Are you a slayer?

Absolutely. But the seasonings and method is Turkish. Pork is all I had on hand. No haram issues in this house.

It’s been my experience that saying out loud. The things that everyone says they know keeps everyone realistic and makes it so they can’t live in denial.

If you suggest a solution and the solution has a problem, the problem needs to be stated. Otherwise, people fixate on that solution and ignore the problem and things get worse instead of better.

If you want some solutions then I recommend a few. Corporate ownership of residential units needs to be banned or strongly limited to the number of units they can own . Square footage requirements need to be lowered. People with enough property should be able to build rental units in the back.
Parking requirements need to be reduced in urban areas.
Mass transit needs to become a thing everywhere. I literally live in a city with no public transportation.
I would definitely tax secondary+ homes at a higher rate, but I don’t know how to solve the problem of rich people keeping poor people out other than mandating low-cost housing in those same exact neighborhoods. Which causes other problems like people deciding not to build at all. Which worsens the problem.

Some of that was subtext in my previous comments like the square footage thing.

After cooking the onions I mixed sour cream and cheddar in the pan with them until melted. That was my sauce.

This is Papita, mother of three of our other orange girls. I’m not allowed to touch her. Only my wife can do that.

I hadn’t watched the show but a friend asked if I could make this for them. Then eventually I saw it.

Everything is connected now.

Cheap and tasty. I buy cumin seeds a liter at a time. Essential for Indian and Mexican cooking.

I am going through what’s in the house and trying to figure out meals. This started with the knowledge that I had exactly half a cup of basmati rice left and some ground pork in the chest freezer. I’m wondering what I’ll discover next.

When I was a kid we would shop at the commissary and there was an entire row filled with nothing but labels with blue stripes. I need that to come back.

If you tell workers they have to use AI they will use it as much as possible on things that it is not well suited to because there are dedicated tools that will do the same thing. Malicious compliance.

Now imagine that house burned down. How much would it cost to replace it under current code compliance and construction costs? How much is it insured for? For example, my house is currently valued at about $200,000. I could not rebuild this house for $200,000. I’d be lucky to be able to rebuild it for $260,000.

Anyway, let’s get back to the main point. There’s more than inflation going on here. There are multiple factors, not just one.

It happens.

I’m trying to find realistic solutions. And if we don’t red team premortem then we are building to fail.

It’s important that we use inflation adjusted numbers here. 13,000 from 1965 would be $137,000 now.

You only bought it as a house, but people around you bought as an investment.

Carl Sagan

Catch 22. As a politician you gotta please the people with money. The people buying homes taxed 200% have the money. Until we reach Star Trek levels of selfless post scarcity society that’s not going to happen and by that point it won’t be necessary.

That’s trickier than it sounds. The places where people buy third homes are the same places where NIMBYs can stop development of poor people housing. Even though those rich people need servants and servants need quarters.

If you think building a city from scratch is expensive you should see what it takes to make an apple pie from scratch. You must first invent the universe.

Materials require labor. Labor requires inspections. The more material the more everything else. And those materials cost more because they are to much tighter specifications than they were in the 70s. The lumber might be cheap but a fire suppression system in a 4000 square foot house costs a lot more than no suppression system in a 1200 one.

But as you point out it’s not really about materials though. It’s about square footage. You don’t get a bulk discount for buying a 5000 square foot house instead of a 1200. You pay even more. And zoning won’t let you build a 1200 anymore because they tax based on square footage so they jacked up the smallest house size they will approve.

There is no single cause for houses being more expensive. It’s a whole host of them and that’s why prices climbed faster than inflation.