Maybe... though with a growing trends of the most affluent / best educated families in SF Bay Area not allowing smartphone use I find your prediction unlikely.
It's a spectrum of people who face housing insecurity due to economic circumstances, to people who resist/actively shun societal contacts that help us all function (often fueled by serious substance addictions.) While the solutions that have been embraced by San Fransisco's current electorate (free cash/housing/no rules) could make sense for the former, that doesn't mean it's a good solution for the latter. And unfortunately it's the latter side of the spectrum that exerts hugely outsized impact in terms of both resources spent and negative draw on the rest of society.
So yeah... more housing would be great, but affordability shouldn't be used as societal gaslighting to excuse the current mess we have in San Francisco. Until the city finds the resolve to enforce some minimum standards of accountability, the problem will only get worse, and the rest of us will just vote with our feet.
> for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-figure increases in equity per year with little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in inglewood from fetching a cash-only two million dollar price.
yeah right... this is all 'the republicans' fault. Say what you will about conservatives, but a party that has held majority since the nineties (and more recently a supermajority) has no one but themselves to blame.
Obviously prop 13 / single family zoning has had an effect on housing, along with taxes, onerous building codes and environmental regulation. However, as long the Homeless Industrial Complex controls the narrative with well-intention voters, and gets to call the shots on where / how to 'address' to problem, the problem of pervasive homelessness is not going to be fixed. We've simply created the wrong set of incentives.
Note that higher response rates don't always translate to better data. As you make the survey experience more intrusive you incentivize certain users to provide junk answers simply to remove the barrier. Just something to consider... especially if you decide to scale to enterprise.
I remember reading about a similar dynamic in Harari's 'Sapiens'... the shift to from hunter/gatherer to agriculture being better for 'society' (more people) but worse for the average individual within the society, at least in terms of health (poorer/narrower diet, increased disease, shorter lifespan.)
>The thing is, we have actual data on a lot of these policies. And we know what works and doesn't work.
Can you cite the 'actual data' -- has it held up to broad peer review? Can you provide examples of critique of these policies, and explain why detractors have concerns, and how we could address them?
This isn't global warming (science is clear) -- social policy is inherently messy, with lots of tradeoffs, and is hard to prove empirically. There are lots of reasons why expanding the welfare state might be beneficial for society, but please stop with the moral grandstanding -- it does nothing to further real dialogue.
>Note that the people in the communities vote overwhelmingly for these reforms, and they are the ones living with the outcomes. A large proportion of people who have problems with it are outsiders.
Speak for yourself. Boudin and Gascon both are facing recalls, and even Portland and Oakland are reversing changes to policy funding. More likely there's a sizable portion of the said electorate that's sick of bearing the brunt of this failed sociological experiment pushed by progressive gaslighting. Not to mention the survivorship bias of the many of our friends / family who got sick of it and uprooted.
So what? These whataboutisms add nothing to the conversation.
People aren't going to stop caring about the carbon costs of crypto because other industries also suck. Think about it as an adoption blocker -- if your particular tech fetish can't address an issue that many, many people care about it is destined to be usurped by something that can. Would be awesome if the 'crypto bulls' would expend as much energy into ways to fix the carbon problem as they do arguing it doesn't matter.
Absolutely -- there seems to be tons of real people very eager to equate criticism of the CCP to 'China bad!' and this is part of the problem. The CCP (like all major governments in history) has / is / will do things that are worthy of pushback and scrutiny. Please stop cheapening the debate by attempting to reframe critique of a major government's policies as nationalistic prejudice.
>I am in China currently, but I am as ignorant of the underlying motives behind the crackdowns.
Why search for underlying motives when the overt motivates are clear; Chinese tech companies should 'come home' to mainland capital markets. The script is simple:
1) Ticket X is floated in an NYC-based exchange
2) China announces some regulatory crackdown affecting X, whose valuation falls precipitously
3) X goes private at a fraction of its original valuation
4) X is re-listed Shanghai / Hong Kong
5) The regulatory challenges affecting X miraculously dissipate
Black-swan events aren't just 'part of business' - they are generational events that upend the established norms of a market.
What happened here is that the government changed the rules (i.e. risk / reward profile) of a well-established market overnight with very little recourse for the players involved. It would be like the government removing FDIC insurance on savings accounts during a bank crisis.
>Imagine how much tax dollars would be gained if all drugs were legalized in US and let's say 20% of it's population started to regularly use them.
Maybe... Or, the same criminal underworld that controlled the drug trade still does, but now operates with more impunity (and still doesn't pay taxes.)
>The Child Tax Credit is a seriously good piece of policy...
Maybe in intent, but certainly not in implementation. Fine if you want to give money to the poor / people with no income, but enacting that through our tax system (designed to collect tax dollars) seems like a particularly poor proscription to achieve the ends. Here's another take (that I'm sure will be unpopular)...
'In 2021, progressives cloaked an expansion to our entitlement programs through a tax cut to get the bill through Congress. This has been hard to implement, and company's like Inuit aren't helping as much as they could.'