Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 92 of 479
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:How Giant White Houses Took Over America
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.
REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.
You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. . . .
We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.
How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers.
By Dan Kois | March 06, 2025 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/business/2025/03/houses-real-estate-luxury-sale.html
Across America, in neighborhoods just like ours, the ubiquity of the Giant White House signifies a neighborhood evolving from one for the middle class to one for the sort of rich to one for the very rich.
The House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Interesting. The white color must be a southern thing. I don't recall ever seeing a white McMansion, let alone ever doing work inside of one. I'll bet it's a sunshine/heat thing. Ours up here are usually made of brick or they're darker colors.
This is a different phenomena down by you too. I've seen this type of rebuild or addition around here on occasion, but as far as I know it's not a regular thing... at least in the souther-Chicagoland area. It could be happening in the West and Norther suburbs... I don't go out there very often. What we've been doing is building entire brand new neighborhoods full of these shrines to excess since the Clinton years. Whenever I'd work on one of these things, it would be in the middle of an entire neighborhood were every house was huge and every house looked nearly identical, with just some very minor face-value changes that gave just the smallest amount of individualism to each house. Probably, one would assume, so you can figure out which house was yours when you came home at 3AM after a night of binge drinking.
Quote:
The Giant White House, though, is not only giant in its floorplan—it’s giant vertically. It’s a trend that comes not from the suburbs but from the city. In recent decades, the loft—the converted warehouse, with its open spaces and high industrial ceilings—became popular in American cities, said Paul Preissner, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago. “Those kinds of preferences trickled out to homeowners, and now everyone wants a cathedral-like ceiling.”
Yup. I'm very familiar with the bullshit cathedral-like ceiling.
I'm glad they went on a quest for answers, but bummed that they didn't offer up any solutions to the problem. That's the only question that really needs answering.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:There was a lovely Victorian on the corner, on a 60,000 sq ft lot filled with towering ash trees and a black walnut that had snuck in. Like all upper class Victorian homes it was large, similar in size to the BWH the article complains about, but graceful, wuth a lovely hardwood front porch. It was green and lovely and quiet, and one of the reasons we bought where we did.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.
REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.
You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. Every one of them came with a bathroom bigger than my Master Bedroom, and they had a huge step-up Jacuzzi that they were terrified to use without any bars. I can't even tell you how many huge walk-in showers with all the extras we put in those things after ripping those beautiful Jacuzzis out. Broke my heart every time because here I was, 22 year old idiot that I was, just dreaming of owning a bathroom setup like that one day... and it was the first thing they all removed.
And I don't even understand the desire of having houses that big at any age, but especially at that age. Some of these people were paying over $20k per year in property taxes. I don't even want to know what it costs to heat those things in the winter. One of the most common styles saw one half of the house wide open from the front door all the way to the back glass doors and a ceiling that peaked at 20 feet tall. All of the upper bedrooms and bathrooms surrounded that opening.
Why????????
We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.
How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
So, what did they do?
Tore it down, bulldozed the trees, divided the lot into six parts, and put up three of the ugliest modernist/ minimalist/ tackiest - looking mansions that sat on the market for over 6 months, with 30,000 sq ft yet to be developed.
We also have a faux French mansion, a couple of faux Italian villas, and an uncountable number of monstrosities with collonades, 2-story entryways that look like something from the Wizard of Oz, and actual goddamn turrets.
But FWIW, the McMansion era ended a few years ago in our neighborhood. It was prolly the high interest rates that killed it. Since the houses here are now OLD, what I've seen is either partial or complete reconstruction on the same foundation.
Also, I was at a planning meeting and managed to get a zoning change that disallowed those pretentious 2-story entryways. A small victory, but at least one less eyesore.
The secret is in your zoning laws. Allow lot-splitting and (especially) require bigger setbacks and smaller % of developed space on a lot and those McMansions will shrink in size.
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:I bring this up to say .... watching the Trump admin apparently go after unions, in the effort to reindustrialize America (even assuming it's at all successful), sacrifices must be made.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, to get back to the problem of reindustrialization ....
Re-industrialization requires sacrifice.
Even in the most equitable of societies, development ... or redevelopment ... requires that at least some portion of the workforce be dedicated to making factories and infrastructure ... work that doesn't lead to immediate production of the goods or services. So people overall will be working harder without an immediate improvement in living standards.
China is an example of successful development. (They followed the Japan model). Start by making cheap goods for export using low-wage labor: plastic crap for Walmart, Nike shoes etc then climb the value ladder (Bosch tools, computer chips etc) For quite a while, the workforce conditions were pretty grim: factory/ dormitories with suicide netting, unsafe working conditions full of chemical exposure etc. And despite what people think, the money wasn't creating a class of rich entrepreneurs, it was (mostly) being plowed back into further development.
