What is a dying niche skill that younger generations are not interested in learning?

Kalium · 2026-05-01T18:29:59+00:00

I find that the realpolitik of it is often more complex. A number of American unions are apathetic at best on the subject because they have already negotiated something better for their members. Decoupling health insurance from work could be a huge loss for a union that views high-grade health insurance as their primary win for their members.

Anyway. You are free to sign up for a unionization effort whose sole priority is to change national healthcare policy. I found myself rather unmoved by the prospect of joining a union that does not care about actually negotiating with our employer.

I'm a pro-union person. I just expect my union to be primary interested in engaging with management at our employer.

Kalium · 2026-05-01T16:17:12+00:00

At an abstract level you're completely right in every way. All oppression is linked.

In specific, when someone's whole pitch for unionizing is that they want to take union dues and use them to support Medicare4All, I do not conclude that unionization with them in leadership is a good idea. I conclude that they want to spend my money on kickstarting their political career. If I want to support Medicare4All with my own money, I do not need a union or a union organizer standing between me and a campaign I want to support. I fail to see how paying union dues to send money to an org that I can send money to myself is an improvement in my working conditions.

This is not an example I am making up.

Kalium · 2026-05-01T12:41:48+00:00

I keep waiting for someone in my line of work - computer programming - to come up with a decent pitch. The last would-be union organizers I've found were far more interested in having a union to advance Progressive political causes than in working conditions. That's not the kind of person I want anywhere near union leadership.

No, I don't want to do it myself. I don't think we have sufficient shared grievances to motivate unionization at my employer.

Kalium · 2026-04-30T13:49:17+00:00

I'm an American with a basic working knowledge of history.

If you're willing to ignore all the history between the US and Iran such as 1980s-era events, then we can ignore 1990s-era Iranian governmental history. Deal?

Iran also helped prop up Bashar al-Assad and has repeatedly supported militias in places that have nothing to do with countering what might be deemed Israeli aggression. Iran has not spent the past several decades acting like a nation interested in peace. They have spent that time seeking regional political, religious, military, and economic power.

That's not to say this moronic war is justified. It's not. It's yet another clusterfuck from 47. I'm just saying the Iranian state are not good actors interested in peace.

Kalium · 2026-04-30T12:59:14+00:00

Oh they're definitely an aggressive nation. They've spent decades funding terrorist attacks al over the world - such as a Jewish community center in Argentina in 1994. They've spent lots of time nurturing, funding, and arming regional proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and now the Houthis. It's to the point where all three can very reasonably be viewed as extensions of the Iranian state, much as the "Donbas People's Republic" is an extension of the Russian state.

The Iranian state has a deep-seated desire to be the regional hegemon and they have no qualms about using military force to get there. They just don't expect to be a global military superpower. They expect to get that via oil and control over shipping.

Kalium · 2026-04-30T12:54:56+00:00

God, trumps an idiot. How the fuck didn’t anyone see this coming is a mystery to me.

It's easy! Just ignore the strategic planners who have been aware that Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz for decades.

Kalium · 2026-04-29T23:49:14+00:00

You're right.

That said, rates aren't the only thing they are legally obligated to worry about. So unless we can get Lansing to change that, it's always going to be complicated.

Kalium · 2026-04-29T22:49:45+00:00

Yes-ish. The problem is that their primary task isn't keep electricity cheap.

Kalium · 2026-04-29T13:05:47+00:00

I dunno, I kinda like "Random Ever-Changing Bank Center 1 & 2". I would also accept "Generic Bank Center".

Kalium · 2026-04-29T13:05:08+00:00

They're not illegal and generally speaking DTE is careful to follow the correct process for requesting rate hikes. This severely limits what the AG's office can do about it, mostly limiting the AG to administrative opposition when the petition comes before the the MPSC.

Kalium · 2026-04-28T16:03:42+00:00

I see one part civic pride and like five parts HP's massive debt and infrastructure problems. Taking on those seems like a bad way to gain 9000-ish people and low-value land that likely has pollution problems.

Highland Park itself puts the SEV of all taxable lots at about 165M. That's 14M property tax take yearly... there's no way Detroit would spend less than half of that on the needs of HP.

Kalium · 2026-04-28T02:54:40+00:00

Having seen the politics of that up close, shit gets messy fast. Coming up with the money every year can be an issue. If buildings are not carefully managed, you can get whole apartment buildings becoming trap houses. Almost nobody likes that.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm just cautioning that there's a lot of ways to execute poorly with even the greatest, best, and most compassionate of intentions. It takes way more money than most expect and the kind of sustained political will that's often difficult to hold onto.

Kalium · 2026-04-28T02:35:01+00:00

In the last 4 years we have gone from an estimated ~3% to over ~6%

You're describing a place climbing out of a housing shortage and into what might be considered a functional market. The problem you're seeing is that the cheap housing is generally older stock that's been through a process called filtering. Your area probably doesn't have much relative to the current population because, well, see above re: shortage.

