Was rape that common? Like in hunter gatherer times (most of human history) most mating would have been within the band. I don’t think intra-band mating would have been rapey, mostly. Incestuous by modern standards, for sure, but I don’t see why it would have been rapey. Inter-tribe conquest mating definitely happened, but was it really that common compared to the normal mode? It takes way more effort, at least.
My similarly controversial take is that modern rape is traumatic because rapists are no longer hung in public. I think public hangings might have had an under appreciated healing effect on the psyche. Like if a guy who attacked you is still out there, he might attack you again. But if you saw him hang, you just might feel better.
It's been extremely prevalent. In terms of prehistory, we have lots of evidence that young women were almost always spared if one group massacred another, and we have genetic evidence that invariably the winning male bloodline would become predominant in any conquered group.
If you look at the Columbia link and do other research it's pretty obvious that 'punishing' rapists has never really been about punishing them or giving women some kind of absolution. In the code of Hammurabi and with the Jews women who didn't scream so that others could hear were prosecuted for adultery or stoned lol. The idea of giving women the satisfaction of watching anything for their own benefit is a very modern notion and even now doesn't really exist anyway. That's just your personal fantasy. You can go back to the Assyrians to see that if, for example, you raped my virgin daughter then I could legally rape your wife. It's mostly been a property or bloodline issue. It's never been about the females and that's another reason I think it's massively overblown in modern times. It's been normal human behaviour for millions of years. To put it another way, if you were a young 19 year old female in a village that was being ransacked, say, 4000 years ago, you'd know what was going to happen to you if your males lost. I don't think it would have been that traumatising - the males in your village would have done it to the females in their village were the roles reversed. The 'trauma' is largely a modern phenomenon where everything has to be upsetting/triggering/trauma-inducing. Everybody has to be a victim these days.
Staying hunter gatherer isn’t sustainable unless everyone does it, because of the larger population size enabled by agriculture. Larger groups can generally dominate smaller groups absent a technological difference, but here again agriculture has an advantage because it at least seems like it’s easier to develop technology when your stuff isn’t getting moved around all the time.
I don’t really get why people seem convinced that the government is removing protections for all citizens under a smokescreen of illegal immigration handling, as opposed to taking limited and temporary measures to deal with an unusual situation.
My current interpretation is that they are fear mongering about violence because they are actually way more racist than they admit publicly, and might want to remove more people than they were letting on initially.
So okay you can definitely disagree with that, and how you feel about it can definitely be influenced by how much you feel threatened (personally or network) and that’s valid.
But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general? Do we think that the borders were opened intentionally to fabricate this “crisis”? If not, it would be such a huge coincidence, because there are a zillion reasons to be concerned about the demographic situation without needing to use it as a smokescreen, what are the odds that this problem organically appeared and then they happen to be able to take advantage of it?
Note that I’m not asserting that the borders weren’t opened intentionally to fabricate this problem to which they can react with a “solution”, that sounds exactly like something a government would do. I just don’t hear anyone saying that out loud, at least, and having personal network or moral values or whatever threatened and reacting to that just seems a lot more likely to me as a reason why people feel like the world is ending.
> I don’t really get why people seem convinced that the government is removing protections for all citizens under a smokescreen of illegal immigration handling, as opposed to taking limited and temporary measures to deal with an unusual situation.
Probably because the actions being taken are against people of every category; illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and naturally born citizens.
As has been noted, _anyone_ not being entitled due process means _nobody_ is entitled to due process. Because then can kidnap you, claim you're "of a group not entitled to due process", and do whatever they want to you. And you can't push back because you're not in that group... because you need due process to do that.
> But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general?
At some point, you have to call a duck a duck. They're doing things that despotically authoritarian would do, over and over. They may or may not _think_ that's what their goal is, but it clearly is.
What actions are being taken against legal immigrants and naturally born citizens?
Are you referring to getting arrested and released due to some suspicion (let’s say the suspicion is always fabricated for the sake of argument), or deported, or something else?
On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do. Have people disappeared off the face of the earth? I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…
ICE themselves states that only 70% of the people they arrest are even illegal aliens. Only 44% have prior criminal records or pending accusations.
