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Posted
3 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

You’ve read one article but haven’t read the book and your conclusion is that the author sucks and that its arguments are flawed?  

Hey man, I've got two young kids under 3 who don't sleep and I'm studying for a board exam. Reading an entire article is a big deal for me right now and this is where I come to share my big-brained conclusions. I'm not reading that entire book right now but I'll try to educate myself further about Klein.

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Posted
5 minutes ago, hookem2010 said:

Hey man, I've got two young kids under 3 who don't sleep and I'm studying for a board exam. Reading an entire article is a big deal for me right now and this is where I come to share my big-brained conclusions. I'm not reading that entire book right now but I'll try to educate myself further about Klein.

This is the gist of the book that Sirota and co. find so offensive:

Quote

Ok but we need more housing and infrastructure.
Democrats should be enthusiastic about more housing and swiftly building things like rail and solar and bridges and ports.
Congratulations I just saved you 6 hours of reading

 

Posted
19 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

Fwiw, Klein had on two guests from the left last week to critique his book from that side, one of whom was AOC’s chief of staff.  

Yes, and the critique in a nutshell is that we do need more housing and infrastructure but evil corporations or whatever and why don’t you also  address all the other things that are bad and blah blah blah

Posted
24 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

Derek Thompson was also a guest last week with Tim Miller on the Bulwark and made a good point that the book’s argument are a little nontopical when ‘26 is going to be a referendum on Trump and ‘28 is likely to be as well.

Perhaps that’s true, but I would argue that the Democrats have been hollowed out and cannot win in 2028 without a core message beyond simple rejection of Trumpism. 
Furthermore, I don’t think it’s possible to understand the election(s) of Donald Trump without understanding the nihilism that has been created by the widespread loss of housing affordability and the widespread frustration with elected leaders to accomplish literally anything.  
in other words, it’s impossible to really reject Trumpism without demonstrating an alternative, and the only alternative that is coherent is an alternative where meaningful progress can be made in on a reasonable timeline and everything isn’t just getting worse.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Yes, and the critique in a nutshell is that we do need more housing and infrastructure but evil corporations or whatever and why don’t you also  address all the other things that are bad and blah blah blah

It sounds like you’re not donating to Zephyr Teachout’s next run for office…

I’m unlikely to read the book (after years of listening/reading both authors, I have a pretty good idea on their arguments), but the part of the conversation I’m more interested in is the mechanics of how you fix it.  

If, for example, you want to shrink public comment periods, is that leading to poor planning decisions and unmet citizen needs?  Klein has brought up repeatedly the story about Newsom taking over a project under emergency powers, Shapiro doing the same with the I-95 bridge, and that exercise of power a useful example of what can be done without the bureaucracy critiqued in the book.  

That said, it’s also the same kind of power we wish to restrain when used in bad faith to deport legal immigrants without due process.  

 

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Posted

David Roberts from Volts says he wishes the Dems would run on a platform of "We can have nice things".  Energy abundance, manufacturing, clean environment, healthcare, economy, housing etc and all we have to do is tax billionaire hoarders. Then go out and do it.  Quickly. 

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Posted
13 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I would argue that the Democrats have been hollowed out and cannot win in 2028 without a core message beyond simple rejection of Trumpism

Tim Miller countered with that-basically, isn’t Abundance a jumping off point for a party admitting failure to solve problems and its animating ideas part of the conversation toward a vision to compete with Trumpian nihilism.  

Posted
14 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

David Roberts from Volts says he wishes the Dems would run on a platform of "We can have nice things".  Energy abundance, manufacturing, clean environment, healthcare, economy, housing etc and all we have to do is tax billionaire hoarders. Then go out and do it.  Quickly. 

They’ve tried that. A bunch of middle class morons took the side of the billionaires and now here we are.

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Posted
9 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

If, for example, you want to shrink public comment periods, is that leading to poor planning decisions and unmet citizen needs?