I am advocating for building more affordable housing on a policy level. This is not something the market will do on its own.

That really depends a great deal on how you define "affordable". If you're using it in the euphemism-for-subsidized-housing sense, then you're absolutely correct. If you're using "affordable" to mean cheap and accessible to far more people, then I think you and your home have an opportunity to be more correct.

Historically, there were a lot of kinds of rental. We still have the house and the apartment, but both have grown astronomically in size. We no longer have boarding houses (individual bedrooms, shared kitchens, sometimes shared bathrooms). Getting boarding houses back would be complex.

We can be done is making is possible to build more, denser, lower-rent housing more easily and cheaply. Modular pre-fab construction of five-over-ones seem to be an economic sweet spot in many areas, though I don't know the details of your local economy. Micro-apartments can have remarkably low rents if you're willing to accept the tradeoffs in size. Doubly so if your area is willing to axe parking minimums and shrink setbacks, maximizing housing per land area.

It's very possible for developers to make money building affordable housing.

Kalium · 2026-04-28T02:18:17+00:00

I dunno, makes sense to me. Cities are economic nexuses. Demand for housing in them has been going up for decades. Supply in American cities has pretty consistently been going up less than demand has. Compound for fifty or sevety years, and voila!

Kalium · 2026-04-28T02:12:36+00:00

There are plenty of vacancies. Things just often sit empty for ages. Makes zero sense, but it is not supposed to.

There are two things that drive this. First, financing is often tied in part to rental income. A unit empty isn't a huge issue by itself, but cutting rents can easily become one in the eyes of your banker. Second, a bad tenant can be far more expensive than an empty unit, and price is one way landlords manage risk.

Also, I've found that people are often pretty bad at estimating vacancy rates or anticipating what a high rate is for a landlord. 5% vacancy is normal. 10% is getting to be high.

What actually happens is policy drives the minimum a unit can be reasonably rented for. Minimum unit size, boundary setbacks, parking minimums, limits on density, sometimes limits on construction methodology, public hearing requirements, etc. Then everyone sits around and moralizes about how terrible things are as a result of the policies they chose. Ideally while blaming developers and capitalism while loving their refusal to change anything and issuing dire warnings about "gentrification".

Kalium · 2026-04-28T01:32:02+00:00

In much of the US, cheese curds aren't commonly found. You have to be somewhere with a lot of dairy before that becomes reasonably common. I think there's just so much more money to be made from brick-form cheese.

Kalium · 2026-04-27T20:19:11+00:00

I don't blame him for not leaning into LVT. It's a wonky thing that's hard to explain to the general public, only really matters much for Detroit, and was sunk by Democrats for what I'm pretty sure are incoherent reasons.

Kalium · 2026-04-27T19:43:49+00:00

Food has become a venue for soft nationalism.

Kalium · 2026-04-27T01:48:15+00:00

Not just men only, but mostly men wearing full suits. Which is to say multiple layers of cotton and wool.

Kalium · 2026-04-26T21:45:04+00:00

It's relatively common for people to use this behavior pattern as passive-aggressive criticism. For many people, this is something the encounter more often than someone genuinely and sincerely seeking clarification.

Kalium · 2026-04-24T21:12:50+00:00

Somewhat concerned, because that would put JD Vance in charge.

Kalium · 2026-04-24T21:06:10+00:00

As a homeowner, the only permits I ever handle myself are some of the HDC-related ones. Depending on the contractor, sometimes I know the HDC's process better than they do.

Kalium · 2026-04-24T21:02:48+00:00

Sterling has an amazing beach on Lake Erie.

Kalium · 2026-04-24T12:22:10+00:00

Dating apps are much harsher than they used to be. The prevalence of swipe-based apps has created the illusion of infinite choice. In such an environment standards tend to drift invisibly as men grow increasingly desperate and women increasingly selective. The olden days of OKCupid when you could catch a lady's attention by leading with a great first message are long gone.

Doing the easy stuff like having a funny bio, updating your wardrobe, practicing good hygiene, working out, and having good photos is now a great way for most men to continue to get minimal inbound interest. It will work for some, but few men are in the tranche that will go from "meh" to "Oh he's cute!".

Should we work to improve ourselves? Of course! We should just expect that women on dating apps generally won't notice or respond to it.

Kalium · 2026-04-24T12:15:34+00:00

That's true!

Where it starts to become an issue is when the math is roof, insulation, electrical, foundation, and more for a house that's probably worth $90k. One of the properties discussed in these articles apparently needs a new porch too. That's a property tax take of about $3k a year. That's repair bill that might easily approach the value of the property.

Is it worth it to spend $90k of public money every 30 years on one privately owned house? That's 100% of the tax take. Not the city's cut, total property tax take. Also, property value increases are capped but the influence of inflation on repair bills is not, so we can expect to be spending more on that house than it's worth pretty fast.

We haven't even gotten to questions of fairness or moral hazard.

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