frostbiker

At least it aligns our fiscal policy with our current monetary policy. I wonder to what extent they are making these cuts precisely to put downward pressure on inflation, and thus encourage the central bank to reduce interest rates in the future.

Selling smoke.

Or, you know, follow the rule of law instead of lynching people we don't like.

Violence against elected officials is not compatible with democracy. To those cheering at this act of violence: you are as violent and authoritarian as the people you loathe. Shame on you.

They are more representative for the spanish people than junts or pnv or eh bildu ever will be

Except for, you know, the fact that Spaniards voted for them.

Again, that is how a parliamentary system works.

They are indeed tightly interrelated because one of the big reasons why people want to live in the suburbs is in order to be away from traffic, which is tragic because those car-dependent suburbs are a big reason why there's so much traffic in our denser areas. With better urbanism the denser areas become much more liveable for those of us who have no choice but to live there.

This means we need to address the housing crisis in a holistic fashion: housing, transport, daily errands and recreation all come together in a well planed urban area.

It feels like solving the housing crisis is as simple as universally allowing 4-plexes in existing single-family zoning

If you simply increase population density without addressing car dependence then traffic will get much worse than it is now. It is thus imperative that we allow for everyday necessities to be doable within a walking distance of where people live, so that people have the choice to avoid using their car for every single daily activity if they don't want to. This entails at the very least having grocery shopping, schools, retail commercial spaces and pharmacies/clinics within a walkable distance.

Around the world this is typically achieved by allowing commercial activity on the street-facing ground floors of buildings.

It doesn’t matter what anyone tries to identify as … the problem starts when someone chooses to identify one way or another for monetary, social or professional gain. The problem start when the person appropriates an identity under false pretenses and then benefits from that identity and then chooses to live under that lie.

The biggest issue here is honesty

Another issue is that self-identifying in a certain way shouldn't come with monetary, social or professional benefits. Easier said than done, of course, but at least in some cases it already happens. For example, people aren't entitled to use a handicapped parking spot by merely self-identifying as having limited mobility; sports organizations have (still evolving) rules for trans athletes; etc.

Whatever we do there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system, and people who will unfortunately fall through the cracks. Part of the issue is also that many of these identities aren't binary: plenty of people have mixed heritage, or have partial disabilities. What do we do about that, and where do we draw the line? Can we have the nuance to cope with gray areas on a case by case basis? A broad consensus will be difficult to achieve in gray cases.

There will never be a consensus on what it means to “be’ Indigenous or what the qualifications are for someone to claim that they identify as Indigenous. So when we consult “members of the Indigenous community” who are we talking about?

That is the crux of the problem, isn't it? In other areas like sexual orientation or gender identity, there's a decently broad consensus that we should allow people to self-identify. The benefit of self-identification is that it discourages gatekeeping. One downside is that it doesn't change the fact that the broader community may still reject a person's self-identity. See for example the debate surrounding trans women in sports.

The issue becomes more acute when being perceived as a certain identity comes with some privileges, whether informal or sanctioned by our government. When that happens, it creates an incentive for people to self-identify in a way that they believe will benefit them in some way or another.

I don't have a solution. Just rambling.

Yeah, you are completely right, I should not jump to conclusions. At the same time, the article does show that attacks against Jewish people have increased recently.

We unfortunately have our own conflicts too.

Yes, that's what I was hinting at. We have enough domestic problems already.

We do, and across generations. But just because there is an armed conflict between two factions somewhere else, it doesn't mean we need to replicate it here. We can and should do better.