I think you get fewer employees per sandwich by switching to less labor-intensive types of bread, hiring robots to spread mayo, and smaller shops (e.g. food carts) where more of the labor is provided by the owner.
I think it would improve things overall, but hindered partially by the above.
Or they hire all their sandwich workers as independent contractors. After all, they are artists.
I while ago I read this essay thing I can't find now. A British PM moves from London to the Bay Area and inter alia contrasts the experience of buying a sandwich. UK: franchise, limited standard choices, order and pay in app while you're in line, zero human interaction necessary. SF: no franchise, each sandwich individually negotiated for and customized, takes forever. The magic wand will give you more Pret a Mangers.
Maybe that's all the fanciest people deserve.
There was one in D.C. It wasn't bad. Better than Subway but pricier.
3: When was this? The days of $7/hour and less scarce housing?
I feel like the proposed wand could work in the direction you describe, but as noted above, it can cut both toward housing/transit and toward labor efficiencies.
Overall when we're talking policy, I feel like a lot of people have the instinct "impose mandate A with a logic chain that produces material outcome B" (like fiddling with the salaries of legislators based on some incentive structure) and that's almost always far less certain and more liable to backfiring than "directly fund and facilitate material outcome B".
If I had a magic wand, and I wanted to fix housing policy, I would pass a law saying that either affordable housing gets built, or we start blowing up mansions. And then leave it to the laboratory of democracy that is local government to fix it. For extra incentive, we blow up cute old houses and start knocking down the redwoods on Marin, to give NIMBYs who hide behind environmentalism an extra push.
Interesting. San Francisco already had a higher minimum wage then, I believe. Certainly plenty of incentive to get labor cost down. Possibly one has to resort to cultural explanations about customization and individuality.
10: Why not just use the magic wand to build the housing?
Overall when we're talking policy, I feel like a lot of people have the instinct "impose mandate A with a logic chain that produces material outcome B" (like fiddling with the salaries of legislators based on some incentive structure) and that's almost always far less certain and more liable to backfiring than "directly fund and facilitate material outcome B".
What would the direct funding and facilitating look like here? Mandating inclusionary zoning and funding it?
(fun fact: inclusionary zoning is illegal in Texas. Because we believe in small government, by which we mean medium-governments micromanaging small governments.)
The other half of the thing I was trying to solve was a geographically-tethered minimum wage in a sensible, easy to explain way. What does direct funding and facilitating look like for this?
14: Literally building government owned or subsidized social housing. You'd need to fix zoning to make that possible, but you also need to make housing affordable for poor people by funding it with tax dollars.
I mean, it seems insanely utopian and outside the boundaries of anything that's politically possible and all that. But it'd work.
The other half of the thing I was trying to solve was a geographically-tethered minimum wage in a sensible, easy to explain way. What does direct funding and facilitating look like for this?
I suppose if everyone has access to affordable housing, reasonable groceries, and free health care, minimum wage becomes much less important.
The other half of the thing I was trying to solve was a geographically-tethered minimum wage in a sensible, easy to explain way. What does direct funding and facilitating look like for this?
I suppose if everyone has access to affordable housing, reasonable groceries, and free health care, minimum wage becomes much less important.
My uncle had a scheme where wages should be strictly set to be inversely proportional to how many people are willing to do the job. So movie stars would get a pittance and garbage collectors would be well-compensated.
My dad and my uncle would then argue about how to handle jobs which require a decade of specialized training.
This is basically against the spirit of the last sentences, but: setting property values for tax purposes is a simpler example. Both in California (prop 13) and in a bunch of big cities, where the homes of long-installed wealthy residents mysteriously generate much less revenue than one might think, while poorer neighborhoods are aggressively assessed, the letter of the law just doesn't matter. I mean, it did in Californa, but the law was so offensive that there was a referendum to avoid effects for everyone that mattered.
NIMBYs motivated by seeing their homes as retirement savings are a real problem. Were this to be implemented, I predict that automation and carryouts that serve microwaved food prepared in the exurbs would be the outcome.
25: Arguably in California we've turned property assessment discrimination into black-letter law via a purportedly neutral formula, although it has the side effect of making assessors' work less of a systemic harm for low-income homeowners, as their property will rarely need reassessing.
(Not sure what you mean by "the letter of the law mattered in California"? There were a lot of corruption scandals with county assessors in the 70's, such as giving sweetheart deals to particular commercial developments that indirectly hurt homeowners, helping propel Prop 13, but if they were doing that I'm sure they were racially discriminating too.)
13: The effect would be the same, and I derive utility from threatening to burn down mansions?
Depends how many existing mansions are affected. I think a lot of NIMBY homeowners would accept cutting down all the redwoods and a 5% risk of destruction of their home, versus a 100% chance of affordable housing near them.
I mean, it seems insanely utopian and outside the boundaries of anything that's politically possible and all that. But it'd work.
It's difficult, but not that insanely utopian. Americans hate public housing, which is presumably why the pro-housing left has rebranded it as "social housing" to sound cool and European, but we do still have lots of it and there are housing authorities everyone with at least the theoretical ability to build more. (The one here has been doing a lot of really interesting, innovative medium-density mixed-use developments lately.) The zoning and public opinion challenges are real and there's a major need for more funding, of course, but it's not unimaginable that we could make progress on this in the coming years.
"Section 80" sounds like it might work 10 times better than "Section 8."
Of course, there are really two housing crises: High-demand areas with vibrant economies but limited housing supply, which get most of the attention, and low-demand areas with struggling economies where there's plenty of housing but wages are so low that people still can't afford it. The latter areas are where heebie's idea is a better fit.
27.2: If I understand 9.2, the correct move here is to burn down mansions and separately mandate affordable housing.