Getting arrested with no valid cause doesn't "totally suck", it's a fundamental violation of the most basic rights of anyone living in a functioning country. As long as you can just pick up anyone you want, nobody has rights. You have a basic right to not be arrested for doing nothing wrong, and yet that's exactly what ICE is doing to tens of thousands of Americans.
>I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…
Which is what they were literally doing. At first. But when you consider human beings as corrosive to your society, you will never be satisfied with just getting them out of your borders. The same people who treat prison rape as a good punishment for criminals will not be satisfied with illegal aliens just being removed, especially since they will "come back".
We've been through all this before. We literally signed treaties with Native Americans, but letting them have all this land just wasn't acceptable because they were "savages" that don't deserve it, and weren't being as useful with it as we would be!
> Have people disappeared off the face of the earth?
It is established that hundreds of detainees from the July 2025 Alligator Alcatraz intake were unaccounted for in ICE’s online system by late August and reported as such through September 2025, with recurring reporting of about 800 with no online record and some 450 with unclear location data.
> On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do.
Are you being facetious, or do you genuinely think so lightly of people being black bagged with no due process and deported to a random country that you'll joke about it being a "free flight?"
Also, you seem to not be aware that deportation and "voluntary deportation (via various forms of pressure)" of Jewish people was the step Nazi Germany did before the concentration camps.
The way I think about this is, let’s say a lot of Americans are moving to Switzerland illegally by overstaying their visas. If I went along with that group, I would not be surprised to be deported by force. If I went there legally and got caught up in a raid or something, or even targeted personally because I sound American, and I get locked up for a bit and then sent back to America on an airplane, would I be upset? Absolutely I would be, that would be a terrible experience. But at the same time, I would understand that a lot of my countrymen are breaking Swiss law and the Swiss have to do something about it, and I can see why it might be hard to not make any mistakes. It would probably make me not want to go back to Switzerland.
Is that not a valid take? Does it not apply somehow? If I put myself in their shoes, that is how I feel.
First off, maybe Americans do move to Sweden, and maybe sometimes they overstay their visas. On the other hand, for decades, various aspects of Sweden encourage this, such as the economic environment - turns out Swedes don't like picking apples, and if some Americans (a small percentage) don't overstay their visas, the apples don't get picked, and Sweden's apple industry collapses within a single season. So the society implicitly approves of having as many Americans as they can get, even if the government goes back and forth on the issue. As a result of this you have Americans with two generations of descendants that have lived in Sweden for decades and are undocumented or perhaps documented under some program that the new government of Sweden just decides it doesn't like. Or maybe they're citizens and the new government just wants to start denaturalizing.
> or even targeted personally because I sound American
I challenge you to really think deeply about this position. Think about what it means for a State to decide that all people from a whole bunch of different countries kinda look the same because of the color of their skin, or kinda have similar accents, and then just start arresting people based off of that. What does that mean for other people who happen to have accents? Who happen to have that one color of skin? Just typing it out makes me feel disgusted, it's flagrantly racist. Why don't you feel that way?
Finally, I really deeply wish to impress upon you the critical importance of due process. It genuinely is All or None. There is no "due process for people who immigrated legally and no due process for people who immigrated illegally," because due process is the method that determines that. If due process is gone, there is no "oopsies we deported you by accident," and there is no "hang on a second, I'm an American, I don't even have a passport, just look at my driver's license!" Do you understand that when due process is suspended, nobody is safe from being black bagged? How could you justify that? How do you not immediately think of the SS?
And all this for what? People being black bagged at the streets, people stuck in traffic tear gassed by high strung ICE agents, businesses being raided, all this violence because why? What actual problems were there from undocumented immigrants? Because deporting them is hurting the economy rather than helping it, so it wasn't the economy. Nobody's taking up the low paid fruit picking jobs that undocumented immigrants worked, so it wasn't for the jobs. Crime isn't going down, so it wasn't public safety. It's so transparently been a distraction from the failure of the ruling class to improve affordability that even my most stalwart of Trump supporting relatives are turning against it and looking to left economic populists like Mamdani.
