Well, the relationship between the supply and the price of housing is complicated. I live in NYC, in a building which has over 700 units in it. The building takes up as much land as a single-family home does in a rural area. But of course living in this building is much more expensive than living in that single-family home, despite the fact that the building represents a much larger supply of housing.

I know your example says “exogenous” and I agree that technically increasing supply doesn’t directly lead to increasing prices, but in practice if I see a lot of new housing being built in an area, I would expect that housing prices in that area are going up. (Why build housing somewhere where it won’t be a good investment?)

Well, not so much in the literal sense…

Every law is potentially unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says is isn’t. Here the court is just saying that this particular law isn’t so obviously and extremely unconstitutional that the ordinary process of appeals ought to be bypassed.

(I happen to think that the law is probably constitutional so IMO the Supreme Court is being reasonable, but I’m not a lawyer…)

I think that some of the arguments Texas is making are silly but the overall reasoning isn’t ridiculous. State law can’t forbid people to enter who are allowed to enter by federal law (or allow people to enter who are forbidden to enter by federal law) but I don’t see any clear constitutional reason why a state cannot enforce a state law against someone entering in violation of federal law. The federal government still has ultimate authority; it just needs to exercise it by changing the law rather than by failing to enforce existing law.

And, as a practical matter, letting Texas do this may be a way of addressing an issue voters care a lot about while bypassing both obstructionist Republicans in Congress and Democratic activists.

Note that this is not a decision that the law is constitutional.

[The decision] means the law can go into effect while litigation continues in lower courts. It could still be blocked at a later date.

Can someone more familiar with the precedent help me understand this case? It seems pretty clear that federal immigration law preempts any contradictory state law, but in this case the state law apparently does not contradict federal law. (Or is that not so?) Does the existence of the federal law prevent the state from enforcing even a compatible state law? Or does the exercise of discretion by the federal government regarding the manner in which federal law is enforced preempt a state from choosing to prosecute someone for violating state law if the federal government chose not to prosecute that person for violating an identical federal law?

I don’t see why this is so outrageous. Why should someone with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets receive free medical care?

Just say no to revisionists. Take brontosaurus back!

He doesn’t look so tawny to me…

Well, technically all goblins have backstories. Most of them just don’t have backstories that involve getting proficiency in dex saves.

One thing I’m curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.

Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character’s backstory. For example, he might say “You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father.”

What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”

On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he’s running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it’s no longer his job to make sure that your characters’s backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.

If the DM doesn’t want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like

The man was just a hired thug. All he knows is that the murderer and his elite guards left in the direction of [city the players were going to visit later anyway].

The man was killed during the fighting, but you find half of a strange icon, the holy symbol of a god you don’t recognize, hanging from a golden chain around his neck.

This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it’s not something you’d tell them in character.

People only figured out the mechanics of plate tectonics relatively recently. However, they started noticing that the continents looked like they had fit together as soon as they had accurate maps to look at. In the late 1500’s

Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus … suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods” and went on to say: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”

Wikipedia link.

One thing I love about art deco is that it is not self-conscious. That’s how you can get stuff like this:

(A beard to impress any dwarf! Also, when I first saw it I thought he was zapping the viewer with two lightning bolts but he’s actually holding a compass.)

dryads reject lizardfolk and only lizardfolk

Lolth is an edgelord that makes all the other gods cringe.

My impression is that Substack markets itself as a platform that refuses to censor unpopular opinions. In that context, hosting Nazi publications is, in a sense, a positive. If they’re not even going to remove Nazis, they’re definitely not going to remove you if you say something controversial.

It looks like many Substack authors don’t agree, or don’t think that safety from being deplatformed is worth being associated with Nazis, however tenuous that association is. Substack has to be careful to avoid a cascade in which respectable authors leave, which causes the reputation of the platform to decline, which causes more authors to leave, until pretty much just the Nazis are left. But Substack also has to be careful to avoid the opposite phenomenon, where any censorship will start a cycle of greater and greater censorship.