If I ever get a tattoo I want it to say, “I would of gotten a stupider tattoo, but I ran out of monee.”
Yes, with the incorrect usage and misspelling. It will still look better than most tattoos out there (alas).
Day: July 21, 2025, 5:45 PM
Not So Rosy
This is not at all a good comparison at all so you deserve the wrath. It is intellectually dishonest and it hides more than it reveals — though it employs all the usual nonsense of denying that anything is now worse than it was in the past. The same tired, wrong arguments get trotted out every time:
1) Houses are bigger now! Who gives a crap. I can’t buy a fraction of a house.
2) Interest rates are lower. This matters some, but the down payment is still huge and lower interest rates still might mean that you pay more over time because you have more principal to pay off. And obviously, it misrepresents affordability by changing the standard by which you measure it. It also ignores renters, which are ~30% of the population. Renters don’t really benefit from lower mortgage rates, and with house prices shooting up, more people become renters thus leading to higher rent. QED.
Another relevant factor that these “everything is so super-duper rosy” types ignore: Household size has changed dramatically since 1980. This matters a lot as there are far more single people now, households are a lot smaller, but house sizes are increasing. This means that smaller households have a more difficult time purchasing anything at all.
I knew people in the 1990s who bought large homes with one person working a blue-collar job in medium-size markets (so not rural) that now would have no hope of purchasing the smallest condo available (much less house) in those same markets working the same job.
I’m not sure what the major malfunction of the people who trot out graphs like that is. They can’t see the obvious, no matter how many people show it to them. They must not want to see.
Les chambres rouges
I watched Les chambres rouges. It was quite good, and sneaky in an audience-respecting way. That’s hard to pull off, being a bit devious but not insulting to your viewers. Warning: spoilers will follow if you read beyond this point.
The film manages this rare feat in two ways. First, it casts an exceptionally beautiful lead, even by Hollywood standards1. Most people equate beauty with goodness, kindness and even intelligence so that is tier one of the film’s strategy to deceive you. It usually bothers me when someone one out of a million attractive is the star, but in this case it works. The second bit of the film’s approach to throwing your judgement off balance is having another person who is obviously delusional for the putative protag, Kelly-Anne, to play against. It unites the viewer with Kelly-Anne against someone who is obviously a bit nuts and who is not composed, not that intelligent, and who is not emotionally stable. Only later do you realize that Clem is little more than Kelly-Anne’s pet that she is toying with for amusement.
Clementine is a perfect contrast to Kelly-Anne, who is more tightly-wound, far more intelligent, but is also the kind of crazy that Clem’s more mundane tendency to believe the best of even clearly-demented people cannot even begin to touch. The movie does an excellent job of seeing the world mostly through Kelly-Anne’s eyes, and any time a film manages that you start to empathize with the viewpoint even if the person whose eyes you’re seeing through is not really worthy of that.
Kelly-Anne is not violent. Or at least that is not shown. But she is certainly a psychopath of some type. She enjoys watching snuff films and spends over a million dollars to obtain one. That it is used the solve the case is only incidental to her goals. Her real motive in purchasing the killer’s “lost” footage was the thrill of being able to view it and then to use it to inflict psychological torture on the parents of one of the murdered girls.
(And note that this isn’t a horror movie. There is never any violence shown and you only hear some screams and a saw or something at one point in the background, but never see any violent acts. This is a psychological thriller. A very dark one.)
And kudos to the movie to having one of the most intensely fucked up scenes in film history that involved no violence, no gore, no blood, and barely any movement at all. And that’s when (again, spoilers!) Kelly-Anne reveals by removing her overcoat in the courtroom that she has dressed up like one of the murdered girls in an effort to connect with the killer and to further antagonize the family. When she puts in the blue contacts and applies those fake braces…dang.
I recommend the film. It’s one of those that gets better the more you think about it.
Actual Freedom
Did kids in the 70s/80s/90s really roam freely like in*Stranger Things*, or is it a movie myth?
Damn, Gen Z is so fucked. The freedom we took for granted seems like some grand myth to them.
But to answer, yes, it was extremely common. Every kid over 8-9 wandered nearly anywhere without much restriction. I biked miles and miles away from my house when I was 10+. I also used to do shit like swim down an entire six-mile long river by myself with no flotation device or life jacket starting when I was 11-ish. No one cared.
In that sense, the world we inhabited in the 1980s and 1990s was a better, freer one. And I think we had a lot more fun.
Backdoor NIMBY
This is a great example of a very clever person using their sharpness to deceive. This piece is using a lot of econ (emphasis on the “con”) terms and pseudointellectualism to sneak in NIMBYism. Essentially, this entire argument is purpose-built to say: We shouldn’t build anything because landlords will inevitably charge the monopoly price no matter what.
I’m sure someone proposed building an apartment complex in his neighborhood. So now he’s upset because his house price might fall and writes this article “proving” it’s a bad idea.
Meanwhile, when Austin built more new apartments than anywhere else in the country, rents fell a large amount. Shocking.
All of this is a result of NIMBYs and the left utterly despising the Klein & Thompson Abundance book. It really gave them quite a scare and bedevils their dreams. Just the thought of someone slightly poorer than them living anywhere nearby keeps them up at night.
So they write clownish sophistry like the article to which I linked.
Lessons From Singapore: Breaking Free Of The Impossible Trinity.
Mauna Loa Observatory captured the reality of climate change. The US plans to shut it down.
The Expensive, Seductive Strategy That Doomed the Democratic Party.
The Landlord Gutting America’s Hospitals.
How the Housing Market For Young People Became ‘A Total Disaster.’
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely. Agreed. The disaster was worsened by climate change denialism, which a (fucking idiotic) political anti-project.
Wall St. Firms Are Buying Utilities to Tap Into the A.I. Boom.
In recent layoffs, AI’s role may be bigger than companies are letting on. Sure is.