As a 'soft' environmentalist (e.g., generally support/favor pro environmental action by government and citizens, but I don't go to meetings or read mailing lists about it) I feel exhausted trying to figure out what can and can't be recycled and under what circumstances. Is there an easy button way to mostly stay onside without getting a Master's in the thousands of permutations of recycling labels? Are there certain materials that are more important to recycle than others?
I also periodically encounter right wing-ish suggestions that the whole enterprise is basically a scam (e.g., everything just goes into a landfill anyway, it gets shipped overseas to be dumped in the ocean, etc.). I assume these not true, but I don't know enough about the process to refute them conclusively and would benefit from a Slow-Boring piece detailing the intricacies of the matter.
I thought corrugated cardboard did OK too, and that glass wasn't that useful--our municipality refuses to pick it up curbside, we have to take it to a bin that they set out in various places. But yes, aluminum above all else--I remember Penn and Teller emphasizing that on their Bullshit! episode on that.
They also emphasized that the dump shortage was made up, which makes sense given how big this nation is. It's a lot better to just bury the stuff deep in the ground, capture methane leaks and use it for energy, instead of it going off to overseas places that don't have advanced sanitation practices and facilities.
I don't think that landfill space was ever a very compelling case for recycling. I think the benefits come primarily in reducing electricity and water use in new manufacturing and reducing mining impacts, forestry impacts of replacing items that could be reused. Much of that depends on how efficiently one can recycle which varies from place to place. But yes. Aluminum is always good in part because it prevents the need for more mining.
Landfill shortages can be very real it depends on the state and issues like the cost of moving the garbage and if NIMBY type opposition prevents new ones from being made. In short it's a political issue not so much a space one, but the challenges can be very real.
Metal (aluminum and steel) and glass are the most reliably recycled materials and what you should prioritize getting into the recycling stream under basically all circumstances. (As I like to say, you're just actively trying to kill the planet if you throw those in the trash.) All other materials are questionable depending on the specific program, but generally speaking CLEAN Type 1 and 2 plastics and CLEAN newsprint or office paper can theoretically be worthwhile.
I argue with people all the time about this. Relying on everyone to know all the rules, and to follow them is not a scalable solution to any problem. This is well known at pretty much any large company that has any process for any tasks that involve getting anything done. If your process relies on humans not making errors, your execution will always be doomed to failure.
The only way recycling ever becomes what environmentalists want it to be is to simplify it so much for the end user that they cannot make mistakes, and it's easy for them to comply. No amount of advertising to make recycling cool or shaming people for not recycling will ever change this.
Many years ago, I declared that "single stream" recycling was the worst thing ever to happen to recycling because it had the entirely foreseeable consequence of just encouraging people to treat recycling bins as trash cans even more than they did before.
My apartment complex has a dumpster bin for single stream recycling, and I've seen trash bags, pizza boxes, and even old furniture in it. I don't know what people are thinking.
My city will fine you if your trash contains more than a certain percent of recyclable material. I don't have a huge problem if they do this for stuff like glass and metal that is highly recyclable.
When it comes to stuff like plastic, I get really annoyed because a lot of that plastic is going to end up in the landfill anyway because the recyclers won't take it. My plastic olive oil bottle is not going to be easily recycled because it's going to take a lot of time to get rid of all the oil and I have other things to do with my time and water.
If we really want to ensure that only acceptable quality plastics end up in the recycling cycle, then it's probably a good idea to just pay for it so that it's worth people's while. Or we could invest in techniques for recyclers to clean the plastic themselves.
We have strains of bacteria that will breakdown certain plastics. I suspect that developing more bacterial strains that break down more types of plastics and then encouraging companies and consumers to use those types of plastics that can be biodegraded by these bacteria is going to be more effective than getting people to wash their plastics and fining them for throwing them in the trash when they'd end up there anyway. It'd also be nice if we could get more use of bioplastics that can be composted. We have technology and we really ought to be using it to make things easier and better for the environment.
Very much not a scam, blocks of crushed cans do get shipped to China and turned into stuff. One of the main challenges now was embracing single sort (all recyclables into the same container) was embraced to make it easier for people but it does lead to real contamination in the "streams" as they were which makes the end product less commercially valuable to be sold back to producers.
But it is much better to recycling bottles and cans than throw them in the landfill/area burner.
I think it depends quite a bit on where you live. I think aluminum is generally very high value to recycle everywhere. Glass most places. In Seattle, we actually make money on our municipal composting which picks up yard waste, food waste, and soiled or wet paper. We do offer municipal recycling of clean paper and some plastics but I am not sure how much that is of real benefit. We also have a company called "Ridwell" that folks subscribe to that picks up plastic film, batteries, light bulbs, threads, and one "speciality item" each week. They have pretty transparent information on where there stuff goes and it is very popular. I do think it is probably not the best investment in the environment that one can make.
We do Ridwell. I think that they do a legit job getting everything to actually get reused and/or recycled. They can do that because they charge a reasonable fee and have highly committed users who make sure to accurately sort and clean. As someone does so much hands on work on our watershed, it makes me feel a lot better to have a way to dispose of the plastic film and other items that I can't easily avoid. But I budget it more in my feel good than my do good budget. I think I am probably doing more to address that by buying products like Trex for all my decking and using recycled denim insulation in my house than my providing the "waste."
I think one of the best aspects about Ridwell has been that it has made me much more aware of how much plastic film that I do produce and that has probably helped me be a bit more careful to avoid it. Plus it helps make sure family doesn't cheat and put the film in the city recycling because they know where it goes!
I originally got our originally annual subscription for my husband who goes nuts about things that can be recycled going into the trash. Apparently we are one of the few couples in the country where the guy is more into recycling than the man! But we kept it because it does help allow us to just use the mini City of Seattle garbage can to support both our home and business and that helps offset the cost.
My sense is that if everyone started collecting their plastic film there wouldn't be sufficient market for its use but there is enough of a market to make participating now worthwhile.
I'm also curious as to when municipalities will start curtailing recycling on non-viable materials, and why it hasn't happened yet. Maybe because the recycling sorting infrastructure is already in place and they want to get their money's worth out of it?
In Seattle, where recycling is more common than most places, there has been a big push to get more places that do single serve plastic to use compostable plastic because we are better able to efficiently compost than recycle. Starbucks is one of the biggest stores pushing the recyclable plastic cups instead. They say that they worry that folks who don't have municipal composting will think that they can just throw those into regular composting or will trash instead of recycle. It depends so much on where to live. We just got back from a vacation from Hawaii. They only offered recycling of aluminum, plastic water bottles, glass, and cardboard. It felt so wrong to be throwing out food scraps and paper towels after years of living somewhere that will fine you if they find those in the trash.
It is cheaper to dispose of without creating plastic waste that is a threat to marine life and can be made without renewable resources unlike "recyclable" plastic, but it is more expensive to make which is why it isn't widely used in many places. It is common in Seattle because we have restrictions on what kind of single use plastics restaurants can provide that are not compostable or recyclable. The public is generally aware that compostable cups are really compostable and recyclable cups generally aren't so you see more businesses willing to pay slightly more for the compostable variety to engender goodwill.
It also make more practical sense for many of them because in Seattle, businesses and families get fined if they either have non-compostable items in their compost, non-recyclable in their recycling, or more than a nominal amount of either recyclable or compostable items in their trash. Straws can't be recycled and all food waste has to go into compost. Businesses often find it easier to just offer compostable everything other than durable items and tell customers to throw everything in to the compost bin other than their durable items than to try to get them to put their muffin wrapper and straw in this bin and their cup in that bin. Otherwise, some poor employee has to go through the compost and pull out all the cups to avoid a fine.
But compostable plastic is also just sort of a scam anywhere that doesn't provide high heat municipal compost. If it ends up buried in a landfill, it doesn't actually breakdown in any reasonable timeframe without exposure to heat and oxygen. If it ends up in a river or ocean, it will break down but not fast enough to avoid being a danger to wildlife. Seattle has that kind of commercial composting facility and it resells its compost at a profit so it makes a lot of sense here but not in areas that don't have that sort of system. That creates challenges for businesses that operate nationally who want to do the "right thing" to come up with products that are going to be practical to dispose of in many different communities.
Seattle gets away with these strong laws in part because we are very Blue but also because we have marine industry as a major economic player and our ocean wildlife as major cultural priorities so there is large scale buy in. But to Matt's point about rule enforcement, we are also a city where the SPD is basically not responding to much crime at all which has lead to a sense that you can shoplift or even steal cars without much change of any enforcement penalty but the waste disposal enforcement is still robust and you absolutely will get a fine attached to your garbage if you fuck up your disposal rules so that makes learning the rules feel very worthwhile to residents. Of course, tourist still make a mess of it all because no one is going to learn the rules for a place they are in for three days. It also means that when we go other places we feel like we are going to get busted every time we throw away any food scraps in the garbage because there is no alternative and literally sweat about it.
It’s all well and good for Seattle to do pointless, performative recycling. All I’m saying is that there is a cost to that sort of thing that is unjustifiable from an economic perspective *and* from an environmental perspective.
If the city of Seattle makes a profit on its compost, they’re doing that on the backs of consumers forced to pay too much at restaurants. Have they done an analysis that takes that fact into account?
Our city and state government has found that single use plastics create a threat to our marine resources by harming our valuable fisheries, tourism, and ecosystems and so want to ensure that single use plastics are minimized and disposed of it a way that would lead to their not contaminating the marine environment. So they have created cost incentives to discourage their use and encourage their proper disposal.
They did so in a democratic process. The majority of us voted for elected officials who were open about their plans to create these programs and bans. We decided that paying an extra 10 to 20 cents for a fast food meal and not having plastics in the Puget Sound seems like a good trade off. No one has to use single use plastics. Folks could and do bring their own grocery bags or coffee cup and get 10 cents off when then do. I guess you could argue that we are all paying a sort of tax by paying more when we do get plastics but that is also getting off set by the revenu created by the composting.
I don't see how that amounts to pointless, performative recycling. Nor do I think that it is a given that it is unjustifiable from an economic perspective or environmental perspective. I think that would depend on the degree to which one views plastics in the ocean to be a problem and how much you think 10 cents for plastic forks is hurting the restaurant business. So far the restaurants don't seem that upset by it.
In many ways it has proved an economic benefit to companies that want to be good environmental stewards because it has created a large enough market for a product that can be more sustainably produced and more responsibly disposed of that has brought down the costs of those products by allowing them be produced at a larger scale. It is now much cheaper for me to go buy compostable cups for a party from cash and carry than it was when those were a "specialty" environmental product.
This criticism is nothing new and gets recycled more often than plastic does. Everyone has known from the begining that it depended on the economics and there was never any way to make plastic recycling economically viable to any serious degree.
But isn't that somewhat dependent on the quantity of plastic being recycled, the value that customers place on buying post-consumer waste plastic products, and the way that people manufacturing new plastics are taxed on the externalities that they create.
My family makes a real effort to buy a significant share of our goods out of post-consumer waste recycled materials. We run a law firm so buying 100% post consumer recycled paper is probably our biggest purchase in this category.
But we also have decking made of recycled plastic and try to buy as much of our synthetic fiber activewear and our insulated grocery bags from companies that use recycled plastic. Those items that are just better made from synthetic materials that natural materials but we have found it pretty easy to get recycled plastic versions. We pay a bit more for them but I don't think that would be the case if manufacturers of virgin single use plastics were forced to pay a tax that was equal to their impacts on climate change and waterway pollution.
Whenever I hear that it isn't economically viable to make sustainable products, I almost always find that this is because we are letting unsustainable products just foist their externalities on society at large as an invisible discount.
