May
2nd
2018
Hills and Silicon Valleys · 1:12am May 2nd, 2018
Probably the best article I've written so far: If you stood in the office of the man who just paid $60 for an orb of raw water, you could watch a teenager get gunned down for wearing the wrong colours in the wrong neighbourhood.
I swear to God, I will rectally insert a chipped weed whacker into the rectum of the next person who tells me you can't just give homeless people houses, they can't be trusted with property.
Of course you can't just give homeless people houses. The land and materials all belong to other people. What are you going to do, expropriate them? That would be wrong. So says the ruling ideology, which is to say, the self-justification of the owners.
Maybe somebody should call Thanos.But seriously, this is a huge problem. Humanity's biggest enemy has always been itself, and I wholly expect poverty, when combined with many other factors, to bring about our downfall as a civilization within the century.
It's OK, Google is eating itself. Google vs. Google: How Nonstop Political Arguments Rule Its Workplace Soon enough, they'll all be equally poor (except for the 1% of the 1%, of course).
...Wow.
(The video linked at the end appears to have been taken down, though.)
When the "captains of Industry" are so superstition or fad-ridden as to pay $60 for a dollop of well-marketed water, how good could they possibly be at solving our inequality issues... supposing they were even interesting in making the attempt?
Our ruling class is very good at manipulating concepts (fictional or otherwise) to their advantage. Solving real problems? Not so much.
I don't want to be Captain Bring-down, but I know where "treating" a gangrenous leg with crystals, prayer, or denial ends up.
The raw milk thing isn't that bad. I grew up on a dairy farm and only got pasteurized at school. I still shake the milk jug before pouring. (For those of you who don't get it, milk from the cow separates when you leave it sit. The cream floats up, the not-cream goes down. Homonogizing stops that, and making it skim allows the milk company to take away the cream and still sell the milk *and* the cream)
Much of NoCal's problems reflect right back on the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) bunch. Listen to Victor Davis Hanson sometime. California policing has turned into a source of county revenue instead of crime suppression. Water projects have been axed out of fear of damaging a baitfish. And so on.
Where I live, some developers wanted to put in some 8-unit apartment buildings. They went to the city council, the zoning board, and started construction three months later. Four months after that, the units were up and renting. Oh, and our rent here is about a decimal point off from NoCal. I wonder why.
4851863
I'd listen to Victor Davis Hanson if we were in a 2,000 year old Hellenic culture, but no one appears to have informed the poor gentleman that we aren't.
Raw milk isn't as bad but it is still stupid -- if you get it straight from the cow it's obviously less of an issue, but raw milk goes through packing, transportation and retail, which makes a significant difference in terms of risk. Also, skim milk's rise in popularity wasn't caused by wanting to sell the cream separately, and in fact the opposite happened; The increase in supply was so great, that the USDA was forced to actually pay people to take it away and do something with it because they didn't have the room to store it. Which is why Dominoes started using way more cheese, and greek yoghurt really took off.
4851873 Something I can speak with authority (a little) on. Milk and Wisconsin. You see, USDA established (at least it did back then) a base price for raw out-of-the-cow milk, the objective being to set it below the cost of production by a few pennies and thereby prevent the Boom/Bust/Boom cycle of agricultural commodities. Certain senators who shall remain nameless discovered that by bumping the price a few pennies, Wisconsin dairy farmers could expand using economies of scale and produce a product that was *guaranteed* to be profitable. So USDA wound up with a little extra milk they had to buy, and channeled it into the secondary market. Then they wound up with a *lot* of milk. Then a (censored) ton of milk, until common sense (finally) managed to force down the base price to under the cost of production, and the farmers were forced to deal with the market, with marginal herds and certain losses. Yeah, the price of hamburger dropped for a while, and a lot of dairy farms in WI went bust. Ours was no bed of roses during that time either.
For a time, the USDA surplus cheese (Colby) was the best possible cheese on the planet. And yes, it was ironic that we ran a dairy farm during that massive loss streak and wound up with such low income that we were getting government cheese. On a dairy farm. Still, that was darned good cheese.
This particular brand of idiocy astounds and appalls me. I would never wish it on someone, but all it will take is for one idiot to drink a brain- or body-destroying strain of e. coli with their dirty water, and the fad will end.
