Lurker > emblem-man

I doubt that'll lower the housing prices here.
They are constantly building new apartment buildings everywhere here and rent hasn't gone down at all.

Its way more important to have affordable housing than over regulations on what if scenarios. Which were probably passed in the first way to keep supply of homes low.

Problem is that whatever is getting built, its still not gonna be affordable. People need sub 250k homes.

*Starts to sweat in Fire Inspector*

Also Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz and an electrical grid that kills itself every time you get snow or heat

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/052596e9.jpg

Too bad you still have to live in Texas though

Isn't inflation to prices as acceleration is to velocity? It's just a rate of change of prices increasing, right?

i wouldn't call him pro-union given his railway strike debacle, but otherwise he has a lot of positives you'll never see from a republican

if the little Biden has done can be considered impressive.

That's literally what it means.

Higher prices.

I don't remember waking up in another dimension today.

This. Take care of that. Theyre fucking over the backbone of America.

I would not cite this as a positive, personally

Also remember when railroad workers were striking and he told them "GET BACK TO WORK"

After months of negotiations, the IBEWs Railroad members at four of the largest U.S. freight carriers finally have what theyve long sought but that many working people take for granted: paid sick days.

This is a big deal, said Railroad Department Director Al Russo, because the paid-sick-days issue, which nearly caused a nationwide shutdown of freight rail just before Christmas, had consistently been rejected by the carriers. It was not part of last Decembers congressionally implemented update of the national collective bargaining agreement between the freight lines and the IBEW and 11 other railroad-related unions.

Were thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement, Russo said. Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

We know that many of our members werent happy with our original agreement, Russo said, but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.

While President Joe Biden was calling on Congress in November to pass legislation to implement the agreement, he stressed that he would continue to encourage the railroads to guarantee paid sick time for their employees.

More positive case for Biden:

-Biden is working toward a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the release of hostages.
-Biden will appoint liberal supreme court justices in the event Clarence Thomas kicks the bucket.
-Biden will work to restore reproductive rights to 1/3 of women who lost them due to overturning Roe V. Wade.
-Biden has forgiven a lot of student debt loan, but there's still work to do
-Biden has appointed mostly competent people. We, for example, don't have a wretched old hag running the department of education into the fucking ground.
-LGBT rights are safer
-Infrastructure is getting fixed
-Working on getting Marijuana to not longer be a Schedule I drug.
-Over the pill birth control pills are on the way
-Will continue combatting climate change
-New framework that helps lower income communities afford housing (unfortunately hasn't gone into effect yet and won't until 2026 assuming someone doesn't undo it)
-Got rid of junk fees
-College programs will lose funding if their students end up with too much debt
-He's pro-union.
-Airlines now have to offer cash refund instead of just vouchers when flights are delayed or cancelled

In fact, Biden did one other thing to help bring down inflation: He increased oil production. Although he came into office expecting to curb fracking in the name of the climate, the Ukraine war prompted an about-face. Biden opened up drilling, and the U.S. now produces more oil than any country ever has in the history of the world.

Cheaper oil doesnt just make gasoline cheaper (although it does do that). It allows all kinds of businesses to move people and goods around more cheaply, allowing to produce things more cheaply which lowers inflation.

So Biden did two big things to stop inflation reappointed Powell, and ensured cheap, plentiful oil. Both of those were in the face of pressure from his own party, and showed a lot of courage and leadership. Less spending on health insurance and student debt would have taken a little of the edge off inflation in 2021, but Bidens actions to bring down inflation in 2022 and 2023 outweigh the mistake.

This is going to be a tough one for the average person to believe simply because companies won't stop price gouging, .-.

Biden made industrial policy a reality
Throughout my entire life, Ive heard Americans talk about the need to revive American manufacturing. First the Rust Belt and then the China Shock hollowed out the manufacturing workforce employment plunged, and output stagnated. And yet neither Bush nor Obama seemed to have any plan for how to make it happen.

Trump talked a big game about bringing manufacturing back to America, but his signature initiative the tariffs didnt make any headway in terms of reshoring. Trumps attempt to harangue American companies into no longer shipping jobs overseas, and his bungled attempt to get Foxconn to build a factory in rural Wisconsin, were even less effective. There was no perceptible increase in factory construction, manufacturing output, or employment.

Then came Biden. With a pair of landmark bills the (somewhat misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act he enacted Americas first real systematic manufacturing-oriented industrial policy since at least the early 1990s, and possibly since World War 2. A massive factory construction boom began almost immediately after the bills were signed:

What kind of factories are being built? The new spending is mostly on chips and batteries:

Wouldn't bother me.

If there's housing an wealthier neighborhoods that the government is willing to give the seller fair market value for and then subsidize it, who am I to stop them?

