Jeffrey Quackenbush

Carelessness?

We can’t unwind this differentiation any more than we could unwind sedentary agriculture. So a lot of the political gyrations we’re experiencing presently, including the impulse to fascism, emanates from the new-ness of this arrangement in human experience.

Industrialization has created a situation where different social functions have differentiated from one another in a way that was unthinkable in the past. Religion, law, politics, arts, culture, etc. are not as intrinsically interconnected as they were in every society in the past.

If Dems could narrow the affordability message to a few discrete things where there are some policy prescriptions available, the message becomes more effective.

1. Reduce housing costs near commercial activity
2. Lower health care costs
3. Control inflation on food and other necessities

So while it’s an objective fact that we have more disposable income than ever, a core feature of our daily lives — where we spend time during our daily routine — had gotten difficult in a way that just wasn’t the case to the same degree in the past.

Because population expansion and barriers to dense development in many cities, spatial distance and traffic has made the logistics of living in big cities harder for people who aren’t in the highest income brackets.

Many of these areas had crime problems and other issues, but they nevertheless made it easier to access jobs and other amenities in the larger urban areas.

This is just no longer true of cities in this country that have more than, like, 3 million people.

Or even lower-scale white collar wages.

So people have to live further out, or move to places that have better housing prices, but lower salaries.

In the past, there used to be “bad” neighborhoods that were relatively close to commercial centers.

The largest cities are responsible for a disproportionate amount of GDP, and so the best income opportunities (and urban amenities) are located in large cities.

However, housing costs near the commercial centers of these cities has gotten hard to afford on blue collar wages.

My theory:

One large portion of the reason why people feel that life is unaffordable is that it is hard, on average, to find affordable housing in reasonable spatial proximity to the best paying jobs.

He’s not entirely wrong that online discourse over-indexes for the biggest, most expensive metros.

On the other hand, the expensive metros have large populations and that’s where GDP and high paying jobs are concentrated, so you can’t look at any part of the country in isolation.

When do their warranties start? When they are shipped to the warehouse or when they are installed at a data center?

This could have some financial implications given the total dollar amounts involved.

I think a good portion of “affordability” discourse is about this issue and it would productive if the discourse became more specific.

Will has been arguing that Americans are wealthier than ever before, and I generally agree with this assessment. However, I think he is ignoring how population growth and housing asset price inflation has deformed the spatial relationship between incomes and 2nd & 3rd places.

Hypothetical family. The point is that an equivalent income in the Imperial Valley might be 60% from San Diego, with a similar job profile. I pulled those numbers out of the air, and am happy to be corrected with better figures.

This is true.

They might, however, be living further away from their jobs than they’d like, with a long commute in traffic.

This hypothetical family could also move to the Imperial Valley where these issues are less acute, and be making closer to $80,000 per year.

At least the accounts I follow on Twitter are foreigners who want to make money while encouraging civil conflict in the US. BlueSky is full of Americans whom I hate.

“The GOP takes its order from Moscow” would be a great campaign slogan for Dems next cycle.

The catch-and-kill schemes run by Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are not evidence of a cover-up, they are evidence of a savvy media strategy.

by Jake Tapper

Who wore it better?

David Pecker or Olivia Nuzzi?

You’re not reading what I’m saying. It is literally not physically possible to build and operate a continent-spanning electric grid without some amount of government involvement. Markets are a good feature of the American grid that can be expanded, but they exist in a specific public context.

Economic transactions related to production and consumption have to be abstracted from the physical reality production and consumption. Who manages the process of abstraction?

This doesn’t even address the ways in which the grid relies on public rights away and other public resources.

Electricity is produced and consumed instantaneously and the amount of energy produced and consumed across the electric grid is equal at all times. A truly “real-time” supply/demand curve is not physically possible.

The electric grid as we know it would be physically, socially and financially impossible without public regulation.

There’s no decision-making time between the production and consumption of electricity, so a “natural” market is physically impossible. Large private investments are impossible to finance without clearly defined market structures, and depend on public right-of-ways.

Olivia Nuzzi is the Zelig of American Fascism.

Therefore some entity charged with the public weal has to be involved in abstracting from physical reality and coordinating appropriate payment for long-term for large, long-term investment. Either electricity markets have to be designed or the electric grid is not possible.

For example, electricity is produced and consumed instantaneously and there is always exactly as much produced as is consumed in every instant. Costs largely revolve around huge multi-decade investments.

Markets are an excellent tool for coordinating complex behaviors among a large number of participants from the bottom up.

They are not, however, a natural state of being.

Maybe Sarah Palin is a good comparison?

The whole scene got to be a little much for her, and then faded into the background after resigning the governorship.