4851862
This is because, for the just-wealthy and especially for the obscenely wealthy, these two things are related only in that a "real problem" is one that reduces their advantage, rather than something that benefits any other class or society in general.
Also, I'll be driving through Stockton again on Friday. Shields up!
4851873
upvoted, if for nothing else, then for the Victor Davis Hanson burn, because that guy is just awful.
Also I've always said that the biggest cause of homelessness is not having a home, just like the primary cause of poverty is not having enough money.
4851723
You have to build the houses as an investment assuming that whoever lives in them works and will eventually pay rent. Unfortunately, betting on people doing what you want can be costly, and therefore no one is inclined to do that. Plus of course, building houses in Silicon Valley, where the people work, is fiscally impossible for anyone not expecting the tenant to pay 20,000 dollars a month for their closets; and naturally this creates multiple logistics issues.
The only way to give people houses is to, well, give them houses, and hope that society as a whole benefits somehow even though the houses are two hours away from anywhere and the people living in them can't afford cars.
Reading this article reminds me how, in the township of Caramel (basically the rich rich rich neighborhood of Indy) they are annexing more land, and suing people for frivolous things until they lose their homes, literally in order to get the poor off their new properties.
4852002
To quote the blog itself:
Also, if more places would invest in a comprehensive public transportation system, the lack of car ownership would be MUCH less of an issue. Look at NYC. Tons of people drive, ofc, those traffics jams don't come from no where, but tons of people don't drive too. They take the bus, or the subway. Because NYC has options. Not owning a car shouldn't mean unable to work.
4852033
I know most of them work. The question is who is going to pay for a public transport system to get employees from their housing in fuckoff nowhere to work? They can't, and it's demonstrated their employers have no need to.
I live in Jackson Hole, we have similar issues. About a third of our town lives in cars (because living outside is literally lethal half the year) not because they can't afford housing, but because there isn't any, at least not any that isnt expensive mansion. Our county has been trying to find anywhere to build a housing complex for years now. As a result, only about two-thirds of a given company's employees even live in the same county, and that means huge snaggles getting into the valley on the two two-lane highways people can come in on. If these people couldnt afford cars they wouldnt be able to work at all.
Numbers, my dude, I'm pretty sure this article is giving me a fucking brain tumor. People can't be this stupid... they just can't... right?
Some additional numbers on this:
Within Silicon Valley as a whole, you cannot buy a home for under half a million. It is a literal impossibility.
Within Palo Alto specifically, that number jumps to 1.5 mill.
There's nothing per se wrong with there be certain localities where housing is exorbitantly priced. But Silicon Valley is not a locality. It's huge! It's bigger than many big cities. The boundaries are a bit ill-defined but even under restrictive definitions it is pretty big. It doesn't same fair, right, or just for the people whose labor that area depends on, without which it would grind to a halt, be forced to either be homeless or waste their lives in four-hour commutes. It doesn't matter if you're picking up litter or if you're a software engineer; indeed, in terms of the actual job difficulty the guy picking up litter likely has the harder job. Ever worked outside undertaking physical activity for eight hours at a time, every day? It takes a heavy toll.
And yes; I believe that the purpose of an economy, which is not some mystical force but is made by people and for people, should provide outcomes that are fair, right, and just.
To an extent, I sympathize with the people who seek out things like "raw" water. We live in a world where it constantly feels like we're being trapped within constructs that are designed to suck the life out of us, and where even the food we eat might slowly be killing us. It is not weird to give a look to something that's basically promising to be a higher-end form of spring water.
However, it is a scam. It is a very obvious scam. It is being perpetrated by the same sort of people who, in another life, would be selling synthetic bottled sunlight. It isn't even a complicated, involved scam that involves Leverage-esque escapades which could fool even sharp folks who are super on the ball; these guys are shady as fuuuuuck.
And the people who are being scammed are... well... they have buckets of money, free time, and resources. They are much less helpless against the world around them than almost anyone else. They're also supposed to be smart. Their self-conception is as smart people. (Spoilers: most of them are not smart. Most of them are lucky. A lot of titans of the tech industry got their fortunes because they solved moderately complex programming problems FIRST. This doesn't make you Grace Hopper or Vint Cerf.)
At a certain point, you stop being a mark, and start being a shill. You start being complicit in the scam and not a victim of it.
4852152
Writing this article made me 40% more Marxist