I really can't relate. Just go to your area's municipal waste website or Google "What is recyclable in NameofYourTown." There's surely a helpful graphic that clearly explains what you can and cannot recycle. Having said this, I know it is true that you are writing for the majority. At work, I just found someone had thrown a hand vacuum in the recycling bin, and people just cannot understand that pizza boxes cannot be recycled, no matter how often it is explained why. I conclude from this that I have some other type of brain--not better, just different--from most folks. They are good at rapid decision-making and having fun; I am good at recycling. Takes all kinds. And btw, if you have read to the bottom of this comment and can take away nothing more, recycle #1 and #2 plastic and throw the other plastic in the garbage...Oh yeah, and just try to reduce your consumption.
They usually are saturated with grease and coated with cheese and leftover pizza bits. Also, people throw them in the recycling bin with half-eaten crusts and sometimes a good portion of the pie. That cardboard isn't recyclable when it's in that state. Also, mixing food and recycling = critters. I mean, you sometimes could separate the lid and recycle that, if you want to be a martyr.
It would be great if there was better regulation on labels for what is recyclable. Basically no one accepts #6 and few places accept #4. So change the numbering system!
We have three bins (trash, recycling, and compost) next to each other at my office and basically every day, I see soda cans and plastic water bottles in the trash can, yogurt containers in the compost, and wet paper towels in the recycling. My assumption is that it all just goes into the garbage dumpster downstairs.
Recycling is kind of a feel-good thing that’s usually slightly better than doing nothing. Note the first two words in the title of https://www.epa.gov/recycle Recycling has always been plan C from an environmental perspective.
Seriously, it’s bizarre that folks who, generally, wish to cut GHG emissions also strongly support recycling, a practice that increases GHG emissions. (Maybe not so bizarre if one considers both to be sacraments of a hippy religion, or whatever.)
My provider has a handy sticker on our bin that shows exactly what can and can't be put into it. Here it's metal, glass, paper, plastic, cardboard.
I've tried to find out how much of this stuff actually gets recycled and have only confirmed that metal and cardboard do. No one will say anything one way or the other about the rest.
You can make money from aluminum, less from steel, much less from paper & cardboard. The rest is basically just for show and is, on the whole, bad for the environment.
“Plastic” is a big category. I think many places accept 1 and 2, but I think many don’t accept 5, which also makes up a significant fraction of plastic waste.
Ilya Somin responds to Matt's defense of the left/right dimension article. Highlights:
"Let's take Yglesias' religion/hierarchy theory first. If religion is right-wing, it's hard to explain explicitly leftist religious movements such as Liberation Theology, which combines Catholicism and Marxism. Worse, it's hard to explain the position of the mainstream Catholic Church!
Pope Francis is socially conservative on issues like abortion. But he also takes positions usually considered left-wing on economic regulation, the rights of migrants, the welfare state, and environmental policy. While the present pope has taken some of the Church's "left" positions further than his recent predecessors, the general idea of combining interventionist positions on economic issues with social conservatism is one the Catholic Church has held for a long time.
If your religion-focused theory of left and right has grave difficulty accounting for the leadership of the world's largest religious denomination, that seems like a significant problem for the theory. And Catholicism is far from the only denomination that doesn't fit the theory well. Many Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim movements, for example, are also anomalies in Yglesias' framework.
The hierarchy side of the theory also has issues. Consider the fact that communist regimes feature rigid hierarchies, with power concentrated in a small elite at the apex of the ruling party. Does that make communist regimes "right wing"? Are their opponents, therefore, necessarily left-wing? What if they are conservatives or religious traditionalists, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn? A theory under which Stalin and Mao are right-wing and Solzhenitsyn left-wing seems problematic. At the very least, it's highly counterintuitive."
Speaking of that, the reader survey question on political views only allowed answers along the Left/Right spectrum and did not allow me to convey my libertarian orientation.
What's the correct box for "100% loving breakneck cultural and technical change, but willing to provide a decent social safety net for the losers who can't keep up"?
I checked "slightly liberal", was that right? "Neoliberal" was obviously the box I needed...
Yeah, I feel weirdly out of place in liberal crowds because while I agree with many liberal policies & liberal values, I just don't have the kind of empathy that "true liberals" seem to love so much.
I do know some people genuinely need help, but I also think a lot of folks just need to step up their game. And the joy of being a pseudonymous rando on the internet is that I CAN just say the quiet part sometimes.
The question asked me to mark my place on the spectrum between extremely liberal and extremely conservative. No way to convey that I want to abolish the income tax and legalize drugs.
Redo the question! "Click to place yourself on the political horseshoe." (I don't know if Qualtrix supports that type of question, but it would be neat).
I was not expecting Macron to have a take on the Amish--and when I Googled what this was all about, it was attacking the 5G conspiracy theorists...coming from the Green Party over there.
It's an amusing meme, but I find myself gravitating to "It's a problem that France doesn't have a King." Maybe that's an accurate meta-statement about my ideology? I don't know.
I actually feel pretty comfortable saying that if you ignore symbolic labels and just look at behavior, Soviet communists post-Lenin and Chinese communists post-Deng were and are pretty straightforwardly classic conservatives. Their main priorities were and are maintaining the political and social power of particular and largely-hereditary cliques, and they want to avoid rocking the boat too much around things like gender roles/family structure/etc (often explicitly adopting socially conservative rhetoric.) The early revolutionaries generally had a more complicated relationship with the institutions they wound up ushering in. Mao in particular was hostile to the development of permanent hierarchies of party elites, and launched China's Cultural Revolution in an attempt to break the power of the emerging party bureaucracy, which ultimately failed.
In the early 19th century, the broad “left” faction in Europe, the liberals, were generally quite a bit more pro-market than their conservative adversaries (who correctly understood that the expansion of trade and industry would undermine the agricultural rent-dependent aristocracy’s pre-eminemce). Generally, in the West, being more pro-capitalist became right-wing only when capitalists became a big chunk of the ruling class and it became impossible to maintain an anti-egalitarian coalition that didn’t include them. In China, I think that you could reasonably describe people who want to expand the role of the market at the Party’s expense as liberals.
(Re: religion— I think that Matt’s critics have more of a point there and that there are plenty of both left and right-wing religious movements, with the former arguably including things like the original historical instance of Christianity. We tend to associate it with the right because until very recently, most strict political hierarchies also had a religious component.)
I think Matt is correct that religion is a central part of Left Right but his critics misunderstand the dimension of religion that is split. It's the difference between the Cathedrals and the Parishes. While the farthest left are atheists who want to destroy religion and the farthest right are the Papists who demand everyone respect all of the bishops (even when the bishops are committing crimes) and punish (poor) people who break the religious laws, most people wind up in the middle so it is possible that the left most group is still religious. It's also possible that the good guys are to the right of the dominant group (e.g. the Directory would have been to the left of Napoleon who was to the left of of the Bourbons but to the right of the Jacobins).
If you are advocating for markets and religious freedom that would definitely be on the Left in China. If you are advocating that the Chinese should follow only a specific religion (especially traditional Chinese religions) then that would be on the Right. I commented on this elsewhere but the Rights love of religion has nothing to do with belief but everything to do with symbolism and respect and China does in fact "respect" their traditional religions now.
Wait, so now to understand whether a groups political ideology is left or right, we need to parse the reason for their religious preferences? Think we might have lost the plot on this.
If you are trying to determine if a group is to the left or right you need to parse their motivations yes (if you only know a group is concerned about abortions you wouldn't know if they are pro life or pro choice). What I am trying to distinguish is between the left idea of religious pluralism (I want to be able to worship my religion) vs the right idea of religious nationalism (We must all worship the one true faith).
I don't think it breaks down that cleanly in large part because I think someone or even parties can have very conflicting opinions about various topics.
Someone votes to support redistribution because of their religious beliefs, but also votes against abortion because of their religious beliefs. But also accepts that as an atheist libertarian you can vote your conscious against redistribution and for abortion. Who in that situation is right or left?
I think Somin is reading Yglesias as attempting to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a left-right axis, or some sort of precise definition like that. But I think it’s better understood as a family resemblance of a bunch of separate axes, each one of which diverges in important ways from the others, but where a majority tend to align on any one categorization.
Good example of how taking the issues of the French Revolution and 19th Century France generally (should the Crown/Church/nobility have more or less power) and the resulting seating chart of the National Assembly and trying to apply it to all other countries doesn't really work.
I think this is right, but it's interesting and significant that people hold on to those terms anyway. I think a big part of it, which Matt didn't touch on, is the glamour of being associated with revolution and, I strongly suspect, with the implied threat of violence.
I'd add that the "Left/Right" discourse is starting to break down in Europe itself as societies become more diverse and the salience of issues like immigration and nationalism increase. See right-wing populists promising to protect gay rights from "sharia law" or the in theory "left" SNP coming out of restriction of freedom of expression (traditionally associate with the right) in order to "combat hate."
Progressive / Reactionary is perhaps a better method of sorting than Liberal / Conservative. But a useful heuristic for examining any of this is to ask who is punching up and who is punching down.
In college, I wrote a paper predicting that eventually, the political divide would reorient itself into a cosmopolitan low-tax/low-spending faction vs a pseudo-religious tax-and-spend-friendly faction. We're kind of along that road now, haha! But not nearly all the way there yet.
It's more conceivable to see liberty as having unintended adverse consequences at times., whereas I've never heard of progress being negative. Though there can be debates on whether certain actions actually achieve progress or not.
I think the left-right spectrum is useful, but is far from all-inclusive.
But it is a net positive for our understanding of the world that it exists. If tomorrow everyone stopped knowing what "left" and "right" meant, that would not be a positive for the world the way that for example everyone all of sudden not knowing what "Black" "White" and "Asian" meant would be.
I agree with most of those observations, but I also think Matt was mostly right: those gaps illustrate the tenuous relationship between political affect and policy outcomes.
The way to square the circle, partially at least, is Inglehardt postmaterialism: the economic stuff forms less and less of the substance of politics (regrettably!) and the sociocultural more and more.
My college did...not so good. But damnit, I had a lot of fun there!
However, I'd like to see how the costs shake out at the public universities do if you add in out of state tuition. I could have been fairly screwed in almost any scenario, as U of I, BSU and ISU come out middling here, and that would have involved either giving up the experience of living somewhere other than Boise, going to one of the most distilled college town environments out there, or Eastern Idaho.
The lesson parents should be learning from all the Ivy meltdowns is "send your kid to a party school with solid academics" like the University of Wisconsin or something like that.
The Bloomberg article argues that the Ivys (and other really elite schools like MIT) do have a good ROI. It’s the not-super-elite private schools that do poorly. (E.g. Wisconsin does better than Vassar.)
Some weirdness there. My daughter goes to a private school which was actually slightly cheaper than the in-state flagship based on what we actually paid, but that data shows it almost twice as expensive instead, which messes up the ROI. One of the annoying things about the lack of price transparency in higher educcation.
Would love to see more information on median tuition actually paid + median living expenses actually paid, both in state and out for public universities.
I wonder what the ROI is by degree type. Most of the universities with negative ROI are art and music universities. Does this chart mean that a music degree from UMass-Amherst has a much better ROI than a music degree from Berklee College of Music?
Someone with a music degree from UMass Amherst probably had to take some classes in the humanities and in the sciences and in math, and probably some general “American cultures” or whatever the other general ed requirements are, and probably wrote a lot of essays. They almost certainly didn’t get anywhere near the number of hours of musical instruction and ensemble practice and other music practice as someone who graduated from Berklee, but they probably wrote a lot more essays.
I'm a faculty member at UMass, and I gotta represent for my Music colleagues.
The BM, Bachelor of Music (as opposed to the BA, Bachelor of Arts in Music), which UMass and other conservatory-style music programs offer, is a very intensive, professional degree, akin to a B.Eng. or the like. The students in the BM program almost certainly *do* get a comparable number of hours of musical instruction and ensemble and other practice as students at a place like Berkelee. The students in the BA program, however, get much more like what you describe. They both pay the same tuition.
Right. According to this chart a degree from UMass has a ROI of nearly 150k, whereas a degree from Berklee has a negative ROI. But is that true for any individual degree?
