I think the title of this post is actually incorrect. It seems they actually blocked this guy from the hackathon due to his former employment with Israeli national defense. Could someone provide me with any evidence that they've banned Jews, as opposed to this specific person?
As someone from NJ...you think seniors and young people don't have affordability problems, especially wrt housing here, in the 5th most expensive state to buy a house? (California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, in that order, according to redfin, if you're going by house cost to income ratio, NJ is 6th)
> you think seniors and young people don't have affordability problems?
Of course I don't think that, which is why I didn't say it. That would be a silly thing to write. What is the advantage for you in mischaracterizing what someone wrote and then expending effort to "correct the record" for a statement no one made?
You created a strawman and then knocked it down.
What I actually said: "New Jersey or Texas that do not have Prop 13 style laws and their seniors are not suffering excessively. However housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states."
Both of these statements are demonstrably true. Let's look at the data.
* NJ price to income ratio for housing: 5.5
* mortgage cost burden: 31% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
* renter cost burden: 52% of renters spend more than 30% on rent
* CA price to income ratio for housing: 8.0
* mortgage cost burden: 38% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% on housing
* renter cost burden: 58% of renters spend more than 30% on rent
So housing in NJ is more affordable than in CA.
Now, let's look specifically at seniors.
In California:
* 68% of senior renters are cost burdened
* 35% of senior homeowners are cost burdened
In New Jersey:
* 59% of senior renters are cost burdened
* 35% of senior homeowners are cost burdened
So we see that across the board, seniors in NJ are not cost burdened more than in California, and that in fact they are cost burdened a bit less.
Therefore if your solution is to look to Prop 13 style fixes to address cost burdens for either seniors or the general population, then you are not making a data based argument, and in fact the data goes against you, because there is no excess cost burden in states without these property tax freezes.
I don't know if it changes the result significantly, but remember the NJ has very high property taxes, more than double of California. So mortgage cost alone does not paint the full picture.
This is more significant for seniors, who likely have a paid-off home so their main expense is property tax. So being a fixed-income senior with a home is likely more affordable in California than in NJ. The worst thing after retirement is cost increases when you no longer have a salary that goes up with inflation.
Your exact words were "housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states", which, even by the numbers you have cited, is not correct. More affordable? Sure, we are number 5 or 6, not number 1. Much more affordable? Come on now.
And no, I don't think prop 13 style laws would be helpful, it would just create more problems, as it has in California.
Your argument, as I understand it, is "In current communist countries, things are bad, therefore, nothing communism-adjacent or communism-inspired should be attempted or tried.", is that right? I think there's a bit of a logical leap there from their issues to all communism-inspired taxation.
I don't think you'd make it far as a hunter-gatherer if you had physiological myopia. Both of my parents are severely nearsighted (my dad around -4 or -5, my mom is worse than -8), and all of my siblings have myopia. It's definitely genetic too, but for less severe myopia, I think it's our environment.
In such a world, if we still kept cats as pets, how would we feed them? Would non-industrial, more small-scale farming of animals be able to sustain that, or would exceptions need to be made? I use cats in this example since they, unlike dogs, are carnivores, and they must eat meat to live healthily (unlike us, where a bit of supplementation is enough for entirely vegan diets to be viable).
I'm curious how problems like this would be dealt with in a vegan world. Just let the cats loose on the local rodent and bird population, maybe?
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