the bike, only poor people take the train, only illegals take the bus". It's considered OK to take Uber and Lyft, although they just make everything worse because 40% of the time, they are driving around without any passengers make traffic even worse. And as @Pancakes mentioned, apartments / condos suck because of ridiculous HOA fees.
     
  7. Taverius

    Taverius Smells like sausages

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2017
    Likes Received:
    3,026
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Rapallo, Italy
    That last bit has always kind of weird for me.

    I know some ultra-wealthy who go everywhere by private jet and chauffeur, but here the most hardcore proponents of high speed rail are the business owners and managers, because they've become addicted to taking half as long to go from, say Milan to Rome for a meeting than if they were taking the plane; also the food is better.

    Hit the subway stations around the center of Milan when offices open and you'd think it was Japan, pinstripe suits as far as the eye can see.

    Or well, that was the case the case before corona-chan ganked the world, who knows what future trends will be.
     
  8. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

    Pyrate Contributor
    Joined:
    Apr 1, 2018
    Likes Received:
    10,474
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Palms Of The Coasts, FL
    Slightly changing topics a bit. @purr1n post here is great.

    Been in the same company for a decade with many different jobs. I joined this company after college, so decade being in the same place doing different things after college is great. Some say why I do this? Getting out of college don't get you the real skills that you need (which is super true in Banking/Finance). You gotta at least spend years at once place while developing your real skills. Some I know job hop too early after college and they are stuck in a "celling." It is normal to job hop if you want to increase salary/get to market value of your job/experience level...but doing it too much in Banking/Finance can be a negative. Anyhoo, being at the same place for ten years after college with different jobs for me is a positive.

    Anyhoo...while I like my "chill" my job is...I think I'm slightly undermarket. Also...I'm pretty bored ATM after getting confirmation that my job is long-term secured. Now this is the best time to test the waters and apply a few places to see what some think am I worth. I'm in a big industry so I'll never run of places to apply...however...I'm just doing it casually. If the pay bump is worth it...I'll most likely jump. I'm not dumb if they offer slightly higher salary with terrible benefits (since I'm very vested in my company's benefits already). Also helps that I'm relaxed when doing it and I can always improve my interview skills and be sharp. Always good to have "fire in your belly," being complacent sucks the more I grow up. But if I am offered something that is super good...I gotta take that.

    If you are in a smaller industry, testing the waters can burn bridges....so be careful on that.
     
    Last edited: May 3, 2021
  9. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Aug 13, 2016
    Likes Received:
    1,505
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Toronto, ON, Canada
    Your avatar is the only reason that comes to my mind why you may not be able to afford a house in Florida :).
    But seriously in the West coast of ...Florida a year ago exactly the houses that were great by my standard were going for $350,000+. South Sarasota is still not that bad, a couple of years ago they started development of hundred of single family homes a bit further inland and and everyone thought they would be waiting for buyers. All gone now.

    Granted that my "standard" is the standard of a guy living in Toronto, where a single car rotten garage, on the lot wide enough to fit a single car garage, sold for the equivalent of $600,000 US close to our place, bought by a contractor who is going to build a tiny house with no parking, no driveway and sell it for 1.5mln CAD. And it is one of the "cheapest' parts of Toronto. I never in my dreams would be able to afford my house here, now of for the last 8-10 years.
     
  10. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

    Pyrate Contributor
    Joined:
    Apr 1, 2018
    Likes Received:
    10,474
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Palms Of The Coasts, FL
    It is only going to get worse for the costal areas...they will have to go inward since there's still tons of undeveloped land around. However, South FL will always be limited due to the Everglades. The big issue of going inward is fighting with the people who families have been in the area for generations. A lot of them are rural, poorer, and have a culture that is just like the rural South. They don't these guys coming into their areas and change their areas to be less rural. It will be the challenge going forward.
     
  11. penguins

    penguins Friend, formerly known as fp627

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Sep 26, 2018
    Likes Received:
    3,439
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    SouthernCA
    Woke up at 230 and saw this. What a surprise:
    https://www.propublica.org/article/...g-millions-of-tons-of-co2-into-the-atmosphere

    More "I FEEL GOODER" type bs that has a net negative in the long run and entrenches us in said net negatives. Every time I see stuff like this I want to jam the figurative boot of good intentions down the throats of said "I need to feel gooder and smugger" types who do said dumb things w/o actually thinking them through until said smugness has been choked out of them. Too bad that day will never come in pretty much half the developed world and doubly so it seems in places like CA. EDIT: to clarify, I'm all for *actually* bettering the environment. Which is why stuff like this annoys me.