Of course this is where it starts. If you ever find yourself in the situation of saying “at least it’s not as bad as Nazi Germany” then you’re probably not heading in a good direction.
There is quite a lot of daylight between “something to complain about” and “authoritarian regime”. I never said they had “nothing to complain about”.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that there isn’t authoritarian regime behavior happening. I am just trying to figure out what people are talking about when they refer to that as if it is happening.
I am using “Germans of the ‘30s” as a euphemism. Obviously I know the timeline of what happened, you are just misinterpreting as an opportunistic drama nitpick. Whether the misinterpretation is happening consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know.
If the “Germans of the ‘30s” had only ever done deportations, which they did do, i.e. had they stopped there, we would not view them in the same way. Ergo, if the current regime stops with deportations, which we have no evidence to show that they won’t, then there is nothing to suggest that they will end up behaving in an authoritarian way, because further massive steps are required to get there. And besides, the current American regime has tremendously more legal justification for these deportations than the Nazis had for the Jews deportation. The Nazis presumably had to change German law to even deport the Jews. No change of law is required here, because it is perfectly congruent with the existing legal framework (and was done consistently for decades prior to this administration, just more quietly and I guess in smaller numbers).
It’s weird how slippery slope arguments are only valid in public discourse when it comes to the Nazis, and in that case it’s so valid it is just taken as a fact. Just because someone is doing something that can be squinted at to look like something that happened prior to a genocide, does not mean that it will lead to genocide. The ad absurdum version of this line of thinking would suggest banning vegetarianism or painting, as genocidal mania soon followed.
A citizen being rounded up by the state and bundled off to a foreign country illegally and with no process is absolutely kidnapping regardless of how much you want to pretend otherwise.
> A citizen being rounded up by the state and bundled off to a foreign country illegally and with no process is absolutely kidnapping regardless of how much you want to pretend otherwise.
You realize half of Americans literally don’t care right?
But I respect your effort for trying. I will stay on my gaming chair and do nothing (won’t vote, won’t donate, won’t raise awareness).
> what are the odds that this problem organically appeared and then they happen to be able to take advantage of it?
Quite low. Borders weren't open to fabricate an excuse to engage in authoritarianism - the excuse was simply fabricate, whole-cloth, with no basis in reality to justify it.
There is no immigration problem in the USA. Large portions of the American economy are dependent on immigration, documented or otherwise. Immigrants, documented or otherwise, commit less crimes per-capita than USA citizens.
So, the current government is using immigration as a flash-point to get themselves elected, and as an ongoing distraction away from their failure to address their other platform (affordability). Getting to be more authoritarian is the stated goal, based on the plan outlined in "Project 2025."
Illegal immigration is a problem whether you want to admit or or not. Just allow the amount of legal immigrants needed. Saying illegal immigration is not a problem is just as much of a smokescreen as saying immigrants are "the" problem.
Ah, well if it's a problem, it should be trivially easy for you to illustrate how exactly it's a problem, using hard facts and numbers. I earnestly invite you to do so!
Europeans are projected to numerically lose control of America, which in a democracy is equivalent to losing control functionally.
It’s very convenient for a lot of people to pretend this doesn’t matter at all, and many or even most Europeans have at this point been brainwashed through childhood conditioning to not be able to go there even in their thoughts, lest they become the deepest evil, according to their conditioning.
But, in a sane world, anything pre-1945, the statement “Europeans are projected to lose control of America within single digit decades” would spur a panic.
Let me guess, I’m just a horrible immoral person and I’m not allowed to think about this, right? Do you have any arguments besides that one?
I think it was a mistake of the left to brainwash white kids to think of themselves as belonging to a group of evil oppressive colonizers - precisely because a few decades of that type of over-the-top racial "justice" schooling has led (inevitably, and even understandably) to the white nationalist backlash we're seeing today.
What should have happened was to stick with the individualist, civil rights notion that all men and women are created equal. Full stop.
Your complaint about the brainwashing is valid to a point, as no one should be raised having guilt for being born of a particular race/ethnicity, and in fact people should take pride in their heritage.