I assume it's not true for any individual degree. But I think it would be interesting to know how much of the variance is between one major and another, and how much of the variance is within majors. There might be some engineering degrees that are nearly universally high income, but I imagine that basically anything else is going to have a range of people who go into consulting or investment banking or any of a number of other generalist college degree jobs, as well as some number who get a graduate degree and do something more or less lucrative.
I can't speak for 'urbanists' as a group, but my opinion is that the key thing is allowing development. What kind is best determined by the landowners and market conditions.
I'd say it depends on the location. I'd be quite happy with rowhouses in the downtown of a smaller community or in a neighborhood several miles from the downtown core of a city. I would not want them in the downtown core of a city or directly along a major subway route
I don't know if I consider myself an urbanist, but the main thing I want from infrastructure is to just not have so much of it be solely dependent on the damn automobile.
I agree, but one of the benefits of density is that it supports geographically smaller customer bases for local businesses, so it's viable to have more of them within (typical) non-driving distance.
Not all YIMBYs are urbanists. Like, I am a YIMBY in that I want to copy-paste Houston/Harris County zoning laws across the country. But Houston isn't an urbanist paradise.
Okay I guess you could say "Urbanists prefer Jerry Seinfeld's neighborhood but with more bike lanes" or something like that but that's not really on the table in many places outside of NYC.
I think it’s interesting to see the cities that are outliers in any one housing type. No surprise that Philadelphia and Baltimore have a lot of row houses, but I’m surprised that DC still has so many, and especially that Virginia Beach does! No surprise that Boston has the most triple-deckers, but I am a bit surprised that Chicago and Milwaukee, as well as to a lesser extent Boston and SF and NYC, have so many duplexes. Mesa, Tucson, and Jacksonville having so many mobile homes suggests something, but I’m not sure what. The fact that Houston and Nashville aren’t on that list suggests that it’s not just having incorporated the suburbs.
Wow. That was interesting. I wasn't surprised to see Seattle have more single family homes than most comparable cities but that seems to be primarily because we have so much less in terms of row houses, duplexes, and triplexes. It looks like in fact at least half the city lives in multi family units of 5 people or more which is definitely not the sense that you have when you look at who attends community meetings, participates in facebook groups, and get kowtowed to by elected officials. Now that the whole city is zoned for at least duplexes on any full lot we are slowing seeming backfill in "second ring" urban neighborhoods like mine. It will be interesting to see how much new housing comes from that vs the large 20+ units that are currently our second largest percentage after single family homes. To answer the question, I think it would depend on the size of the city and where in the city. I think that while there are probably some pure urbanists who would want to live in a place as dense and New York, I think most are looking to see the downtown and first ring neighborhoods primarily either commercial or large dense apartment blocks. But outside that core, I think larger apartment buildings along the major transit lines and atop retail in the urban village main streets with residential areas a mix of smaller apartment buildings, triplex, duplexes and some single family homes probably make sense, with the ration of apartment buildings to single family homes getting lower with each ring that you get farther from downtown.
I am in a second ring neighborhood. My block is already about 20% duplex, triplex now and I would guess that will be closer to 60% in the next ten years given the current building trends. I think that it should probable be something closer to 75% with most of the remaining single family homes also doubling as businesses, which mine does along with another 15% of the block.
My parents live in a 5th ring neighborhood. Their neighborhood is currently 95% single family home with zero walkable retail. I think it would be much better for them in terms of aging in place if the largest street near them which currently has one not very frequent bus lane developed into apartments with retail on the bottom and their neighborhood flipped to about 30% to 50% duplexes so that the density could support a walkable grocery store, drug store, coffee shop, take out place, etc and a more frequent bus service so that they wouldn't be so car dependent when frankly neither of them are as good at driving as they used to be. It would be better for the rest of the City too because their neighborhood does have some lovely parks and beaches that are currently not easily accessible by bus. I don't see nearly as much of a move to build where they live though and a lot more NIMBY push back. (Not from my parents.)
I agree. The Dispatch moved off Substack and their comment section deteriorated significantly. Not just the quality, but the user experience was markedly worse.
In addition to residence, there should be a question about nationality! Like me, I imagine there are some foreign subscribers who sign up for Slow Boring because they like to read about policy and american politics (and Matt's writing, of course).
1) It would be good to do really deep dives into federal agencies and their specific programs. Why do they work or not? We get too many 10,000 feet views but no specifics. When if ever is Congressional oversight effective? 2) More specifically, Matt never comments on one of the largest federal agencies, the Department of Veteran's Affairs. Why not? It is the closest thing we have to socialized medicine and should be relevant to any discussion of the future ofmedical insurance in this country. The commentariat generally has a low opinion of it but some aspects of that agency are considered superior to private sector by many in the medical community.
I keep recommending the book "Recoding America" by Jennifer Pahlka which gives a look at the IT side of some federal bureaucracies. Just a tiny slice but very interesting. Not sure who could do deep dives or how they could do it, although the DVA is a worthy target and maybe even a bit more transparent than others since everyone at least understands their main mission.
VA's are very popular among those who use it. It is veteran political support that keeps the VA going. Recent bipartisan bill expanded coverage and got record enrollment.
There are any number of interesting issues that come up e.g. how did the changes in VA under the previous administration affect care? How does MAGA think about the VA? What happens to the VA as the number of veterans goes down?
So is the official Biden position on this Iran thing actually gonna be, "No harm, no foul."? Like I'm pretty anti-interventionist, but between this and Putin it really seems like we're into full appeasement territory. Seems bad. I doubt Israel is stupid enough to play along, but we seem determined to self-deter into really bad spot.
I think it's more "Israel is going to do whatever they are going to do but we aren't going to go to war with Iran over this" and that's the correct position.
I think there's a real difference between 3 options: what Bibi thinks will keep him in the PMO, what Bezalel Smotrich wants to do, and what the Israeli general officer corps will go along with.
And the 4th option to consider (maybe this is related to the 3rd) is how long the haredi parties can retain getting draft exemptions without blowing up the coalition.
To clarify re option 3 -- because everyone in Israel either will serve, is serving, or has served, the "general to politician" pipeline is very real. Israel is not by any means a stratocracy, but to be a flag officer in the IDF is to already think of yourself as a diplomat and one-day politician. And because reaching that level involves such regular contact with other Western countries, the general officer corps is less "burn it all down" than you might think.
Read the piece, Chamberlain got a real raw deal in that all his enemies blamed him for everything and because he died so soon after Munich he never got a change to defend himself with say memoirs or whatever.
I'm familiar with the argument, I just don't agree with it. For one thing, these arguments (and the Slate article is no exception) always set the Czech ability to resist at zero, but that's a major distortion. As Lloyd George put it during the No Confidence vote on Chamberlain:
"Let us face it; just look at it. Czecho-Slovakia, that spear-head, aimed at the heart of Germany, broken. A million of the finest troops in Europe of a very well-educated race of free men, all gone. Such advantage as there is in Czecho-Slovakia, with its great lines of fortifications and its Skoda works, which turned out the finest artillery in the 1914 war, are in the hands of Hitler. That is one strategic advantage which we have handed over to the enemy."
As far as this article specifically goes, it seems to me that the author doesn't even try to say that Chamberlain was right? He just says that the blame for being wrong goes to the military brass ("The British military systematically overestimated German strength and underestimated its own in the lead-up to the Czechoslovak crisis") and the public ("If Britain were to go to war with Hitler’s Germany, most people didn’t want to do so over Czechoslovakia"). That might exculpate Chamberlain himself—though it goes against the principle that the buck stops here—but it actually supports, not undermines, the idea that from Munich we should learn the dangers of appeasement.
Yes, that's my point, "learn the dangers of appeasement" basically means "End diplomacy and have a war", but there are very real reasons why that war didn't start in 1938 (such as the UK was totally unprepared for the war and it was very unpopular) and it's wrong to blame it all on Chamberlain even if that's what everyone did because it suited their own political interests.
Well, I think it depends on what one is using Munich to argue. If one is arguing about Chamberlain's specific culpability, then fair enough (even though I don't think I go as far as you in letting him off the hook). But I think generally people are arguing, not about Chamberlain's level of responsibility for the decision, but about *whether it was the right decision in the first place.* Like, yes, the generals and the public didn't think the UK should stand up to Hitler, and Chamberlain followed their lead. But maybe the generals and the public were wrong! If they were wrong, then that's something we should take into account now when these questions come up. And when you referenced how these arguments have led to disasters in the past like Vietnam and Iraq, I took you not just to be saying that it's unfair to blame Chamberlain for what turned out to be the wrong move, but that it wasn't the wrong move at all and that the outcomes from appeasement were better than the outcomes from confrontation would have been. Did I understand you correctly?
In my view, standing up to Hitler would have been better than giving him Czechoslovakia. (Hitler, for one, was glad that he got Czechoslovakia without fighting for it, so either he was wrong or Chamberlain was.) If I'm right, that's a point in favor of military intervention in certain circumstances. On the other hand, Iraq and Vietnam are points in the other direction, about the dangers of *not* letting diplomacy work. It's all data and has to be hashed out; we shouldn't rule any of it out for circumstantial reasons, but take what we can from it.
I think America's message to Israel should be, "Do what you're gonna do, but we're not gonna help you do it and we're not gonna save you from it, so calibrate the extent of your fucking around to the extent of your willingness to find out, and go from there."
It's appeasement when we don't attack countries that didn't attack us? We're already arming and cooperating with Israel and Ukraine. If we fought every country that bothers a somewhat ally we'd be fighting Russia, China, NK and Iran all at once.
>> It's appeasement when we don't attack countries that didn't attack us?
I mean that’s precisely how it went down in the locus classics of the 30s, so yes. In fact even when infamous Chamberlain did declare on Germany it didn’t attack the uk and offered it peace! Was he wrong?
This is such a dumb counterargument-by-example. It's only "easy" to answer because we know everything else that happened after, that he couldn't have known, most notably Pearl Harbor and the Nazi invasion of the USSR. If one and certainly if both of those two events hadn't happened the UK probably loses.
But so what anyway? Appeasement is basically just a way of denigrating a peace or containment strategy that you think is too soft. Going to war with Russia because they attacked a non-ally, a "partner" at best is not soft. Not attacking Iran because they are in a tit-for-tat round of violence with a friendly country is not soft.
You asked "It's appeasement when we don't attack countries that didn't attack us? " The answer is a resounding yes, given that the term appeasement harks back to exactly such situation. Sa to whether Western powers long appeasement of Germany was foolish and immoral, as most people assume, or not, as you seem to suggest - that's another discussion altogether. I only teased it because I thought (and hoped) it's a closed one, but it doesn't matter either way.
(and thanks for classifying my "counterargument" as dumb. Super helpful ;)
Sorry for calling it dumb. It's hard for me to talk about this topic without my blood pressure spiking. There may have been a point when war with Germany made sense for England, and certainly a joint attack by Russia, France, England and the US might have been very effective in 1936, but as to the narrower question of "Should England have declared war on Germany a few years earlier" I think it's quite likely they would have just lost unless Hitler bailed them out by choosing to bring Russia and the US into the war. I'm certainly glad I don't live in that timeline.
"I think it's quite likely they would have just lost unless Hitler bailed them out by choosing to bring Russia and the US into the war."
Hitler got very very lucky in his initial invasions, mainly because nobody believed he'd actually attack. I think crossing the channel would have been sufficiently hard that the UK could have held out for at least 5 years, at which point Japan attacks Pearl Harbor anyways and the US joins and bails the UK out.
There’s a non-trivial chance that in the next decade or two we end up fighting those four countries. No need to accelerate it, and plenty of good reason to try to prevent it.
I don't think a direct tit-for-tat is worth it. Iran came out on the losing side of this both militarily and diplomatically. Israel will keep whacking Qods personnel in Syria when it finds them. The cycle repeats.