    Everything from stuff like the above to random super miscellaneous stuff like "no lead for hunting in CA b/c it poisons the condors... ugh... **nevermind that the condors have been on the way to extinction long before modern society showed up AND the same group who raised the alarm went back and said "oops actually it's not several grams of lead via bullets it's b/c those condors are dumb and were eating tons of discarded lead everywhere else" long before the ban took place... but our idiot leadership went ahead with it anyways**

    I also love how I rarely I see these said people address complex things that will actually benefit society at large like the housing market, actually reducing or managing the cost of healthcare instead of half baked wealth transfers to insurance and drug companies, questioning why the financial system is set up to inflate or otherwise take away all of our munnies away, why the legal and prison system is so messed up (and I guess why the police are so hard to reform now), or any other number of things that would most likely yield actual long term significant improvements to QOL for probably 90% of the population.

    OK, inane 4AM rantings over.
     
    Last edited: May 4, 2021
  12. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Aug 13, 2016
    Likes Received:
    1,505
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Toronto, ON, Canada
    Why do you think that the "dumb" things happening in the climate business are unintentional consequences. A lot of this stuff is just fake, and people who are doing it are fully aware.
    Canada can produce a lot of oil for domestic consumption. But the government is making sure that most of Canadian oil will be landlocked in few years. Not that the oil consumption is any less
    So the Irving family tankers in New Brunswick are unloading millions of barrels of Saudi oil a day, refining it and then transporting their products using trains inland. It is not their fault, the head of the family gave the first interview in history and said that he would gladly be processing Canadian oil and exporting it, but 80% of his business is based on Saudi oil.
    No one is even trying to asses the environmental impact of this criminal stupidity because what is fashionable is not building pipelines.
     
  13. haywood

    haywood Friend

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Oct 22, 2015
    Likes Received:
    763
    Trophy Points:
    93
    I don’t think the programs are bad per se but we’re kidding ourselves that drastically limiting carbon emissions in the US and Europe means anything for planetary sustainability when the rest of the planet isn’t really following along. There’s also a very real cost to people in terms of more expensive and less reliable power (e.g. wind and solar) that relies on government subsidies to be competitive, and jobs that are no longer viable domestically because it’s too expensive to offset the carbon emissions when you can do them elsewhere without that burden at a fraction of the cost.

    That said there are tangible benefits at least locally to polluting less so I do think it’s a worthwhile endeavor but how we’re choosing to do it seems more performative than effective.
     
  14. Taverius

    Taverius Smells like sausages

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2017
    Likes Received:
    3,026
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Rapallo, Italy
    Most of that boils down to "because politicians only pay lip service to anything until its their necks on the line".

    See Germany and "ok nuclear bad let's stop" so now they're shifting to coal, which even the most egregiously pessimistic projections on chernobyl and fukushima kills something like 4 orders of magnitude more people.

    But its killing people in Poland so *eh* votes secured.
     
  15. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Feb 3, 2016
    Likes Received:
    1,790
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Any cops on here? Got to be a pretty tough work environment these days.

     
  16. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

    Pyrate Contributor
    Joined:
    Feb 23, 2016
    Likes Received:
    10,587
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    NOVA
    Home Page:
    that sorta shit makes me sick to my stomach.
     
  17. robot zombie

    robot zombie Friend

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    May 11, 2016
    Likes Received:
    1,407
    Trophy Points:
    93
    Location:
    Ennui, FL
    Carbon credits are bullshit. And I agree, it's frustrating. We're staring down a whole cascade of world-changing shit when it comes to climate change and all these dillweeds do is capitalize on it.

    It's also true that we have SO many other issues to tackle that get that same treatment. Extremely disheartening shit.

