Hoarding land and land speculation is really the root problem.
It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to provide rentable space to industries and business or to provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide easy money to investors.
Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard work from you? That's easy money.
The key words here are "a basic" level of housing. A house in the most exclusive area of town will always be an investment (not necessarily a good one), because it primarily offers exclusion of other poorer members of the society from your surroundings, not habitation for yourself. It can't be affordable by definition.
But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for healthcare.
It's also possible for housing to be neither affordable nor an investment. If there's an expensive area of town, and property tax is 100%, that would be expensive and I don't think people would consider it an investment.
Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?
> Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead.
I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.
But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support.
So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.
It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and buying up dozens.
You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.
I'm a transwoman who had dysphoria the moment puberty started. Before puberty I as fine with my body, but once it started it became complete body horror. The word dysphoria is used a lot, but I think body horror is a more relatable concept. Have you ever seen the movie The Fly? It's like that. It's not that I felt I had the wrong body, it's that my body was literally changing into something I did not want and did not fit me. When my voice changed it wrecked me. I begged the adults around me for hormones or blockers something to make it stop and they all refused. If I was born a girl, people would think it was fucked up if the adults forced me to take testosterone and develop male characteristics. But because I was born a boy, that means I'm forced to take testosterone even if I know 100% I'm not? I know they were trying their best and wanted to make sure I didn't make the wrong choice, but by doing that, they deprived me of being able to make the correct choice. I started estrogen at 18, the moment I had autonomy, and haven't once had a doubt and that was back in the late 2000s.
As for male interests, I like computers and programming. I think of it as less of a "male interest" as a "nerd interest" since most of the males I grew up with were into sports, something I'm very much not.
As for relating to men, I'm attracted to men. I like programming which is male dominated. But I wouldn't say I fully relate to them. I don't really understand a lot of things about men and I think outside of some interest overlap, I don't relate that much.
Those studies were mostly from the 80s-2000s when things were really different. Kids were often referred just for being gender nonconforming (like boys playing with dolls), not necessarily having serious gender dysphoria. Plus the treatment back then was often trying to make kids more "gender typical" - which obviously might push some kids toward appearing to "desist" even if they still had gender issues.
Many of the kids in those studies didn't even meet what we'd now consider the criteria for gender dysphoria. So saying "80% of trans kids desist" might be more like "80% of gender nonconforming kids don't turn out to be trans" - which is pretty different.
The majority of the sample met the criteria for gender dysphoria as listed in the DSM. Gender non-conforming behavior is just one criterion, multiple of which need to be met to categorized as gender dysphoric. This is the same set of criteria that a medical professional would use to approve a patient for puberty blockers.
The predominant approach back then was not to suppress incongruent gender identity. The approach was to take a neutral stance and neither foster not suppress the patient's gender identity, called "watchful waiting".
> The predominant approach back then was not to suppress incongruent gender identity. The approach was to take a neutral stance and neither foster not suppress the patient's gender identity, called "watchful waiting".
The clinic involved in this study actively was known for conversion therapy. Zenneth Zucker is one of the authors and is famous for it.
The head of the child and adolescent gender identity clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, has made a career promising the parents of intersexed and transgender children that he can make them “normal”. His method, called reparative therapy, in which children are pushed into assigned gender roles and discouraged from behaving or dressing in a way that’s counter to their ‘assigned’ sex, was once standard practice, but in recent years, has been increasingly scrutinized. A 2003 report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry called his techniques “something disturbingly close to reparative therapy for homosexuals,” and author Phyllis Burke has questioned the idea that transgendered children should be treated as mentally ill, saying, “The diagnosis of GID in children, as supported by Zucker and [his colleague J. Michael Bailey] Bradley, is simply child abuse.”
I imagine a conversion therapy clinic would issue a study that their conversion therapy works. I wonder how long those kids stayed "desisted" or if they were just pressured into the closet again only to transition later in life.
Kenneth Zucker won over half a million dollars in a defamation lawsuit over these false claims. Your own link covers his successful defamation lawsuit, but you seem to have ignored this:
> After his dismissal, Zucker sued CAMH for defamation and wrongful dismissal.[3] In October 18, CAMH settled with Zucker for $586,000 in damages, legal fees, and interest and released an apology for the report falsely stating he called a patient a "hairy little vermin".[3][46] CAMH removed the report from its website and apologized, and replaced it with a summary of the report which has not survived a move to its new website.
Is it intellectually honest to post CAMH's accusations against Zucker, but neglect to mention that they were sued, paid out a settlement, apologized, and removed this report?
And again, what about the other three studies that all saw desistance rates over 70%? Even if you want to ignore Zucker's results on the grounds that he practiced "conversion therapy" (despite winning his defamation case...) it's not the only study conducted on desistance rates absent puberty blockers.
> I wonder how long those kids stayed "desisted" or if they were just pressured into the closet again only to transition later in life.
You don't need to wonder, just read the study: they followed up with patients over a decade later. By comparison, much of the research attempting to study the benefits of puberty blockers only follow up 1 or 2 years later, yet few seem to point out that this is a small duration of time in the context of a child's entire future adult life.
I'm sorry, I don't want to spend my whole friday evening getting into this.
For me, the topic is personal because I was one of those young transgirls who was forced to go through male puberty. I transitioned the moment I was 18. I'm in my thirties now and still trans and still a woman. There's aspects of my body that are still permanently altered by the fact that I was forced to go through male puberty. I still resent the adults in my life, particularly the psychiatrist who strung me a long for years while I had to go through body horror. I would have done literally anything for hormone blockers back then.
I'm sure this is personal for you too. That's why you spend so much effort replying. Maybe we can see common ground? Neither of us want children to be forced to go through the wrong puberty.
A child put on blockers that would have desisted absent hormonal intervention is also a child that goes through the "wrong puberty". Chances are a good number of your psychiatrist's patients that became comfortable in their same sex gender, who would have been put on blockers and set on a track towards transition if your psychiatrist took a permissive approach towards hormonal intervention. Any responsible cost-benefit analysis of blockers has to weigh the effect it has on persistence rates.
And the cohort studies among gender dysphoria patients that don't receive blockers do show a majority desistence. This isn't just Zucker's practice finding majority rates of desistence. And your personal stake is still no justification to repeat defamatory statements about him.
What if we charged a small toll for comments. We create a web standard where you can precharge an amount to your browser account, then you get charged $0.02 for making a comment. The price could be progressively raised until the spammers stop. The profit could pay for website hosting. This would be affordable for users but prohibitively expensive for spammers.
The problem originates from LLM service so the toll needs to be on LLM usage in a way that doesn't harm legitimate users but makes it unprofitable to abuse in bulk.
This is a cartel, not capitalism. It's literally voters doing regulatory capture and preventing new housing because they want their property values to go up.
When there wasnt regulatory capture in late 19th, entire US ended up getting owned by ~12 robber barons. The housing situation was the same back then: Barons would be buying up or building entire neighborhoods in which people would have to live like feudal tenants on knife's edge.
These futile attempts to redeem capitalism are making it difficult to address the problems that it creates.
That used to be the driving factor, politically at least. But things have changed. As older folks retire and sell to fund their end of life care, funds, corporations and the super rich have swept in to buy the properties, increasingly pricing out regular folks who depend on an (also more expensive) mortgage which the investors don’t have to worry about. So on the margin, fewer and fewer homes are in regular people’s hands. That is capitalism’s inevitable consequence: those that have wealth can ever more quickly acquire more of it.
