sonori

Note again that my example of it working pretty effectively was for a decently sized nation and not just a small highly desirable city that wants to grow. The percentage of public to private housing in a city is meaningless to demand of people who want to live there.

I’m also not sure that Vienna counts as some massive failure of public housing, as the city is famed for its average rent being so far below comparable cities.

I also don’t see the problem with the government owning most of the apartments in a city, and indeed the more well to do citizens you can get to pay rent to the housing agency the less in taxes everyone else needs to pay.

Eventually if you build enough housing for everyone who wants to live in a place to live there, people will stop competing with each other for the limited spots. Prices are so high in dense urban areas because so many people want to live there, and so price goes up until enough people are pushed out that there are enough apartments to satisfy demand.

If you want to crash prices as you put it, you demonstrably need massively more housing than people who want housing, either by building more housing or by reducing the number of people who want to live there. If you don’t, people will just fight over the limited slots, and in a private market that means the slots universally go to the richest.

Given private developers will never willingly build enough housing to satisfy demand and therefore drop the price their units self for, it falls to an entity that is not seeking maximum profit from a given development to do so.

Around both outlying Vancouver skytrain and Toronto regional areas there is a lot of single family residential within a few blocks of stations that could be redeveloped for higher density, even neglecting that massive portion of the Toronto dock lands near the size of downtown that the government just sold off for private development. The government can absolutely get its hands on lots of land to develop, especially as industrial activity continues to move away from city centers.

The government also uniquely has the ability to build more metro lines that bridge areas to downtown, and could thusly drive density in currently cheap areas.

Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.

Council housing in Britain between the 50s and privatization, not only did the price of the entire market remain affordable because of the competition but the quality vastly improved given the need for any private developer to do better than the government with its massive economies of scale, near free land, and effectively no taxes on itself.

If you have long waitlists, you by definition do not have enough public housing to meet demand, and need to make more. We wouldn’t say schools didn’t work because look, our town only has enough space in its public school to admit half the towns children, guess it’s just a lottery and we should shut it down.

Real estate, building apartments, this is an immensely profitable industry, and its absurd to assume that it suddenly not only becomes unprofitable but is a massive tax burden just because the government is developing the land and not a billionaire doing near the same thing but walking away with an absurd profit skimmed off the top.

At least not unless the government is so obsessed with the free market that it is just renting existing apartments instead of the normal method of developing a new complex with a bunch of apartments, using most as cheap public housing for people who need assistance and renting the rest out at market rate to cover the cost of the project.

How trans people can have multiple passports/ citizenship in multiple countries, what to actually do to be prepared if you or a loved one are arrested for being trans, protesting, etc, and a lot of other things that take a few hours of work to do ahead of time that can turn life-destroying disasters into manageable problems your friends can solve.

The talk itself is mostly focused on things every single person should know and was given in 2022, but we do get a few mentions and a story about a trans person arrested on trumped up charges, but everything in there is worth knowing and Devient is always an interesting speaker.

Seriously, at the very least if you or a loved one are trans, start at 1:10:36 and do as much of the list as possible.

Hence why it’s important to build more public housing. My suggestion was just to keep the economic and rural housing problem from deteriorating, but if you want to house minimum wage workers in an dense urban area like like downtown Vancouver or Toronto, there is no viable alternative to government owned and operated apartments excepting maybe building new greenfield dense development connected to the urban cores by frequent rail.

Ideally however, the government could work to hold the price of homes relatively constant, and let inflation slowly bring them back into affordability. This would piss off everyone, but it would safely deflate the bubble without damaging people’s retirement too much.

With current battery and hydro storage prices, their cheaper than natural gas with with the cost of the buffer, and absurdly cheap for any industrial application that doesn’t.

Also there are bulk industrial processes to make steel, concrete, fertilizer, and glass with little to no carbon emissions, they just require more electricity and so aren’t cost effective if your electricity comes from fossil fuels, hence why most such plants only started construction once the cost for electricity in general dropped below the cost for fossil electricity.

Moreover while mining and shipping are only starting decarbonization, the required fossil fuel extraction is already far, far smaller than what’s continually required to run the generation they are replacing, and that’s only going to continue to drop as more and more primary energy is electrified with renewables.

For the most part to my knowledge it’s the same as maintaining any large, complex piece of infrastructure. As it gets older spare parts get harder to find and have to be replaced with different similar parts requiring new engineering analysis, more and more big components like pipes and tanks get to the point where they need to be wholly replaced, etc…

Design lifespan is the point the designers expected a lot of annoying to replace things to wear out on paper for the cost of maintenance to rise, but now in the present we can inspect things to see how they actually did in practice.

This means that operations gets more expensive and you need to shut down for major work every now and then, but compared to the ever increasing cost of building an entire new plant just replacing the parts that have worn out in order to squeeze an extra fifteen or twenty years is probably going to be more cost effective to a point.

We just need them to hold in long enough for us to get enough renewables and storage capacity on the grid to replace all the fossil sources, at which point we can keep building renewables and replace the most most expensive to maintain nuclear and most fish limiting dams and the like.

Nuclear power was absolutely the answer, 50, 30, or even 20 years ago, but given the long construction times and cost relative to wind and solar backed by battery and hydro, the time for new construction has probably passed outside of niche regions. It’s still much more cost effective to keep existing plants online, but when the primary bottleneck is funding focusing on the more cost effective technologies just makes sense.

Of course, I imagine that’s the same reason why the oil and gas companies that have been fearmongering about nuclear power for the last half century have suddenly come around on it.

Highly unlikely, the closest I can see it getting is Troubles style car bombs, truck bombs, and maybe some homemade fpv drone strikes, plus a bunch of cops and feds beating and shooting people in retaliation.

At this point I can’t help but wonder if a few foreign agents befriended him on Twitter and are now in an office competition to see who can convince him to do the dumbest thing possible.

Don’t forget acceleration, one of the main reasons passenger trains care about weight is that you can get up to and down from line speed quicker, thusly saving trip time and allowing for more frequency/capacity from the same number of trains and drivers.

The extra weight from the batteries means you don’t get said benefits from going to battery electric as compared to overhead line.