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[McTraveller]

Eh, I knew I should've edited that post about "peacefully"... Of course I meant "my safety" in the generic sense, from the standpoint of any person, not my personal safety. I thought my follow-on statement about it being relative to an individual's baseline would make that apparent...

[Frumple]

Got my early voting done today, only took about three hours of standing in line. Not too bad all things considered.

Cheers. Least a small benefit of being in a rural shithole and going first day, first hour? For me it took like two minutes, think it took longer to walk from the car to the voting area than it did to vote. Was one person ahead of me, and plenty of space for concurrent voting :V

Eh, I knew I should've edited that post about "peacefully"... Of course I meant "my safety" in the generic sense, from the standpoint of any person, not my personal safety. I thought my follow-on statement about it being relative to an individual's baseline would make that apparent...

Though yeah, from that standard, well... I don't think it's possible? As mentioned, Harris winning probably sees an uptick of political violence in the short term, so your (and the generic you's) daily risk of harm sees an increase, if probably a small and temporary one.

Trump wins, and, well, the scumbag's campaigning for very fucking literal pogroms, y'know? Your standard of risk is just about certain to go up and probably keep going up. Your hoping for peace under that standard with that lot is god riding down on lightning and very publicly smiting more or less the entire GOP political class, heh.

[Random_Dragon]

Took care of early voting back on the 27th, yeah. Also...yep. They're going to start shit whether they win or lose. Harris needs to clamp down on it early if she wins, but there's the risk we're gonna have a lot of faithless electors shenanigans even before we get to all the other forms of potential sabotage...

[Telgin]

I took care of early voting today, and was astonished at how many people were waiting in line considering the area.  It is a more urban part of South Carolina, but I saw way more people at the polling station today than I ever did when voting on election day.  I swung by Tuesday afternoon on break and there were so many people there I had to come back today.  And that was before people even got off work for the day.

I'm not sure if this is normal early voting turnout for the area, but it seems very high to me.

[Robot Parade Leader]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-gets-bad-news-211641558.html

This is another boss or CEO hair brained illegal scheme Good luck trying to tell them they can't do it if you work for them though. I'm sorry, I usually don't wish for people to get in trouble but he totally broke the law. He's been warned repeatedly and nobody is forcing him to do this because he has so many other options it's not funny.. You can't do some sort of not defined lottery. There are rules for those and then the whole money thing is just a mess during an election anyhow. You can't give water to people in line to vote, but he can pull this? Ok, whatever.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/elections-verify/georgia-voter-poll-lines-water-biden-fact-check/536-704802f4-251b-491f-a564-5d4774963b2e

At least, there may be some accountability because gen Z is hearing Trump's "Grab them by the *****," tapes, some for the first time. I'm hoping my faith in the next generation isn't misplaced. I'm hoping they are smart enough to hear this stuff and call it wrong, because it is wrong. This is just the tip of the iceberg with Trump's sexual misconduct (he's been sued and lost in court and all that too with judgements hanging over him). I don't know, because there are still a ton of people who heard them originally and it didn't phase them one bit. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/31/tiktok-trump-access-hollywood-gen-z/

“I don’t think any of my friends had heard it,” said Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio who heard the tape for the first time on her TikTok For You feed this week. “We all felt equally shocked.”

Some of the trending “Access Hollywood” TikToks came from older users who heard Trump’s comments the first time around. But for people like Sullivan, who will vote for the first time in Tuesday’s election, the discovery cast both the 2016 and 2024 elections in a new light.

Did people know about the tape before they voted in 2016? she asked a Post reporter.

Yes, the tape came out before Election Day.

“I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

Yes. Come on kids. Show those of us who believe in you we aren't wrong to believe in you. Yeah, people knew and didn't care and they were wrong for that.
Be better than other people were when they messed up. Learn from the mistakes other people made and don't repeat them. I want to have faith that you're smarter.
Look at the facts and think and Vote.

[JoshuaFH]

I think my definition of "peaceful" would be that my daily risk of harm doesn't change from its current baseline value.  So for instance if I have a probability of 0.0001 to get intentionally injured by another person today, that wouldn't change.  (That number is roughly a "one injury in 30 years" kind of probability).

Note this definition works for anyone; while the risk for each person may be different, the question is the change in risk.

