Real Estate

 

Today #NorthCarolina became the first state to change its Residential 1-2 Family Code to the 1-4 Family Code, a reform that opens up:
- lower cost triplexes & quads
- more viable missing middle housing
- more flexible alignment with zoning

It’s potentially revolutionary for… pic.twitter.com/YQbC1ivrr8

— Aaron Lubeck (@aaron_lubeck) August 16, 2023

Sure. There are many moving parts but here are the most critical ones:

1 most of the rest of America has two codes: the 1-2 family “residential” code, and the “commercial” code which covers everything else;
2 the commercial code is substantially more expensive to operate in;
3… pic.twitter.com/rH4XuBXu9g

— Aaron Lubeck (@aaron_lubeck) August 17, 2023

Stages of the Suburban Experiment Ponzi Scheme

Stage 1: Lots of growth. Aren't we smart!

Stage 2: First maintenance bills come due. Ouch, but hey, still growing!

Stage 3: Growth slows, maintenance costs mount, local taxes go up, debt goes up. Pain, but it's only temporary…

— Charles Marohn (@clmarohn) June 12, 2024

The Revenge of the Gold Bugs?

 

I was studying other times in history when gold prices more than doubled in the reserve currency of the time, as they did in the past year: it's rare and almost always a sign of a profound loss of confidence in the existing monetary and political order, going all the way back to… https://t.co/M3reToeQ1d

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 7, 2025

Serious Fun

 

Price 2999, are you planning to spend this money?
Huajiang Canyon Bridge, with a height of 625 meters.😃 pic.twitter.com/SVap7NK5ld

— Sharing Travel (@TripInChina) October 7, 2025

The Clinton Legacy

From Xitter: 

Basel Musharbash

@musharbash_b

We are where we are in our politics today because of neoliberal idiots like James, and they are insistent on learning absolutely nothing. Clinton gave us the Telecom Act of 1996, which enabled the rise of the media monopolies that Trump is now using as kill switches for our freedom of speech. Clinton passed Section 230, which shielded tech companies from liability for their algorithms and gave us the disastrously polarizing, hate-fueling, nihilism-inducing social media horrorscape we live in today. Clinton deregulated banking and finance, which gave us the Great Financial Crisis, tens of millions of home foreclosures, and Too Big To Fail banks — all while destroying the community banks that used to serve our small businesses and keep our small towns alive. Clinton blessed merger waves in the defense industry, allowing a handful of monopolists to roll up our defense industrial base, degrade its production capacity, and profiteer off of our military even as they can’t even produce enough ammunition or working fighter planes. Clinton gave us NAFTA and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which decimated our manufacturing base en masse and destroyed communities across the South and Midwest. Clinton gave us the Faircloth Amendment, which capped the number of public housing the federal government can fund and is a big part of why we can’t build enough affordable housing in this country. Clinton passed the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1997, which pushed farmers to grow soybeans and corn above all else and beyond all domestic demand, fueling the rise of ultra-processed foods while making farmers dependent on Chinese and other foreign buyers to sell their crops. Clinton gave us mass incarceration, the destruction of welfare programs, the abandonment of racial integration, the outsourcing of government to contractors, and so much more of what ails this country. But perhaps worst of all, Clinton normalized all of this corruption. He normalized a government and a political culture that looked the other way while Big Business and Wall Street ruled and looted the country. But yes, by all means, James — let’s go back to this “winning platform.”

Quote

James Surowiecki

@JamesSurowiecki

·

14h

Raise taxes on the wealthy, push for universal healthcare, be pro-free-trade, cut defense spending, pass tough crime bill, sign law tightening immigration enforcement. With the right candidate, that probably would be a winning platform for a Dem. x.com/patrickruffini…

Who is the biggest crook?

 

Just a reminder: Trump is terrible. For example, see this video about how his pardons, clemencies, and commutations gave crooks $2 billion for reimbursements and court fines they now don't have to pay.

 

Meanwhile, Obama gave Wall St. a pass for the subprime/derivatives meltdown--arguably the largest theft in human history. Nobody went to jail (except one Swiss banker). Nobody lost their job. Heck, nobody lost their bonus.

For an idea of how big this was, according to the Federal Reserve's own audit, it extended $16 - $29 trillion in credit to Wall Street's thieves to cure the subprime disaster.

And a trillion is 1,000 times bigger than a billion.

So who's the biggest crook here? And is this a contest anyone would want to win?

My Democratic friends seem to think Trump voters are just ignorant bigots. I say they have a legitimate reason to be angry--not that anger always leads to the clearest thinking or the most sensible solutions.

 

Imperial Blowback

 "We're Bringing the War Back Home!"

From Wikipedia:

The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century.[1][2] Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).[3][4][5] According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South.[6] It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.