The problem isn’t political will per se, but specifically steamrolling local NIMBYs. The people with the most political power and will tend to push high density housing out of more desirable areas and into less desirable areas. If you wanted to, for instance, but a 100 unit building in Ukrainian Village or Wicker Park in Chicago, you’d have a really stiff fight on your hands from local property owners who want to keep their neighborhood all brownstones. OTOH, if you want to demo a square block near Garfield Park and build there–and I wouldn’t recommend doing that–you’ll have the local alderman holding a golden shovel for the groundbreaking.

It’s really not that simple.

You can, for instance, buy land and build your own home. But if you do that, you’re likely going to end up paying prices that are very comparable–or much, much higher!–to the prices you would pay to get the mass-produced homes from one of a few companies that are building massive sprawl. Those companies have economies of scale working on their side; they have limited floor plans, and have more control over the cost inputs, because they can negotiate bulk pricing. If you break up the ‘cartels’, then you’re suddenly dealing with much, much more custom homebuilding.

(FWIW, I’m currently looking into custom homebuilding, so I’ve got a pretty decent idea on what some of the costs will be for even a fairly modest home where all I really want is a shell that’s stub plumbed and has a breaker box.)

The price-fixing cartels refers to rent specifically, rather than sales. And yes, there is a shortage of units for sale, and that is due largely to market forces. For instance, if I have a house right now that I still have 25 years of mortgage on, my mortgage is probably at a very low rate. Selling that home and buying a new one would mean a new mortgage, at a higher rate, which means bigger monthly payments. This is a problem that older people are running into right now; their homes are too big now that their kids are gone, but they can’t afford the new mortgage rates.

Even without rental software suggesting market values for landlords, it’s very easy to look at comparables in your general area to set your own rates close to what other people have their at. Similarly, if you list a property at $X, and get 200 queries in a single day, you are likely to set your prices higher because you know that you’re listing lower than average. (I sold a car like that; I got 50+ inquiries in just a few hours, because I’d set the price lower than market rate.)

And in places there’s actually a shortage

…Which actually is most places.

IIRC, the gov’t is restricted right now, and can’t build more without a change in the law. And sure, let’s change that. But you’re also going to need to change local zoning restrictions that prevent high density housing from going into certain residential areas.

Great! I’m all for gov’t increasing housing supply! But, frankly, most of the pushback from building affordable, high-density housing is coming from the local level. If we build high-density, affordable (e.g., low-income only, versus mixed-income) housing in it’s own area, rather than integrating it into existing communities, we’re only building the slums of the future. As it stands, well-off communities, even in areas that are heavily Democratic (such as, most of California), have been strongly opposed to locating such housing in their neighborhoods, and do everything they can to prevent it.

Katrina was notably bad because of the murders that happened in the name of “stopping looting”. We don’t talk about Hurricane Sandy, for instance, or the Galveston hurricane in the same way that we talk about Katrina, despite the fact that e.g., Galveston killed 4x as many people.

That would be great! Except that cities refuse to do that, and no one wants to put high density housing anywhere near their cute, historic neighborhood.

If you can build the political will to steamroll the NIMBYs, I’m all for it.

Okay, now you have waiting lists like they do in Copenhagen.

Pretty much every economist will tell you that rent control creates disincentives to building more housing.

This fundamentally misunderstands the way that the market works.

If you have 1000 people trying to rent a 1br apartment, and there are 500 1br apartments on the market, then yeah, the price is going to go up, because there’s more demand than supply. But supply is constrained by outside factors, like zoning, and neighborhoods that don’t want to ruin their “character” be someone building high-density housing next to their cute, retro bungalow. Sure, you can build your apartment complex out in BFE, but no one wants to rent a place out in BFE because now they can’t get to their job in a reasonable amount of time, and have to drive rather than take public transit (or walk, ride a bike, etc.). Plus, that creates sprawl.

If you really want more housing, blaming landlords–including corporate landlords–isn’t going to fix it. Blame the cities that won’t allow proper high density housing, blame the NIMBYs.

I don’t know where people think that more housing comes from; someone has to put up the money. I’m fine with it being the state, but someone has to front the money in the first place.

…And the net result would be that they would charge more on rent. And since taxing at higher rates would deter people from building more rental properties, the housing shortage would get worse.

