Most of the 'squeeze' comes from things like housing and health care. The former driven by NIMBYs pulling the ladder up after them in so many desirable places.
The subcategory of NIMBY hate regarding overdevelopment of existing communities (as opposed to things like datacenters, multi-home owners concerned about investment, etc etc) is mostly hatred of the average citizen, which is not a great category of people to decide to hate. 90% of people would react the same ways in the same situations.
The obvious problem is that you can only develop a "desirable" area so much before you have fundamentally altered it. When there is a perception that the demand is driven in large part by people moving into the country, rather than by being born, that naturally engenders bitterness. When there is a perception that there are plenty of other areas available for development, which would then become desirable over time, but the developers want money and the government is focused on short-term goals, that further engenders bitterness. This is all very natural, and doesn't necessitate people to be unreasonably NIMBY to oppose it. Again, most people would.
It's not hate, it's just something that changed in the US in about the 1970ies. In the past, you'd have a booming area and people would build homes as a result and things weren't perfect, but kind of balanced out in terms of housing.
A huge amount of housing demand comes from immigration. You can't call people who like their neighbourhoods "NIMBYs" for not wanting their nice area to triple in population to solve a problem. They aren't the problem. The demand is the problem.
So lack of supply isn't the problem, it's the people who want a place to live who are the problem? Would you make this same argument if the increased demand was from people being born rather than immigration (because it is both)?
I think if you want to be able to block your neighbors from building denser housing on their property then that should only be enforceable if it was agreed to by everybody in advance when they bought the place (e.g. via an HOA contract or some similar type of restriction on the property deed). Otherwise this is tantamount to allowing Walmart to get a vote on whether to allow Target to set up next door.
> So lack of supply isn't the problem, it's the people who want a place to live who are the problem? Would you make this same argument if the increased demand was from people being born rather than immigration (because it is both)?
I totally agree it's both, although most first world populations have low birth rates (until you add in generational immigration from high birth rate cultures), so slow building works well.
Actually you can blame them because it was the done thing throughout US history to build more homes when people moved to an area. And there is nothing more American than moving to a place with better opportunities or amenities. "The pursuit of happiness" and all that.
Actual immigration from outside the US is a vanishingly small part of our housing problems, just as immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs".
Where I live in Oregon the conflict is almost entirely about other Americans moving here vs those pulling up the ladder - which doesn't, of course,stop anyone from moving here, it just means only the wealthy can, rather than teachers, nurses, firefighters and so on.
> Actually you can blame them because it was the done thing throughout US history to build more homes when people moved to an area. And there is nothing more American than moving to a place with better opportunities or amenities. "The pursuit of happiness" and all that.
Of course you can - good point. It's just extremely misleading to. However, "throughout history" America is only about 400 years in total, and for a lot of that there was loads of free land available. And - more importantly - no benefits, so you came to the US to carve out a new life from the soil, not to join a successful nation and raise house prices.
Land in America is now settled, and that means that historical time is over, and no more applicable to debates today than it would be in any other nation, for most of whom the first 400 years would also have been a time of settling and opportunity.
>immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs"
This is a pretty stark straw man. It's very normal to be critical of immigration policy without believing that immigrants will eat your pets, and it's petty to try to implicitly cast the person you're talking to into that camp.
It's really dismaying how many people on this site seem to think immigration and the job market are a zero sum game... and that hasn't changed 12 years after I wrote this:
It's an oversimplification to portray the "other argument" as asserting that everything in society is strictly a zero-sum game. In some important ways, it is; and in some important ways, it isn't. People may be wrong about those details, but that's not the same thing as the common quip "it's not a zero-sum game", which essentially portrays the other side of the argument as dunderheads (a trap that well-meaning people who believe they are on the "right" or "moral" side of an argument very easily fall into).
I.e. no, it's not a zero sum game, but it is a complex system with inputs, outputs, some finite resources, and lots of human subjectivity and desires. Concrete harm easily comes from bad immigration policy (regardless of the "direction" of the policy's badness).
I feel like tech has lost its way recently. It's a huge, huge field, so there have always been people working on 'bad' things, but IDK, I just don't have the same feeling of optimism about things that I used to and I wish there was some kind of movement bringing that back.
Yeah, people trying to get rich quick are maybe not great, but that's a side of humanity that has always been with us and always will be and you can kind of discount it. I'm talking about the people who run things lurching towards some pretty ugly stuff.
I think many people share this feeling. I sure do.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
I don’t know I think it’s really rich to see people who’ve spent a generation hooking the world on dopamine machines and making society full of hate suddenly act like those who work in the MIC are “going to far.”
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
The main reason as far as I'm aware was due to intense lobbying from car companies. It makes absolute sense from the perspective of Ford, etc. to have alternative modes of transport be removed from the streets
This makes sense, but boy would it be easy to mix up something like this with some fancy graphics and sell some snake oil. Stuff that sounds like
"What is therefore required is not merely a more capable agent, but a closed-loop capability orchestration substrate capable of continuously reconciling observed product reality against an evolving demand manifold."
fancy words; it's true, though ~ i think it was clear from the moment LLMs entered the scene that (if) one day they would be able to write code ~ then the real challenge would be to integrate the output into our organizations ~ and this integration would not work without changing the orgs
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