It's really encouraging to see these kinds of success stories. I really hope people who are concerned about affordability start to view things from more of a "yes and" point of view. We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development.
> We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development
One of the NIMBY lobby's greatest wins was putting these options on the ends of a policy spectrum.
They're not. They're complementary. If it's cheaper to build, it's cheaper to build social housing. And if you have a vibrant construction sector, you can build more public housing faster.
Sorry, yeah, IZO/IHO --- rules requiring some margin of AMI affordable units in new developments (which makes new development harder to pencil out, while giving warm fuzzies to locals who want to genuflect to affordability while still fencing out new neighbors).
Probably the best thing you could do in terms of social housing construction would be to have the government put up some capital to buy land and build new housing on that land, then immediately sell it and use the proceeds to do it again and again with exponential growth because it's actually profitable.
But that's also what construction companies would be doing regardless except for the subsidy, at which point you might be better off doing something like exempting construction companies from property taxes for two years if they at least double the number of housing units on their land in that time.
In the context of the the lack of confidence investors seem to have in Intels long term vision this makes sense but it really doesn't feel like a good sign for their future
Weather data is incredibly important to a huge number of activities and to the general safety of the public, which is why the government is providing it in the first place. Debt to fund it is almost certain to economically productive. The republican controlled congress is cutting taxes and raising debt levels. A similar argument could be made that we should continue to fund services and raise taxes to reduce deficits instead
Companies can and do offer data for a fee. In the same way that private toll road existing doesn't mean we should get rid of the highway system, a paid option doesn't mean the government should stop providing a publicly funded option given the immense value it provides to society
If the government option successfully creates a government monopoly, maybe we should?
In this case we simply don't know what the market needs or market value of these services are because no one is incentivized to compete with the subsidized government program.
How have they created a monopoly? This comment is on a post about a company that charges for this data, not to mention competitors like foreca or the weather company
I've noticed this user has a habit of asking these "questions" and then suddenly falling quiet when pressed more closely. (I think they are concern trolling)
I'm deeply worried about the number of people I see online who don't understand what Vanguard (or Blackrock, State Street, etc.) do and develop conspiracy theories instead. I think it presents a real risk for ETFs going into the future.
ESG scores and similar have a very real and visible impact. Maybe if you are that worried instead of calling them all conspiracies you could actually address them.
"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."
No, they're both south of the Mason-Dixon line and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Texas is considered less South, culturally, than Virginia.
Yeah, I don't really consider virginia part of the south, culturally. Maybe it was different in the past but proximity to DC has rotted any of that away.
I can see parts of Virginia not feeling culturally like a lot of the rest of the south but I’m still intrigued by the use of yankee. Like is someone from Wyoming a yankee because they aren’t from the south or is it more cultural to you?
Nope, yankeedom as I see it is Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
There is another, semi-derisive, use in which it means any non-southerner. But that is less common and context-dependent.
Fundamentally, I think laws like this miss the mark on what the actual problem facing news publishers is. Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher. On the other hand, allowing users to see a link, headline, and maybe a bit of the opening paragraph are almost certainly a benefit to the publisher, encouraging more users to view the article and potentially generate revenue for them.
But the issue is news is competing with so much other stuff for our attention and consumers don't really care about where it originally comes from. I pay for multiple newspaper subscriptions but a bunch of my social media is "news" but not from a media outlet. It's commentators I like discussing a story. It's my Aunt posting "Can you believe the mayor is so corrupt". It's hacker news threads. I'm getting enough of the information to feel informed without feeling like I need to go pay for the original reporting.
>Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher.
AFAIK both companies provide ways of opting out of this. It's that news organizations want their cake and eat it too by forcing google to give them free traffic (via search results) and charge them for the privilege.
The main issue is Canadian politics/news is pretty boring so why would I pay for Globe and Mail or The Star when I can get the main gist from social media? Sometimes your product simply isn't interesting enough to be a big business like it used to be. Propping them up with taxes is just that, propping up something people don't really want. You can never shield them from competition on the internet unless you go full China.
Your point on competition is a good one. I find the news interesting, but watching a TikTok is a much easier way to find out what's going on. Not to mention the competition in my feeds to show me the craziest thing that happened in Australia or Morocco today. It's impossible for a single entity to compare with that. I think a major problem that creates is news becoming more sensationalized than before. I think it's also leading to a lot more misinformation (both intentional and not).
That's led me to think that more public funding of media, including privately owned publications, would be a good thing. Information is valuable even when the market doesn't recognize it, and I think we're becoming worse off as the public relies on institutions less and less. A tax on algorithmic social media & search to pay for it seems like a better plan than laws that just result in news being blocked
It's a mix of believing that news has value and I should support that and actually enjoying the product. The NYTimes has done a pretty great job of expanding the scope of the offering to make it really valuable to me. Others like the Globe & Mail or Washington Post or random Substacks have more niche coverage that I enjoy. But there's also plenty of times when I've seen a story and gone "ok got it, not going to subscribe to Bloomberg"
What is confusing about it? Trademarks are there so consumers aren’t being misled in the market and not getting the thing they expect. It’s annoying that you had to come up with a different brand, but it’s pretty understandable that Basecamp doesn’t want someone to mistake their software product for yours. Its also reasonable that if your product was a new energy drink that you could ignore them since the trademark almost certainly isn’t that broad
