Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?
I’m not, please don’t assume that. It sounds like we’re in agreement here, so I’m not debating you, but rather adding to your post, I suppose. It sounded like you wanted to extend the conversation towards solutions to the housing crisis in general.
How do you define ‘corporate’ ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as ‘corporate’? If it doesn’t, that seems like an easy loophole. If the intent is to ban large quantities of homes owned by single entities, then doing it by quantity sounds more sensible.
That might redistribute old homes, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the drip feeding of new homes that we have going on right now. For example, the UK used to build 250k+ houses every year during the 1950-1980s period. 50% of that was government built council houses for those in need. It’s estimated that we need to build 250k more homes than we currently do in the UK, and the private housing industry has not done its part.
This is about specific sites’ abnormally high methane pollution, and China is in the data set but does not have as many “super-emitters” according to this. Here’s an example where China’s listed in the linked Sky article:
Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanxi, China, peaking at around 181 tonnes an hour last February.
However, they go on to rank the countries in the article as such:
Kayrros’s data shows Turkmenistan had higher methane emissions than any other nation, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Pakistan.
So the answer is simply that China, along with the EU, does not have as many “super-emitters” to worry about. Other regions do, and that means they can target those sites specifically to reduce their methane emissions now that the data clearly highlights them.
That’s not what we were talking about here. We were talking about building enough housing to be able to guarantee it for everyone. That’s not rent control, that’s just investing in our housing supply.
The topic of this conversation follows from your statement:
Which is bad for landlords (including the ones that work in legislation)
i.e. landowners and people in power hold sway over the decision making process and are keeping us away from legislation that houses people. Unless I misread you. That’s why I brought up another example.
Rent control doesn’t work, the economists are correct (Who woulda thunk it, but studying the way prices are determined is a valid field of academic study). Or rather it does work for some people but makes life harder for others, and isn’t nearly as good of an approach as people think.
You clearly did not read the link, the person who wrote it is a PhD economist. Also, using one solution as a way to fix housing is naive, when we could (and should be, it’s horribly unaffordable for average people in urban areas, where most people in western countries live, already) be using many, including rent control.
Also economists (who are usually wealthy enough to be able to landlord if they want to do so)… which means they’re financially incentivised to hold right wing economic views like “rent control doesn’t work, 9/10 economists recommend against it!” like it’s a toothpaste advert and economists who challenge that don’t get much spotlight in the mainstream.
I felt this a year ago when I got measles and all the medical staff I talked to were pretty surprised. Parents didn’t give me the vaccine as a child, but I got vaccinated as soon as I could afterwards. The weirdest part is I work from home and don’t leave my home too often, which means I was either really unlucky, or it was already pretty widespread in the UK then.
“A liberal* is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”
* not to be confused with “left wing” as the term is often used in the US
They’re in talks about it, hopefully we’ll see action soon. There was also an article in NRK (BBC equivalent state news) about Tesla (non factory) workers in Norway having bad working conditions and mulling unionisation, but the leadership there is anti-union so they have to do it in secret.
https://www.nrk.no/norge/tesla-ansatte-organiserer-seg-i-hemmelighet-1.16641657 (you’ll have to use a translation service if you can’t read Norwegian)
NL is one of the best countries in the world.
That can change. Norway is also one of the best countries in the world, but they’ve been doing the same thing I see happening in the UK: not funding health care adequately, police corruption scandals, refusing to decriminalise and legalise drugs, not really using the oil fund money enough (unlike Alaska (US) which pays dividends to its citizens from its oil fund, not exactly a left-wing US state compared to Norway), welfare benefits being reduced, the Norwegian state used to fund housing coop development which led to 20% of our population living in democratic housing but isn’t doing that anymore and now we’re in a housing crisis, inequality has grown over the last 50 years, union density has reduced over the last 50 years, …
When we’re talking about things going to shit we mean relative to where we were before. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot I wish we had in the UK that Norway has, but the trajectory looks oddly similar to what happened and is happening in the UK. We’re currently boiling frogs and because things are going to shit so slowly it’s harder to notice. Like, so much counter evidence to what we’re doing exists around the world if we simply look at how other areas are solving problems. For example, Finland is the only country in the EU where homelessness isn’t increasing and housing prices have actually decreased* - wanna guess how they did that? (hint: the state gave people free housing)
* at least until recently, housing markets are weird now because of the inflation, but theirs were falling before that
You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.