I understand you are asking this in good faith, but a lot of people are not. 
I spent about two decades deeply in the weeds on zoning, for example- if I showed you the process in a place that moves very quickly and a place that moves very slowly, you (as a normal person) would be very hard pressed to tell them apart. But what I can tell you from watching thousands of things go through the public approval process is that it’s built to facilitate wars of attrition between highly organized interests and making good “planning decisions” is the first sacrifice that gets made. 
And approval is only the first stage. That’s when the engines start to crank inside the real killing machine

Posted (edited)
16 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

Tim Miller countered with that-basically, isn’t Abundance a jumping off point for a party admitting failure to solve problems and its animating ideas part of the conversation toward a vision to compete with Trumpian nihilism.  

I heard that. It’s a very silly counter. People need housing and working drawbridges and the walk-up service at the DMV. This isn’t complicated.
Harvey Milk once said that if you could figure out how to clean up all the dog shit in San Francisco you could be elected mayor. He was right then and he’s right now. 

5 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

They’ve tried that. A bunch of middle class morons took the side of the billionaires and now here we are.

The baddest of bad faith arguments: we can’t have more housing in cities because billionaires.

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
Posted
25 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

David Roberts from Volts says he wishes the Dems would run on a platform of "We can have nice things".  Energy abundance, manufacturing, clean environment, healthcare, economy, housing etc and all we have to do is tax billionaire hoarders. Then go out and do it.  Quickly. 

Its impressive how stupid people are about things. 

Even if they took all the billionaires money (impossible) it would barely pay for a single year of the debt service on the national debt. For those who forgot how go count a trillion is 1000 billion. 

image.png

Tax receipts have risen from 3T to 4.7T in a decade with the majority of that coming post covid stimulus with the wage increases that went out during that time. The US Government is running on a pretty hefty deficit and on track to spend 6.75T this year. 

Fed balance sheet during same period. 

Screenshot_20250506_090216_Chrome.jpg

The problem is not one wants to face the reality of covid. The fed chart is actually so fucking absurd it's hard to believe its reality and thats the fantasy world everyone lives in. 

4T poofed into existence out of thin air.

Everything is fucked up and broken right now and the only reason everyone isn't feeling it is because of the insane debt apparatus here in the US. One day those debts need to be repaid, you can't continually go further and further into debt as a person, a business or a country. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Ok but we need more housing and infrastructure.
Democrats should be enthusiastic about more housing and swiftly building things like rail and solar and bridges and ports.
Congratulations I just saved you 6 hours of reading. 

Yeah, I haven't read it but my understanding from some reviews is "ok they've got a pamphlet with two pretty good ideas buoyed by too much focus on California-specific shit that they really padded out to try to make it into a real book."

Derek Thompson also guested on Richard Hanania's podcast and can go gargle balls. 

Posted (edited)
21 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Yeah, I haven't read it but my understanding from some reviews is "ok they've got a pamphlet with two pretty good ideas buoyed by too much focus on California-specific shit that they really padded out to try to make it into a real book."

This is a very fair criticism.
They also get a lot of local details about Texas wrong by not drawing more of a distinction between the successful but unaffordable cities like Austin and their affordable but bleak suburbs in the context housing supply, which is crucial  because of how it impacts school funding at the district level and regional transportation and transit problems. As a result they wind up conflating the aggregate impact of suburban development with the impact of very recent zoning reforms. 
 

I don’t think it’s really necessary to read the book, honestly. The broad strokes are the important thing, and it fits on an index card with plenty room to doodle left over. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted
2 hours ago, hookem2010 said:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/abundance-discourse-ezra-klein-trump-musk-democrats-1235310224/

 

Someone had mentioned recently that they didn't have Rolling Stone as the journalistic entity with the greatest integrity and strongest reporting during Trump 2.0, but damn if it ain't true.

