There's been a big boom in interest in urbanism in recent years and increasing awareness of just how the US got so car dependent. Toss in a quick trip to Europe at some point, add in people explicitly saying "the reason you liked these old cities so much was because of transit and lack of cars", and it's an idea that spreads itself.
Yeah, there's absolutely a valid question of whether the AUMF is a good idea or not, but the fact of the matter is that it did pass, it is in force, and therefore essentially any military action - especially in response to direct attacks on American military ships - is unquestionably legal.
If Congress would like to complain about the President conducting war without its authority, they should perhaps revoke the essentially unlimited authority to conduct war that it gave him.
A lot of local urbanist groups have been pushing for this for a long time. Parking minimums were largely made up by pulling numbers out of hats in the 50s and have essentially no basis in empirical fact. Countless small businesses all across the countries exist in buildings that could not legally be built today because of parking minimums. I remember a story from a small Arkansas town about some local entrepreneurs that wanted to open a cafe in a vacant downtown building, but couldn't because they'd need to buy the adjacent building and bulldoze it to make a parking lot in order to meet parking minimums.
These also apply to residential buildings as well. If someone is wanting to build a medium sized apartment building in an older pre-war walkable area near a train station, but modern parking minimums require buying 3x the land in order to build a parking lot, that building isn't going to happen, meaning that new housing units aren't being built and thus there'll be more price pressure on existing housing.
Not to mention, denser housing allows for fewer cars and more transit, which in an absolute boon for the environment. There's a reason why suburbs emit way way more CO2 per capita that downtown areas.
Deflation tends to trigger massive layoffs since revenue drops and investment becomes a worse option than saving.
Everyone always hopes that economic downturns will affect everyone but them specifically, but it really doesn't work that way.
But with rent that’s more than doubled...
We really need politicians to start paying more attention to the housing crisis. Housing costs have been such a massive squeeze on literally everyone, and it's an incredibly stupidly self-inflicted wound because for the last 50 years we collectively decided that housing should be a primary investment asset for all Americans instead of a place to live, and fundamentally, you cannot have housing both be a good investment and have it be cheap.
Literally just build more housing. Public housing, subsidized housing, private market rate, yuppie condos, literally anything.
https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/
In the last 20 years, we build around a million single-family homes. In that same time period, the population increased by 3 million. There is no universe in which this happens and housing doesn't become significantly more expensive.
The money spent on Ukraine has been essentially pennies relative to any significant domestic program.
If you instead redistributed all the $113 billion spent since the invasion began in 2022, you could give each American a grand total of $340. A nice chunk of change, to be sure, but spread out over the course of the war, this is literally $15 a month.
Personally, I'm okay having $340 less over the course of nearly two years if the alternative is tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russia successfully re-asserting that violent conquest will not be resisted. Moldova would almost certainly be invaded next as well, since they're not in NATO. $15 a month is a pretty damn cheap price to pay to protect a democracy and save countless lives (not to mention, the torture and rape the Russian army has been committing as well)
To quote the speech that you evidently did not watch or read:
Like so many others, I’m heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life
We mourn every innocent life lost. We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity.
Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and innocent Palestinian families are suffering greatly because of them.
Yesterday, in discussions with the leaders of Israel and Egypt, I secured an agreement for the first shipment of humanitarian assistance from the United Nations to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. If Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment, these shipments, we’re going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians.
As I said in Israel, as hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution.
Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity and peace.
In recent years, too much hate has given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism, Islamic-phobia, right here in America.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community and so many others are outraged and hardened saying to yourselves, “Here we go again with Islamophobia and the distrust we saw after 9/11.”
We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia.
And to all you hurting, those of you who are hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.
And here in America, let us not forget who we are. We reject all forms, all forms of hate, whether against Muslims, Jews, or anyone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html
I dunno, the internet has told me that Israel is just as bad. I definitely remember when the IDF took a bunch of civilian women and children as hostages and then announced that it was going to livestream their murder.
Oh wait.
I don't get why anyone would use the free tier - not being able to choose songs would actually drive me insane, let alone the ads - but $11 monthly for essentially all the music anyone could ever want, plus solid playlists and recommendations, is a perfectly good value for me. Admittedly, I listen to music all the time and it's a pretty big part of my life, so it's an easy sell.
I guess the free tier is still an improvement over radio, but regardless, producing and distributing music has costs, and I'm more than happy to pay for it. Given that Spotify isn't even profitable, having lost about a billion dollars last year, I'm not sure how long this situation will last, but for the time being, I really don't mind it.
Some people simply do not care.
Is it really that hard to understand that some people like the idea of participating in a community with all their friends and favorite content creators, and find the idea of getting access to this for free at the cost of some privacy that they don't hugely value to be an acceptable enough trade?
BraveSirZaphod
joined 1 year ago
The issue with local policy like that is that school boards or individual teachers are hugely susceptible to parental rage. Countless teachers will talk about how every parent has some reason why little Timmy just absolutely must have his TikTok machine on him at all times, just in case his mom needs to text him and can't be bothered to call the school office.
Having some state-level precedent makes this much easier for local officials, who can just say that they're following state guidelines.