The results are spectacular for renters and buyers…One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development

Because the wall street journal’s readers aren’t renters, they’re investors, and while lower rents are good for renters they’re not good for investors.

The relationship between investors and consumers is often adversarial, they have opposing interests. The investors want to make as much money as possible and the consumers want to spend as little as possible on the things they want and need. Usually that’s not a huge problem because (ideally) consumers have choices, like the choice to not buy something they want if they think the price is too high, but when it comes to things like housing, consumers’ choices are limited to: pay whatever investors demand or be homeless. That’s less a choice than a threat.

The era of energy blindness is over. We can no longer act as though we have an infinite supply of energy. That means some difficult choices are going to have to be made.

I think it might have something to do with some young people not feeling connected to their communities. In my case, I grew up in a conservative Christian community but as I got older, I didn’t want to be conservative or Christian. I left the only community I had and I haven’t yet found another community to replace it. I don’t think this is an entirely new phenomenon, but whereas in the past young people would move from conservative rural areas to more liberal urban areas, many urban areas today are prohibitively expensive, so that’s not an option, at least not for as many young people. Many people are therefore without a community, left to feel lonely and alienated.

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Mostly. I’m fine with some of these being left up to the states, like prostitution and marijuana, although I do think marijuana’s federal status should change (from schedule 1, to a much lower schedule). Also, I think the highest tax bracket should be 99%, or even 100%. But that highest bracket should be a very high number, like 0.001% of GDP.

Oh, you are definitely working for the Biden campaign.

I’ve always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There’s no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I’m aware of, anyway.