techwooded

As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing

I would check out Semafor as well

Malt vinegar or brown sauce

• Accidental Tech Podcast: Three dudes talking about tech and (mostly) Apple
• The Allusionist: podcast about language and linguistics
• The Bruenigs: Matt & Liz Bruenig talk about random stuff
• Cortex: podcast about productivity by Myke Hurley & CGP Grey
• Factually: Interviews with interesting people hosted by Adam Connover
• Hello Internet (Dead): two dudes talking, GGP Grey & Brady Haran (Numberphile)
• Intentionally Blank: Random conversations with Brandon Sanderson & Dan Wells
• No Such Thing As a Fish: Intersting and odd facts by the team behind the British TV show QI
• Puck Soup: Ice Hockey News and information
• Stuff You Should Know: Funny podcast about all kinds of stuff
• The Tennis Podcast: podcast about tennis
• Ungeniused: brief episodes about interesting Wikipedia pages
• The Unmade Podcast: mostly random stuff, but about pitching ideas for other podcasts
• Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me: the NPR News quiz

For me I think part of it is more nostalgia for a certain relationship I had with this person, even if it wasn’t a close one, and my life during the time I knew them.

I think that the internet has given us this almost elongation effect to personal relationships though. Some people are just meant to pass into our lives for a brief time then pass out of them, and that’s okay

Lots of cakes in Germany for example are traditionally made from yeasted doughs

I like the idea in theory, but I think it would be a hard sell of “hey trade in your $10k+ car for this few hundred dollar bike”

Main problem with this is that unemployment isn’t handled by the IRS, it’s a program under the Department of Labor and administered by the States and federal agencies notoriously don’t talk to each other.

There’s also nothing wrong with just giving them unemployment benefits, but you structure your tax system so that the rich people, when they end up needing to claim unemployment, are paying more or equivalent in taxes paying into unemployment than they’re getting in the payout. You simplify both sets of laws, the IRS is in charge of collecting revenue and the subdepartment of Labor tasked with this only has to worry about dishing out your cash so the administration of the benefit is simplified, and you still get your desired result of exceedingly well off people not “dragging” the system

Would just like to pop in here and say that terms like “millionaires” and “billionaires” typically refer to net worth/wealth, not income. This is why Jeff Bezos was able to claim some of the federal COVID aide because, despite being a multi-billionaire, his income in that year was below the threshold (I think it was sub-$100k) as income from investments didn’t qualify under the structure of the plan.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment of people whose net worths are upwards of a million being able to claim unemployment, actually calculating net worth is extremely difficult to do, especially among the wealthy. That would put an unreasonable burden on the unemployment benefit system that would probably end up costing more in administrative costs than the money saved by not including to the ultra-wealthy in the benefit. Preventing the latter is the main benefit of universal programs