And hopefully we (the US), have made it clear that if Iranian proxies look at US forces the wrong way, we are not going to take kindly to that.
My Israeli relatives don't agree with me here, but I feel like this is a boxing match: Israel v. Iran.
It's been going on for years in various ways, and this round involved Israel killing an Iranian general, and Iran injuring an Israeli child.
It's awful that an innocent girl was hurt, but Israel won this round. Every country would trade a 7-year-old citizen's life for killing an enemy general. End the round, and continue to kill Iranian generals as the situations arise in the future.
Maybe a little more challenging, logistically. The Osirak strike only required overflying Saudi Arabia. And I suspect the Iranians have hardened their nuclear facilities, perhaps beyond Israel's ability to penetrate with conventional weapons. But I could be wrong.
I doubt Israel would have much difficulty flying over Syria and Kurdish Iraq. But you are probably correct that Israel will find it more difficult to penetrate Iran's facilities than Iraq's facilities.
There were 2 "random chance" things that, had they gone the other way, might have foiled Israel's attack.
1) Their planes flew over King Hussein's yacht and he recognized them and deduced their destination; he ordered that Iraq be warned, but the warning was never sent.
2) The Iraqi air defense crews had gone to dinner about 30 minutes before the strike and turned off the radars.
I mean...it depends how we're evaluating things? Like, if we're evaluating it by numbers of missiles launched, then Iran clearly engaged in wild escalation, and we should all be worried. If we're evaluating based on casualties inflicted, then Iran got absolutely embarrassed and we should all just go about our business rather than continuing to engage in tit-for-tat direct exchanges.
Note, all of the above is about Israel's reaction. The US's reaction ought to be basically the same as when Israel bombed the Iranian consulate.
But Iran launch those huge number of missiles right in to the iron dome where they knew they would likely do relatively little damage. It felt to me like Iran was trying to do something that looked tough without actually inflicting much damage so they could save face and not end up in a full out war. I think Israel should let this be a tit for tat and not keep this going to the point where Iran gets serious about killing Israelis in large numbers.
If they were wanting to look tough without actually inflicting casualties, they wouldnt have tried to coordinate the various weapons involved to arrive so close in time to each other.
It seemed pretty clear that they were trying to overwhelm their air defenses.
Eh, there were also at least some warnings to local powers they were about to overfly, which they had to anticipate would leak. But it's the usual internation relations communications problem. No matter what their goal/intentions were, they're going to be saying the same thing, since they need their local audiences to believe they're strong.
I do think the series of quick statements to the effect of 'well, this is all over now' indicate a desire to not escalate further, whether that's because the attack failed, or just because they've got a story they think they can sell locally is probably unknowable.
Given that, and Israel's other goals, it seems obvious that calling this round is in everyone's interest. Except maybe Hamas, which I'm sure would very much like an escalation that wasn't focused on them.
They signaled this attack days before it happened, allowing for multiple countries to back Israel and shoot the vast majority of them down. It seems like they were signaling more that they could have launched this without warning and it would have been much, much more deadly.
Eh. At the time the faction that didn't hate the US was ascendant. Who knows how Iranian domestic politics would have turned out if we didn't backstab them? (Probably the same, but you never know.)
Iran’s attack was a direct response to Israel blowing up an Iranian consulate!! Israel is attacking Iranian-linked forces in Lebanon (who are attacking back) every day! Plus Iran is under extensive sanctions.
I don’t think we should be getting involved in defending against retaliation against Israel when we were quite plainly opposed to Israel’s attacks prompting the retaliation. If Israel wants to use the US as a shield, it needs to not be going around starting wars.
But a lot of that happened in the 70s - 90s, indeed parts of Baltimore have seen real gentrification in the last 20 years, either way you slice it, it's a massive change.
I'd add that just people people moved to Townson or whatever doesn't mean they couldn't still go to church in "the old neighborhood" Sopranos style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI7YzBE5zAo (also the title of the video is hilarious, whoever wrote it clearly didn't get the show)
I'm getting whiplash from the rise in talking about USMCA and Trump's impact on US trade policy. Or maybe it's outright gaslighting? Can someone else who was there from 2016 to today help me?
I remember that President Obama was pushing the TPP and was, like most Presidents, more friendly to free trade than parochial members of Congress. I know that Trump broke traditional GOP orthodox on free trade (well, modern orthodox, don't talk to Lincoln or McKinley about free trade) and pushed to renegotiate NAFTA as USMCA. So that's a big break in continuity of US trade policy.
But I also remember that this guy Bernie Sanders ran against the TPP and there was such discontent over trade policies in the Democratic primary that he got the former Secretary of State who played a role in its negotiation to disown it.
And I seem to remember that for the past 30 odd years there's been a major complain among a major Democratic constituency, labor, that President Bill Clinton's embrace of free trade was a betrayal of the party's working class base. I remember some guys like Dick Gephardt. I remember Tim Ryan and Chuck Schumer and others complaining about Chinese currency manipulation. I remember Obama struggling to convince his own party in Congress to back him on the TPP.
I remember, by and large, Democrats claiming a huge victory with USMCA as it was a classic Trump-Congressional Democratic deal: Trump gets to claim a rhetorical victory, Democrats get everything they want and force Republicans to vote for it against their interests because Trump's happy.
But I'm seeing all these commentators from the finance and trade reporting world acting as if the only change was from Obama to Trump, and Biden continuing Trump's approach to trade. Is this because that aspect of journalism is used to only talking to the executive branch and has no idea Congress exists?
Important to note that Trump's penchant for tariffs is not rooted in principled determination to boost US production capacity or save US jobs or anything like that. He looks at it as a way to shake down foreign countries. He genuinely thinks that a tariff is money another country pays to us for the privilege of selling things here, instead of a tax that American companies are simply going to pass along to the consumer.
Yeah, he thinks he's the master dealmaker and can get a better deal via his bullying style and tactics. He renegotiated NAFTA, but it didn't change very much.
Can you explain? The Trump International in Chicago was built on the site of the hideous Chicago Sun-Times building. It was not an existing building the Trump put his name on.
You should change the open question to make sure its obvious that that is the question to input feedback on things like the book club or in person meetups (or add a specific question for that). I assumed there would be more questions afterward.
It's kind of cruel to tease us with the possibility of winning a totebag after we, you know, didn't get any totebags actually delivered as part of the pop-up store SB merch sale . . . .
Tradle: I knew it wasn't THAT one, but the "Other Animals" exports prompted me to think the geography would be different than the actual answer.
Matt, what is your view on the effectiveness of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit? It’s the largest source of subsidy for new rent-restricted housing in the US. It is often criticized for having higher development costs relative to unsubsidized housing.
What's the deal with recycling, really?
As a 'soft' environmentalist (e.g., generally support/favor pro environmental action by government and citizens, but I don't go to meetings or read mailing lists about it) I feel exhausted trying to figure out what can and can't be recycled and under what circumstances. Is there an easy button way to mostly stay onside without getting a Master's in the thousands of permutations of recycling labels? Are there certain materials that are more important to recycle than others?
I also periodically encounter right wing-ish suggestions that the whole enterprise is basically a scam (e.g., everything just goes into a landfill anyway, it gets shipped overseas to be dumped in the ocean, etc.). I assume these not true, but I don't know enough about the process to refute them conclusively and would benefit from a Slow-Boring piece detailing the intricacies of the matter.
My heuristic level understanding is basically that glass and aluminum pencil out and everything else merits skepticism.
I thought corrugated cardboard did OK too, and that glass wasn't that useful--our municipality refuses to pick it up curbside, we have to take it to a bin that they set out in various places. But yes, aluminum above all else--I remember Penn and Teller emphasizing that on their Bullshit! episode on that.
They also emphasized that the dump shortage was made up, which makes sense given how big this nation is. It's a lot better to just bury the stuff deep in the ground, capture methane leaks and use it for energy, instead of it going off to overseas places that don't have advanced sanitation practices and facilities.
I don't think that landfill space was ever a very compelling case for recycling. I think the benefits come primarily in reducing electricity and water use in new manufacturing and reducing mining impacts, forestry impacts of replacing items that could be reused. Much of that depends on how efficiently one can recycle which varies from place to place. But yes. Aluminum is always good in part because it prevents the need for more mining.
Landfill shortages can be very real it depends on the state and issues like the cost of moving the garbage and if NIMBY type opposition prevents new ones from being made. In short it's a political issue not so much a space one, but the challenges can be very real.
I should have paused writing my response to see what the reply was!
I think glass only pencils out if you're reusing whole bottles.
Metal (aluminum and steel) and glass are the most reliably recycled materials and what you should prioritize getting into the recycling stream under basically all circumstances. (As I like to say, you're just actively trying to kill the planet if you throw those in the trash.) All other materials are questionable depending on the specific program, but generally speaking CLEAN Type 1 and 2 plastics and CLEAN newsprint or office paper can theoretically be worthwhile.
I argue with people all the time about this. Relying on everyone to know all the rules, and to follow them is not a scalable solution to any problem. This is well known at pretty much any large company that has any process for any tasks that involve getting anything done. If your process relies on humans not making errors, your execution will always be doomed to failure.
The only way recycling ever becomes what environmentalists want it to be is to simplify it so much for the end user that they cannot make mistakes, and it's easy for them to comply. No amount of advertising to make recycling cool or shaming people for not recycling will ever change this.
Many years ago, I declared that "single stream" recycling was the worst thing ever to happen to recycling because it had the entirely foreseeable consequence of just encouraging people to treat recycling bins as trash cans even more than they did before.
My apartment complex has a dumpster bin for single stream recycling, and I've seen trash bags, pizza boxes, and even old furniture in it. I don't know what people are thinking.
Multiple former roommates of mine believed that styrofoam could be recycled before I told them otherwise.
:'-(
When my lovely mother in law visits, she puts dirty paper towels in my recycling
Make a compost!
:'-(
My city will fine you if your trash contains more than a certain percent of recyclable material. I don't have a huge problem if they do this for stuff like glass and metal that is highly recyclable.
When it comes to stuff like plastic, I get really annoyed because a lot of that plastic is going to end up in the landfill anyway because the recyclers won't take it. My plastic olive oil bottle is not going to be easily recycled because it's going to take a lot of time to get rid of all the oil and I have other things to do with my time and water.
If we really want to ensure that only acceptable quality plastics end up in the recycling cycle, then it's probably a good idea to just pay for it so that it's worth people's while. Or we could invest in techniques for recyclers to clean the plastic themselves.
We have strains of bacteria that will breakdown certain plastics. I suspect that developing more bacterial strains that break down more types of plastics and then encouraging companies and consumers to use those types of plastics that can be biodegraded by these bacteria is going to be more effective than getting people to wash their plastics and fining them for throwing them in the trash when they'd end up there anyway. It'd also be nice if we could get more use of bioplastics that can be composted. We have technology and we really ought to be using it to make things easier and better for the environment.
“…types of plastics that can be biodegraded…”
What is the point of that? Why not bury them in a landfill?
Very much not a scam, blocks of crushed cans do get shipped to China and turned into stuff. One of the main challenges now was embracing single sort (all recyclables into the same container) was embraced to make it easier for people but it does lead to real contamination in the "streams" as they were which makes the end product less commercially valuable to be sold back to producers.
But it is much better to recycling bottles and cans than throw them in the landfill/area burner.
"Area burner" sounds like Dune-ese for fuel air explosive bombs.
The politically correct terms is "energy recovery center"
IIRC from Dune Messiah, there was some 'burner' weapon.
*SPOILER* I think it's what melted Paul's eyes with it's made-up J-rays. Or some such.
"Stone burner," I believe. (Not a Dunehead though, so trying to remember 20+ years back to the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries.)
Correct.
You're saying the Israelis were able to shoot down all the drones and cruise missiles because they have their own giant worm person thing?!?!?!