I'm not trying to dogpile on you Mctraveller. I just think your idea here about probability of being harmed intentionally is inherently misguided. My view is that ordinary people are too wrapped up in the daily crisis of their ordinary, day-to-day lives to even notice that the temperature of the pot they're in is starting to increase to lethal levels. The Japanese citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably thought that their 'baseline level of being harmed intentionally' were pretty low and steady... until the very instant that they were vaporized in nuclear hellfire. My point being: at the point where you can see the writing on the walls, it'll already be too late, brown-shirts will already be at your door with guns, ready to take you and your family.


I'm honestly so fucking terrified of this election. Even with how seemingly likable Kamala is (I don't necessarily like her, but she has some attributes that I feel should induce widespread appeal), and with how Trump is shitting himself on-stage for the whole world to see ("They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!") I'm honestly not completely convinced that the election won't simply hinge on the lowest common denominators; the masses of people lured in by populist rhetoric, who are so ignorant, stubborn, selfish, and myopic that they'll throw the entire country to the Fascist dogs just because they always vote Republican no matter what, or they hate women, or they're racist, or they were promised lower gas prices, just some stupid shit that dooms all the rest of us. A Trump victory might even be the end of the civilized world, or at least is one of the dominoes that leads to that conclusion. The only good ending is Trump losing by a landslide, he goes to prison where he spends the rest of his miserable life, and that ruling about Presidents being able to do anything so long as it is an 'official act' gets reversed entirely so that there is never any fear of wannabe dictators ever again.

[McTraveller]

No worries; I just take it as I didn't communicate my thought very well.  The basic idea was, there is some level of risk we have today, and if civil unrest or outright war breaks out, that level of risk increases.  That example of WWII is kind of a good one too - you don't even have to know the level of risk, but it's still there.

[Duuvian]

Housing is expensive. Here’s how Harris and Trump promise to bring costs down
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/31/nx-s1-5170351/trump-harris-housing-costs-plan

I'd like to suggest as part of whichever plan that a study on the adoption of innovative construction materials be a part of it. Here is an example. It was a Canadian company I read about in a news article. It has what appears to be a quite useful and innovative product. It seems to have exploded in value and then crashed spectacularly, with some of it's subsidiaries sold off.

The company now seems to be held by an LLC in Kentucky, if going off the company's main page is accurate.

Here are some articles:
https://nexiisbs.com/product-facility/

https://www.nexii.com/

Here is an article detailing this company as the fastest in Canadian history to reach $1billion in valuation (not sure if in Canadian Loonies or US Crazydollars), though most of it is on the court protection. It says it had an investor drop out at an inopportune time as an explanation, but also in some of the earlier articles it was said to have claimed to have $1billion in orders from the US...
https://www.biv.com/news/economy-law-politics/vancouver-unicorn-nexii-under-court-protection-creditors-8294956

Here is the sale, presumably with at least parts landing with the Kentucky based LLC but I don't know for sure and didn't search for it.
https://www.bctechnology.com/news/2024/6/20/Nexii-Building-Solutions-Under-Creditor-Protection-Sells-Subsidiaries-For-3-Million.cfm

So, anyways this material seems to be easy and quick to construct at the site and has some material properties that seem to stack up well if the reading material is to be believed. One article I found listed a seismic test at University of Berkeley, but there was little detail other than the testers had never seen anything like it; however as this was implied as a positive that might be a good place to start a review. It is also claimed that it is able to be constructed to be airtight while snapping together (whole walls at once IIRC from the 2019 hype), is fireproof, and is cheap in material cost (one of the pitches is that it uses sand). In the affordable housing push it might be a good idea to evaluate materials such as this if the government has such authority to make at least recommendations if not funding decisions, which I do not know.

Here is some of the 2019 hype that caught my eye. To be clear I don't know if it was business or market reasons for the valuation collapse or if the product is actually not as good as claimed, but if it may be I do think it may be advantageous to evaluate it.
https://canada.constructconnect.com/joc/news/economic/2019/11/builder-aims-to-shake-up-industry-with-nexiite-material-2

[McTraveller]

I don't think the housing supply issue is due to the time it takes to build housing. I think it's more the local (not federal) regulatory environment and the fact that many, many people locked in really low interest rates a few years ago.

