suddenly i feel like my invisible knapsack has grown fuller as well.

i think Putin persuaded himself that territorial expansion is what marks a leader as durably "great", then persuaded his admirers and imitators of this. Trump doesn't actually want to invade anybody, to his credit he's squeamish abt that kind of thing, but he figures he might work some kind of deal.

in some places. in really high demand places you're fine covering the cost of parking if they'd permit the project. (the parking requirement is still bad, because it's bad urbanism!) again, circumstances differ, but there are circumstances where a vacancy tax might make sense.

probably if you want a vacancy tax, you'd want a vacancy tax in high-demand places where abandonment is rare rather than low demand places. (although low demand places might want to accelerate the process from abandonment to legal confiscation, so they can tear down, sell for $1 to rehabbers, etc.)

but incentive to build new stock isn't really the problem, is it? incentives to build are already very strong, but non-price barriers prevent new stock regardless. as with rent control, there's a supply story but it often seems detached from supply constraints that actually bind.

they are vacant if you define vacancy as not physically occupied at least some fraction of a period of time. you'd have to come up with an arbitrary threshold, but it's perfectly doable, no more arbitrary than a lot of arbitrary thresholds. enforcement would be imperfect, but again, not unusual.

Why did Lina Khan succeed so much more than Gary Gensler?

burrito taxis are exempt, right?

it doesn’t have to be the income tax though. the income tax can be for clipping the wealth and income distribution. other taxes can finance social democratic benefits, eg VAT. for financing, you need a tax that hits the middle class. for shaping the distribution, you don’t.

he's resigned to resigning.

regulation has it costs, but journalism, which disproportionately presents extreme cases, overstates them. regulation has profound benefits too. that there's lots of room for improvement doesn't render the regulatory state a catastrophe. see @kdrum.bsky.social jabberwocking.com/yeah-america...

perhaps i'm mistaken, but i don't think the outpouring of support for luigi reflects affluenza or post-materialist politics. although, yes, even people with awful health insurance do have a wide variety of sushi options these days.

this by @mattyglesias.bsky.social is very good. www.slowboring.com/p/four-years...

baby's first bsky script github.com/swaldman/sca...

Thanks!

Test post.

it'd be pretty wasteful to make a special trip to drive a single cup of pears two blocks!

what is the waste in SSA? i don’t get the example.