an opinionated and jaded traveler
New York, USA
Joined February 2013
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The problem is that the activists and tenants basically don't trust the process or anybody involved, and the anecdotes from other cities where the residents didn't return isn't helping.
Based on a few anecdotes that I've seen here, squalor but cheap is better than the alternative.
First Class Duck retweeted
wild ruling out of Seattle that @PHLCouncil needs to read. a builder put $39M into 254 low-income apartments locked at 60% AMI for 30 years. from 2015 to 2018 it worked, collecting ~94% of rent.
then Seattle stacked on "tenant protections": banned criminal background checks, banned winter evictions, required 180 days notice for rent hikes + 3 months relocation pay, and forced the owner to let unscreened roommates move in and take over leases.
result: rent collections dropped from 93.9% to 44.1%!!! the building lost nearly $6M through 2023 ($2.7M in 2023 alone) and is now appraised as functionally worthless. the city bankrupted actual affordable housing lol.
the appeals court just ruled the owner can sue Seattle for an unconstitutional taking. when you strip a landlord's right to screen, collect rent or remove non-paying tenants, it's not "regulation" anymore, you took the building…. Philly has half these laws already 🙄 courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/8…
First Class Duck retweeted
These WSJ graphs, wow. They explain a lot about France's current meltdown.
First Class Duck retweeted
Obama embodies so much of what the conservative base hates in one man: Black, Child of an Immigrant + Miscegenation (BM + WW), Harvard Grad, Chicago, Technocrat..
Oh yeah, he's got a Muslim middle name!!!
His mere existence, accomplishments and talent, 24/7, has them like:
Cheesecake Factory is not a "Middle America" coded restaurant or for the "working man," as this editorial says. It's like P.F. Chang's: it indicates a bougie area. Have WSJ editorial writers not been to a chain restaurant beyond Ruth's Chris? wsj.com/opinion/barack-obama…
First Class Duck retweeted
That’s $375,000 per apartment unit to renovate btw.
I’ll keep pointing this out until I die or until New York amends vacancy control to fix its broken housing system. Whichever comes first.
gothamist.com/news/in-east-b…
First Class Duck retweeted
This is mostly due to social spending, which wasn't so high in the Soviet Union. People think of the Soviet Union as some kind of welfare state on steroids, but social spending was only about half of the current level in France as a share of GDP when defined narrowly and, even if you include food subsidies and enterprise benefits, it was still significantly lower. It was probably high relative to a typical, non-socialist country at a similar level of development, but not shockingly so.
What made set the Soviet Union and other socialist countries apart from market economies was not so much social spending but the reliance on central planning rather than prices and the market to coordinate production units. It's actually a testament to the efficiency of a market economy that France can get away with so much redistribution, even allowing for the fact that it's not sustainable at current levels, without destroying its ability to produce wealth in the first place.
First Class Duck retweeted
Could run it back, but as a collective we refuse to make a hard stance on certain topics, and it is stagnating the progress that should be happening
The Million Woman March was a grassroots protest march for Black women in America that took place on October 25, 1997 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event was organized by local store owner Phile Chionesu and public housing activist Asia Coney, who worked independently of national organizations and spread awareness largely through the internet, flyers, local women's organizations, and word-of-mouth.
First Class Duck retweeted
No surprise. I’d be more shocked if right wing money wasn’t quietly being poured into fifth column third-party candidates, groups like the DSA, or controversial candidates like AES.
If my goal were to weaken the Democratic Party, I’d absolutely bankroll the leftists. Even if a few of them eke out a win, they’re still useful: they damage the Dem brand, energize the right, make excellent political foils, keep the left divided and infighting, and make every subsequent Democrat harder to defend.
Something I’ve come to understand is that republicans don’t tend to succeed because of their policies. They succeed because Democrats got sloppy, go too far left, and ran divisive, extremely ideological candidates.
NEW: The group behind Cornel West's 2024 ballot push was wholly funded through Elon Musk's dark money network, according to Sludge's review of tax documents. readsludge.com/2026/10/26/mu…
First Class Duck retweeted
re: airbnb discourse
in college I worked as a server at an upscale steakhouse. we had a few different steak sauces that were made from scratch daily. they were expensive to make, and less than half of the customers that ordered steak wanted sauce, so the restaurant charged $3 for it
we got complaints constantly. just at my own tables, half a dozen times a week I'd get complaints about being "nickel and dimed" for $3 of sauce on a $70 steak. a few times a month someone would mention it in an angry online review, or ask to speak to a manager and demand that it be removed from the bill because "who the hell charges for condiments?"
after several years of this, finally management had enough. they raised the price of every steak by $3, and now complimentary sauce was included with each steak on request. want to hazard a guess about how many customers complained about the $3 price increase on steak? essentially zero.
it was great, from the restaurants perspective! no more complaints, and instead of making $3 on 40% of steak orderers, they made $3 on all of them. and the customers were much happier, despite this deal being absolutely, unequivocally worse for them.
consumers are not rational agents from microeconomics textbooks. very often the *feeling* of what they're being charged for matters way more than the absolute value of what they're being charged. I think that's more or less what happening with airbnb. people don't want to be charged a cleaning fee and then also told they have to clean, even if in the counterfactual world the additional cleaning fee is more than they'd be willing to pay someone to do the required cleaning. a $100 cleaning fee *feels* better than a $50 cleaning fee + "load the dishwasher and take the trash out to the dumpster", even though most people would not pay $50 to not have to do that.
I think a lot of you are misunderstanding the frustration. what's annoying is paying a cleaning fee and then being asked to clean. it feels like double dipping. it may be illogical, but you'd get less complaints about "$100 fee but you don't have to do anything" versus "$50 fee + load the dishwasher"
First Class Duck retweeted
We LOVED getting these on deployment. Kids would draw the wildest stuff and teachers clearly weren't reviewing them. They would draw Army men shooting people and blood coming out and then it would say "I hope you don't die." Everyone looked forward to getting them.
