I’ve never met a person actually making that argument, though. I’m certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it’s primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:

The YIMBY movement (short for “yes in my back yard”) is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]

As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]

The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]

The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1  and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY

Plus, it’s just a weird argument to be making that we should be just forcefully shipping homeless people out to Bumretch, Kentucky to live in a dilapidated shed. No jobs, no opportunities.

The places where housing is needed are cities. The places with jobs and opportunities. And the cities that are most expensive are the ones with the absolute lowest vacancy rates.

Additionally, why would we actually want zero vacancies? Vacancies are good for the average person. Vacancies mean you can shop for a new home or apartment without finding someone to swap units with you. Vacancies mean your landlord has a credible threat of vacancy if they demand too much in rent. Vacancies give power to renters and buyers. Why would any left-leaning person willingly – much less gleefully – take bargaining power away from renters and give it to landlords on a silver platter?

At this point, I’m half-convinced this “vacancy truth” rhetoric the person you’re responding to is espousing is a psyop by landlords to protect their economic interests.

I only mention North America because the US and Canada are the only two countries I have lived in, and thus have the most intimate knowledge of how their urban land use policies work.

But even outside of North America, many places have some form of restrictive land use policy. In the UK, I know they have the council system, where there’s a local council that has veto power over every single development. It may not be the same form as North American zoning, but the net effect on making it de facto illegal to build enough housing.

I’m also aware of many other European countries having strict land use policies that make it extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to build denser housing, hence why many European cities (cough cough Amsterdam) have ludicrous housing crises.

Japan is perhaps the most notable exception that I’m aware of. In the 1980s and 1990s, they had the mother of all real estate bubbles burst, which devastated their economy, and the lesson they learned was they needed to make it easier to build housing to avoid a similar thing ever again occurring. They made land use policies uniform and quite permissive at the national level, allowing people to build most housing by right in most locations. The result? Tokyo, despite being the most populous metro area in the world, is actually remarkably affordable, even to minimum wage earners.

If housing is expensive where you live, and most of the land is tied up in single-family homes, what’s stopping people from just converting their homes into plexes, or straight-up selling to someone who will turn a couple single-family lots into an apartment complex that houses hundreds?

If you’re anywhere in North America, chances are it’s literally illegal to do so, because of restrictive zoning and other NIMBY land use policies that make it literally illegal to build enough housing in the places that need it most.

So the solution, then, is to make it legal and easy to build housing so people don’t have to fight over scraps.

Some squatter who bought the rights to it for two twigs and a raspberry back when they were first selling off name rights 200,000 years ago

And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn’t suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.

Plus, why do people act like the “incumbent advantage” is some magical advantage? It’s a cargo cult mentality, especially in this day and age where all the old “rules” about elections have gone out the window.

I mean, I remember the day where being twice-impeached and a convicted felon would be unrecoverable political death, yet here we are staring down the barrel of a possible second Trump term.

Biden is a historically unpopular president, who is behind in basically all polling in basically every key swing state, and who just had the mother of all “the emperor has no clothes” moments on national television, losing the confidence of his own base. Even Democratic congresspeople are calling on him to step down now.

There is simply no path forwards for Biden to win in November. He’s cooked.

As for replacements, personally, I think Gretchen Whitmer is the best choice. Relatively young, good compromise candidate between the progressive and moderate wings of the party, current beloved governor of Michigan (key swing state!), competent technocrat, no significant political baggage, and made a name for herself protecting abortion rights in Michigan after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.

Is the GOP actually the ones wanting us to replace Biden at the moment? If anything, there’s a very good reason to believe the GOP would want Biden to remain: he’s a quite unpopular president for whom the overwhelming majority of Americans have concerns about his age and mental fitness. Further, he has a ton of political baggage, and is highly contentious amongst Democrats.

Personally, I genuinely think Gretchen Whitmer (with Pete Buttigieg as running mate) would be much more likely to win in November, at least according to post-debate polling from this leaked internal memo: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

Leaked internal memo with post-debate polling data showing a strong preference for Biden alternatives (especially Whitmer and Buttigieg) in key swing states: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

Silvopasture is an ancient practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock. Pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless while maintaining or increasing productivity and providing a suite of additional benefits. Livestock continue to emit the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, but these are more than offset by carbon sequestration, at least until soil carbon saturation is achieved.

