Linkage

The one-sentence description of effective altruism sounds like a universal goal rather than an obscure pseudo-philosophy. After all, most people are altruistic to some extent, and no one wants to be ineffective in their altruism. From the group’s website: “Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” Pretty benign stuff, right?

Dig a little deeper, and the rationalism and utilitarianism emerges.  […]

The problem with removing the messy, squishy, human part of decisionmaking is you can end up with an ideology like effective altruism: one that allows a person to justify almost any course of action in the supposed pursuit of maximizing their effectiveness.

A lot of recent linkage.

In Scotland, people who meet a broad definition of homelessness get immediate access to short-term shelter and then put on a list for permanent housing, which is usually heavily discounted. Healthcare, a leading cause of debt in the United States, is largely free for everyone in the United Kingdom, as is treatment for the mental health and substance abuse issues that can exacerbate homelessness.

Few people here sleep on the street — about 30 in Glasgow and 40 in Edinburgh on a given night, according to Simon Community Scotland, a leading charity that deploys outreach teams and offers services in both cities. That’s up from recent years when the numbers could often be counted on one or two hands, but still a manageable figure for a pair of cities with a combined population of about 1.2 million people.

The city of Los Angeles, just over three times as populous, estimates that 46,260 people sleep on its streets on a given night.

The problem is not that the owners of multi-million-dollar homes, or those like the landed gentry of the Regency period who are deriving their income from investment properties, still believe that they are humble members of the middle class. It’s how this warped self-image is wielded, in ways that impact everyone—notably, the one in three Canadians who rent. This is most obvious in the inclination of owners to rent on Airbnb rather than long term; in North Vancouver, one Airbnb host complained to North Shore News that “people don’t want to deal with [long-term] tenants” who are less profitable and harder to evict. But it’s also evident in the way that homeowners frequently oppose new developments that encroach on their neighbourhoods, fighting—often successfully—against change and exacerbating unaffordability and insufficient housing supply in the process. This opposition frames apartment dwellers not as prospective neighbours but as interlopers; when BC’s NDP government introduced new legislation to end restrictive zoning in communities with more than 5,000 people on November 1, Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer described it as the latest escalation in a “war on single-family neighbourhoods.” 

This is what Israel and Palestine look like now.

Every day for the last six weeks, journalists in Gaza have shown inhuman strength and bravery reporting from the frontlines. Journalists are losing their lives at four times the rate of the enclave’s general population. Since the start of the war, nearly fifty journalists have been killed by Israeli forces. That’s almost one every single day. Two are unaccounted for and at least a further six are missing. More journalists have died since the beginning of this violence than in the last twenty years.

At the same time, many journalists have been displaced from their homes, and are now living in tents around Khan Yunis. Collectively, they have lost around 1,000 family members.

This is the price they pay for doing their jobs, for documenting Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, and for showing evidence of its war crimes to the outside world. Israel does not want the world to witness their atrocities.

Israel has freely admitted to destroying communications systems in Gaza ahead of their intense bombing campaigns. Israeli airstrikes have targeted and completely or partially destroyed the headquarters of several media outlets, including al-Ayyam newspaper, Gaza FM radio, and Shehab news and Palestinian news agency Ma’an, among others. The targeting of journalists is itself a violation of international law.  

London mayor Sadiq Khan signalled a move away from demolition not backed by residents in 2018, declaring that estate regeneration schemes need to obtain support through mandatory ballots. Since then, high profile plans to demolish architecturally acclaimed estates Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill have been "paused" by Lambeth Council after an independent review by the late crossbench peer Bob Kerslake recommended a "fundamental reset" to the council's handling of the redevelopments.

Sentiment is also moving sharply against what is known as the "cross-subsidy" approach to regeneration that has dominated in the past two decades, in which council estates are demolished to make way for expensive for-sale properties that in turn fund building a proportion of more affordable homes. The model was declared "bust" by housing association leaders as far back as 2019, before the economic downturn left thousands of apartments unsold across developments in London.

While plans for demolition come under scrutiny, more emphasis is being placed on infill development, such as Camden's rejuvenation of the post-war Kiln Place social housing estate. Working with the London Borough of Camden, Peter Barber Architects upgraded the whole estate and increased its density without demolishing any existing homes.

Come with me on a magical journey between Sydney and Melbourne. No, not via the airport… but starting at Sydney’s Central Station, aboard a newly refurbished all-sleeper night train.

[…] 

So my perfect journey is a dream – but why can’t Australians enjoy such a pleasant way to travel, given sleeper trains are going through a major resurgence in Europe, partly in response to climate change? It’s a good question, and there’s a simple answer: because the New South Wales government doesn’t want you to.

High-priced houses do not create wealth; they redistribute it. And it’s meaningless because we can’t use the wealth to buy anything else – a yacht or a fast car. We can only buy other expensive houses: sell your house and you have to buy another one, cheaper if you’re downsizing, more expensive if you’re still growing a family. At the end of your life, your children get to use your housing wealth for their own housing, except that we’re all living so much longer these days it’s usually too late to be useful. And much of this housing wealth is concentrated in Sydney, where the median house value is $1.1m, double that of Perth and regional Australia.

It’s destructive because of the inequality that results: with so much wealth concentrated in the home, it stays with those who already own a house and within their families. For someone with little or no family housing equity behind them, it’s virtually impossible to break out of the cycle and build new wealth.

It will be impossible to return the price of housing to something less destructive – preferably to what it was when my parents and I bought our first houses – without purging the idea that housing is a means to create wealth as opposed to simply a place to live.

Oh, FFS! Currency issuing governments do not — and as a matter of brute accountancy can not — "pay for" anything through tax revenue!

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts – a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars.

The legislation, which is thought have inspired a plan in the UK to phase out smoking for future generations, contained a slew of other measures to make smoking less affordable and accessible. It included dramatically reducing the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products, allowing their sale only through special tobacco stores, and slashing the number of stores legally allowed to sell cigarettes from 6,000 to just 600 nationwide.