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New post: some thoughts heading into the college football season. I picked Texas over 'Bama for the title writers-fakeblock.blogspot.com/2025/08/on-202โฆ
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Arjun Chandrasekhar ๐ฐ
2.7K posts
Arjun Chandrasekhar ๐ฐ
@arjunc12
@SouthwesternU prof, @Caltech + @UCSD alum, PhD. I dream of College Football, NBA, Culinary Arts, Discrete Math, Pop Culture, LVT, and John Quincy Adams
ATX via SoCal ๊ฐ์
์ผ Mart 2009
1.6K ํ๋ก์979 ํ๋ก์
Arjun Chandrasekhar ๐ฐ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
@PastorView @statsowar I am actually imagining a system where the committee could pick any N >= 2 for the playoff, with all non-title games played on campuses. But I know that's even less likely to happen haha
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@arjunc12 @statsowar You would always know how many 2nd round games there would be. The fluidity would be in 1st round on-campus games, and those sites donโt know till selection Sunday anyway.
BUT, ESPN wouldnโt know how many games theyโre buying the rights for. And thatโs why itโll never happen
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Let's take it a few steps further, not just selecting location, but selecting opponent.
Ross Dellenger@RossDellenger
Greg Sankey mentions here an interesting adjustment that CFP leaders made for this year where the 1 seed in the playoff has its choice of both its quarterfinal and semifinal bowl locations, followed by the 2 seed having its choice of its path as well.
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@PastorView @statsowar That's kind of like how the Oscars does it for the best picture, and generally I love it. The committee could pick just 2 teams in 2005, 4 teams in 2008, etc.
I just wonder if it's logistically feasible to not know ahead of time how many playoff games will take place
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@statsowar This gets close to my idea: Donโt have a set number of playoff spots. Use computers to rank teams. Use committee to determine how many get in. Some years the gap is between team 8-9 sometimes itโs 10-11.
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@NoahProoval @StatisticUrban Or we could, you know, try to diversify the economy.
Housing wealth is really land wealth, land is scarce and non-reproducible, it's completely unsustainable to keep doubling down on putting all our economic eggs in that particular basket
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@StatisticUrban I mean, in a country where the main investment and intergenerational wealth vehicle is housing people aren't exactly crazy to not want to get stuck in lower class of permanent renters. Not crazy at all.
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The push to ban large companies from owning housing is purely a populist tantrum. The problem is not real, and it will not solve or help any actual problems, like affordability.
Jay Parsons@jayparsons
Name one major U.S. industry where the biggest players have <0.5% market share. The apartment business has gotta be the most fragmented major industry, is it not? Big names, sure, but no behemoth owners. (Analysis from today's release of the NMHC Top 50)
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Harry Heymann ๐ฅ@harryh
@amoralorealis I think what is happening is that leftists (and almost everyone else tbh) see that homeownership is good for the individual homeowner (under our current land use regime) and then mistakenly jump from that to "the way to help society is to help more people become homeowners."
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Lots of people -- namely @SenWarren -- seem to sincerely believe that no one in their right mind would choose to rent.
For @TheArgumentMag, I wrote about the millions of people who disagree.
theargumentmag.com/p/stop-trying-โฆ
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@UneducatedTakes @HPbasketball Also get rid of individual maximum salaries.
But yes, what you said
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@HPbasketball Abolish the draft (wokely). Rookies are FAs
Hard cap, not tax, no apron
Young players will choose orgs that are run well and give them an opportunity. Do you want to ride the bench in LA on a cheap contract, or start in Urah for more money?
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The idea of the draft is to give the worst teams talent to get better.
1. That's not what's happening. the Jazz aren't low on talent. The Wizards have more than they've shown.
2. SO MANY teams get good draft slots and suck anyway because their *organizational structure* is a disaster. You cannot fix a rotten multi-billion-dollar function with an 18-year-old. That's a bandaid on a bullet wound.
3. I am personally very done with forgiving organizational incompetence behind the idea that they got the 4th best 18-year-old instead of the 2nd
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Harry Heymann ๐ฅ@harryh
@amoralorealis I think what is happening is that leftists (and almost everyone else tbh) see that homeownership is good for the individual homeowner (under our current land use regime) and then mistakenly jump from that to "the way to help society is to help more people become homeowners."
QME
Frequency, reliability, speed, and safety are the most important factors but I also think that if every transit system could accept tap the way the NYC metro now does it would have a much bigger ridership impact than reducing the sticker price
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I canโt imagine someone who sincerely preferred to take transit but went with uber instead because the $4.75 transit fare spooked them.
