jpigeonopolis

[jpigeonopolis]

I have this.

i need the worlds easiest job and i need it to pay me $100,000 a year

[jpigeonopolis]

to put it another way: there is some data that to win an election it helps a lot to be perceived as moderate. great! but to yglesias, the necessary and sufficient thing you have to do to be perceived as moderate is to triangulate against public opinion and message carefully on that basis. but donald trump didn't do those things, and was still perceived as more moderate. so clearly these are not the necessary and sufficient things you must do to be perceived as moderate. and in fact, i would argue (based on why donald trump is perceived as a moderate), triangulating against public opinion and messaging carefully on that basis is a bad way to be perceived as a moderate. not just not helpful, but actively harmful. instead it will result in you just getting ignored, and your opponents exploiting the fact you are being ignored to portray you however they like.

what republicans have trialed rather successfully is picking political fights and using obstructionism to portray the other guys as extremists. and this worked rather well under obama, who was not particularly extremist. i reckon it would work very well (and has, when democrats have tried it) under trump, who is a bona fide extremist, but who of course will never be portrayed such by him and his allies, who have outsized influence on media narratives. because democrats try to position themselves as moderates via triangulation and careful messaging, which does not work.

the thesis here isn't that democrats need to tack to the left, it's that democrats need to be more partisan. which is not the same thing as being more ideological. you can have an ideological big tent and also unabashedly treat the republican party as constituted under donald trump as the implacable foe of american democracy. but yglesias seems to treat partisanship as the same as ideology. which is why his theory of political strategy is bad.

[jpigeonopolis]

usamericans, do you remember in the incredibles when syndrome made the robot go haywire just so he could swoop in and 'save the day'

[jpigeonopolis]

David and his co-authors offer a different theory: Support and opposition for new housing is largely predicated on how you feel about cities to begin with. Regardless of whether your property values are at stake, someone who lives in a city probably likes cities and, thus, is more likely to support new housing or denser development.

There���s plenty of rich people that vote to raise their taxes. Ideology, tastes—that’s a lot of the story, too, about why people have the views that they have. And so I’ve had a lot of personal experiences over the years paying attention to this housing issue that have made me realize: You know what? Maybe housing is just kind of like any other issue, where self-interest and personal impacts are some of the story but, actually, not the whole story.

One of those personal anecdotes: I was talking with a member of my family—as I mentioned, I have a condo in San Francisco, where I live—and this member of my family and I were talking about moving to this condo and how I wish there was more housing like this. I was talking to them about it, and they just said, You know, I just don’t understand how you can live like that. You know, You don’t have a yard. You know, you can’t walk out onto green grass right from your front door. And they, eventually, at some point said not just, I don’t think you should live like that, but they said, People shouldn’t live like that.

But at the same time, just such a powerful predictor of people’s answer to that question is just one simple question, which is, Do you like big cities? And the people who say, I like big cities, they’re like, Yes, we should build more housing in cities. And the people who say, I don’t like big cities, say they don’t.

And so we have some suggestive evidence that that is part of why the Boomer generation is so opposed to housing as well. So if you think about the Baby Boomers—those folks, when they were going through their formative years in the ’70s, that was when cities were just, like, a total basket case. Like, I was talking to my dad about this and saying, So okay, you know, when you were 20 years old or 22 years old, when you were graduating college, were you or any of your friends—was it your dream to move to a big city? And he said to me, You’d have to be out of your mind to want to do that then. Right?

So I think that’s really funny about how, you know—I guess it’s kind of a positive story you could tell here. Millennials—it’s a very big generation. Not to be very, you know, morbid about this, but obviously, like, Boomers are gonna die, and then Millennials will make up the larger part of the voting block and the tastemakers for how new homes will be built and developed. So it seems like a possible situation, where the people who wanted cities to look a certain way, they got that when it was their time. And maybe things will change now that tastes are changing and people are changing.

So in the spirit of helpful thoughts, maybe, I’d say a couple of things. One is that, clearly, what you see, I think, in a lot of cities is that there’s a lot of cynical attempts to brand more pro-housing policies in a negative light by saying things like, Oh, right—as we talked about—this is going to help Wall Street. It’s going to help developers, basically trying to find all these disliked symbols, or in a liberal place like San Francisco, rich people, even though people here are objectively mostly really rich. And so you see that attempt, and I think there could be a little more, especially in policy design, effort among YIMBYs to think about ways to harness some of those same forces.

So for example, if people love the idea of affordable housing, right, that’s a great moniker, but not everyone necessarily knows what it means. YIMBYs might think about, Well, how can we basically use that moniker to define it more generously? For example, why not define affordable housing as saying housing that’s cheaper than the typical housing in the neighborhood? That’s affordable housing. We’re going to build more affordable housing.

Or for example, people really hate government fees. They hate red tape. And so one of the things we find, for example, is that if you look at our survey question about reducing fees—so this is, again, one of the many other policies really relevant to understanding development but that isn’t about specific development—support for capping fees that cities charge on developers is actually really high in our survey. And interestingly, like, all of people’s preferences about whether or not they want more housing to be built seems basically, totally unrelated to that.

The Political Psychology of NIMBYism - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/why-people-are-nimbys/681225/

[jpigeonopolis]

[jpigeonopolis]

how to read 10,000 pages without trying too hard

We had been walking for several minutes, he says, before he realized that he was talking to himself; looking over, he saw me soldiering along beside him, apparently none the worse for a dozen-ish beers, holding a volume of the old Everyman’s edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. For the rest of our walk, he says, I continued silently reading.

[https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy](https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy)

I don’t know if I would be walking after 12+ beers let alone reading. But, I do think that my daily reading strategy might be helpful for other people.

Reading every day, even just a paragraph, is the foundation. It maintains momentum, helps you track the narrative, and builds a sustainable habit. (I've kept this up for 711 consecutive days, thanks to Kindle's tracking.)

The Technology Setup:

- Use both Kindle devices and the phone app

- The phone app is crucial - it's always with you and just as accessible as Instagram

- Pro tip: Buy Kindle editions with audiobook add-ons. They sync perfectly, letting you switch between reading and listening seamlessly

- For audiobooks, 1.3-1.5x speed works well for most content

My Core Reading Principles:

1. One book at a time - this helps maintain focus and lets your subconscious process the story better

2. Always finish what you start - even if it means speed-reading or cranking the audiobook to 2.0x for less engaging sections

3. Start the next book immediately after finishing one - maintaining momentum is key

Finding Books Worth Reading:

- Keep a dynamic to-read list (I use an Amazon wishlist)

- Don't buy too far ahead - moods change, and excitement about your next read matters

- Sources I trust:

- End-of-year best book lists (though watch for publisher bias)

- Mr. and Mrs. Psmith and Astral Codex Ten reviews

- Reddit and Hacker News recommendations

- Friends' current reads - great for connection and conversation

Making It Affordable:

Amazon's credit card gives 5% back in points - between that and my regular Amazon spending, most of my books end up nearly "free."

Work in Progress:

I highlight interesting passages regularly but haven't developed a great system for using them. Still working on maintaining a Goodreads review habit - maybe in 2025!