I think it depends quite a bit on where you live. I think aluminum is generally very high value to recycle everywhere. Glass most places. In Seattle, we actually make money on our municipal composting which picks up yard waste, food waste, and soiled or wet paper. We do offer municipal recycling of clean paper and some plastics but I am not sure how much that is of real benefit. We also have a company called "Ridwell" that folks subscribe to that picks up plastic film, batteries, light bulbs, threads, and one "speciality item" each week. They have pretty transparent information on where there stuff goes and it is very popular. I do think it is probably not the best investment in the environment that one can make.
We do Ridwell. I think that they do a legit job getting everything to actually get reused and/or recycled. They can do that because they charge a reasonable fee and have highly committed users who make sure to accurately sort and clean. As someone does so much hands on work on our watershed, it makes me feel a lot better to have a way to dispose of the plastic film and other items that I can't easily avoid. But I budget it more in my feel good than my do good budget. I think I am probably doing more to address that by buying products like Trex for all my decking and using recycled denim insulation in my house than my providing the "waste."
I think one of the best aspects about Ridwell has been that it has made me much more aware of how much plastic film that I do produce and that has probably helped me be a bit more careful to avoid it. Plus it helps make sure family doesn't cheat and put the film in the city recycling because they know where it goes!
I originally got our originally annual subscription for my husband who goes nuts about things that can be recycled going into the trash. Apparently we are one of the few couples in the country where the guy is more into recycling than the man! But we kept it because it does help allow us to just use the mini City of Seattle garbage can to support both our home and business and that helps offset the cost.
My sense is that if everyone started collecting their plastic film there wouldn't be sufficient market for its use but there is enough of a market to make participating now worthwhile.
I'm also curious as to when municipalities will start curtailing recycling on non-viable materials, and why it hasn't happened yet. Maybe because the recycling sorting infrastructure is already in place and they want to get their money's worth out of it?
For others, this was what was circulating in the news over the weekend: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critics-call-out-plastics-industry-over-fraud-of-plastic-recycling/
In Seattle, where recycling is more common than most places, there has been a big push to get more places that do single serve plastic to use compostable plastic because we are better able to efficiently compost than recycle. Starbucks is one of the biggest stores pushing the recyclable plastic cups instead. They say that they worry that folks who don't have municipal composting will think that they can just throw those into regular composting or will trash instead of recycle. It depends so much on where to live. We just got back from a vacation from Hawaii. They only offered recycling of aluminum, plastic water bottles, glass, and cardboard. It felt so wrong to be throwing out food scraps and paper towels after years of living somewhere that will fine you if they find those in the trash.
“…single serve plastic to use compostable plastic because we are better able to efficiently compost than recycle.”
If compostable plastic was cheaper wouldn’t folks already use it?
It is cheaper to dispose of without creating plastic waste that is a threat to marine life and can be made without renewable resources unlike "recyclable" plastic, but it is more expensive to make which is why it isn't widely used in many places. It is common in Seattle because we have restrictions on what kind of single use plastics restaurants can provide that are not compostable or recyclable. The public is generally aware that compostable cups are really compostable and recyclable cups generally aren't so you see more businesses willing to pay slightly more for the compostable variety to engender goodwill.
It also make more practical sense for many of them because in Seattle, businesses and families get fined if they either have non-compostable items in their compost, non-recyclable in their recycling, or more than a nominal amount of either recyclable or compostable items in their trash. Straws can't be recycled and all food waste has to go into compost. Businesses often find it easier to just offer compostable everything other than durable items and tell customers to throw everything in to the compost bin other than their durable items than to try to get them to put their muffin wrapper and straw in this bin and their cup in that bin. Otherwise, some poor employee has to go through the compost and pull out all the cups to avoid a fine.
But compostable plastic is also just sort of a scam anywhere that doesn't provide high heat municipal compost. If it ends up buried in a landfill, it doesn't actually breakdown in any reasonable timeframe without exposure to heat and oxygen. If it ends up in a river or ocean, it will break down but not fast enough to avoid being a danger to wildlife. Seattle has that kind of commercial composting facility and it resells its compost at a profit so it makes a lot of sense here but not in areas that don't have that sort of system. That creates challenges for businesses that operate nationally who want to do the "right thing" to come up with products that are going to be practical to dispose of in many different communities.
Seattle gets away with these strong laws in part because we are very Blue but also because we have marine industry as a major economic player and our ocean wildlife as major cultural priorities so there is large scale buy in. But to Matt's point about rule enforcement, we are also a city where the SPD is basically not responding to much crime at all which has lead to a sense that you can shoplift or even steal cars without much change of any enforcement penalty but the waste disposal enforcement is still robust and you absolutely will get a fine attached to your garbage if you fuck up your disposal rules so that makes learning the rules feel very worthwhile to residents. Of course, tourist still make a mess of it all because no one is going to learn the rules for a place they are in for three days. It also means that when we go other places we feel like we are going to get busted every time we throw away any food scraps in the garbage because there is no alternative and literally sweat about it.
It’s all well and good for Seattle to do pointless, performative recycling. All I’m saying is that there is a cost to that sort of thing that is unjustifiable from an economic perspective *and* from an environmental perspective.
If the city of Seattle makes a profit on its compost, they’re doing that on the backs of consumers forced to pay too much at restaurants. Have they done an analysis that takes that fact into account?
Our city and state government has found that single use plastics create a threat to our marine resources by harming our valuable fisheries, tourism, and ecosystems and so want to ensure that single use plastics are minimized and disposed of it a way that would lead to their not contaminating the marine environment. So they have created cost incentives to discourage their use and encourage their proper disposal.
They did so in a democratic process. The majority of us voted for elected officials who were open about their plans to create these programs and bans. We decided that paying an extra 10 to 20 cents for a fast food meal and not having plastics in the Puget Sound seems like a good trade off. No one has to use single use plastics. Folks could and do bring their own grocery bags or coffee cup and get 10 cents off when then do. I guess you could argue that we are all paying a sort of tax by paying more when we do get plastics but that is also getting off set by the revenu created by the composting.
I don't see how that amounts to pointless, performative recycling. Nor do I think that it is a given that it is unjustifiable from an economic perspective or environmental perspective. I think that would depend on the degree to which one views plastics in the ocean to be a problem and how much you think 10 cents for plastic forks is hurting the restaurant business. So far the restaurants don't seem that upset by it.
In many ways it has proved an economic benefit to companies that want to be good environmental stewards because it has created a large enough market for a product that can be more sustainably produced and more responsibly disposed of that has brought down the costs of those products by allowing them be produced at a larger scale. It is now much cheaper for me to go buy compostable cups for a party from cash and carry than it was when those were a "specialty" environmental product.
This criticism is nothing new and gets recycled more often than plastic does. Everyone has known from the begining that it depended on the economics and there was never any way to make plastic recycling economically viable to any serious degree.
Yeah but it still goes on. I'm wondering which recycling of the recycling is finally going to stop the recycling.
“…which recycling of the recycling is finally going to stop the recycling”
Pimp My Recycling
But isn't that somewhat dependent on the quantity of plastic being recycled, the value that customers place on buying post-consumer waste plastic products, and the way that people manufacturing new plastics are taxed on the externalities that they create.
My family makes a real effort to buy a significant share of our goods out of post-consumer waste recycled materials. We run a law firm so buying 100% post consumer recycled paper is probably our biggest purchase in this category.
But we also have decking made of recycled plastic and try to buy as much of our synthetic fiber activewear and our insulated grocery bags from companies that use recycled plastic. Those items that are just better made from synthetic materials that natural materials but we have found it pretty easy to get recycled plastic versions. We pay a bit more for them but I don't think that would be the case if manufacturers of virgin single use plastics were forced to pay a tax that was equal to their impacts on climate change and waterway pollution.
Whenever I hear that it isn't economically viable to make sustainable products, I almost always find that this is because we are letting unsustainable products just foist their externalities on society at large as an invisible discount.
I really can't relate. Just go to your area's municipal waste website or Google "What is recyclable in NameofYourTown." There's surely a helpful graphic that clearly explains what you can and cannot recycle. Having said this, I know it is true that you are writing for the majority. At work, I just found someone had thrown a hand vacuum in the recycling bin, and people just cannot understand that pizza boxes cannot be recycled, no matter how often it is explained why. I conclude from this that I have some other type of brain--not better, just different--from most folks. They are good at rapid decision-making and having fun; I am good at recycling. Takes all kinds. And btw, if you have read to the bottom of this comment and can take away nothing more, recycle #1 and #2 plastic and throw the other plastic in the garbage...Oh yeah, and just try to reduce your consumption.
They usually are saturated with grease and coated with cheese and leftover pizza bits. Also, people throw them in the recycling bin with half-eaten crusts and sometimes a good portion of the pie. That cardboard isn't recyclable when it's in that state. Also, mixing food and recycling = critters. I mean, you sometimes could separate the lid and recycle that, if you want to be a martyr.
It would be great if there was better regulation on labels for what is recyclable. Basically no one accepts #6 and few places accept #4. So change the numbering system!
We have three bins (trash, recycling, and compost) next to each other at my office and basically every day, I see soda cans and plastic water bottles in the trash can, yogurt containers in the compost, and wet paper towels in the recycling. My assumption is that it all just goes into the garbage dumpster downstairs.
The opposite flow of this: https://frinkiac.com/img/S04E16/353702.jpg
Recycling is kind of a feel-good thing that’s usually slightly better than doing nothing. Note the first two words in the title of https://www.epa.gov/recycle Recycling has always been plan C from an environmental perspective.
Recycling is bad. Don’t do it.
Seriously, it’s bizarre that folks who, generally, wish to cut GHG emissions also strongly support recycling, a practice that increases GHG emissions. (Maybe not so bizarre if one considers both to be sacraments of a hippy religion, or whatever.)
My provider has a handy sticker on our bin that shows exactly what can and can't be put into it. Here it's metal, glass, paper, plastic, cardboard.
I've tried to find out how much of this stuff actually gets recycled and have only confirmed that metal and cardboard do. No one will say anything one way or the other about the rest.
You can make money from aluminum, less from steel, much less from paper & cardboard. The rest is basically just for show and is, on the whole, bad for the environment.
Next Monday is Earth Day. Celebrate accordingly!
“Plastic” is a big category. I think many places accept 1 and 2, but I think many don’t accept 5, which also makes up a significant fraction of plastic waste.
Ours takes clean plastic containers #1 through 7, no plastic bags or other random plastic.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/04/14/what-differentiates-political-left-and-right/
Ilya Somin responds to Matt's defense of the left/right dimension article. Highlights:
"Let's take Yglesias' religion/hierarchy theory first. If religion is right-wing, it's hard to explain explicitly leftist religious movements such as Liberation Theology, which combines Catholicism and Marxism. Worse, it's hard to explain the position of the mainstream Catholic Church!
Pope Francis is socially conservative on issues like abortion. But he also takes positions usually considered left-wing on economic regulation, the rights of migrants, the welfare state, and environmental policy. While the present pope has taken some of the Church's "left" positions further than his recent predecessors, the general idea of combining interventionist positions on economic issues with social conservatism is one the Catholic Church has held for a long time.
If your religion-focused theory of left and right has grave difficulty accounting for the leadership of the world's largest religious denomination, that seems like a significant problem for the theory. And Catholicism is far from the only denomination that doesn't fit the theory well. Many Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim movements, for example, are also anomalies in Yglesias' framework.
The hierarchy side of the theory also has issues. Consider the fact that communist regimes feature rigid hierarchies, with power concentrated in a small elite at the apex of the ruling party. Does that make communist regimes "right wing"? Are their opponents, therefore, necessarily left-wing? What if they are conservatives or religious traditionalists, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn? A theory under which Stalin and Mao are right-wing and Solzhenitsyn left-wing seems problematic. At the very least, it's highly counterintuitive."
Speaking of that, the reader survey question on political views only allowed answers along the Left/Right spectrum and did not allow me to convey my libertarian orientation.