However, you do not explain why you think it matters whether a majority of the US remains of European stock, (by which I guess you mean not mixed race as well). And this is where your argument is transparently, well, racist. Because to explain that, you would probably need to denigrate other races.
I think you could make an argument that Europeans should stay a majority in Europe, on the basis that it is Europe. But America is not Europe, and never was. Europeans were a minority throughout the Americas when they showed up, and they will be a minority here again, and I don't see a big problem with that.
[edit] Just to add, there was nothing "sane" about the way Europeans conducted themselves either on the continent or here, especially in the decade prior to 1945. Also, prior to 1945, there was no general notion of "European", but rather many smaller nationalities. From 1941, it was a widely held idea that people of German descent for instance were a threat to America and should be deported. In the 19th century, a lot of people thought the same about the Irish, and you would have had to replace "European" with "English" in your statement to get some sort of nativist reaction.
> Europeans are projected to numerically lose control of America, which in a democracy is equivalent to losing control functionally.
This is incomprehensible to me, since there are no European Americans, there's just... Americans.
> Let me guess, I’m just a horrible immoral person and I’m not allowed to think about this, right?
Yes, you correctly intuit that there's something inherently wrong about being a racist. I support you in following this thread to figure out why people are disgusted when you talk this way.
>Europeans are projected to numerically lose control of America
What does this even mean?
You realize you descend from africans right? How african do you identify? Is it bad that you don't identify as african even though it is provable that you are descended from africans? Is it bad that the UK developed a culture that wasn't really african?
>Let me guess, I’m just a horrible immoral person and I’m not allowed to think about this, right?
You are allowed to think about it, and others are allowed to rightly point out how stupid, utterly unfounded, and abysmal, and utterly pathetic such a thought is. It's deeply childish. Grow up.
Oh no, the UK might be more brown in 100 years, what a shame, anyway who wants Tikka Misala? No? Aw, well lets have a cuppa instead, freshly imported from asia!
You know the Hamburger is german right? Or all that delicious cajun food is, not from white people, though it has some french influence thanks to the brits deporting my family 300 years ago. Or how saint patty's day isn't something the Irish Celebrate?
Meanwhile, do you know where Algebra comes from? Not Europeans.
Except, by leaning on European "control" of the US, it's a hundred times dumber! Your own logic is that each and every one of us should be violently deported because this country belongs to Native Americans.
Fuck me, do you even know how the US got Texas? A bunch of Americans illegally settled in Mexican land (that was owned by the spanish at the time) and cried to Uncle Sam to "protect" them and the state that resulted from that behavior has the utter gall to assert that their state should "Stay European"!
God forbid your children have to interact with other human beings who have different cultures than them, the utter horror. God forbid a "European" country have to learn a second language, that definitely isn't "European"!
>But, in a sane world, anything pre-1945, the statement “Europeans are projected to lose control of America within single digit decades” would spur a panic.
The US quite literally killed 600k of our own people to give some control to imported africans and their descendants. America started as a multicultural nation sharing land with Native Americans, and supporting extremely varied immigrants basically without a formal process for hundreds of years. The KKK came back to life partially to oppress french and irish catholics because "European" wasn't actually what racists cared about. The Irish and Italians and Jews were "others" because racists DGAF about European ancestry or purity.
Do you even see how trivially you are being played? Do you really think the administration full of first and second generation immigrants from Non European countries gives a single fuck about America becoming "Non European"?
It's a problem insofar as it exists and is illegal. I'm no fan of the current administration, but the Biden admin just plain refused to execute the laws. That seems problematic to me for an executive branch.
I have no problem with uncapped migration, but to flat out refuse to enforce the law is a bit ridiculous. What should be done is simple: Congress should just pass a law like is expected of the Legislative branch that says all immigrants are welcome.
As an added benefit, it would get rid of the illegal wages overnight. Americans complain that illegals are taking their jobs, but they're only taking the ones that aren't filled by US laborers. And US laborers can't legally compete with illegals if illegals are being paid less than minimum wage.