OTOH I have seen people eschew transit because it wasnโt worth it to find exact change or find/download a clunky app before the bus arrives
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I honestly think the ease of payment (or lack thereof) is a bigger annoyance to potential transit users than the actual number on the fare.
Matthew Chapman@fawfulfan
Frequency is the most important factor. The vehicles being clean and not having visible disorder is the second most important factor. Fares, or lack thereof, is *at most* third behind these, and if you cut corners on either to get to free fares, your transit is going to fail.
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@LouiseS1996 @Matthuber78 Not when the asset in question is land
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@Matthuber78 How can asset appreciation outweigh productive investment? The assets are doing productive things
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โโฆthe dynamics have inverted: asset appreciation now outweighs productive investmentโฆThe result is an urban anti-growth machine: a decentralized but powerful coalition of homeowners, landlords, neighborhood associations, & local officials that blocks new construction.โ
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@_RoboBoogie @Birdyword You should read Mikeโs book (Iโm still waiting on my copy to arrive) but you could also read this one landisabigdeal.com/?ref=fortressoโฆ
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@arjunc12 @Birdyword Right, itโs supply and demand, and much of the demand here comes from Australia having very high immigration
Am I going to have to read his book
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The great news for people who want to live as we did 20 or 30 years ago is that such a life is available to you, and getting cheaper with every passing day.
wanye@xwanyex
I just completely reject that we are wealthier than we were 20 or 30 years ago in any way that matters. Whatever data seems to show that we are is very clearly not measuring what you want to measure. I donโt think burrito taxis matter. I think the phones have made us miserable. I donโt think the advancements in communication are important. I donโt care that the cars have more features. I donโt think any of this stuff matters like even a little bit. And I certainly wouldnโt trade my country for more of it. I think we long ago reached a level of comfort thatโs sufficient. We arenโt hungry. We arenโt cold. We arenโt worked to death in fields. I wouldnโt trade my family for more stuff. I wouldnโt trade my country for more stuff. The people who see all this so-called material wealth and think that the opportunity costs are just too large to have children or that we need to give away the country to foreigners to keep the train rolling are in my view demented, deranged, lost. And their addiction to antidepressants and other mood-altering pills seems to confirm it.
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@_RoboBoogie @Birdyword Even w/out immigration, land value rises from native population growth and technological advances. Anything that increases productivity increases the value and opportunity cost of owning land.
We canโt outrun it but we can embrace it to everyoneโs benefit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism?โฆ
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@_RoboBoogie @Birdyword Thatโs because land is the one thing that technology canโt and wonโt make more abundant - which is why @Birdyword wrote the book that he did!
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@Birdyword I cannot buy a house with a decent sized backyard commuting distance to my work - unlike my parents and their siblings. Iโm further up the income percentiles too
Agree on literally everything else being better though!
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@BloggedByRain Is this not a generalised anti-improving-lives argument? So long as you still use a "landlords can do whatever they want to you" system, literally anything good will raise rents and thus gentrify.
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I donโt have the exact wording yet but I feel like the dislike cars and wanting walkable cities is tied to dislike of Black people.
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Arjun Chandrasekhar ๐ฐ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
New deep dive video: I analyzed the urban design of Ba Sing Se in Avatar: The Last Airbender
youtube.com/watch?v=N1_XjAโฆ
YouTube
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@bobcobb301 @ZaidJilani Also it's a bit disingenuous to use an edge case like squatter's rights to argue that the state does nothing at all to enforce exclusivity. It is not the case that any individual can take any property by force (which is the logical endpoint of your "security guard" framework)
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@arjunc12 @ZaidJilani This is not the law anywhere. You can pay property taxes AND someone else can still have squatters rights to your house.
If I kick their ass and throw them out I go to jail.
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I learned recently Texas makes you pay taxes on the entire car price when you lease. This is one of many ways you get nickeled and dimed once you cut progressive taxes like income and property. Give to rich and take away from everyone else.
Atlanta News First@ATLNewsFirst
Georgia Republicans introduce plan to eliminate property taxes by 2032 atlantanewsfirst.com/2026/01/29/geoโฆ
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@bobcobb301 @ZaidJilani The squatter's ability to eventually claim ownership is contingent on paying property taxes, as are your ability to evict them by legalistic means. You aren't refuting the idea that the property taxes are the fee for the state enforcing exclusive access.
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@bobcobb301 @ZaidJilani Are you going to concede your property rights if someone else hires a bigger badder security guard?
Personally thatโs not the kind of society I want to live in, Iโd rather have a government to enforce law and order and I want to fund it in the most economically efficient way
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@arjunc12 @ZaidJilani Ridiculous when states are saying they can choose which federal laws to enforce like immigration.
Can I opt out of this agreement and just hire a security guard to โenforce my rightsโ?
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