IIRC there’s one part on the Shadow II that’s known to fail at regular intervals, I think the extractor? It’s something that’s well known to competitive shooters, common enough that they keep spares on hand the same way that most competitors keep spare optics batteries on hand. I don’t know that I’d try running a Shadow or Shadow II for thousands of rounds without cleaning, just because it’s got closer tolerances than a CZ-75B. But that’s just me.

Oh, and if you like CZ, check out KMR Arms. KMR does some of CZ’s manufacturing, and also does their own line. Sadly, they aren’t yet generally available in the US due to the general difficulties in importing pistols, but I’ve heard they’re trying to work out distribution. These should be viewed solely as competition guns though rather than tactical or duty firearms; you should probably not be using any of them as a carry gun.

EDIT: A range can probably get away with a little less cleaning, because they limit the ammunition that people can use; they can only sell very clean burning ammunition that won’t leave a ton of powder and copper fouling. Most people that practice on their own use whatever is cheap, which may even be shitty Russian surplus Wolf ammo with lacquered steel cases, and corrosive Berdan primers.

Well, you’re definitely correct about many PDs using revolvers before switching to Glocks. That goes back to the Miami shootout with the FBI; FBI agents were still using revolvers at the time, and they were significantly outgunned b/c one of the suspects was armed with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle. As a result, the FBI started looking for a better sidearm, and the initially settled on 10mm before adopting the .40S&W. Glock managed to bring a .40S&W pistol to market before Smith & Wesson did (!!!), and then charged below cost for PDs in order to convince them to adopt the then-new firearm.

And after finding an article about it, it looks like the NYPD did want to match the pull of their old double-action service revolvers. Which is nuts.

As in, white supremacists and cops murdering unarmed black people that are looking for food and shelter? That kind of bad?

But… That is the safety. A safety is intended to prevent ADs/NDs. And that’s what it’s doing here. If you have your finger on the trigger, then yes, it’s going to do off, and maybe you shouldn’t have your finger on the trigger unless you’re pointing the gun at something you intend to shoot?

The NY Glock trigger is, IIRC, for NYPD, so that cops aren’t “accidentally” shooting unarmed people. Because clearly it was an accident that they shoot unarmed people multiple times…

Glocks are among the most popular handguns, period. That’s because they work, and they work consistently, even with poor maintenance and cheap ammunition.

If you try running your expensive Staccato 2011 without cleaning it every few hundred rounds, you’re going to be guaranteed to have jams. A Glock? You can get about 3000 rounds at a range between cleaning.

Right. The John Sturges that was born in 1910 was directing films in 1890, twenty years before his birth, and also pioneered color and sound films several decades prior to their patents. Cool.

You’re not a very effective or amusing troll.

My experience has been that executives don’t usually have a solid grasp of how things work at ground level. They’re good for vision and overall direction, but can have… peculiar ideas about how to get there. Good management makes sure things go in the direction that executives want, without the executives interfering in actual processes.

This does assume that executives aren’t actually malicious though, and same with management.

Some of them certainly did. My younger brother, for instance. He’s quite literally a psychopath. There’s no cure for him, no rehabilitation that would fix him. The best that can be done is keeping him out of society for as long as possible. He was in and out of juvie starting at about 11.

People think this without a hint of irony, and yet have never worked in a place without management. Good management improves productivity and efficiency, while also shielding workers from executives. Bad/no management almost always leads to chaos.

It’s like the whole idea of not having leaders; it’s a great theory, but it assumes that everyone is capable of working together perfectly towards the same goal, when the reality is that not everyone has the same goal.

Middlemen, etc., are trading in knowledge. They know who can do what, and decrease duplication of effort.

The Magnificent Seven was released on October 12, 1960.

The Seven Samurai was released in 1954, six years prior.

A number of Kurosawa films have been remade for American audiences. Take The Hidden Fortress; it was remade as Star Wars. Meanwhile, Kurosawa did take inspiration from western playwrights, such as Shakespeare’s MacBeth (Throne of Blood) and King Lear (Ran).

And, BTW, I happen to absolutely love chanbara, especially and including the schlock garbage like Sleepy Eyes of Death, Zatoichi, Lady Snowblood, Lone Wolf and Cub, and especially Hanzo the Razor. Samurai film share a lot of similarities with western films, and many of the low-budget sword-fighting films were modeled after the western genre films (only with a funk and jazz soundtrack).