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It’s funny how time and circumstances can erode disappointments, over time. I’m sure that at one time I had hopes for career advancement which have largely become irrelevant, since having concluded that it’s better to be self-employed. I used to be disappointed in womanhood’s indifference to me, until I spent so long living on my own that I decided it’s just as well. Years ago, there was a time when I was fired up to move to one of the really big cities, but the post-9/11 security-state transformations of Washington and New York cooled a good deal of that ardor. And for years, now, I’ve cherished this little dream of bailing out on our afflicted nation to take up residence in Canada, but…

Lately, it seems like a concerted campaign is in progress to convince me that it wouldn’t be worth bothering.

The national government in Ottawa has been run by increasingly-American-ish Conservatives for years, now. And in my Canadian city-of-choice, Toronto, the current mayor is apparently a reactionary blowhard from the Bill O’Reilly school. Presumably these things will change, eventually, but the larger picture of Canada becoming a petrostate seems worryingly likely to be a long-term trend. (more…)

Alright, part of what’s bugging me here may just be a product of Matthew Yglesias busily promoting his e-book, and therefore placing a lot of posts about his arguments against artificially-high rents in front of me. But even if Yglesias is ultimately behind most of the noise about insufficient rental housing, he isn’t alone. He’s apparently got this guy Mark Bergen joining in, both at Forbes as well as at Good (which I read for a while last year, before giving up). And Ryan Avent has been writing along similar lines over at The Economist for quite some while.

And in some ways I’m quite sympathetic, here. I rent, after all, so I’m interested, particularly in any idea which might lower my cost of living. And I’m sure there’s something in all of this fretting and complaining, especially lately as a traumatic disaster in the mortgage market has undeniably moved more people into the renter’s market for various reasons, including what may well be an entire generation or two (myself included) which is now permanently more averse to obtaining housing through an arrangement which, translated from French, essentially means “death pact.” In a lot of ways I think it’s great that the national obsession with “homeownership” may have receded a bit and that my own preferences for housing/agreement type may not mark me as a shifty-loner-outcast quite as immediately.

However, it’s not so great if we have more people demanding one category of housing (which I happen to prefer also) while the supply remains fixed. That way lies yet another basic living expense going up, and up. And that’s pretty much the essence of Yglesias’s complaint, so far as I can tell. So far, so fair-enough.

Except I kind of wonder, just how general a problem is this alleged rental-housing shortage? Those guys are the masters of number-crunching and I’m not, so they may well have a solid foundation for presenting this as an everyone problem. But I still find myself wondering, to be blunt, is this actually any kind of national problem or is it just a New York issue? (more…)

It’s been some time since I’ve done one of these posts, and I hadn’t even really intended to be writing any sort of “series,” anyway. But, hey, maybe it’s a decent idea. I can certainly think of a thing or two to say to one state in particular, of late… I actually wrote this up about a week ago and then thought, hm, isn’t this just gratuitous even by SB “standards?” But having given it further reflection, actually: no. The problem is not going away, and may well be getting worse. So, then…

Dear Tejas,

Could you just go the fuck away, at some point here, already?

Seriously, for all that we hear about fucking Texas this, Texas that, Texas Texas Texas all fucking day long day after day week after week all year ’round, what positive contribution to anything has come out of Texas in recent memory?

The Mavericks’ victory in this year’s NBA finals, maybe? I didn’t personally see this as positive, but I realize that many non-Texans nonetheless embraced the Dallas team as America’s sweethearts in spite of being the expensive toy of Mark Cuban, whom most people otherwise agree is a dumbfuck jerk. Aside from myself, there was indeed widespread sentiment that a Mavs victory was desirable, because old Dirk Nowitzki “needed” to get a championship finally, and more importantly because someone needed to prevent the Miami Heat from getting one, because they had been appointed as the “bad guys,” because they seemed to be obnoxious and full of themselves… like, in other words, the entire state of Texas…

Still, for argument’s sake, I’ll grant that the state of Texas was somehow the savior of the NBA this year. Considering all the noise which comes from that particular renegade former province of Mexico, I don’t think “hero of the NBA finals” goes very far. What else does Texas have to its credit?

…yes, that would be the sound of crickets chirping if this were a podcast.

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