It’s a general rule of wine pairing that the wine should be sweeter than the food

That’s tough buddy

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization

-Jo Walton, Among Others

I guess the argument is that they will raise rent by the maximum, even at excessive risk of losing tenants? Because if the tenants will pay that much, why wouldn’t the landlord charge that anyway?

Definite agree with the core of what you’re saying, though for US and EU (and to a lesser degree “High income countries”), the numbers are quite close, as clean grid energy is significantly outpacing electric vehicle adoption (and EVs rely on a clean grid to be clean).

If you return the tax to everyone as a dividend, then it becomes progressive, while still encouraging less polluting options

To be fair, it would be more effective to build a handful of mid-rises rather than clear-cutting space for a new exurb

The antecedent of “its” is America, not the drug

Effective systemic change requires changing the systems, not individual people or companies. If we want less virgin plastic or gasoline burning, it needs to be less profitable to extract oil, process it, and sell it to people who want it, otherwise somebody is going to do that.

The report describes living comfortably as spending no more than 30% of one’s income on rent.

This is abusing a crude, outdated rule of thumb that never worked in HCOL areas [1]. Put simply, if your rent goes up by $10K annually and all other costs remain the same, you only need $10K more per year to be just as “comfortable”, not $33.33K.

Granted, $35.1K is a lot (that would be 100% of minimum wage in Los Angeles). The median rent for a **1BR ** is $2.2K [2], so 26K per year (i.e. still too much).

In short, minimum wage isn’t enough to afford rent in L.A., but you certainly don’t need to be making $100K.

1. https://www.earnest.com/blog/rent-and-the-30-percent-rule/
2. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/los-angeles-ca/?bedrooms=1

Every presidential election is important, and it never makes sense to make a “protest vote”. That’s just not how voting works.

I’m sure somebody has cried wolf at every election, but McCain and Romney never aimed to become dictators. Republicans currently have a published plan to institute fascism. It’s pretty obvious that these elections actually are exceptional.

This article is an abuse of the source data. “Working class” here is closer to manual laborer and excludes teachers, farm workers, military, emergency services, nurses, law enforcement, and others. The data is also fairly noisy, with typos and 2% of values being empty affecting the calculation.

To conclude that anyone not “working class” by this definition is “upper-class” is absurd. I guess for some it is hard to imagine the lofty former assistant manager at Burger King (D-AR) understanding the struggles of the common man.

There are certainly interesting discussions to be had about the disruptive influence of wealth on elections and about balancing representation with competence – and folks are having that discussion – but this article contributes less than nothing to those conversations.

Industrial strength anthropic principle

Oh man, don’t stop

You got it! Here’s some other consumer protections the administration has introduced recently:

• Direct filing with the IRS
• Price limits on asthma inhalers and insulin for seniors
• Requiring ISPs to provide consistent up-front information and pricing
• Restrictions on college junk fees and disallowing witholding of transcripts

Hungry for more? Check this out:

White House Statement on Junk Fees

That’s from October, so some of it overlaps, but among other stuff there’s still a “Click to Cancel” rule working its way through the FTC.

Sadly Biden has been spending a bunch of time on lame crap like climate change, human rights, health care, infrastructure, election integrity, etc., so it might take a bit longer for him to single-handedly usher in consumer utopia.

This seems entirely opposite to my observation. I’d say Biden and his administration are unusually focused on unfair or annoying business practices. In just the past two weeks the Biden administration:

• Set clear rules requiring cash refunds for flight delays
• Banned non-compete clauses
• Set new rules on “junk fees” for credit cards
• Increased the minimum salary for overtime exemption
• Expanded fiduciary duty to retirement “advisors”
• Announced a lawsuit against Live Nation (TicketMaster)
• Re-instated net neutrality

The complete rules are here: https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/refundsfinalruleapril2024

The meat of it is the table on pages 9-14 and mostly comprehensible.

Worth noting:

• A change to your flight number is always a “cancellation” and you may choose to accept a refund
  • The expectation is most people would not, for the same reason most don’t cancel their refundable tickets - they want to go on the flight
• There are no carve outs for weather, etc.
  • I am really glad to see this because airlines could claim “weather” for connecting flights, so any weather anywhere meant they could delay your flight

Funny running across this article after reading https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Spoiler: the author does not have a high opinion of Raghavan.

I agree that saying gerrymandering affects everyone is sort of off-topic and distracts from discussing the precise impact being discussed, but it’s really not equivalent to “All Lives Matter”.

• “Black Lives Matter” => Stop police murdering black people
• “All Lives Matter” => La la la, I can’t hear you

• “Gerrymandering Denies Incarcerated People Fair Democratic Representation” => We should stop gerrymandering for the sake of prisoners
• “Gerrymandering denies everyone fair democratic representation.” => We should stop gerrymandering for the sake of everyone

The dinner example assumes only one person didn’t get dinner. If instead everyone went without dinner, wouldn’t it make sense to point out they weren’t the only one affected?

That’s not a wealth tax, that is an income tax (+4% for the 1M+ tax bracket).

Countries that have a general wealth tax are Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. Countries with a selective wealth tax (beyond property taxes) are Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands. Source: https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/10/what-is-a-wealth-tax-and-should-the-united-states-have-one (under the heading “How have wealth taxes worked in other countries”)