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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

101–110 of 600 posts

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#101
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not all about food and fuel anymore Is it, though? The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now? Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkl…

>Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet. And what is needed to grow all that corn, soy, and alfafa feed? The tapped-out Colorado or the dwindling…

To me it's more like slapping an expensive patch on an imperfect solution. Instead of encouraging healthier diets which have lots of follow-on nutritional and long-term medical benefits, we're paying pharma a huge monthly subscription price to keep doing something that's causing the problem in the first place. It's better than nothing, sure, but holistically it looks more like a rent-extraction trap to me.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#102
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…

I believe you are correct that if every immigrant of the last ten years left the US abruptly, rent prices would be among the things that would crater, yes.

Are you suggesting that 10 years of immigrants going home would be a net positive for the US?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#103
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…

And prices for much of what we buy would instantly double. The US is addicted to cheap immigrant labor for a huge number of jobs that Americans largely aren’t willing so do.

Yes; the increase of prices alongside domestic labor cost is part of the necessary "immune system of capitalism" that is suppressed by immigrant labor. If a first-world business cannot survive without offering very low wages, it needs to die off and make way for new businesses, even if that lowers material product and service availability.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#104

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cyc…

[flagged]

Please attack substance, not on a personal level.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#105
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

workforce in usa seems pretty good. Have you seen the homeprices they are able to afford ?

But that's the thing. Most people can't afford a home here; we're renters. The exception is upper class people riding stock market hype bubbles.

I can easily afford a home, but I have no interest in buying one.

I'd rather take all the extra money I save by renting and invest it in other assets. I also value my time and I don't want to have to do all the chores and upkeep a house needs. Sure I could pay someone to do all those things I suppose, but then it makes renting even that much cheaper.

Owning a house used to be a goal of almost everyone? But I wonder if like me younger generations don't even have an interest in buying a house and maybe that also affects the homeowner rate.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

>enact state level YIMBY policies to override local planning (who will always kowtow to local folks who show up to say no, and local folks who say no because it costs them nothing to do so as they already own) It's more than that; it's a standard free-rider problem. If all the other districts in your city support development in their area, then your own property value will go up, but you won't be burdened by any loca…

> The simple solution is to remove the local district's ability to veto local development. At least, as long as city-level/state-level planners don't have an agenda that favors certain districts over others.

That is what state level YIMBY policy is intended to do, to override the free rider problem of existing property owners in the local domain. If the human can say no to any new housing, and it costs be nothing to do so, what is a human going to do when all of their incentives are to say no?

As a YIMBY activist who also owns property, I have seen this first hand at local planning meetings. Rebutting complaints point by point (crime, decreased property value, traffic, etc) with data, we finally arrive at "because I don't like it" typically when having this discussions (happens all the time with utility scale solar permitting as well). I am only one person saying "yes, build, build, build." We need more of this, everywhere, and I argue the solution is not simple; if it was, this would be solved instead of being a herculean effort. Please consider attending local planning meetings to voice your support for building more housing in your communities.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adult living organisms don't have exponential cell division. When they do, we call that cancer.

>Adult living organisms don't have exponential cell division. Sure they do. Your cells are dying and being replaced constantly. Cancer is just when the instructions for said division get messed up, i.e. runaway inflation in this analogy.

I think you missed the word "exponential". Adult living things don't have exponential cell division. If they did, they would continue to grow in size. But they don't. They have cell division at a constant rate, not an exponential rate.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#108
We expect young men to grow up and become "husband material". Due to various changes (standards for husbands rising, economic opportunity diminishing), this goal has become clearly unreachable for many.

I would opt out if I was a poor young man today, and focus on enjoying the small pleasures (drinking with my buddies, playing PS5). The hill they are expected to climb is ludicrous, and I am not surprised they respond by walking away.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#109
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…

Immigration has always been big and has gradually picked up speed. The idea of immigrants going home does not make any historical sense, neither does stopping immigration.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#110
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…

And prices for much of what we buy would instantly double. The US is addicted to cheap immigrant labor for a huge number of jobs that Americans largely aren’t willing so do.

> The US is addicted to cheap immigrant labor for a huge number of jobs that Americans largely aren’t willing so do.

Maybe more like "business owners are 'addicted' to paying cheaper wages that only immigrants from poor countries are willing to do at the offered rate."

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