Note again that my example of it working pretty effectively was for a decently sized nation and not just a small highly desirable city that wants to grow. The percentage of public to private housing in a city is meaningless to demand of people who want to live there.

I’m also not sure that Vienna counts as some massive failure of public housing, as the city is famed for its average rent being so far below comparable cities.

I also don’t see the problem with the government owning most of the apartments in a city, and indeed the more well to do citizens you can get to pay rent to the housing agency the less in taxes everyone else needs to pay.

Eventually if you build enough housing for everyone who wants to live in a place to live there, people will stop competing with each other for the limited spots. Prices are so high in dense urban areas because so many people want to live there, and so price goes up until enough people are pushed out that there are enough apartments to satisfy demand.

If you want to crash prices as you put it, you demonstrably need massively more housing than people who want housing, either by building more housing or by reducing the number of people who want to live there. If you don’t, people will just fight over the limited slots, and in a private market that means the slots universally go to the richest.

Given private developers will never willingly build enough housing to satisfy demand and therefore drop the price their units self for, it falls to an entity that is not seeking maximum profit from a given development to do so.

Around both outlying Vancouver skytrain and Toronto regional areas there is a lot of single family residential within a few blocks of stations that could be redeveloped for higher density, even neglecting that massive portion of the Toronto dock lands near the size of downtown that the government just sold off for private development. The government can absolutely get its hands on lots of land to develop, especially as industrial activity continues to move away from city centers.

The government also uniquely has the ability to build more metro lines that bridge areas to downtown, and could thusly drive density in currently cheap areas.

Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.

Council housing in Britain between the 50s and privatization, not only did the price of the entire market remain affordable because of the competition but the quality vastly improved given the need for any private developer to do better than the government with its massive economies of scale, near free land, and effectively no taxes on itself.

If you have long waitlists, you by definition do not have enough public housing to meet demand, and need to make more. We wouldn’t say schools didn’t work because look, our town only has enough space in its public school to admit half the towns children, guess it’s just a lottery and we should shut it down.

Real estate, building apartments, this is an immensely profitable industry, and its absurd to assume that it suddenly not only becomes unprofitable but is a massive tax burden just because the government is developing the land and not a billionaire doing near the same thing but walking away with an absurd profit skimmed off the top.

At least not unless the government is so obsessed with the free market that it is just renting existing apartments instead of the normal method of developing a new complex with a bunch of apartments, using most as cheap public housing for people who need assistance and renting the rest out at market rate to cover the cost of the project.

How trans people can have multiple passports/ citizenship in multiple countries, what to actually do to be prepared if you or a loved one are arrested for being trans, protesting, etc, and a lot of other things that take a few hours of work to do ahead of time that can turn life-destroying disasters into manageable problems your friends can solve.

The talk itself is mostly focused on things every single person should know and was given in 2022, but we do get a few mentions and a story about a trans person arrested on trumped up charges, but everything in there is worth knowing and Devient is always an interesting speaker.

Seriously, at the very least if you or a loved one are trans, start at 1:10:36 and do as much of the list as possible.

Hence why it’s important to build more public housing. My suggestion was just to keep the economic and rural housing problem from deteriorating, but if you want to house minimum wage workers in an dense urban area like like downtown Vancouver or Toronto, there is no viable alternative to government owned and operated apartments excepting maybe building new greenfield dense development connected to the urban cores by frequent rail.

Ideally however, the government could work to hold the price of homes relatively constant, and let inflation slowly bring them back into affordability. This would piss off everyone, but it would safely deflate the bubble without damaging people’s retirement too much.

With current battery and hydro storage prices, their cheaper than natural gas with with the cost of the buffer, and absurdly cheap for any industrial application that doesn’t.

Also there are bulk industrial processes to make steel, concrete, fertilizer, and glass with little to no carbon emissions, they just require more electricity and so aren’t cost effective if your electricity comes from fossil fuels, hence why most such plants only started construction once the cost for electricity in general dropped below the cost for fossil electricity.

Moreover while mining and shipping are only starting decarbonization, the required fossil fuel extraction is already far, far smaller than what’s continually required to run the generation they are replacing, and that’s only going to continue to drop as more and more primary energy is electrified with renewables.

For the most part to my knowledge it’s the same as maintaining any large, complex piece of infrastructure. As it gets older spare parts get harder to find and have to be replaced with different similar parts requiring new engineering analysis, more and more big components like pipes and tanks get to the point where they need to be wholly replaced, etc…

Design lifespan is the point the designers expected a lot of annoying to replace things to wear out on paper for the cost of maintenance to rise, but now in the present we can inspect things to see how they actually did in practice.

This means that operations gets more expensive and you need to shut down for major work every now and then, but compared to the ever increasing cost of building an entire new plant just replacing the parts that have worn out in order to squeeze an extra fifteen or twenty years is probably going to be more cost effective to a point.

We just need them to hold in long enough for us to get enough renewables and storage capacity on the grid to replace all the fossil sources, at which point we can keep building renewables and replace the most most expensive to maintain nuclear and most fish limiting dams and the like.

Nuclear power was absolutely the answer, 50, 30, or even 20 years ago, but given the long construction times and cost relative to wind and solar backed by battery and hydro, the time for new construction has probably passed outside of niche regions. It’s still much more cost effective to keep existing plants online, but when the primary bottleneck is funding focusing on the more cost effective technologies just makes sense.