It was even worse than left-right. They did liberal-conservative.
Seriously. I'm glad Nate Silver is trying to bring back the good fight of getting us to reterm liberal like most of the rest of the world does.
Nah, liberal vs conservative is the best spectrum for talkin about American politics as it actually is and has been since at least the New Deal.
Nah
My favorite Yglesias troll is when he says that Hilary Clinton is liberal, Bernie Sanders is more liberal, and Mao Zedong is even more liberal.
That was the only question that I skipped. I shall not confine myself to one dimension!
Just because Matt believes an incorrect definition of liberal doesn't mean I have to, survey results be damned.
What's the correct box for "100% loving breakneck cultural and technical change, but willing to provide a decent social safety net for the losers who can't keep up"?
I checked "slightly liberal", was that right? "Neoliberal" was obviously the box I needed...
“for the losers who can’t keep up”?
You said the quiet part out loud.
Yeah, I feel weirdly out of place in liberal crowds because while I agree with many liberal policies & liberal values, I just don't have the kind of empathy that "true liberals" seem to love so much.
I do know some people genuinely need help, but I also think a lot of folks just need to step up their game. And the joy of being a pseudonymous rando on the internet is that I CAN just say the quiet part sometimes.
Didn’t it have a spot for “other?”
The question asked me to mark my place on the spectrum between extremely liberal and extremely conservative. No way to convey that I want to abolish the income tax and legalize drugs.
That's "moderate conservative," haha.
Good point. I thought it would lead to a space where you had an opportunity to say something more detailed
I chose "Other" for that.
Plus I couldn't figure out which meaning of "liberal" to go with, so probably put myself in the wrong part of the scale.
As a libertarian, this also disappointed me a little!
It’s over here trying to figure out how to properly represent the Lizardman.
Redo the question! "Click to place yourself on the political horseshoe." (I don't know if Qualtrix supports that type of question, but it would be neat).
I have toyed with the idea of "horseshoe theorist" when it comes to trying to encapsulate certain of my beliefs.
A "horseshoe theorist," to me, evokes a specialist in novel ways of shoeing horses! HA!
Yeah, that bothered me to. I meant to mention something about it in the feedback box, but then I forgot. I ended up checking moderate.
The most advanced political compass yet devised is this one where a quote from Emmanuel Macron is matched to every possible political orientation: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/ksh5df/macron_political_compass/#lightbox
I was not expecting Macron to have a take on the Amish--and when I Googled what this was all about, it was attacking the 5G conspiracy theorists...coming from the Green Party over there.
It's an amusing meme, but I find myself gravitating to "It's a problem that France doesn't have a King." Maybe that's an accurate meta-statement about my ideology? I don't know.
...when Sakozy was president they had a short king.
there are some very deep cuts in that meme
Thanks thanks thanks!
Who argues that Petain wasn't a great soldier?
Who isn't a Maoist? We all like programs that work.
Communism in theory has no hierarchy. Communism in practice requires hierarchy because people are selfish, competitive, and ingenious.
I actually feel pretty comfortable saying that if you ignore symbolic labels and just look at behavior, Soviet communists post-Lenin and Chinese communists post-Deng were and are pretty straightforwardly classic conservatives. Their main priorities were and are maintaining the political and social power of particular and largely-hereditary cliques, and they want to avoid rocking the boat too much around things like gender roles/family structure/etc (often explicitly adopting socially conservative rhetoric.) The early revolutionaries generally had a more complicated relationship with the institutions they wound up ushering in. Mao in particular was hostile to the development of permanent hierarchies of party elites, and launched China's Cultural Revolution in an attempt to break the power of the emerging party bureaucracy, which ultimately failed.
Yes, but then can you describe those with a desire for more capitalism or religion in China as leftists?
Or does the political spectrum on those categories not allow for a leftist side?
In the early 19th century, the broad “left” faction in Europe, the liberals, were generally quite a bit more pro-market than their conservative adversaries (who correctly understood that the expansion of trade and industry would undermine the agricultural rent-dependent aristocracy’s pre-eminemce). Generally, in the West, being more pro-capitalist became right-wing only when capitalists became a big chunk of the ruling class and it became impossible to maintain an anti-egalitarian coalition that didn’t include them. In China, I think that you could reasonably describe people who want to expand the role of the market at the Party’s expense as liberals.
(Re: religion— I think that Matt’s critics have more of a point there and that there are plenty of both left and right-wing religious movements, with the former arguably including things like the original historical instance of Christianity. We tend to associate it with the right because until very recently, most strict political hierarchies also had a religious component.)
I think Matt is correct that religion is a central part of Left Right but his critics misunderstand the dimension of religion that is split. It's the difference between the Cathedrals and the Parishes. While the farthest left are atheists who want to destroy religion and the farthest right are the Papists who demand everyone respect all of the bishops (even when the bishops are committing crimes) and punish (poor) people who break the religious laws, most people wind up in the middle so it is possible that the left most group is still religious. It's also possible that the good guys are to the right of the dominant group (e.g. the Directory would have been to the left of Napoleon who was to the left of of the Bourbons but to the right of the Jacobins).
If you are advocating for markets and religious freedom that would definitely be on the Left in China. If you are advocating that the Chinese should follow only a specific religion (especially traditional Chinese religions) then that would be on the Right. I commented on this elsewhere but the Rights love of religion has nothing to do with belief but everything to do with symbolism and respect and China does in fact "respect" their traditional religions now.
Wait, so now to understand whether a groups political ideology is left or right, we need to parse the reason for their religious preferences? Think we might have lost the plot on this.
If you are trying to determine if a group is to the left or right you need to parse their motivations yes (if you only know a group is concerned about abortions you wouldn't know if they are pro life or pro choice). What I am trying to distinguish is between the left idea of religious pluralism (I want to be able to worship my religion) vs the right idea of religious nationalism (We must all worship the one true faith).
I don't think it breaks down that cleanly in large part because I think someone or even parties can have very conflicting opinions about various topics.
Someone votes to support redistribution because of their religious beliefs, but also votes against abortion because of their religious beliefs. But also accepts that as an atheist libertarian you can vote your conscious against redistribution and for abortion. Who in that situation is right or left?
I think Somin is reading Yglesias as attempting to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a left-right axis, or some sort of precise definition like that. But I think it’s better understood as a family resemblance of a bunch of separate axes, each one of which diverges in important ways from the others, but where a majority tend to align on any one categorization.
Yep, the left-right binary is only useful in a constrained and defined context.
Good example of how taking the issues of the French Revolution and 19th Century France generally (should the Crown/Church/nobility have more or less power) and the resulting seating chart of the National Assembly and trying to apply it to all other countries doesn't really work.
I think this is right, but it's interesting and significant that people hold on to those terms anyway. I think a big part of it, which Matt didn't touch on, is the glamour of being associated with revolution and, I strongly suspect, with the implied threat of violence.
I think it's more that it's a short hand everyone is taught in college and those are the people who dominate The Discourse.
Yeah, that's a piece of it too, maybe even the most significant chunk.
I'd add that the "Left/Right" discourse is starting to break down in Europe itself as societies become more diverse and the salience of issues like immigration and nationalism increase. See right-wing populists promising to protect gay rights from "sharia law" or the in theory "left" SNP coming out of restriction of freedom of expression (traditionally associate with the right) in order to "combat hate."
It's all getting more and more confused.
Progressive / Reactionary is perhaps a better method of sorting than Liberal / Conservative. But a useful heuristic for examining any of this is to ask who is punching up and who is punching down.
In re your first sentence, see also Virginia Postrel's categories of "dynamists" vs. "stasisists" in her book, "The Future and its Enemies."
In college, I wrote a paper predicting that eventually, the political divide would reorient itself into a cosmopolitan low-tax/low-spending faction vs a pseudo-religious tax-and-spend-friendly faction. We're kind of along that road now, haha! But not nearly all the way there yet.
My suspicion is that that particular alignment is exceptionally bad as it usually ends in holy wars.
I hate the term progressive even more because of its smugness. "See, we're for *progress*, how can you *not* be for that?"
And reactionary identifies a rollback from the status quo that would be considered conservative.
I think progressive is a useful term - it's different from liberalism and stems from the early 20th century.
You could say the same about liberals - "we're for liberty, how could you not be for that?"
It's more conceivable to see liberty as having unintended adverse consequences at times., whereas I've never heard of progress being negative. Though there can be debates on whether certain actions actually achieve progress or not.
Or ... trying not to throw punches?
I guess those are the Libertarians!
I think the left-right spectrum is useful, but is far from all-inclusive.
But it is a net positive for our understanding of the world that it exists. If tomorrow everyone stopped knowing what "left" and "right" meant, that would not be a positive for the world the way that for example everyone all of sudden not knowing what "Black" "White" and "Asian" meant would be.
I agree with most of those observations, but I also think Matt was mostly right: those gaps illustrate the tenuous relationship between political affect and policy outcomes.
The way to square the circle, partially at least, is Inglehardt postmaterialism: the economic stuff forms less and less of the substance of politics (regrettably!) and the sociocultural more and more.
Probably not the best idea to take on a ton of debt to attend a non-elite private university:
https://x.com/MattBruenig/status/1779528204476387561
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-college-return-on-investment/
My college did...not so good. But damnit, I had a lot of fun there!
However, I'd like to see how the costs shake out at the public universities do if you add in out of state tuition. I could have been fairly screwed in almost any scenario, as U of I, BSU and ISU come out middling here, and that would have involved either giving up the experience of living somewhere other than Boise, going to one of the most distilled college town environments out there, or Eastern Idaho.
The lesson parents should be learning from all the Ivy meltdowns is "send your kid to a party school with solid academics" like the University of Wisconsin or something like that.
The Bloomberg article argues that the Ivys (and other really elite schools like MIT) do have a good ROI. It’s the not-super-elite private schools that do poorly. (E.g. Wisconsin does better than Vassar.)
1) Private non-elite colleges provide terrible value. Most out-of-state non elite public colleges likewise provide terrible value.
2) Elite private (or out of state elite public) colleges provide good value in some cases, especially for graduate degrees.
3) Public colleges (whether elite or not) in your own state provide good value.
4) It's all moot to you, the eighteen year old, if Mom and Dad are paying the bills.
Obviously the above refers to full freight. Scholarship money (AKA a discount) can change the calculus.
Some weirdness there. My daughter goes to a private school which was actually slightly cheaper than the in-state flagship based on what we actually paid, but that data shows it almost twice as expensive instead, which messes up the ROI. One of the annoying things about the lack of price transparency in higher educcation.
Would love to see more information on median tuition actually paid + median living expenses actually paid, both in state and out for public universities.
This was eye opening. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-how-have-college-prices-really-changed
I wonder what the ROI is by degree type. Most of the universities with negative ROI are art and music universities. Does this chart mean that a music degree from UMass-Amherst has a much better ROI than a music degree from Berklee College of Music?
Right, that is the fundamental problem with these charts from a student perspective.
Nobody is choosing between WPI for engineering, or Williams for English.
Someone with a music degree from UMass Amherst probably had to take some classes in the humanities and in the sciences and in math, and probably some general “American cultures” or whatever the other general ed requirements are, and probably wrote a lot of essays. They almost certainly didn’t get anywhere near the number of hours of musical instruction and ensemble practice and other music practice as someone who graduated from Berklee, but they probably wrote a lot more essays.
I'm a faculty member at UMass, and I gotta represent for my Music colleagues.
The BM, Bachelor of Music (as opposed to the BA, Bachelor of Arts in Music), which UMass and other conservatory-style music programs offer, is a very intensive, professional degree, akin to a B.Eng. or the like. The students in the BM program almost certainly *do* get a comparable number of hours of musical instruction and ensemble and other practice as students at a place like Berkelee. The students in the BA program, however, get much more like what you describe. They both pay the same tuition.
