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.

>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).

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."

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.

Massive monetary expansion via QE and low interest rates. Resolved by raising interest rates and taxes on wealth holders (and particularly those holding unused or underutilized real estate) to deflate the asset bubble.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

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

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

Art is political; it stirs passions, which is to say that it's the motive force behind (public support for) many great undertakings. In these cases, you've mistaken pricelessness for worthlessness. You're just one in a long line of very incorrect people to mis-define "intrinsic value"; designating that as a "brutal reality" is ironic, since you won't face the actual reality.

There is certainly a hammer/nail aspect to the issue (which is itself one of degrees), but I do think that part of the blame that gets put on the technology and its use lies more correctly with the society that makes judgments off of that use's outputs. Ideally, in a functional society, no one would bat an eyelash at coeds sharing platonic nakey time.

But I'm not here to argue the points I've raised, only to state them, and that the debate you're trying to start is old and counterproductive and not something someone with any amount of introspective ability should want to continue further.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335150

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https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE

Even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by hand.