Interesting Links for 03-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• A great short film about bikes and childhood. Delightful _and_ impressive
  (tags: bicycles viaSkreidle video )
• Simon's cat vs the spider. I giggled all the way through. And now itch.
  I _wish_ that last time I had a cat, it had been this good with spiders.
  (tags: cats spiders funny video )
• Amazing car ad, full of optical illusions
  (tags: cars

Comments

[gonzo21]

I think the house price thing is deliberate social planning. They're trying to build fewer, in order to keep the values rising, so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and eventually the majority of housing will wind up in the hands of the super-rich gentry, and everybody else will be reduced to renting.

And sadly both Labour and the Condems have bought into this scheme of enriching the rich and screwing the poor. Even though it means another financial crash is now inevitable.

[andrewducker]

The Coalition are currently pushing through changes to planning legislation to allow more building. They are getting _huge_ amounts of pushback on this.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/planning-measures-will-make-best-use-of-underused-buildings-for-providing-new-homes

http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN06418

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23831517

So it's not like moves are being made - although not as strongly as I'd like.

[gonzo21]

I sometimes wonder how much the pushback is coming from people who simply don't want their views spoiled, or if that might be the lie they tell themselves where the truth is they don't want their high property values to be threatened by the appearance of more supply.

[resonant]

My building is being torn down, and the rental units are being replaced with condos. The rich homeowners in the neighborhood love that. However, they want the zoning laws changed to only permit condos that are $500,000 and above, not the planned $350,000 and up, to attract "the right demographic".

Rich people don't want to live in the same neighbourhood as regular people.

[octopoid_horror]

It's really weird and sometimes quite upsetting how people who own property seem to change dramatically once they own it, and often seem to fail to be able to comprehend the thoughts of people who don't even if they were once non-property owners. I'm sure the reverse is true as well, of course.

There seem to be a lot of ways that renters are irrelevant to the government. It's always nice to here about yet more environmental/ease of living initiatives aimed at home owners, because if you're renting then fuck you, you can stay cold and not worry about things like energy efficiency.

[gonzo21]

We do seem to have a lot more ghettoisation going on across society as a whole than we used to. Or maybe that's just a symptom of the rapidly accelerating gap between the rich and poor.

[steer]

See comment below for some commentary on some misleading things in that article.