You can’t really raise a kid in the city without private school. Large school districts are super inefficient and have to spend lots of money to bring up kids from broken families. High quality schools cheat that problem by excluding poor families through expensive real estate thereby increasing the number of resources per student. It’s not fair but that’s how the game is played
You assume a free market economy that does not exist. Rent is a good example because regulation is driving it small land lords in favor of a few large corporate land lords that collude on rent using common algorithmic models.
In my country there used to be a government-owned airline with a monopoly. Tickets were so expensive that only the wealthy could afford them (yet somehow the airline still lost money). Then the market was thankfully deregulated. Competition substantially lowered the prices, and gave people the freedom to choose which airline to fly on.
No, I assume the free market that does exist, i.e. the one where the outcome of competition is monopoly/oligopoly. On the way to oligopoly you get all these sweet, sweet benefits from competition, so one of the major goals of government has to be breaking up the ologipolists/monopolists or at least regulating them in such a way that they can't exercise market power (i.e. mitigating market power) so we can keep competition fierce and keep benefiting from said fierce competition. Doing the above has mostly been an utter failure in America and Canada since roughly the 1970's.
It's interesting that I said government self inflicted a lot of this in the rent space by over-regulating and you seem to think this is an example of the free market not working rather than the government breaking the market.
Mostly the issue with being a small landlord lies in how the landlord-tenant laws are written to treat you like a large corporate landlord. You have the same legal obligation to go through very lengthy eviction processes and to be very verbose about criteria but you can’t amortize the risk of a bad tenant over even tens of units like a corporation can. If you get one bad tenant they can cost you more than you get from them in rent, and they can destroy the rental house before you get to the eviction hearing.
I’ve had more than one conversation with my wife about just keeping the house empty instead while we’re gone, but I still think I have a moral obligation to rent to someone if I can.
I think short term rental lowers that risk by having more renters but none under contract. Air b&b is a terrible thing but also the local maximum for individuals
My state has been infected by California copy cat syndrome and it’s destroying our cities. Every shitty California policy gets adopted here a couple years later and now we can’t build anything, Pay more taxes and have more crime. The supposed benefits never come through.
Look up California clean air regulations, and how they have radiated around the world and made every single city cleaner and healthier. That's bad? You want to go back to breathing lead and other heavy metals and carcinogens in your exhaust?
The problem is, like any good government agency, they don’t stop when they’ve succeeded fixing their original problem. What started with catalytic converters and OBD-2 is now preventing me from buying sub-freezing temperature windshield wiper fluid, and my BBQ lighter fluid is so watered down I have to use 2x to get it to do anything useful.
Yeah, because those things are toxic and poisoning you, your children, and our environment.
Now that those have been banned, companies will work to meet the market demand that you are noting, they will develop alternatives that are good, but also not poisoning us, and sell that. It will only be a minor inconvenience for you.
This is the exact same thing that happened with whale oil, leaded gas, leaded glass, sulfur diesel, ddt, on and on.
In each of those cases people were complaining like you, in each of those cases life went on and we figured out how to cope with the new, safer, less toxic, reality.
> Yeah, because those things are toxic and poisoning you, your children, and our environment. ... This is the exact same thing that happened with whale oil, leaded gas, leaded glass, sulfur diesel, ddt, on and on.
You don't know what you're talking about, but you feel like you do. Methanol, ethanol, and isopropyl alcohol are all legitimate ingredients for the examples I gave. You're making equivalence between burning leaded gas, and a desire to spray my windows with volatile alcohol.
Are you planning on banning isopropyl alcohol for medical use? Removing my ability to by vodka? Stopping my ability to use my camp stove?
One day it's stopping toxic waste getting poured into the watershed, the next it's a desire to stop research on safe nuclear power, and ban gas stoves for interior cooking use.
and cyanide poison has water in it, that doesn't make it good.
Just because Isopropyl is an ingredient in some product that is banned for other ingredients doesn't mean they will ban Isopropyl, your argument makes no sense
> ...preventing me from buying sub-freezing temperature windshield wiper fluid
Actually you can buy and use that stuff in California, you just can't buy it in the valleys (which are warmer BTW) because the emissions cause smog. But in the sierras, where it's a safety issue and the topographic features are different, its available in every service station and car parts store. It's in in my gf's car right now.
The same sensible attitude works in reverse: some states ban studded winter tires because they rip up the roads. California allows them from November-April (longer in very snowy years) because they are safer in snow (and annoying as hell, especially in dry conditions, so you never encounter them at low altitude).
You're missing the point: I don't live in the Sierras. I live on the coast, and I drive to the mountains.
What do I do with the windshield wiper fluid that is in my car, before I go to a freezing area? Do I waste it all by overusing it on the drive up? Do I set calendars to make sure I cycle my windshield wiper fluid, so that I'm low enough by the time I get to the mountains, I can buy sub freezing fluid, that my remaining fluid won't freeze?
What I end up doing is making my own blend on the coast because (thankfully) I know how, but it's a ridiculous limitation of California environmentalism.
Wow, must be difficult being you. I just add some to my fluid reservoir when I get up there.
And I benefit from the clear skies down in the valley when I am here. In the 60s you couldn’t see the mountains from Mountain View. Now you can again, and people have fewer breathing problems.
If that’s “California Environmentalism” well, it seems pretty good to me.
It was the suppression of volatile vapors, the smog being photocatalytic hydrocarbons as you point out. Catalytic converters were indeed a big deal, as were the vapor barriers on fuel pumps.
But that witches’ brew of smog was (is) a mixture of all sorts of volatiles from many sources (e.g. paint shops and factories).
There’s by definition no one solution to diffuse fugitive emissions, and I’m glad the various AQMDs and CARB are working on it. I’m also glad they are organized in a decentralized fashion, so that different districts can have different rules and programs.
Oh and the ECUs (and their O2 sensors) came in after a lot of the work had been accomplished back in the carburetor days, but things are a lot cleaner today because they continued.
Yes, what a bizarre comment! I'm not some nutter who goes out to learn how to make fire with sticks in the woods, but I can certainly readily light a barbecue with matches and kindling.
there is some kind of international phenomena about halting house building and raising the prices, to bury capital. People on YNews from Australia to Hungary have mentioned it. So, yes, that one thing is problematic and is not unique to California
I recommend external filtration (with lots of overprovisioning), keeping fish count down and razor blade scrapper once in blue moon and the tank will take care of itself.
Wood shops are pretty expensive but not crazy so. The quality of the tools leaves a lot to be desired though