    I say this as someone who is fully in favor of police and justice reform. f**k that bitch. That actually makes me angry. Right at the dead f'ing center of that issue are questions of accountability, where we place it, how we hold onto it... seriously, as a society, that is really the big conversation we are having with many issues right now. And then you have people like this who probably don't even engage much with politics, but can pump a ton of emotion into issues at a glance. That's why it is always black and white with them. That's the max level of nuance they allow time for. The ACAB shit is dumb and alienating, but I don't think this is even that. It's a different level of ignorance. And her behavior doesn't have shit to do with cops or politics. That much is pretty obvious. Press her on any of it, just start bringing out basic normatives and you'll lose someone like her real fast. She'd probably think you were trying to argue :p

    Though for the most part I think she was just ducking her violations by acting like a total karen immediately. You gotta have ZERO experience talking to police to think that is wise at all.
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2021
  18. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

    Pyrate Slaytanic Cliff Clavin
    Joined:
    Sep 27, 2015
    Likes Received:
    5,345
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Nobody wants to pull the credit plug, pop the tech bubble, regulate the monopolies, build higher volume housing in accessible places, Europe, Canada, and East Asia style. Most of these guys paying scrilla for this stuff turn these places into shit holes just like the slums a couple of miles or blocks away. And it’s not just tech. The older tech guys are mostly interesting dudes who had ideas. Especially if they started pre dot com bubble. It’s the younger generation in general.

    They turned many of these cities into any suburb USA. The shitty chain restaurants which populated the suburbs in the 90s and 2000s now dominate many neighborhoods in DC, Arlington, Alexandria, and large parts of NYC to serve people who live in overpriced cookie cutter condos. Anyone with any sense of wonder flees these areas. Those neighborhoods are wastelands filled with drones way worse than the suburbs. They look like a commercial park in a wealthier exurb but worse because there’s not an old small town 5 mins away and a weird/cool strip mall across the street. 5 mins away, there are high crime areas, drug markets, and homeless encampments and across the street from the Starbucks is a Panera Bread.
     
  19. haywood

    haywood Friend

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Oct 22, 2015
    Likes Received:
    763
    Trophy Points:
    93
    This was going to be another reply I wrote but didn’t post but before we go too ballistic at the driver consider that there was a survey about how many unarmed black men people thought were killed by cops every year.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost...y-against-black-people-are-overestimated/amp/

    [​IMG]

    The correct answer is 27 but as you can see the truth is wildly at odds with the belief of many people. They’re not coming up with this on their own, it’s a narrative fed to them by the mainstream media and much of the establishment. Who benefits by fomenting this divide? Who benefits from pushing CRT in schools so students are less able to compete in the global job market? Is this just another example of an empire destroying itself or is someone playing 4d chess and we were too dumb to see it until it was too late?
     
  20. penguins

    penguins Friend, formerly known as fp627

    Pyrate
    Joined:
    Sep 26, 2018
    Likes Received:
    3,439
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    SouthernCA
    ^ I'm slightly hesitant to post this b/c some or many will assume or purposefully interpret this in a wrong way or with a wrong underlying message, interpret it as "Cringe", or whatever else, but I wonder what the answers would be if it was "how many poor white people?"

    Potential plot twist - as of several years ago (~2010) when I was already quietly complaining about police misbehavior, lack of accountability, QI, Supreme Court rulings that police are not obligated to actually serve, too many people getting charged or being killed in "Breonna Taylor-like" situations etc etc. I decided to look into this a bit. I was surprised when I saw that "poor white people" were actually the most disproportionately killed demographic for quite a while (many years in a row) at the time. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was significantly above the total % of population that "poor white people" actually are in America. I forget the next demographic for "people killed". Funny enough, in some "ethnic studies" or whatever the title of the class was in the next week or two, I was quite surprised when the "I dislike white people vibes" professor talked about the same thing and mused why no one complained about it. Not sure what the most killed group today is (and bluntly put, I haven't looked into it in a while). Also note that the above data did not separate "armed" vs "unarmed" - nor does it make a huge difference "on it's own" IMO - many of the shootings were justifiable or what one would judge as a dangerous situation where people were trying to reach into their waistbands in front of the cops after being chased (for EU / Asia members who haven't seen normal people carry guns, this is how most Americans carry a gun), were high or "out of their mind" and a threat to others, etc.

    Anyways, I don't post this to troll or whatever, but yes, I can definitely see how people say "there is a narrative" being pushed. And b/c the internet likes to misinterpret, no, I don't hate "poor white people", "black people", individual police or the concept of law enforcement, etc. Just find it silly that this debate happens while minimal to no actual effective police reform happens and we get told you either pick "abolish police" or "blue line".
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2021

Share This Page