That assumes rent controlled units actually benefit mostly the underprivileged. They don't.
They create a strong incentive to keep a flat indefinitely. It's not unheard of for a person to continue renting a rent frozen apartment after they buy a house because the rent is so cheap - effectively it's a second home.
There's also plenty of corruption. "Knowing a guy" is one of the best ways to get a rent controlled unit since the wait time can be years.
Are these "favors" rank-blind (i.e. does its hushhush-nature more-equalize the men, just trying to secure places to live)? Obviously officers and enlisted have different housing, but might an E-6 kiss an E-5's ass only on account of wanting his soon-to-be-vacated housing?
My background is non-military (with one each, officer & enlisted, brother).
Even if they don't benefit economically, there's some value in having them feel that they are valued and have a voice at the table. Such policies can provide the popular support needed to implement other more economically optimal policies, and we're seeing this happen for example with the mayor of New York.
I don't know about that. Canada also tracked the UK more closely than the US and it was not involved in Brexit[1]. The US just did really well during this time.
If you "know a guy" you can even pass a driving test without ever getting behind the wheel of a car. Road licensing is in complete shambles in the last 10 years. A lot of "workarounds" and corruption.
How are they undeniable? They're very deniable. One example is the (seemingly) increasing maintenance costs for AI-generated code[1]. Another is the cost incurred by everybody reading AI slop instead of actual communication.
I don't have hard data as to whether these cancel out the benefits, but it's not as rosy as some seem to think.
[1] After years of people understanding that LOC is not only a poor productivity metric but also a negative indicator of code quality (shorter code for the same thing is better), we now have people touting how many LOC their LLM agent is generating. It's like everyone forgot what LOC actually represents and what it means for long term maintenance costs.
Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].
Some choice exerpts:
> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.
> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.
> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”
> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”
The Saudis aren't "daring" with megaprojects. They're fucking[1] stupid[2]. Saying their megaprojects are "daring" is like saying I'm "daring" for claiming I'm going to build a catapult that will launch me to the moon.
That’s what daring means. You try things that do not guarantee success. I remember a decade of people shitting on Dubai for all of the crazy projects it was building. It really paid off for them (pre Iran war). They made something out of nothing and still are. What’s stupid about a kilometer high tower? It’s fucking awesome.
Still trucking but that’s another attempt at diminishing some pretty great achievements. Turning a sterile, hot piece of sand into a “destination” isn’t easy but they managed to do it. Do you bring up lead pipes and police violence every time someone talks about the US?
Social media itself was the beginning of the end. Once we largely replaced a decentralized networks of blogs and websites with 4 giant sites containing content copied from the other 3 the jig was up. Many of the social media sites don't play nice with search engines and include features that auto-delete content or block linking to other websites as well.
I hate it and I hate that this is what became popular instead of what the internet was in its heyday. It's sad to see.
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