I didn’t realize UMass offers a BM as well as a BA!
Right. According to this chart a degree from UMass has a ROI of nearly 150k, whereas a degree from Berklee has a negative ROI. But is that true for any individual degree?
I assume it's not true for any individual degree. But I think it would be interesting to know how much of the variance is between one major and another, and how much of the variance is within majors. There might be some engineering degrees that are nearly universally high income, but I imagine that basically anything else is going to have a range of people who go into consulting or investment banking or any of a number of other generalist college degree jobs, as well as some number who get a graduate degree and do something more or less lucrative.
Are rowhouses/townhouses/brownstones urbanist?
https://x.com/alanthefisher/status/1779241450770714790
It's a variable, very urbanist compared to most suburbs, not very urbanist compared to Jerry neighborhood in Seinfeld.
What kind of development do urbanists want? I could live in a rowhouse, especially if it has a yard or patio. I could not live in Jerry's apartment.
I can't speak for 'urbanists' as a group, but my opinion is that the key thing is allowing development. What kind is best determined by the landowners and market conditions.
I'd say it depends on the location. I'd be quite happy with rowhouses in the downtown of a smaller community or in a neighborhood several miles from the downtown core of a city. I would not want them in the downtown core of a city or directly along a major subway route
I don't know if I consider myself an urbanist, but the main thing I want from infrastructure is to just not have so much of it be solely dependent on the damn automobile.
I agree, but one of the benefits of density is that it supports geographically smaller customer bases for local businesses, so it's viable to have more of them within (typical) non-driving distance.
I agree, but even small retail/office spaces here and there would be a win over having everything in distant strip malls.
The YIMBY argument is more "We should allow development and density" not that's there's an ideal goal here.
Not all YIMBYs are urbanists. Like, I am a YIMBY in that I want to copy-paste Houston/Harris County zoning laws across the country. But Houston isn't an urbanist paradise.
YIMBY !=urbanist, and it's a point that's Matt's stressed over the years.
I generally find urbanists annoying, though because I live in downtown Seattle I'll use it myself at times.
Okay I guess you could say "Urbanists prefer Jerry Seinfeld's neighborhood but with more bike lanes" or something like that but that's not really on the table in many places outside of NYC.
You could also ask the question of whether lots of multi-storey apartment blocks == 'urbanism'
A city like Sao Paulo has a lot of them but I don't think anyone thinks of there as an urbanist paradise.
I think it’s interesting to see the cities that are outliers in any one housing type. No surprise that Philadelphia and Baltimore have a lot of row houses, but I’m surprised that DC still has so many, and especially that Virginia Beach does! No surprise that Boston has the most triple-deckers, but I am a bit surprised that Chicago and Milwaukee, as well as to a lesser extent Boston and SF and NYC, have so many duplexes. Mesa, Tucson, and Jacksonville having so many mobile homes suggests something, but I’m not sure what. The fact that Houston and Nashville aren’t on that list suggests that it’s not just having incorporated the suburbs.
Wow. That was interesting. I wasn't surprised to see Seattle have more single family homes than most comparable cities but that seems to be primarily because we have so much less in terms of row houses, duplexes, and triplexes. It looks like in fact at least half the city lives in multi family units of 5 people or more which is definitely not the sense that you have when you look at who attends community meetings, participates in facebook groups, and get kowtowed to by elected officials. Now that the whole city is zoned for at least duplexes on any full lot we are slowing seeming backfill in "second ring" urban neighborhoods like mine. It will be interesting to see how much new housing comes from that vs the large 20+ units that are currently our second largest percentage after single family homes. To answer the question, I think it would depend on the size of the city and where in the city. I think that while there are probably some pure urbanists who would want to live in a place as dense and New York, I think most are looking to see the downtown and first ring neighborhoods primarily either commercial or large dense apartment blocks. But outside that core, I think larger apartment buildings along the major transit lines and atop retail in the urban village main streets with residential areas a mix of smaller apartment buildings, triplex, duplexes and some single family homes probably make sense, with the ration of apartment buildings to single family homes getting lower with each ring that you get farther from downtown.
I am in a second ring neighborhood. My block is already about 20% duplex, triplex now and I would guess that will be closer to 60% in the next ten years given the current building trends. I think that it should probable be something closer to 75% with most of the remaining single family homes also doubling as businesses, which mine does along with another 15% of the block.
My parents live in a 5th ring neighborhood. Their neighborhood is currently 95% single family home with zero walkable retail. I think it would be much better for them in terms of aging in place if the largest street near them which currently has one not very frequent bus lane developed into apartments with retail on the bottom and their neighborhood flipped to about 30% to 50% duplexes so that the density could support a walkable grocery store, drug store, coffee shop, take out place, etc and a more frequent bus service so that they wouldn't be so car dependent when frankly neither of them are as good at driving as they used to be. It would be better for the rest of the City too because their neighborhood does have some lovely parks and beaches that are currently not easily accessible by bus. I don't see nearly as much of a move to build where they live though and a lot more NIMBY push back. (Not from my parents.)
The long-awaited reader survey is finally here!!
Both Graham and myself toyed around with making an unofficial one, and neither of us ever got around to it. Maybe I still will some day.
This one covered most things we wanted to ask, though the “would you follow Slow Boring to another platform?” was foreboding…
I agree. The Dispatch moved off Substack and their comment section deteriorated significantly. Not just the quality, but the user experience was markedly worse.
I think Matt should stick with Substack.
Same with Parent Data
My first thought: "Does Matt have a contract renegotiation coming up?"
I immediately thought "Is Niskanen planning a dispatch like thing?" not sure if MY would hitch his wagon to something like that though.
You definitely should. Don’t use Google.
In addition to residence, there should be a question about nationality! Like me, I imagine there are some foreign subscribers who sign up for Slow Boring because they like to read about policy and american politics (and Matt's writing, of course).
1) It would be good to do really deep dives into federal agencies and their specific programs. Why do they work or not? We get too many 10,000 feet views but no specifics. When if ever is Congressional oversight effective? 2) More specifically, Matt never comments on one of the largest federal agencies, the Department of Veteran's Affairs. Why not? It is the closest thing we have to socialized medicine and should be relevant to any discussion of the future ofmedical insurance in this country. The commentariat generally has a low opinion of it but some aspects of that agency are considered superior to private sector by many in the medical community.
So, a lot is going to depend on what you mean by 'work' here. Most agencies have a weird combination of missions which make things...complicated.
Regulation of whiskey and filing income taxes!
I keep recommending the book "Recoding America" by Jennifer Pahlka which gives a look at the IT side of some federal bureaucracies. Just a tiny slice but very interesting. Not sure who could do deep dives or how they could do it, although the DVA is a worthy target and maybe even a bit more transparent than others since everyone at least understands their main mission.
It's probably difficult to write about specific agencies without an extensive existing knowledge base or time to do a lot of research.
I like the VA, but it's got it's problems and so much depends on which clinic you have and if you're even near a clinic.
I have spoken to others veterans with same comment. Thank you for your service.
I used to work at a VA and saw it from the inside, both very good and not so good.
What about those in the veteran community?
VA's are very popular among those who use it. It is veteran political support that keeps the VA going. Recent bipartisan bill expanded coverage and got record enrollment.
https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-enrolled-401006-veterans-healthcare-365/
VA has been processing claims faster than ever. Backlog is due to more claims being made.
https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-enrolled-401006-veterans-healthcare-365/
There are any number of interesting issues that come up e.g. how did the changes in VA under the previous administration affect care? How does MAGA think about the VA? What happens to the VA as the number of veterans goes down?
Government press releases are self-serving. I don't believe a word of it.
So is the official Biden position on this Iran thing actually gonna be, "No harm, no foul."? Like I'm pretty anti-interventionist, but between this and Putin it really seems like we're into full appeasement territory. Seems bad. I doubt Israel is stupid enough to play along, but we seem determined to self-deter into really bad spot.
I think it's more "Israel is going to do whatever they are going to do but we aren't going to go to war with Iran over this" and that's the correct position.
As for "appeasement" these arguments are pretty ahistorical about what actually happened in Munich: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/09/neville-chamberlain-was-right-to-cede-czechoslovakia-to-adolf-hitler-seventy-five-years-ago-the-british-prime-signed-the-munich-pact.html and have been used to get us into quite few disasters in the past (Vietnam, Iraq etc).
I think there's a real difference between 3 options: what Bibi thinks will keep him in the PMO, what Bezalel Smotrich wants to do, and what the Israeli general officer corps will go along with.
And the 4th option to consider (maybe this is related to the 3rd) is how long the haredi parties can retain getting draft exemptions without blowing up the coalition.
To clarify re option 3 -- because everyone in Israel either will serve, is serving, or has served, the "general to politician" pipeline is very real. Israel is not by any means a stratocracy, but to be a flag officer in the IDF is to already think of yourself as a diplomat and one-day politician. And because reaching that level involves such regular contact with other Western countries, the general officer corps is less "burn it all down" than you might think.
Totally agree that Bibi's reaction will largely be driven by his domestic political concerns: ie staying in office and out of the slammer.
I agree with your first paragraph but not your second!
Read the piece, Chamberlain got a real raw deal in that all his enemies blamed him for everything and because he died so soon after Munich he never got a change to defend himself with say memoirs or whatever.
I'm familiar with the argument, I just don't agree with it. For one thing, these arguments (and the Slate article is no exception) always set the Czech ability to resist at zero, but that's a major distortion. As Lloyd George put it during the No Confidence vote on Chamberlain:
"Let us face it; just look at it. Czecho-Slovakia, that spear-head, aimed at the heart of Germany, broken. A million of the finest troops in Europe of a very well-educated race of free men, all gone. Such advantage as there is in Czecho-Slovakia, with its great lines of fortifications and its Skoda works, which turned out the finest artillery in the 1914 war, are in the hands of Hitler. That is one strategic advantage which we have handed over to the enemy."
As far as this article specifically goes, it seems to me that the author doesn't even try to say that Chamberlain was right? He just says that the blame for being wrong goes to the military brass ("The British military systematically overestimated German strength and underestimated its own in the lead-up to the Czechoslovak crisis") and the public ("If Britain were to go to war with Hitler’s Germany, most people didn’t want to do so over Czechoslovakia"). That might exculpate Chamberlain himself—though it goes against the principle that the buck stops here—but it actually supports, not undermines, the idea that from Munich we should learn the dangers of appeasement.
Yes, that's my point, "learn the dangers of appeasement" basically means "End diplomacy and have a war", but there are very real reasons why that war didn't start in 1938 (such as the UK was totally unprepared for the war and it was very unpopular) and it's wrong to blame it all on Chamberlain even if that's what everyone did because it suited their own political interests.
Well, I think it depends on what one is using Munich to argue. If one is arguing about Chamberlain's specific culpability, then fair enough (even though I don't think I go as far as you in letting him off the hook). But I think generally people are arguing, not about Chamberlain's level of responsibility for the decision, but about *whether it was the right decision in the first place.* Like, yes, the generals and the public didn't think the UK should stand up to Hitler, and Chamberlain followed their lead. But maybe the generals and the public were wrong! If they were wrong, then that's something we should take into account now when these questions come up. And when you referenced how these arguments have led to disasters in the past like Vietnam and Iraq, I took you not just to be saying that it's unfair to blame Chamberlain for what turned out to be the wrong move, but that it wasn't the wrong move at all and that the outcomes from appeasement were better than the outcomes from confrontation would have been. Did I understand you correctly?
In my view, standing up to Hitler would have been better than giving him Czechoslovakia. (Hitler, for one, was glad that he got Czechoslovakia without fighting for it, so either he was wrong or Chamberlain was.) If I'm right, that's a point in favor of military intervention in certain circumstances. On the other hand, Iraq and Vietnam are points in the other direction, about the dangers of *not* letting diplomacy work. It's all data and has to be hashed out; we shouldn't rule any of it out for circumstantial reasons, but take what we can from it.
