The author disclaims that he's not a homeowner at the very end of the article, but these types of pieces steelmanning renting always read to me as thinly veiled pleas of "please exit the market so I can have more".
And over the decades there have been many more pro-renting pieces like this in the general press than pro-home ownership. I’ve assumed the pieces are bankrolled by the investment community, because investment bankers can’t make money off of your money if your money is locked up in a home.
“Rent your apartment, save the difference, invest it in the financial casino of your choice and maybe you’ll win big this time.” Or maybe not. But the house (investment brokers) always win.
this is one of those where sheer facts and numbers can be interpreted either way and more
so (in my opinion) than most other “arguments” it is almost impossible
to change someone’s opinion once it formed.
I once spent 1/2 my Sunday trying to convince my best friend that he would have financially been better off if he rented (he paid off his house which he can sell today for $2,000,000) - I came with receipts (pun intended) showing how he would
have been significantly better off if he rented and invested in the market but to no avail :)
Someone must have a wild-ass theorem about whether or not consciousness is representable as some distribution over possible realities. But yeah, I agree this feels like taking a huge step towards fewer and fewer people having agency in their own (real) lives.
I'm certain Big [insert industry] will gobble this kind of thing up.
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
I think of it as being reactively empathetic instead of proactively empathetic. Comes from a place of incuriosity and probably fear of mortality and bursting the just world fallacy, among other things. It's a bummer so many are so stingy with their hearts, as though love is some finite resource.
I like to call it "radius of empathy". My spouse provides counseling and therapy services, and is amazed how some of her colleagues can show such genuine empathy to their clients, yet be so unconcerned with the suffering of others that result from the policies promoted by the people they vote for and vocally support.
Well said. And it is probably worth a point of clarification, since some of these replies are acting as if I said that conservatives can't be compassionate. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm specifically using a definition of empathy like the following (emphasis mine)[1]:
>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation
It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.
If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.
The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.
"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."
-Source unknown
EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.
If you want to be this petty, this can be easily explained as american right not caring about Palestine specifically and simply hating him for other things. Please do not try to left/right this.
There is something crazy ugly going on on the left with all their 'happy he got an extremely painful cancer' that is not normal in American discourse and needs to have light shown on it. Please don't try to cover that up, it needs to stop/go away, or at the least be called out, not the calling out being silenced.
> All the people saying Biden's a genocider of Palestine and you shouldn't forget it just because he has cancer are on the left.
Well, they are from the crowd using leftist rhetoric to convince people that the most important thing in the world is to oppose the dominant center-right liberal wing of the Democratic Party at all costs, and which has continued to hold that position even when the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government, and most state governments, and is in the process dismantling the rule of law. A crowd which, incidentally, rapidly metastasized from a small fringe group to a well-funded, highly-visible network between the time that Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and the 2024 election.
Now, they could be genuine leftists with the worst imaginable praxis (certainly, truly effective praxis is too rare a commodity on the left), but there are other obvious explanations.
I see it differently. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy from the right when Bidens news broke. I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.
> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
In the case of George Wallace, he really did change. But like you're pointing out, it's not great if someone has to get shot before they realize they've been a jerk.
On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.
I would love to have such a model tell me how to prune my fruit trees as they grow up. Should be a fairly straightforward supervised problem with the right front end for the graph generation.
You can start right now with an algorithm I learned from an expert when I was working in a landscaping business.
It is a very simple three-pass plan: "Deadwood, Crossovers, Aesthetics".
So, first pass, go through the tree cutting out only and all the dead branches. Cut back to live stock, and as always make good clean angle cuts at a proper angle (many horticulture books will provide far better instructions on this).
Second pass, look only for branches that cross-over other branches and especially those that show rubbing or friction marks against other branches. Cut the ones that are either least healthy or grow in the craziest direction (i.e., crazy away from the normal more-or-less not radially away from the trunk).
Then, and only after the other two passes are complete, start pruning for the desired look and/or size & shape for planned growth or bearing fruit.
This method is simple and saves a LOT of ruined trees from trying to first cut to size and appearance, then by the time the deadwood and crossovers are taken later, it is a scraggly mess that takes years to grow back. And it even works well for novices, as long as they pay attention.
I'd suspect entering the state and direction of every branch to an app would take longer than just pruning with the above method, although for trees that haven't fully leafed out, perhaps a 360° angle set of drone pics could make an adequate 3D model to use for planning?
In any case, good luck with your fruit trees — may they grow healthy and provide you with great bounty for many years!
When i read OP this is what I thought it was going to be - these branches are going to be apex competitors, these are crossing or going to cross, this one shows signs of disease, this one interrupts air flow through the centre, etc.
Don't trust changing your card either. I had a predatory LA Fitness membership. When they made me jump through one too many hoops to cancel, I called up WF and had them issue me a new card (Visa). Well, Visa, in their infinite wisdom, gave my new credit card number to LA Fitness and they kept on charging me for almost two years before I noticed. I don't remember the name of that program at Visa, but I'm sure they and other CC companies continue to do this. Should be illegal.
Netflix does this as well, and is how I found out about it. They claim that since you didn't cancel the service, it was clearly a lapse in your updating of the new number so they just helped you out. Of course it is in everyone's favor except yours when this happens.
If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?
The simplest, safe route is to not give companies the newly updated number. If my Netflix lapses because I forgot to update the number after a card change (whatever the reason), they can email me, and then I will log in to my account and update the card on file.
> If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?
You dispute the charge, just like any other unauthorized transaction. That's quite different than changing your card number under their feet, and will be received as such by Netflix.
Do companies that do subscriptions know when multiple accounts are using the same card number? Just curious if they try to use something like that for fraud detection or anything. Then again, I don't think they'd care. Just take the monies and let the card people deal with it.
During the whole clamping down on password sharing era, I'd be very surprised if some folks haven't had to pay for multiple Netflix subscriptions (for summer houses, or their kids off at college, that sort of thing...)
Don't trust cancelling your card either. I closed my account at Capital One, paid the final balance, and six months later I noticed a steep drop in my credit score. I had a $3 monthly charge that kept recurring even though I had closed my account.
Also, because my account was "closed," I didn't receive any statements notifying me that I was being charged. I only discovered this issue when my credit score dropped by 100 points.
Closing a personal credit card, in my experience, temporarily drops the score a few points and then it goes back to normal. It's a myth promulgated by banks to keep accounts open.
If so, that just raises the question: of what benefit is it to the banks to keep unused accounts open? The maintenance costs may be low, but they're still nonzero.
You have to report the card is lost or stolen then the new number will not propagate. You likely asked for a replacement card which will propagate the new number through the network.