That being said, I don't know if local governments are willing to buy up multi-million dollar homes in nice neighborhoods in hopes they can house 2-3 families when they can put up a building with 40 affordable apartments in them with the same amount of money.

Austin city council just passed a resolution directing staff to look at single-stair reform as a part of their 2024 building code update!

This is a MASSIVE step toward enabling more missing-middle and affordable housing to be built in Austin!

Safety advances should be evaluated together

One of the most underappreciated success stories of the past 100 years has been the miraculous decline in the fire death rate: by 90% over the past century and by 60% since just 1980. Some factors include less smoking and widespread smoke detectors.

Multifamily buildings are now particularly safe from fire deaths, largely due to building code requirements for sprinklers. The National Fire Protection Association notes that in 1980, house and multifamily fires had comparable chances of causing deaths; by 2022, the death rate for multifamily fires had fallen 17% while those for house fires had actually risen. Yet because sprinklers are usually only installed in new apartments, their adoption has been slow; only 7% of home fires happen in sprinklered residences. Increasing the number of sprinklered residences is key to further advancing fire safety.

Second staircases are a holdover from early fire codes, which focused on evacuating occupants; since then, material and building science advances have improved our ability to isolate and suppress fires, and firefighting equipment has improved. Because of those advances, the commercial codes continued insistence on extra staircases amounts to a belt and suspenders approach to fire safety. Just as suspenders were replaced by belts in the early 20th century, perhaps its time for fire codes to evolve beyond the second stair.

the inflation we have been experiencing has been global (and hit most other places much harder). part of it is due to covid shutting the world down for a year and then consumerism going buckwild globally, and part is due to the war in ukraine caused by vlad pootin and supported by the gop.

progressive policy in the us would be something like investing in green energy much more or regulating insurance/healthcare better and those would both drive tons of good paying domestic jobs. some inflation is inevitable, but massive inflation in a country with a stable currency and economy is p much always cyclical and rare and brought on by outside circumstances. the us government could invest in a massive public works program and education and healthcare without any negative consequences other than raising taxes on the top 10%. it probably won't happen because our congress is so broken and gerrymandered and the senate is fixed for the minority party, but it could be done and only benefit americans

Reminder that Biden has yet to reverse Trump's foreign policy fuck ups, from scrapping the Iran nuclear deal and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, to starting a trade war against China that backfired against US businesses. Now Biden's trying to follow Trump's footsteps in trying to ban Tiktok and alienate his own support base.

if biden loses it won't be because of his stance on israel/palestine or this perfectly reasonable statement (the exact statement obama made), it will be because of dipshit 'centrists' who are 'concerned' about the economy despite this economy being better than fat donny left it. young people and twitter hypocrites almost never vote, and the ones that do will likely be motivated to vote for women's bodily autonomy and against trump installing himself as a redneck cult leader for life

it will be because of dipshit 'centrists' who are 'concerned' about the economy despite this economy being better than fat donny left it.

First thank you for the long post. It took time to write that and I don't want to discount it. However you really didn't say how they should protest. Like specially what should they do. Remember a school canceled commencement because there was going to be a pro-Pal speech.

Taking care to paint the counter-protesters, or the police, as the violent groups.

How should they protest, what you make you guys happy. Again this reminds me of when Republicans complained about black man taking a knee.

Trespassing in their own colleges... hmm. I would have loved sit in.

None of those things are violent.

so this is the better guy than trump

Violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is. ... Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes ... none of this is peaceful protest

This is why we have so many apathetic voters, and why the left needs to go ahead and unleash their fringe groups. Politicians are cowards, and will only respond to violence.

I've never understood the argument of "protest, but not too loudly." You may as well tell people to stop. At least you're not bullshitting.

Fully going to vote for Biden this election. If he loses I'm going to have the most Pikachu-ist face imaginable.

Probably full on fascist government for like 50 or so years. Sucks right? Not my fault Biden Admin are trying their absolute hardest to lose this election.

Probably full on fascist government for like 50 or so years. Sucks right? Not my fault Biden Admin are trying their absolute hardest to lose this election.

Hopefully this kills liberalism forever.

Hopefully not, or at least not through direct violence. I imagine it would be more like how the US would take Native American children from their tribes and native cultures and raise them to "be white" thereby eventually removing any sort of Palestinian influence in their upbringing and making them more in line with Israeli thinking and culture.

I don't like it, but I think the most likely outcome of this situation is Israel taking the land by force and creating a "one state solution." At best, this one state grants Palestinians full civil rights, but they would likely assimilated into Israeli culture in the not so distant future (thereby "wiping out" the Palestinians). But given Israel's current views and attitudes towards Palestine, I imagine it's much more likely that this one state will end up as more of an Apartheid state where the Palestinians are treated as second class citizens (or worse...)