Silvopasture also offer financial benefits for farmers and ranchers. Livestock, trees, and other forest products, such as nuts, fruit, and mushrooms, generate income on different time horizons. And help protect farmers from risk. The health and productivity of both animals and the land improve.

https://drawdown.org/solutions/silvopasture

Trees in silvopasture systems provide livestock with protection from sun and wind, which can increase animal comfort and improve production. Trees can provide shade in the summer and windbreaks in the winter, allowing livestock to moderate their own temperature. Heat stress in livestock has been associated with decreased feed intake, increased water intake, and negative effects on production, reproductive health, milk yields, fitness, and longevity.[4][5]

Certain tree types can also serve as fodder for livestock. Trees may produce fruit or nuts that can be eaten by livestock while still on the tree or after they have fallen. The leaves of trees may serve as forage as well, and silvopasture managers can utilize trees as forage by felling the tree so that it can be eaten by livestock, or by using coppicing or pollarding to encourage leaf growth where it is accessible to livestock.[1]

Well-managed silvopasture systems can produce as much forage as open-pasture systems under favorable circumstances. Silvopasture systems have also been observed to produce forage of higher nutritive quality than non-silvopasture forage under certain conditions. Increased forage availability has been observed in silvopasture systems compared to open-pasture systems under drought conditions, where the combination of shade from trees and water uptake from tree roots may reduce drought impacts.[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

Exactly. I’ve seen it with faaaaaar too many tankies and even populist leftists. Instead of advocating for empirically-driven policy that would measurably improve the world, there’s a ton of rhetoric about how we just need to punish capitalists/fascists/landlords/neolibs/billionaires/etc. harder to fix the world’s problems.

At this point, I think it’s just a deep-rooted flaw of the human psyche that we’re just inclined towards trying to force our solutions through by punishing those who oppose us, rather than trying to deeply understand the dynamics at play and changing the underlying structure to incentivize the outcomes we want.

And if we fail to address the tendency towards knee-jerk, brute-force, authoritarian “solutions” to problems within our own ranks, we’ll meet the same fate as every other revolution-turned-brutal-dictatorship.

The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.

It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

It’s just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

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Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.

Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.

When Milwaukee implemented a housing-first homeless policy, they actually saved money.

Turns out that, by almost completely eliminating homelessness, you can save a lot of money on the legal system, policing, healthcare, and other costs associated with homelessness.

Housing-first homeless policy is the obvious solution: it’s humane, it’s effective, and it saves us money.

You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.

Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.

NYC itself doesn’t have much (although it still has some! see image below) low-density zoning, but their suburbs sure do. The city itself also has a lot of other bureaucratic barriers to development that result in it having abysmal housing construction rates.

As for vacancy, yes, the threat of not being able to sell is what stops builders from building too much. For example, it’s the reason no one’s even trying to build the Burj Khalifa in Bakersfield. But if you make it legal and reasonably easy to build, yes, people will build.

Perhaps Tokyo is the best example. Biggest city in the world, and yet it’s actually relatively affordable, thanks largely to good land use policy:

In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.

Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area.

…

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

I think the key idea is to not have government bureaucrats or existing homeowners or landlords decide whether there’s “enough” housing, but rather let builders determine if there’s unmet demand. If there is unmet demand, they will build if you let them. If there truly is enough housing in a certain city, then you don’t need to tell builders not to build – they’ll simply stop building if they sense there’s not enough demand for it.

The “we have enough homes already” is a common (and unfortunately very harmful) myth.

A couple good in-depth videos on the topic:

• https://youtu.be/evYOhpjMql0?si=IRUAo9RxDjZVenpI
• https://youtu.be/3xZXdXxYBGU?si=DF-MesH6FIetbur-

The gist of it is that statistics on how many vacant homes exist are highly misleading, for two main reasons:

1. Many of the homes are not where the demand is. A vacant home in St Louis does nothing to help with a housing shortage in NYC. People want to live in NYC because that’s where the jobs are. A house in St Louis isn’t worth much if you can’t find work there. And statistics consistently show that the most expensive cities have the lowest vacancy rates.
2. A lot of the homes that are counted as “vacant” aren’t actually just free for the taking like “vacant” would have you believe. In these statistics, “vacant” can mean: 1) a unit that is between tenants, 2) a unit that just finished being built and is awaiting its tenant’s move-in, 3) a unit occupied by someone who doesn’t legally state it as their primary residence (e.g., student housing where the student still lists their parents’ home as their primary address), 4) a unit in horrible disrepair that is unfit for occupation, etc.

Add to this the fact that high vacancy rates are GOOD for you, as it means landlords and sellers have a credible threat of vacancy, meaning they can’t demand ludicrous prices. Reducing vacancy rates is an incredibly anti-consumer, pro-landlord move.

Yeah, political opinions based on “regulations always good” or “regulations always bad” are lazy and unhelpful. For one, it ignores that many regulations are written for the express purpose of manufacturing or solidifying a monopoly.

Regulatory capture

And NIMBY land use policies really are just a textbook example of regulatory capture. Homeowners, who expect their homes to perpetually increase in value, lobby their local governments to manufacture an artificial scarcity of housing so as to drive their property values to the moon. All of this at the expense of renters and new home buyers.

Imo, we should all be trying to form nuanced political opinions where we judge policy on whether it’s good policy or not.

Honestly, I care far more about untangling our rat’s nest of NIMBY land use laws. As it stands, it’s literally illegal to build anything denser than sprawling, low-density suburbs on the majority of urban land thanks to NIMBY policies such as restrictive zoning and arbitrary mandatory parking minimums.

Tbh, the whole “corporate ownership of homes” is a red herring. Shuffling around ownership does nothing if you’re not massively expanding supply. And what we need most right now is massively expanded supply.