I don't know much about this Klein guy, other than hearing some NPR host embarrassingly gush over his ideas during an interview, but it seems like he might suck. Haven't heard the Pod Save interview, but it's disappointing that NPR and Jon Stewart apparently didn't poke any holes in their book's flawed arguments.

David Sirota is a moron and everything in that article is rehashed NIMBY bullshit. 

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Posted
3 hours ago, WBT said:

With R primary voters set to nominate Paxton and the Trump backlash, I'm having a hard time envisioning how the Ds are going to fuck up this senate election.  But I still know they will.  It's going to be the performance of a lifetime.

If only Pop was healthy and 10 years younger...

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Posted
54 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

This is a very fair criticism.
They also get a lot of local details about Texas wrong by not drawing more of a distinction between the successful but unaffordable cities like Austin and their affordable but bleak suburbs in the context housing supply, which is crucial  because of how it impacts school funding at the district level and regional transportation and transit problems. As a result they wind up conflating the aggregate impact of suburban development with the impact of very recent zoning reforms. 
 

Klein and Thompson’s perspective of Texas is definitely one from their coastal bubbles, but I think it’s fair to say that they (and many other YIMBY-ish writers like Jerusalem Demas and Conor Dougherty) conceptually see that Texas has not been weighed down by the “everything bagel” progressivism that California and New York have. Inclusionary zoning requirements for BMR, union labor requirements, “community impact” fees, CEQA, etc - by giving everyone a right to get their say and take their piece, nothing gets built, which is of course a feature. And, in CA at least, this isn’t a LA/SF issue. The suburbs are just as bad. But yes the book is very CA- and NY-centric (to be fair, that was their original intent) but the way they have riled up the tankie left makes me think it was worth raising these issues for broader discussion. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

But what I can tell you from watching thousands of things go through the public approval process is that it’s built to facilitate wars of attrition between highly organized interests and making good “planning decisions” is the first sacrifice that gets made

That's actually something I've been bringing up in PC one on ones, because it's a problem I can wrap my head around.  I don't like the idea that a process gets so complicated that only the well-capitalized can navigate it.  That said, I don't well understand alternatives besides a Power Broker-esque central authority and don't favor moving backwards to that, either. 

1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

Derek Thompson also guested on Richard Hanania's podcast and can go gargle balls. 

Gargle balls BECAUSE he's on Hanania's podcast?  I want the thought leaders on the left to get out and take their ideas to the right's home turf  I doubt there's much overlap between the listening audience there and Real English. 

Posted
25 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

That's actually something I've been bringing up in PC one on ones, because it's a problem I can wrap my head around.  I don't like the idea that a process gets so complicated that only the well-capitalized can navigate it.

This is a little less of a problem than it was before, but from 2014-2022 especially, Austin had a massive leadership vacuum on the council, and they generally expected their appointees on the sovereign commissions like PC to act as surrogates. That’s not how it’s supposed to work and not how good commissions run. A Sovereign commission should make defacto final decisions on about 80-90% of what they see the first time it comes up with the expectation of council approval on consent. And council should use commissions to soak up political heat on controversial issues. 

Instead what was happening was that staff would present a sound recommendation, and if the issue was politically hot the commissions would delay as long as they could, indulge anyone with connections, blame staff for not taking enough input, and then send it to council much watered down. Then council would repeat the delay/indulge/blame dynamic until they ran out of process to conduct, and if the issue hadn’t died on its own (or if it had died of misinformation like the Zilker plan or sabotage like Code Next), they would blame staff for not taking enough community feedback, and either restart the process over again or do something halfass (Northcross) and blame staff for not taking enough community feedback. 
 

What staff learned from all this was that they could not trust council or PC to take the heat for their own policy decisions and adopted a practice of slow rolling projects until either the applicants or opposition collapsed. 
 

It’s slightly better for the land use plans than it was, but the teens were a lost decade in terms of land use and public safety still  very much appears to be operating in that dynamic 

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