A single, simple, straight-forward law could fix all those issues with the stroke of a pen.
>but the Biden admin just plain refused to execute the laws.
The Biden admin tried to pass the single most restrictive immigration law the US has ever seen with bipartisan support from all but the most progressive democrats.
Please tell me, who killed that bill?
>As an added benefit, it would get rid of the illegal wages overnight
Speaking of laws not being enforced, republicans have spent 30 years bitching about immigration while utterly refusing to enforce existing laws punishing primarily republican owned businesses for hiring illegal immigrants and suppressing wages. Gee, surely they care about fixing things right?
Even Trump's admin is still refusing to enforce those laws. Desantis spent five minutes suggesting he might finally enforce such laws and was immediately stopped by republicans
>That seems problematic to me for an executive branch.
So you voted for an executive branch that demonstrably violates all sorts of laws, refuses to punish friends for violating laws, and pardons literal war criminals or literal scammers if they donate enough. Good job. Please tell me how pardoning the guy from Nikola Motors is enforcing the law and a good use of the executive branch.
>What should be done is simple: Congress should just pass a law like is expected of the Legislative branch that says all immigrants are welcome.
Again, democrats love nothing more than passing laws in congress and there is ample evidence of that. It is republicans who have spent 50 years OPENLY not doing their jobs in congress. They are the ones saying, openly, that congress not passing anything is an intended outcome. They are the ones saying that preventing democrats from doing anything at all is intended. Democrats, despite such bad faith, still cross the aisle and pass things republicans want, because the US system requires bipartisanship as a feature.
When the illegal migrant laborers come to cash their checks every week, those checks carry the signature of republican families. If you've ever bought potatoes that come from a Maine farm, they were picked by migrant labor, overseen by angry and lazy republicans who do nothing but bitch about migrant labor while smoking weed with the local cops, and choosing to hire that exact labor. LePage made zero effort to enforce laws on the book to stop those very republicans from using migrant labor.
Why hire the politicians that have a demonstrated history of making no attempt to solve the problem, voted in by the people causing the problem in the first place?
Meanwhile here in Maine, bulk asylum migration is pretty much the only reason why Lewiston is a functioning and thriving City, and migrants from former french colonies in africa are the only people who can still speak french and carry that culture after the KKK spent the early part of the 1900s stamping out my french ancestry and culture.
I'm late on this reply; have been solo parenting while the spouse was out of town, but I wanted to say thank you for the detailed response.
Also, I understand why you presume I voted for the republican candidate during the most recent presidential election, but I assure you I did not. Trump's interview with Bloomberg Business solidified beyond any doubt that he was a fool that had no idea how tarrifs worked.
I am equally dissatisfied with the lack of enforcement against employers of illegal migrants and agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment. My initial response was to point out that somehow Trump has quelled the rush of migrants without new legislation as a reference against what Biden's administration seemed not to be able to do. But you make a very good point about the unreasonable unwillingness of republicans to pass legislation that would likely have dramatically helped the situation.
Ive gotten the same response, knee jerk reactions that regurgitate CNN talking points and assumptions that im a Trumpist. Im a lifelong NDP / Green Party supporter. lol..
I understand why it happens, and I am a registered republican, but that's mostly because I align most with small government and low regulatory environments philosophically. In practice, my voting record is probably some random smattering of blue, red, and green. I vote for the candidate I think is best, and I try to evaluate all candidates based on their positions before looking at their party affiliation.
But also I live in the Portland, OR metro area so my vote is pretty much irrelevant.
Well this is a controversial statement. Many people have thought there was an immigration problem in the USA since well before Trump entered politics.
If I pretend to believe that there is definitely no immigration problem, though, then I agree with you. But like I said, that is a controversial statement.
Would you believe that the people who support this just do believe there is an immigration problem? People are allowed to care about things other than the economy and crime stats, by the way.
What is it about being a US citizen that increases criminality? Shouldn't we expect that crime comes down as the US has been a leader in immigration, considering immigrants commit less crime? Has crime come down in Europe as it became a leader?
