The White House is taking aim at the housing shortage by deregulating housing constructionđź§µ
A big part of the American Dream was created by a massive housing boom when the troops came home
Since the Great Financial Crisis, practically everywhere has reduced the number of permits they issue for new housing
This has resulted in housing cost growth outpacing wage growth:
To revive the American Dream, we need to build more homes.
If we want to build more homes, we'll have to overcome a lot of different regulatory burdens.
One step is to get rid of federal regulatory burdens that straddle homebuilders and owners with lots of random costs.
This has the broader meaning of:
- getting rid of energy-efficiency guidelines
- getting rid of water use regs
- getting rid of alternative-energy requirements
These regulations might seem good, but they're actually destructive because, for example, you need to handwash dishes:
The really big thing is that the CEQ, which manages the disastrous 1969 NEPA law, has been told to instruct states on a less burdensome implementation of that law.
That means less costly and unnecessary environmental review and attendant grifters:
Every state is also going to be provided with a set of deregulatory guidelines for housing.
This will be used to push states to stop doing things like retroactively applying new building codes, capping permitting fees and timelines, and allowing by-right construction nationally!
The Order also calls for the creation of more ways to let homebuilders leverage preexisting tax benefits by building in Opportunity Zones
This means that they want to reward builders for doing their jobs anywhere, but we're exploiting the fact that we can in these areas. Clever!
Did you know that prefabricated homes face extra regulatory burdens? They shouldn't, but they do, making it harder to build cheap homes
Perhaps my favorite part of the Order is that the administration will encourage states to drop their excess regulations on prefabricated homes:
The Order includes more than this, but the general gist is that the administration wants to see more homes built, and they're aware that the issue is regulatory.
To get America building again and to revive the American Dream in the process, we need more homes.
P.S. This is mostly concerned with single-family homes and there's not anything directly concerning apartments and condominiums in here. Unfortunate, but at least there's some progress and they'll be helped indirectly.
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In my latest article, I documented that the only RCT for functional medicine methods appears fraudulentđź§µ
Before getting into it, what's functional medicine?
It's a pseudoscience used to bilk patients by getting them on an unending cycle of tests, supplements, and more tests.
Functional medicine's practitioners claim that they can reveal and treat so-called "root causes" of people's health problems
These are proposed to be things like gut health, toxin burdens, and various chemical and hormonal imbalances
They find these things with unproven tests
If you run enough tests, you will be able to find something that looks 'off' about a patient, and if you're a functional medicine doctor, that's your 'A-ha!' moment, even if—as is usually the case—the result is just a false-positive and treating it is unlikely to do anything.
If you want to add beds to a hospital, build facilities, purchase diagnostic scanners, but you live somewhere with CON laws, then you have to prove you're not creating competition for other medical facilities in the area, which is often the whole state.
No. Competition. Allowed.
The idea behind these laws is that people will spend excessively on healthcare, so to combat that, we'll have people report if there's more spending needed before approving it.
Nutrition science is the area of science that's suffered the most in the replication crisis. It is a graveyard of theories and pseudoscientific bullshit.
Now:
The HHS is going to make doctors to sit through 40 hours of classes where they'll have to take that bullshit seriously.
This reads like a list of the things that fared the worst in all of nutrition science and stuff with NO EVIDENCE.
When I read through this, my mouth was agape.
Whoever wrote this trash needs fired for incompetence. Mentally retarded people should not hold keep government posts.
'What did you learn in your mandatory nutrition misinformation class?'
'Well, if a patient comes in with a migraine, I'm supposed to sell them a WHOOP bracelet or an Oura ring so I can help them figure out their health age.'
Strength training is a highly effective way to improve your flexibility, and I've made a graphic to put this into understandable terms:
This is from a meta-analysis of strength training trials.
What makes that so useful is that there's major publication bias for strength outcomes (pictured).
But, since authors weren't looking at it, there's no publication bias for flexibility outcomes.
Studies made their way into this meta-analysis because they had a flexibility outcome, but they made their way into the literature because they showed positive strength results.
This could indirectly biased the flexibility results because of selection on a correlated outcome.
"Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable."
This quote summarizes Pirenne's thesis that the European Dark Ages began with the rise of Islam because it destroyed the flow of trade across the Mediterranean, ending Antiquity.
The decline in trade that resulted from differences in faith had profound consequences for the economic geography of Europe.
Byzantine economic activity depended on trade, and it collapsed, whereas the Frankish economy, which was never trade-dependent, transformed.
Byzantine minting stalled and the Arabs' and Franks' increased (perhaps partly because they were cut off from one another!), providing each of their states with divergent trends in seignorage revenues and a widening gulf in the ability to fund the government.