Of course, I imagine that’s the same reason why the oil and gas companies that have been fearmongering about nuclear power for the last half century have suddenly come around on it.

Highly unlikely, the closest I can see it getting is Troubles style car bombs, truck bombs, and maybe some homemade fpv drone strikes, plus a bunch of cops and feds beating and shooting people in retaliation.

Don’t forget acceleration, one of the main reasons passenger trains care about weight is that you can get up to and down from line speed quicker, thusly saving trip time and allowing for more frequency/capacity from the same number of trains and drivers.

The extra weight from the batteries means you don’t get said benefits from going to battery electric as compared to overhead line.

Every single third party protest vote could have gone to Harris and she still would have heavily lost. She managed to even lose the damn popular vote by five million votes, despite Trump having a lower turnout than 2020.

This wasn’t because people voted third party, this was because at a time when incumbents have seen massive pushback across the globe from Covid inflation and Biden was unpopular across the board she ran as completely the same as Biden but even more Right on the border.

At a time when the politically disconnected working class families that make up the record trunout in 2020 were struggling with wage stagnation, erosion of Covid gains, and greedflation eroding their savings and pensions, four more years of the same but we’ll adopt even more Republican policies and look how many rich Republicans like us was never going to get the everperson off the damn couch.

More of the same is not a good platform for ‘progressives’ during economic hardship, even if it was out of their control and less hardship than most peer nations.

Even though Trump is a disaster for many of us, most people got though his first four years just fine, and don’t understand just how much damage he did or how much more he could do if the guardrails failed.

Getting the general public out to vote requires giving them something they want to vote for, and when the biggest thing you can point to doing or wanting to do more of is some clean energy related tax breaks that is a major problem.

Had the Dems impeached Clarence Thomas for his and his wife’s role in Jan 6, had Biden improved the immigration system like promised, had he provided free National Guard abortion clinics on federal land, had he made the FDA make puberty blockers and abortion medicine available by teleheath and mail, or indeed had any major victories in the last half of his term to show, we would not be here. Had they run AOC, Bernie, Waltz, or anyone at all who could articulate a platform beyond four more years of the same, we would not be here. Had Harris focused on how she could use left wing policy to fight the effects of late stage capitalism, we would not be here.

This election was an unforced error of the highest consequences, and one brought about by a political party that was so confident that until he dies of old age every politically disinterested Amarican would be so scared by the threat of Trump that they would maintain an unprecedented level of voter turnout without them having to actually do or promise anything.

The silver lining is that everyone from Lemmy, to youtube, to Bernie seems to have correctly identified the problem early on this time around, so much of the anger is being directed towards the party establishment for screwing up the easy win as it is towards Trump. The question is whether or not that anger can be turned towards productive action to gain control of the DNC, or will be quashed by the establishment once again.

Time, and agitation, will tell.

Given how entrenched support for Isreal is parts of the base and moreover how conflicted much of the middle ground of the community is, I expect a lot of them would have sat the election out. Of course I think playing both sides of the street did lead to a lot of them sitting it out, but I think the hope was that an week intermediate position would allow for unity and coalition building around issues that didn’t have your party primarily fighting itself.

I also wasn’t talking about individual solar. Utility solar is nearly always divided between manufacturing, installation, and the operator. The operator is the only one benefited by solar’s long term return on investment. Everyone else makes their money in construction, which is very much price competitive.

In my experience none of these groups however have even a fraction of the cash of a company like BP or Exxon Mobile, and what piles of cash they do have tends to be investment in rather than profit from. As it’s a lot harder to spend investors cash on buying regulators than it is to spend incoming profit on it this limits the amount that they can spend on such an endeavor.

There are also a lot more places banning utility scale solar and wind than are oil and gas, so delaying renewables rollout seems like an evidently effective strategy for limiting their lobbying power.

And the Jewish voting population of PA is more than three times that. Now, that hardly means that they’ll all vote for Isreal, but it does mean that how that group breaks has a far more outsized impact and why Haris was focused so much on things that both sides can generally agree with like conditional aid.

I would have much preferred an actual hardline leftist stance of course, but at the end of the day Gaza does not seem to have played a significant part in this election.

Not really, without Pennsylvania Michigan doesn’t matter unless nearly every other swing state goes for her, and they don’t look like that’s even a possibility.

No, i’m thinking of solar.

Over decades a solar system will pay back itself many times over, but that’s irrelevant to the question of how big of a money pile can business throw at politicians in the here and now.

That’s determined by the profit margin for companies manufacturing and installing them, which tend to be rather thin given the highly competitive nature of the market. No solar installer anywhere near the profit that oil companies are raking in, and the people owning the panels are usually paying off the loan to install them, using the profits to build more capacity, or saving, not buying off politicians.

Without subsidies there would be far less profit for oil companies, which is exactly why it is so important for them to ‘reinvest’ some of their recent massive profits into continuing and expanding said subsidies and slowing down the adoption of alternatives. Buying off the government with its own money is a benefit since it leaves more for them.

Counterpoint, Alberta exists and low costs benefit the consumer, not the company. I am fully confident that the profit made by oil and gas is significantly more than the tight profit margins in renewables, which means far less money to throw at politicians. Oil and gas can therefore throw much more money at Trump and still be in the black on their ‘investment’, even if you ignore that Trump has deep ideological and political opposition to renewables.

That’s unfortunate but I understand, I just didn’t want the thought of working for him to be the only reason. Be safe.