I've been trying to make sense of the statistics. Interested to hear any explanation that can reconcile these contrasting observations.
Generally it seems to be more related that if you are an immigrant, you more likely try to keep your heads down. This comes from a video about immigration in sweden. For which the first generation of immigrants want to contribute to society in most cases, while the second generation seems to be more open to crime. The second generation does of course has then the citizenship and are not considered to be immigrants anymore. But this does does not need to correlate with immigration and culture per se, but also can have todo about second generations being badly integrated and/or having less oportunities then other citizens. Just seems citizens generally accept less shit from the government then immigrants do.
>> why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general
You stated this very well.
But I do think it's a ruse. I don't have a problem with enforcing the law on illegal immigration.[0] But I do think the deployment of National Guard and in some cases Marines on American streets, allegedly to disperse anti-ICE protests, is a long game to make sure that there will be no judicial obstacles in the way if MAGA loses the 2028 election fair and square, cries foul that the election was stolen, decides to send in their own slate of electors, and faces nationwide protests.
I live in Portland. I see the ridiculous cosplay of protesters outside the ICE detention facility. I see the absurdity of deploying troops to face off against them. If these clowns can be used as a casus belli to declare war and use the US military against the civilian population, then it will be no stretch to do so when a large portion of the population rises up to demand a proper electoral count in 2028. That's the scenario I see when I see the willy-nilly, unnecessary use of federalized troops on American soil.
And for the record, I'm a registered Republican and mostly libertarian.
[0] I am not anti-immigration, and I don't view immigration as a "demographic problem". I don't care what race people are as long as they are coming here for the right reasons and want to integrate and be productive members of our society. I was also an illegal immigrant in Europe for years. I accept the fact that countries have the right to decide who they want to accept as citizens, and that breaking those rules may damage your ability to become a citizen of the country you want to be accepted into. And that going there illegally may carry certain risks.
> "If these clowns can be used as a casus belli to declare war and use the US military against the civilian population, then..."
That hasn't happened though. Deploying the national guard to stare down and maybe tear gas some clownish protestors is pretty typical stuff, not a civil war.
By the way, I was in Seattle when the CHAZ stuff was happening and saw firsthand how both sides of the media were lying about the reality on the ground. Half the media wanted me to believe it was a violent insurrection and the other half wanted me to believe it was just a family friendly Woodstock situation. Reality as I observed it: it was just a bunch of losers huffing spray paint fumes, with the police hanging back a few blocks letting them make fools of themselves. I saw no violence, I wasn't stopped at an armed checkpoint by AK-47 wielding masked rebels like Fox News promised (I didn't seriously expect that, lmao.)
Well then it sounds like there's no reason to send the national guard in at all, and that it's quite wasteful to do so. So why are they sending in the national guard?
It's a very typical thing to do in response to protests. Maybe it's just worthless posturing, I don't know. I do know it doesn't constitute a civil war.
> But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general? Do we think that the borders were opened intentionally to fabricate this “crisis”?
Maybe because many things Trump does and says are blatant lies and shameless despotic authoritarian ones? Ignoring courts, ignoring the constitution especially the first amendment, using his office for personal gain. I don't think I have to give examples because they're just too many. Only last week he pardoned a convicted drug dealer who was Hondurese president while planning to invade Venezuela and "just killing people" because of drugs for which there isn't even any evidence. It was just the last of many (including silk road captain Ross Ulbricht). Anyway that's just one of the recent things.
And the borders were never actually open. It's really hard to migrate to the US and the illegals do all the work the Americans won't do for almost nothing.
The real problem with public safety is the huge income gaps, leading to disenfranchised ghettos with festering organised crime gangs. A lot of them might be immigrants but many are born Americans. The thing they have in common that they are poor and have no upward opportunities.
It would probably need a grace period so things don't go crazy, but after that then yes. It would also have the benefit of pumping stocks being lower and more risky, and could help prevent stock bubbles from rising so big and fast.
I think the whole problem is that global market access plus nearly limitless product replication (software, media) has resulted in extreme differences in money availability for different subsets of the population. So we have some people who can buy many properties, and some people who can’t buy a single property. This low level of product sales friction and reach hasn’t really happened before in human history, and I’m not sure classical free market economic theory accounts for it. Back in the day there were only so many boats/shoes/whatever one company could physically sell.