Nope. Let me quote Joeri from his second video (19 minutes in):
Let’s tackle the one that the internet loves the most first: money printing. To view money printing as the source of all price inflation actually has a very long tradition in economics. The most prominent economist to support this idea was Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman (11:49) who said that. […]
Crucially, Friedman inspired economists often assume that velocity and production are roughly constant. Remember that clip from Peter Schiff arguing that stimulus checks for people at home would be inflationary? Crucially, he made the implicit assumption there that this didn’t prevent a further collapse of production.
“Everything is getting more expensive. And if people think that is transitory, it is because they don’t understand the problem. In fact, they don’t even understand inflation or where it comes from because inflation is about money. You are inflating the money supply. That’s what’s being expanded and none of this is transitory because these deficits aren’t transitory. The money printing isn’t transitory. It’s here to stay. — and that means prices are going to continue to go up because we continue to destroy the value of the dollar as we expand the supply”
Sounds pretty convincing right? However, the monetary theory of inflation has almost completely disappeared from universities. Why? Well, because the data doesn’t support this simple explanation in most economies. For example, check out this graph of the CPI for Europe and compare it to the graph of central bank printed M1 money supply… You can clearly see that the money supply has accelerated while price growth has slowed. To a less extend this disconnect also exists for the USA. But, if you really want to see this simple theory fail, you only need to look at Japan. Even if we take into account the more expansive M3 money supply measure, which include money created by private banks, and compare it to the CPI. You can clearly see that while M3 kept going up, the CPI had its ups and downs. What can explain this disconnect?
Argentina’s runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government’s out of control spending)
Macroeconomists don’t really agree that that issuing money in and of itself causes inflation, but it certainly can lead to it in some cases. Instead, if you issue money you need to spend it on something that increases the productivity of your economy, otherwise it can lead to waste and inflation down the line. You can actually use money issuing to fight inflation if you spend the money you issued on addressing the problem at hand - for example, the supply side problems we faced following the pandemic that caused the inflation we’re at the tail end of right now.
By adopting the US dollar, Argentina would effectively give up monetary autonomy to the US central bank (so, just another central bank outside of their control). In fact, the US central bank could decide to issue money in a positive way as mentioned above, without any of that having a similarly positive impact on the countries that depend on the US dollar.
Money & Macro (PhD Joeri Schasfoort) has made multiple videos on the topic, but here are two (the first one short, the second one a deep dive) if you want to hear this side of the story told in greater depth:
The oil industry is on its death bed so I’m not against what you’re saying, but we’re currently subsidizing the green energy sector (a good thing) with nothing in return (a bad thing).
We should look to how Norway avoided Dutch Disease and taxed the hell out of private oil extraction. They subsidise the discovery (the risky part) and then slap a very heavy tax on the oil those companies then extract and sell, all the while having a national oil company they have to compete with it (crucial to keep oil expertise within the government).
Norway already taxes private wind energy and hydropower, because they know the oil industry will be dethroned by the green energy industry soon and don’t want to simply subsidize their profits. Norway also owns wind energy both domestically and in other countries (hilariously, they own more UK wind energy than the UK government itself does), and massive amounts of their domestic hydropower.
“Crazy expensive” doesn’t really matter when you’re a government and can borrow or print to make investments that have investment returns in the form of efficiency gains that go on to improve the economy, much like what corporations do to grow (borrow, reinvest profits gained from growth). There isn’t really any good macroeconomic evidence that inflation is to blame because of said funding strategies, as explained by PhD Joeri Schasfoort in multiple of his videos[1], much to the behest right wing populist politicians who lie about not being able to invest in infrastructure. In the UK, Rishi Sunak is cancelling our HS2 railway falsely citing costs and even sabotaging it by sidestepping the democratically elected House of Commons by selling off gov. owned land so that the incoming Labour government will have a hard time un-cancelling HS2 - even our old conservative Brexit-causing PM David Cameron is criticising it publicly (ex-PMs rarely criticise their own party’s contemporary government).