I think America's message to Israel should be, "Do what you're gonna do, but we're not gonna help you do it and we're not gonna save you from it, so calibrate the extent of your fucking around to the extent of your willingness to find out, and go from there."
It's appeasement when we don't attack countries that didn't attack us? We're already arming and cooperating with Israel and Ukraine. If we fought every country that bothers a somewhat ally we'd be fighting Russia, China, NK and Iran all at once.
>> It's appeasement when we don't attack countries that didn't attack us?
I mean that’s precisely how it went down in the locus classics of the 30s, so yes. In fact even when infamous Chamberlain did declare on Germany it didn’t attack the uk and offered it peace! Was he wrong?
This is such a dumb counterargument-by-example. It's only "easy" to answer because we know everything else that happened after, that he couldn't have known, most notably Pearl Harbor and the Nazi invasion of the USSR. If one and certainly if both of those two events hadn't happened the UK probably loses.
But so what anyway? Appeasement is basically just a way of denigrating a peace or containment strategy that you think is too soft. Going to war with Russia because they attacked a non-ally, a "partner" at best is not soft. Not attacking Iran because they are in a tit-for-tat round of violence with a friendly country is not soft.
You asked "It's appeasement when we don't attack countries that didn't attack us? " The answer is a resounding yes, given that the term appeasement harks back to exactly such situation. Sa to whether Western powers long appeasement of Germany was foolish and immoral, as most people assume, or not, as you seem to suggest - that's another discussion altogether. I only teased it because I thought (and hoped) it's a closed one, but it doesn't matter either way.
(and thanks for classifying my "counterargument" as dumb. Super helpful ;)
Sorry for calling it dumb. It's hard for me to talk about this topic without my blood pressure spiking. There may have been a point when war with Germany made sense for England, and certainly a joint attack by Russia, France, England and the US might have been very effective in 1936, but as to the narrower question of "Should England have declared war on Germany a few years earlier" I think it's quite likely they would have just lost unless Hitler bailed them out by choosing to bring Russia and the US into the war. I'm certainly glad I don't live in that timeline.
"I think it's quite likely they would have just lost unless Hitler bailed them out by choosing to bring Russia and the US into the war."
Hitler got very very lucky in his initial invasions, mainly because nobody believed he'd actually attack. I think crossing the channel would have been sufficiently hard that the UK could have held out for at least 5 years, at which point Japan attacks Pearl Harbor anyways and the US joins and bails the UK out.
There’s a non-trivial chance that in the next decade or two we end up fighting those four countries. No need to accelerate it, and plenty of good reason to try to prevent it.
I don't think a direct tit-for-tat is worth it. Iran came out on the losing side of this both militarily and diplomatically. Israel will keep whacking Qods personnel in Syria when it finds them. The cycle repeats.
And hopefully we (the US), have made it clear that if Iranian proxies look at US forces the wrong way, we are not going to take kindly to that.
My Israeli relatives don't agree with me here, but I feel like this is a boxing match: Israel v. Iran.
It's been going on for years in various ways, and this round involved Israel killing an Iranian general, and Iran injuring an Israeli child.
It's awful that an innocent girl was hurt, but Israel won this round. Every country would trade a 7-year-old citizen's life for killing an enemy general. End the round, and continue to kill Iranian generals as the situations arise in the future.
Two Iranian generals, five other IRGC soldiers, 6 militiamen, one Iranian adviser and two civilians.
I assume a strike on nuclear facilities is imminent.
So, no different than what Israel did to Iraq in the 1980s.
Maybe a little more challenging, logistically. The Osirak strike only required overflying Saudi Arabia. And I suspect the Iranians have hardened their nuclear facilities, perhaps beyond Israel's ability to penetrate with conventional weapons. But I could be wrong.
*EDITED: It was Saudi Arabia, not Jordan.*
I doubt Israel would have much difficulty flying over Syria and Kurdish Iraq. But you are probably correct that Israel will find it more difficult to penetrate Iran's facilities than Iraq's facilities.
There were 2 "random chance" things that, had they gone the other way, might have foiled Israel's attack.
1) Their planes flew over King Hussein's yacht and he recognized them and deduced their destination; he ordered that Iraq be warned, but the warning was never sent.
2) The Iraqi air defense crews had gone to dinner about 30 minutes before the strike and turned off the radars.
I mean...it depends how we're evaluating things? Like, if we're evaluating it by numbers of missiles launched, then Iran clearly engaged in wild escalation, and we should all be worried. If we're evaluating based on casualties inflicted, then Iran got absolutely embarrassed and we should all just go about our business rather than continuing to engage in tit-for-tat direct exchanges.
Note, all of the above is about Israel's reaction. The US's reaction ought to be basically the same as when Israel bombed the Iranian consulate.
But Iran launch those huge number of missiles right in to the iron dome where they knew they would likely do relatively little damage. It felt to me like Iran was trying to do something that looked tough without actually inflicting much damage so they could save face and not end up in a full out war. I think Israel should let this be a tit for tat and not keep this going to the point where Iran gets serious about killing Israelis in large numbers.
If they were wanting to look tough without actually inflicting casualties, they wouldnt have tried to coordinate the various weapons involved to arrive so close in time to each other.
It seemed pretty clear that they were trying to overwhelm their air defenses.
Eh, there were also at least some warnings to local powers they were about to overfly, which they had to anticipate would leak. But it's the usual internation relations communications problem. No matter what their goal/intentions were, they're going to be saying the same thing, since they need their local audiences to believe they're strong.
I do think the series of quick statements to the effect of 'well, this is all over now' indicate a desire to not escalate further, whether that's because the attack failed, or just because they've got a story they think they can sell locally is probably unknowable.
Given that, and Israel's other goals, it seems obvious that calling this round is in everyone's interest. Except maybe Hamas, which I'm sure would very much like an escalation that wasn't focused on them.
They signaled this attack days before it happened, allowing for multiple countries to back Israel and shoot the vast majority of them down. It seems like they were signaling more that they could have launched this without warning and it would have been much, much more deadly.
Worst case is they were doing a reconnaissance by fire. Best case is that's the best they've got.
The truth is surely in between.
“So is the official Biden position on this Iran thing…”
Biden’s position was to tell Iran, “Don’t!” And, then, when they did anyway, to tell Israel, “Don’t!”
He’s a hell of a president.
"For God's sake, please stop risking an escalation during an election year!"
Oh, please: He was pissing his pants about Russian escalation a couple years ago.
He has a hell of a national security advisor.
I still frequently harken back to Obama telling Romney he was an out of touch Cold Warrior for saying that Russia was a major geopolitical threat.
I still can't get over Obama wanting to do a deal with the oppressive Iranian government that hates the US.
Eh. At the time the faction that didn't hate the US was ascendant. Who knows how Iranian domestic politics would have turned out if we didn't backstab them? (Probably the same, but you never know.)
Iran’s attack was a direct response to Israel blowing up an Iranian consulate!! Israel is attacking Iranian-linked forces in Lebanon (who are attacking back) every day! Plus Iran is under extensive sanctions.
This pretence Iran is untouched is really crazy.
I don’t think we should be getting involved in defending against retaliation against Israel when we were quite plainly opposed to Israel’s attacks prompting the retaliation. If Israel wants to use the US as a shield, it needs to not be going around starting wars.
Really good snapshot of the decline of religiosity in America during the 21st Century: https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1779873944033501288
White flight had a lot to do with that too.
But a lot of that happened in the 70s - 90s, indeed parts of Baltimore have seen real gentrification in the last 20 years, either way you slice it, it's a massive change.
I'd add that just people people moved to Townson or whatever doesn't mean they couldn't still go to church in "the old neighborhood" Sopranos style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI7YzBE5zAo (also the title of the video is hilarious, whoever wrote it clearly didn't get the show)
Yes, but I think the new arrivals are far less inclined to attend Sunday mass than the Italian, Irish, Polish, etc people who left in the first place.
Sure, but that's just another example of the overall decline of religiosity in America in the 21st Century.
Who says it’s not still home to 250,000 Catholics?
If it is, they aren't attending mass regularly.
So decline of religiosity still fits.
I'm getting whiplash from the rise in talking about USMCA and Trump's impact on US trade policy. Or maybe it's outright gaslighting? Can someone else who was there from 2016 to today help me?
I remember that President Obama was pushing the TPP and was, like most Presidents, more friendly to free trade than parochial members of Congress. I know that Trump broke traditional GOP orthodox on free trade (well, modern orthodox, don't talk to Lincoln or McKinley about free trade) and pushed to renegotiate NAFTA as USMCA. So that's a big break in continuity of US trade policy.
But I also remember that this guy Bernie Sanders ran against the TPP and there was such discontent over trade policies in the Democratic primary that he got the former Secretary of State who played a role in its negotiation to disown it.
And I seem to remember that for the past 30 odd years there's been a major complain among a major Democratic constituency, labor, that President Bill Clinton's embrace of free trade was a betrayal of the party's working class base. I remember some guys like Dick Gephardt. I remember Tim Ryan and Chuck Schumer and others complaining about Chinese currency manipulation. I remember Obama struggling to convince his own party in Congress to back him on the TPP.
I remember, by and large, Democrats claiming a huge victory with USMCA as it was a classic Trump-Congressional Democratic deal: Trump gets to claim a rhetorical victory, Democrats get everything they want and force Republicans to vote for it against their interests because Trump's happy.
But I'm seeing all these commentators from the finance and trade reporting world acting as if the only change was from Obama to Trump, and Biden continuing Trump's approach to trade. Is this because that aspect of journalism is used to only talking to the executive branch and has no idea Congress exists?
Important to note that Trump's penchant for tariffs is not rooted in principled determination to boost US production capacity or save US jobs or anything like that. He looks at it as a way to shake down foreign countries. He genuinely thinks that a tariff is money another country pays to us for the privilege of selling things here, instead of a tax that American companies are simply going to pass along to the consumer.
Yeah, he thinks he's the master dealmaker and can get a better deal via his bullying style and tactics. He renegotiated NAFTA, but it didn't change very much.
The USMCA is the equivalent of the Trump International Chicago. He bought an existing building and slapped his name on it.
Can you explain? The Trump International in Chicago was built on the site of the hideous Chicago Sun-Times building. It was not an existing building the Trump put his name on.
You should change the open question to make sure its obvious that that is the question to input feedback on things like the book club or in person meetups (or add a specific question for that). I assumed there would be more questions afterward.
Trump: a weak dollar. A weak America.
It's kind of cruel to tease us with the possibility of winning a totebag after we, you know, didn't get any totebags actually delivered as part of the pop-up store SB merch sale . . . .
Tradle: I knew it wasn't THAT one, but the "Other Animals" exports prompted me to think the geography would be different than the actual answer.
#Tradle #771 2/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://games.oec.world/en/tradle
Don’t worry: I declined the tote bag offer in order to increase your odds. You’re welcome.
I did the same.
You're a prince.
You are both saints. I want my tote bag so I can buy more stuff at Half Price Books.
Well, thank you, but I'm still thinking the totebags are illusory.
I like to think everything would have worked out differently had we gone with my vote for a stylish-but-utilitarian quarter-zip.
Stop trying to make stylish-but-utilitarian quarter-zip happen, Joseph! Stylish-but-utilitarian quarter-zip is not going to happen!
"...stylish-but-utilitarian quarter-zip"
Describe, if you please.
A quarter-zip that looks good on you and serves the functional purpose of keeping you warm when it is slightly crisp outside.
Everyone is so pedantic around here.
Cashmere?
#Tradle #771 2/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://games.oec.world/en/tradle
Let me guess: Same starting sound, different letter?
Nope. Other end of the shared body of water.
Matt, what is your view on the effectiveness of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit? It’s the largest source of subsidy for new rent-restricted housing in the US. It is often criticized for having higher development costs relative to unsubsidized housing.