Swann Marcus Profile picture
May 20 4 tweets 1 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Thai people are incredible. A friend of mine who's frequently traveled in the US was surprised when I mentioned America doesn't have wild dogs everywhere like Thailand does

She's spent months of her life in America and never realized we don't have packs of roaming street dogs
This woman became the head of dermatology at a major private hospital when she was like 33 years old. I will never understand Thais - they can be absolutely brilliant and still fail to overcome whatever national trait leads them to be totally oblivious to their surroundings.
It's so hard to explain Thais to Westerners because anecdotes make them sound stupid, even though they aren't. I've seen Thais cross busy highways in the middle of the street when there's a bridge half a block away

It doesn't even save time because they have to dodge traffic!
They just have this fascinating way of viewing the world around them and of judging risks. Thais will drive their motorcycles the wrong way on the shoulder of a highway to save 3 minutes of travel time and then tell you not to use public buses because they're too dangerous

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More from @SwannMarcus89

May 22
You know what's be awesome? If we just built more housing in our cities so that when immigrants moved here it created tons of jobs in construction and related manufacturing, rather than making housing unaffordable

We could use immigration to reindustrialize Ohio, Senator Vance!
I have all these crazy ideas like "hey, what if we increased America's manufacturing base by building housing and increasing the demand for wood products, glass, and steel?"

I know, the idea that demand for manufactured goods might increase factory employment is voodoo economics
I'd love to see 2020s JD Vance argue with 2016-2017 JD Vance about housing policy Image
Read 8 tweets
May 22
lol "why are American citizens working for America's border patrol agencies?"

ktsm.com/news/border-re… Image
White liberals love nothing more than getting confused by brown people failing to exhibit racial solidarity with entirely different brown people they have little in common with
Latinos are terrible POC. Their support for increased police spending is almost identical to the KKKrackers Image
Read 5 tweets
May 22
Minnesota's median household income is $10,000 higher than Texas and its cost of living is quite low. The fact it has lower population growth rates than Kentucky is pretty much entirely attributable to Kentucky having a better climate
One flaw in how cons understand population shifts is that they'll talk about tax burden, when what actually matters is cost of living. Taxes are just one factor in overall cost-of-living and the tax difference from one state to another for the average person is small
Tax burden is also a dumb stat since the composition of taxes varies from state to state. Often times the people leaving a state aren't the ones paying high taxes in that state - expensive blue states have higher taxes for the rich, but rich people actually move to those states
Read 8 tweets
May 22
This meme never stops being relevant

latimes.com/california/sto… ImageImage
Housing vouchers are such a stupid policy. We should just build public housing instead. The government should be building housing, not subsidizing demand in supply-constrained markets where no amount of vouchers will ever reduce the size of the homeless population
If you want to know how useless housing vouchers are, that article praises Santa Barbara for using its vouchers more effectively than LA. Santa Barbara's metro area has far more homeless people per capita than San Francisco does.
Read 4 tweets
May 22
You can always tell a system is working extraordinarily well when a mayor has to ask the federal government to help cut through the red tape in the city where she is nominally the chief executive
A Democratic president will never do this, but the proper response here is "we'll send resources on the condition you change your zoning policies."

If you don't want to remove barriers to housing construction, we won't waste federal resources fighting your own city's policies
Ironically, it's probably a more efficient use of resources to try and build supportive and public housing in cities that *don't* currently have a housing crisis. Those are the places where it's actually possible to build, so we should drive prices down there as much as possible
Read 4 tweets
May 21
You'd think after the insane "zero covid" debacle and the unsustainable debt of China's rail and housing systems people would stop buying into this mid-2010s idea that China's ruling class is brilliantly efficient
America shouldn't try to be more like China in terms of housing and public transportation.

We should try to be more like continental Europe
Sorry to break it to you, but China's GDP stats are also fake, just like their Covid death statistics. China's a powerful adversary solely because there are 1.4 billion of them. They have a huge economy despite having 3rd world living standards for most of the population
Read 6 tweets

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