This isn’t a great summary, but with the article headings as context it makes a bit more sense:
- YOU CAN TURN OFF AI-RECOMMENDED VIDEOS
- IT’S EASIER TO FLAG HARMFUL CONTENT
- YOU’LL KNOW WHY YOUR POST WAS TAKEN DOWN
- YOU CAN REPORT FAKE PRODUCTS
- YOUR KIDS WON’T BE TARGETED WITH DIGITAL ADS
I agree with you, but in absence of a perfect policy I prefer this outcome to nothing. There isn’t just one party being affected here: the effects of air pollution on life expectancy and early chronic illnesses is well known, in fact I am personally affected by a chronic illness that’s known to be associated with air pollution. I’d rather we keep going forward and push for giving poorer drivers the things they need to adjust, e.g. grants for electric vehicles, public transportation links, or bike networks, depending on needs - rather than pushing for reverting this policy, because it’s not flawed in and of itself, it’s the lack of welfare that is flawed here.
This means that the role of commercial banks is not canceled with the launch of the single digital currency, but they will still be an important part of the ecosystem.
[…] a ceiling on the liquidity that citizens will be able to maintain in digital euro, in the order of 2,000 or 3,000 euros per user. The goal is for the digital euro to be used purely as a means of exchange and not as a means of accumulating wealth.
The benefits of the digital euro include the immediacy and security of transactions – […] instant payments […] made in a few seconds
A very important advantage of the digital euro is also the zero cost of its use, putting an end to the – harsh in some cases – commissions that banks currently impose on direct payments
Maybe I’m talking from a privileged country, but none of this would benefit me at all in my country as the banking system already does all of this. It’s a bit disappointing that they seem to be intentionally kneecapping the digital euro so that they can placate private banks. Although I wouldn’t mind what they’re doing if they also provided a government run bank that didn’t shoo away customers if they didn’t have the right risk profile, that competed with private banks (e.g. Norway’s state-run consumer bank exists alongside private ones). For example, legal sex workers are often pushed out by private banks.
the fact that the complete lack of any basic check made it available to anyone who just asked for it, does not make it an universal welfare
it measurably does make it closer to universalism than the selectivism you seem to be championing here. They’re not replacing it with a better system, they’re removing something that was closer to universal welfare and leaving poor people to suffer even more. Austerity policies are not new and you can literally just google “austerity excess deaths” for various countries and see the impact of those policies
it was just a failed attempt to let people vote for their party
You have fallen for their rhetoric. This is exactly how they justify anti-welfare policies in many countries around the world - “it was just there to win votes”… yes, good things tend to win votes. Like welfare.
Universal welfare is objectively economically superior to bureaucratic means tested welfare. Calling it “abuse” is just how they get away with turning you into bigger wage slaves with less bargaining power
The findings of the report include: moving from universalism to selectivity increases social and economic inequality and diminishes rather than enhances the status of the poor; selectivity requires processes and procedures that separate benefit recipients from the rest of society, increasing stigmatisation and reducing take-up; universalism is incredibly efficient – the selective element of pension entitlement is more than 50 times more inefficient than the universal element measured in terms of fraud and error alone and without even taking into account the cost of administration; universalism creates positive economic stability by mitigating the swings in the business cycle and creating much more economic independence among the population; on virtually every possible measure of social and economic success, all league tables are topped by societies with strong universal welfare states; universalism creates a higher and more progressive tax base which also improves economic stability, reduces price bubbles and creates more efficient flatter income distributions; and universal benefits promote gender equality and do not suffer from the inherent bias built into a system designed within a framework of assuming a male breadwinner model of welfare.
There are also valid reasons for disabled people to be against SUVs, and the abundance of cars in general: pollution creates disabilities, and so much pollution comes from car tyres. I know, because I have a disability that’s associated with said pollution, and I wouldn’t wish this on anyone else so I really hope we can replace car use with less polluting methods as soon as possible. And then there’s the more physical way: cars crashing into people also creates disabilities. If you’re disabled, you’re probably more likely to have sympathy for all the other disabilities that cars contribute to creating, and would prefer if SUVs and cars were replaced by other methods.