29: We have rentals. I would kind of love affordable to buy, cooperative housing, with limited but not NO, equity growth. And lots of common green space.
"The Gang learns that soviet-style economic planning is hard"
Or our businessperson chooses option 5: Join together with other business people to create a building within 30 minutes of downtown that theoretically is affordable enough to qualify as affordable housing under the law, even if in practice it is almost impossible to qualify for, or almost nobody actually wants to live there. Problem solved!
I assume the magic wand took care of regulatory capture, otherwise the war would be fought over the definitions of housing (how damp does a cardboard box have to become to be disqualified?) and commute times (measured at 3am with no traffic lights and assuming everyone has a car and can park it literally inside the kitchen).
A British PM moves from London to the Bay Area and inter alia contrasts the experience of buying a sandwich. UK: franchise, limited standard choices, order and pay in app while you're in line, zero human interaction necessary. SF: no franchise, each sandwich individually negotiated for and customized, takes forever. The magic wand will give you more Pret a Mangers.
I assume there's some sort of allegory going on here, but it does not seem like a particularly accurate description of reality. Yes there are lots of Prets in London, but they are dwarfed by the number of independent, made to order sandwich shops.
faux-gressive NIMBYs are always looking for reasons to think that this particular development is bad, even though of course they would enthusiastically support some other hypothetical development (elsewhere). Performative outrage about evil developers is a key move in these debates, even though in many cities it's existing homeowners rather than developers who see absurd profit margins from real estate sales.
So my prediction about this approach is that as soon as a single new development were proposed, the instant objection to it would be "this is bad because employers only want it built so that they can pay their workers lower wages."
I prefer Walt's "blow up the occasional mansion pour encourager les autres" approach.
Today I went down to Worcester to stand in the picket line for the St Vincent nurses strike, which has been going on for 89 days. They are striking against a national, for-profit hospital chain that wants to run with fewer nurses per patient and would very much like to break the union. The hospital is still running with scab nurses bused in from Georgia and Alabama. The nurses are annoyed that they aren't getting support from the doctors.
39: When did Tenet buy them? Before Steward all of our hospitals in Eastern MA were nominally non-profit.
It seems like Tenet has owned them on and off since the 1990s. There was also a 49 day strike at the same place against Tenet in 2000. It was resolved by Ted Kennedy getting Donna Shalala on the phone and asking her for the dirt on Tenet. Turns out it was years and years of Medicare fraud, which was successfully leveraged into a favorable contract for the nurses.
It's like how the Grinch stole everything and then gave it all back.
People need to live somewhere so they should just have the federal government build a shitload of apartment buildings. .
Do people get on top of their carports, like a patio?
My parents' carport has a peaked roof. So they don't.
My spare bedroom/office forms a kind of carport in front of the garage.
It can't legally be called a carport because it isn't long enough to cover the back of the car and it isn't from the Carpo region of France.
Carpeaux, you ignorant American.
Could the heebielaw lead to distinct regions with different wage/rent amounts, but similar wage/rent ratios? (Isn't that what theoretically always happens, eventually, also equilibriating with things like "gold mine ran out" and "baby bust"?)
I always wanted to see the giant-ass McMansions they have in Potomac, MD split up into multi-family housing. That place could easily hold triple the population, although they might have to run a few more buses.
I don't suppose the rich people who currently live there would like it, but Dan Snyder can go fuck himself.
56: I've been following a Canadian epidemiologist on twitter who linked to some video about that. Am I understanding correctly that- although everyone a"feels terrible" about the 215 bodies found in a mass grave in BC -the government of Canada is suing the survivors of the Residential schools?
I haven't been following the Kamloops discovery in detail, but in general Canada's record on indigenous rights is atrocious.
Only if you judge it by a standard that values human life.
A minor detail, I'm sure we can agree.
58: I always think that, but I'm ignorant enough of how badly we treated our Native Americans. I know how badly we mismanaged the Indian trust funds and obviously we threw them on to shitty land. So I think, we'll, as a US Ilan, I don't really have a leg to stand on. I'm not sure where the US ranks on the atrociousness scale. Are we less ungood?
One doesn't need a leg to stand on. The reverse of the tu quoque fallacy; the atrocity exists independently of who points it out.
This all reminds me of how in the new Star Trek: Discovery the ship runs on a mycelial network drive.
I guess I stopped watching after Next Generation so I didn't know the Federation ever got into forcible conversion of the locals.
OT: Went back to the office for the first time. Within two minutes of being here, I stained my shirt.
They had to invent the organic warp drives hack because they decided to introduce the warp drive version of global warming (go too fast and you tear up the universe) and they've been regretting it ever since.
They had to invent the organic warp drives hack because they decided to introduce the warp drive version of global warming (go too fast and you tear up the universe) and they've been regretting it ever since.
But that was a century after the events of Discovery.
The median single family home price on Oahu is on track to pass a million bucks this summer and the vast majority of new housing being built is either an hour plus from most employment or a condo costing north of a million. It's such a mystery why we have so many tents along the sidewalks.
Hey DaveLHI, send me an email? I don't have your email address.
Twenty years ago I had the opportunity to buy an ocean-view condo in Waikiki for $200K but felt the price was too high.
76: May have been wise. I can't make sense of the pricing of the new buildings in relation to some of the older ones, but my general impression is that a lot of what could have been price appreciation went into maintenance fee creep instead.
maintenance fee creep
If nobody likes him, get a new custodian instead of insulting him.
Yeah, I do recall that the maintenance fees were wicked high and the place had more than a couple roaches.
Also, we never did catch the Graduation Day Shitter.
73- Time travel also messes up the universe but they've done it in like 30 different plots so I'm sure they'll tie it all together.
But why would the superintendent shit all over my kitchen?