I like the Harris campaign suggestion to give incentives to builders to produce low-cost housing since that will increase supply. I don't like the suggestion to give grants to buy a house though, since that increases demand.

Trump doesn't even appear to have a plan; he just makes up things like saying interest rates are higher than they really are and how he somehow will reduce the interest rate again.  I mean I guess maybe his policies could result in low interest rates (and prices) because they are very likely to crash the economy...

[Folly]

I'd like to suggest as part of whichever plan that a study on the adoption of innovative construction materials be a part of it. Here is an example. It was a Canadian company I read about in a news article. It has what appears to be a quite useful and innovative product. It seems to have exploded in value and then crashed spectacularly, with some of it's subsidiaries sold off.
The company now seems to be held by an LLC in Kentucky, if going off the company's main page is accurate.
Here are some articles:
https://nexiisbs.com/product-facility/
https://www.nexii.com/

Personally I like the 3D House Printers that I've read about lately.
But however it gets done, I agree that new technology is going to be essential to solving the housing problem. With outdoor labor becoming increasingly impossible to survive as the heat rises each year, the traditional way of building houses is simply not sustainable. It would be nice to hear politicians acknowledge this and commit to investing in the future.

[Lord Shonus]

I don't like the suggestion to give grants to buy a house though, since that increases demand.

You functionally can't increase demand at this point, because the supply is so massively constrained - every property that is, was, or will be in a place people want to live is going to get bought up either to live in or as an investment. What giving grants can do is help ensure that more of the buyers are going to live in the house instead of renting it out or trying to flip it for profit.

[anewaname]

Housing in rural areas is tightly controlled by small groups of people who have an interest in NIMBY policies. They will fight any attempt to create housing units in their "rural" region because any increase in housing will upset their regional political control.

Some months ago, Trump was in Arizona(?) talking about using federal lands for housing... His team knew housing was an issue and some red-state profiteer had a plan that Trump liked; something like "let's forcefully place federally-subsidized retirement communities in the desert ensuring they are dependent on our water and fuel lines so we rake in those federal dollars while those communities impinge on Native American water and land, creating conflict between the new communities and the Native Americans for future political-division payout, and it won't touch any of our communities". Then Harris also mentioned using federal land for housing and Trump stopped talking about it because he couldn't own the issue for campaigning. Harris has been pretty good at taking Trump's campaign issues away from him and beating him with them.

[McTraveller]

I think we have different definitions for demand? If you have a constrained supply, a sign of increased demand is an increase in the transaction price for a given volume.  That is, you increase the number of transactions at that price level - you "increased demand at that price."

So all giving first-time buyers an extra $25k is going to do, is going to increase the number of transactions at that higher price point.  I don't see how it can ensure that more properties will be owner-occupied.

Would that increase in baseline price really take enough investors out of the market to make a difference? I doubt it, but maybe I'm wrong there...

[Lord Shonus]

No, it won't price the investors out. You're talking in terms of "well, if the number of people trying to buy goes from 6 to 10, then prices will go up!". Which is the way things usually work. But the housing supply (again, in terms of houses worth living in that are in places where people actually want to live) is so low right now that the demand is not 6, or 10, or 20. It is ∞. Any property in a market where property is selling will be sold, and it will be sold for the maximum possible price. Giving your average John, Tanisha, or Ricardo money to buy a house won't increase demand when people are already dumping this level of money into things. But it will give said John, Tanisha, or Ricardo enough money that they might be able to actually buy in.

[McTraveller]

If you have 10 people that can afford 100k and 5 people that can afford 75k, and then you give those 5 people an extra 25k, how would that not increase demand? There are now 15 people competing up to the $100k level instead of 10; that is the typical definition of increased demand.

I see your point that it may give them a chance to win a bid where before they couldn't even have made a bid, but what about suddenly realizing you've got property tax and homeowners insurance on $100k instead of $75k? Yeah you could make the initial purchase, but can you make the recurring costs? I just don't think it's as great a plan as alternatives, like actually building more lower-cost housing.

Put another way: it's very rare to reduce costs by giving people more money to buy stuff; and if it does, it will be deferred to the future, not the time of the made-possible purchase.