Per the article, it’s money the government gives these people in the first place, so it kinda is.

It does raise the possibility that if the government had just not made it legally impossible to build these things on a normal property, they’d already exist, and probably in a less dumb place.

Yes, but he has four walls now, so he’s not homeless and can’t complain/can be removed from the statistics.

/s, although that’s the vibe of how a lot of systems for poor people work, probably because they’re designed by never-poor poiticians.

Edit: And for what they’re charging and in what area, I wonder if these are actually profitable rental units.

Carney is still left enough I’d guess it will be hiked progressively. Maybe flat.

and they made a really astute point that the US’s immense military budget does not exist to produce the most effective weapons (as we can clearly see in their war on Iran)

Sooo what’s the casualty ratio right now?

They have great weapons, it’s just that weapons can’t occupy a country.

Also notice that military contractors give the same average long-term returns as everything else.

Yup. Cutting federal staff worth 3.5% of GDP was never going to work.

That’s fine. Spending on the military is mildly redistributive anyway.

Well, the people paying the most taxes are doing just fine.

This specific policy seems like it’s trying to alienate people, though. They could have gone with anything besides nationalisation, or at least used a bullshit name for it.

Like, radical policies can win, and sometimes aren’t even a bad idea, but it just doesn’t seem like this one has wide appeal. Unless they win it means about as much as our hot takes on here.

You know how the Conservative party has gotten further and further right to appeal to their own activists, at the expense of appealing to anyone else? There’s a similar vibe with this.

Is it not loading for me, or are there actually just two sentences?

Poor people 40 and up tend to vote more Conservative. They strike the same angry tone without any of the complicated or uncomfortable stuff.

Actually, poor young people are to the right of affluent young people, as well.

I did see that report. How embarrassing for the BBC.

Excellent news, though.

I’m not sure that’s infuriating at all, when they’re already blowing up and hacking neighboring countries. It might mean Europe has to spend more or regulate more to protect their cars, that’s it.

They get fantastically accurate results about what they study, which is large-scale voluntary exchange. Much more so than the other social sciences. The trick is just that war isn’t voluntary exchange (although it does include it), so other disciplines become really important when it breaks out.

I mean, there’s more options than just tree or grid, and if it’s not strictly a tree the fastest route from A to B could be something small again. And of course trees have their own issues, like what happens if you need to get from one leaf to another that’s nearby, but only “as the crow flies”.

That example about having to move aside for a car going through a narrow European street is something I’ve actually experienced. Maybe it’s just my Canadian brain but it feels unsafe.

That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them.

I feel like so much of the debate misses this forest for the trees. Sure, X regime is awful. How does valued ally Saudi compare? It’s at best an often-decisive factor in whether to be nice to someone or not.

Edit: Another good one:

There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad.

Even if you only care about economics, continuing the war just has to be personally cheaper for an official than ending the war. And then there’s tons of coercion, ego and ideology in the mix as well, and sometimes raw irrationality.

Early on in this, there were oil traders talking about how nothing will even disrupt oil because it’s too important. That’s replacing history with a fanfic you wrote, basically. Same vibe as the 90’s when the world decided free markets always become a democracy.

Ahh yes the good old days, when there was no urban planning, and empty land to develop on was always there from whatever section of town just burned down.

Only kinda /s. Obviously fires are bad, but development can be so politicised and dumb now.

Bingo. Allow me to introduce you to the colonial French seigneurial system.

And the ancient Romans, and Indus valley people another couple millennia earlier were both fond of grid plans.

They’re considered passe, but there’s real advantage in terms of easy scalability and adaptability to changing land uses.

I mean, you can organise grids to be more or less stroady, and if you have too much of this going - like you have a medieval street plan - you can get the opposite thing where cars are forced through areas only suited to pedestrians, and everyone has to flatten themselves against building walls to make room.

Yeah, someone deciding to clear out an area and develop it in a completely different way is possible, I guess, but seems a lot less likely. Maybe there’s a bit of both - something large like horse stables or a hospital was there, then it was replaced with a new self-contained development, and then they built out into the margin around it later on yet.

In any case, somebody had a big urban planning idea of some kind, but it hasn’t really continued to make sense as things changed. The angle could just be because one grid is aligned true north, and the other magnetic north.

There has to be some interesting history here.

A few other examples have been posted, but this is easily the wildest. It’s not even the same aspect ratio of grid, or at a normal angle to the rest, or over a very significant area. (And they’ve still managed to tie it in reasonably well)