Continuing to grow the population under these conditions doesn’t help either.
If this was true, it would be true of other durable goods like appliances and cars. But people with lots of money know that investing in appliances and cars is pointless because millions of new ones are created constantly. There is no scarcity to benefit from as an asset owner.
Unfortunately, in North America and other Anglosphere countries, we have decided that a scarcity in residential floor space is a public good and our planning rules tend to create such scarcity and enforce it. This allows incumbent homeowners to profit, and they fight for vociferously to protect that profit. Of course, if a company also invests in residential floor space they can also profit, but it’s not clear why we are so concerned with who profits, rather than the fact that we are enforcing the scarcity that produces the profits.
Land is fundamentally scarce, though, unlike other durable goods, so what you say does not follow. And by land, I mean land situated near geographically and/or economically useful areas. To make land like other durable goods, you need to convince people to treat all land equally, which is against human instinct (ie good luck with that).
This doesn’t mean nothing should be done and things are great, but if we mischaracterize a problem we have little hope of solving it.
Land is scarce, but we are making residential floor space far more scarce than it needs to be through restrictive planning laws. Simplifying it a little but, say all 20M people in the greater New York area want to live in Manhattan, which has a population of about 1.7M. That means that people will bid up the price of housing until only the top 1.7/20=8.5% of people can afford it. We can pack manhattan full of sky scrapers and get a lot more people in there.
On affordable housing: there’s no such thing. There are enough millionaires around that will live in a 600sqft apartment if it gives them the lifestyle they want.
In fact, it might blow your mind to know that building luxury accommodation actually lowers house prices as well as affordable housing, because wealthy people have to live somewhere, and if all that’s available is mid-range housing then they’ll live in that. That will push the middle into the lower income housing, pushing the lower income people out of the city.
Additionally, if you only build cheap housing to make it affordable, you end up with a city of cheap housing. If you build a ton of luxury housing, then in a few decades you have a ton of older high quality housing coming into the more affordable range as “luxury” buyers follow the new luxury construction around.
People do not live in land, they live in floorspace.
Of course well located land is special and will never behave like a durable good. But whether there exist 250 sqft of livable residential floorspace or 250,000 sqft of livable floorspace on that land is at the moment, an entirely political decision that we can reverse at any time.
There's basically no evidence that big companies own enough property to matter in the market. Even if every individual unit was owned by a different person, you'd see exactly the same outcomes we do today.
Well, at least domestically you don’t have to compete with someone who doesn’t have to pay that because their product is probably tariffed directly.
Internationally, yes if you manufacture the international product in the home country, but AFAIK in auto at least there are usually satellite factories and have been for some time, and those wouldn’t be subject to home country tariffs would they?
Precisely, you need to set up plants overseas to dodge the input tariffs instead of onshoring manufacturing for export. That causes reductions in manufacturing investment compared to the alternative.
In that hypothetical they can't compete because of labour protectionism and immigration restrictions, not because there's some intrinsic reason it's too expensive to manufacture in one country versus another.
I’ve wondered whether vitamin D is a real time signal within the circadian rhythm regulation system. Perhaps it is released in response to sunlight in order to let other parts of the system know it is daytime.
If it were like this, bulk dosing would be expected to be better than nothing (“maximum daytime!!!! Followed immediately by a very long slow sunset at whatever curve it is cleaned up in the body), but it would be better to dose continuously in real time at a level and body location(s) that would simulate the range of sunlight throughout the day.
Can anyone professionally familiar with the research in this area comment?
Vitamin D interacts with clock genes, which regulate the body's daily rhythms, through its ability to modulate the expression of genes like Clock, Bmal1, and Per2.
My similarly controversial take is that modern rape is traumatic because rapists are no longer hung in public. I think public hangings might have had an under appreciated healing effect on the psyche. Like if a guy who attacked you is still out there, he might attack you again. But if you saw him hang, you just might feel better.
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