Trump derangement syndrome in full effect. Nobody cared until the link was made to the Trump campaign benefitting from analytics research. Now it's an issue.
It's not that part of regulations that are causing housing affordability issues. More zoning regulations that say you have to have x parking spaces with x lot sizes under x height with x impact fees and x long bureaucratic processes.
The problem is you can't compete with cash buyers, or people who can qualify to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars when you can't (along with the influx of foreign money from China and South America, and stagnant middle class wages for 40 or so years).
Remove government support for mortgages, remove tax deductions, and put in place higher taxes for non-owner occupied dwellings. This will (mostly) fix the affordable housing issue. Work will still have to be done on pushing wages up.
Textbooks are more highly regulated than cell phone service? I doubt it.
As the article tries to point out, the things we need are largely dominated by human costs. TV manufacturing is automated and scaled, but child care is not.
Textbooks are not particularly regulated, but they are an interesting monopoly. You probably don't think of them as a monopoly, but they are. If you just want to learn calculus, any text will do, but if you are taking a college class, you have to have the text the instructor says. You'd better even have the same edition. So the publisher can charge pretty much any price, because you (the buyer) have no choice.
More often than not, you have to have the text the professor (and or department head) had a hand in writing/editing/producing, and therefore gets royalties from. It's corrupt as all hell.
Sounds similar to the monopoly on SIM chips by cell service providers.
We were not always required to have the same (or any) textbook in some of my college classes. Sometimes, multiple alternatives (with brief reviews) were given.
Healthcare fits that description, food possibly, housing and education not so much. Have they become more regulated? Are regulations the reason for education prices increase?
The main reason for the increase in education costs is the availability of student loans.
Lenders will loan huge amounts of money to students, who have often never worked and have no assets, because the loans are almost impossible to discharge or otherwise get out of. In many cases, students qualify to borrow more money than even their parents could.
State governments know that students can get student loans in pretty much all circumstances, and they use that as a justification to cut funding to state colleges -- after all, aid is available for those who need it.
Colleges increase tuition to make up for the shortfall in state funding. They also need to attract students who have the means, via the loans, to attend the school of their choice. So, colleges build amenities, such as luxurious student housing and health clubs, which increase operating costs and necessitate further increases in tuition.
Meanwhile, students are being told by their parents that they will have no problem paying back their loans, but that's not generally true. Their parents went to school before this vicious cycle of loans and funding emerged, and don't fully understand the burden these loans can cause for new grads, especially in non-STEM fields. The students borrow more than they ought to.
Well, yes, but that's also from the expectation of higher standards. Combine that with the sheer mass of consumption for - pick a product, pork - and the costs soon become very high indeed.
Scary thought: very little of our actual total food produced and imported is actually examined. If we insisted on complete examination it would be prohibitively expensive.
For good reason: if you don't take care of the regular maintenance people die. Homeowners are notorious for not doing maintenance until it is too late unless the maintenance is also cosmetic. (fortunately for roof and siding when it looks bad it is bad, and most other parts of a house don't wear out)
The original comment was almost certainly about zoning regulations, not safety regulations. Obviously inspecting elevators so people don't plunge to their deaths is something we know how to do.
Yes, I was a being tongue-in-cheek at the expense of clarity. The elevator, in combination with advances in building materials and engineering, allows for construction of high-rise condominiums. These lower the cost of housing by improving the efficiency of land use. Regulation prevents this technology from being used in many of the areas where it is needed most.
It was certainly different, but I wouldn't say the original art style was 'destroyed' due to the fact the at any time in the game you can switch back to the original style. It's not exactly destroyed if its RIGHT THERE.
I think with DotT there is less room for that kind of art upheaval though, because, frankly, the art already looks good. It still holds up very well today, expecially if you run in SCUMMVM in turn on some graphics filters.
As someone who has the original game CDs and played through each of those games at least 10 times over the years, the BEST part of these remasters, IMO, is the added developer commentary. I really, really enjoyed playing through the Monkey Island and Grim Fandango remakes and hearing Tim and crew's thoughts, remembrances, jokes, etc around the development and production of the games, the music, the characters, etc. Really added something new and special to the playthroughs of games that I know like the back of my hand, like old friends.
Well I'm not afraid myself, but you should talk to people who work at the FBI, homeland security, and the CIA, to see how they view things. Security does matter. When you have large scale events like what is happening in Syria, it becomes an issue of national defense, would you like it or not.
I know that a difference must be made, and not let security have an influence on freedom.