Russia is an example of successful reindustrialization. In Russia's case, they had to first corral the gangster-oligarch class (get them out of politics), and then partially re-nationalize major resources (oil, gas, electricity, telecom, aeronautics etc) usually by becoming majority shareholder in major industries. The government also loaned money in sectors such as farming that needed further development. However, note that Russia's internal economy didn't take off until it was divorced from western companies and finance.
By withdrawing western companies from Russia and cutting off Russian banks from western finance, that forced profits to be reinvested in Russia instead of being constantly drained off to the west.
I think there's a lesson in there for us as to where are real economic problems come from. It's not Dems or Repubs, not the deep state, not even inefficient government. Its the constant draining away of capital by the already wealthy, with the complicity of our government. .
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
And it's not going to be by the billionaires.
Trump, and (probably more from Elon) seem to be developing their economic plan along the lines of classic Italian fascism. (No, I don't mean Nazi gas chamber stuff. Please look up the history of Italian fascism as a way of restoring order to Italy's 1920-1930 economy. "At least he made the trains run on time".)
This could be the only legitimate and important criticism of Trump. Needs watching.
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns
By Claude Malhuret | March 8, 2025, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/claude-malhe
uret-speech/681947/
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine.
We should disregard his rant against what (he thinks) Trump is doing to America. What Trump does here is our business, and not for him to theatrically wring his hands over.
The rest is hypocrisy, hot air, and scaremongering designed to whip up support for Macron's and Ursula's get-rich-quick scheme of stealing Russian assets and creating Eurobonds.
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427
Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow)
By Phillips P. Obrien | Mar 08, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-123-the-week-the
-usa
Hello All,
Well, I feel that cannot really wait until tomorrow to send the first part of my weekend update out. What we have seen over the last few days is so extreme that it deserves to be said out loud and acknowledged as soon as possible. The United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, the United States is now actively helping Vladimir Putin and the Russian state kill Ukrainians to try and force Ukraine to accept a bad peace deal that very well might spell the end of their country. At the same time, the USA is now bending over backwards to help protect the Russian military.
Rescuers respond to a Russian missile strike in Ukraine's Kharkiv region on Friday.
The Results of a Russian missile attack on Ukraine just over a day ago. The damage and death you see is now courtesy of the USA.
The United States is now an active enemy of democracy not just in Ukraine, but in all of Europe. That it would, somewhat gleefully in the case of the president, help Russia kill what were recently some of the most pro-American people in the world, a people desperate to be US allies, tells you everywhere about the dark period we are now in. The fate of freedom throughout Europe is at stake.
Needless to say, therefore, the European reaction is key. There is a general awareness that Europe faces a great challenge—but I’m not sure people understand the reality of what Trump is doing. There are still those looking for signs that he might be ok, that he can be trusted, that NATO still has validity. The sooner Europe can fully face the reality of what it is confronting the better.
Also, on the battlefield, the Russians/North Koreans made a 4 mile advance in Kursk (while hardly being able to advance anywhere else). It shows that Putin is working with Trump more than you might think.
All of that will be in the update sent out tomorrow.
The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
The United States government took some dramatic steps this week to help Russia and weaken Ukraine—the intended result of which will be more Ukrainian deaths, fewer Russian losses, and the undermining of Ukrainian democracy.
The steps were comprehensive, layered, and designed to punish Ukraine for not doing what Trump wants. Its worth listing them just so you can see how significant the changes are.
1. The USA has stopped the delivery of all military supplies to Ukraine. The Trump administration had actually been slowing the supply of remaining Biden era supplies for a while. However now even Biden appropriations are not being delivered.
2. The USA has stopped allowing Ukraine to attack Russian forces with certain high-value US systems such as HIMARS.
3. The USA, in a particularly twisted move, has made it far more difficult for Ukraine to defend against Russian missile attacks. What the USA has done is no longer provide Ukraine with warning of such attacks—which will make them far more deadly and effective.
4. The USA is actually stopping non-military supplies such as medical equipment, which is vital to keep wounded Ukrainians alive. This had started with the USAID cut—but has now reached an extreme level with no medical supplies to treat Ukrainian soldiers. The USA is also forbidding the Ukrainians from having access to Maxar commercial satellite data—which has been widely available to them (and many civilian agencies) throughout the conflict.
5. The USA is signalling strong support to Putin that they want to see his strategic priorities met in the short term.
Note—for point 4 I’ve linked to an Adam Kinzinger tweet for the evidence on medical supplies
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Fuck you, and fuck Ukraine.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
SECOND:
Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.
Oh look. It's the unconvincing robot mimicking emotions ...
Quote:
SECOND:
TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427
Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow) blah blah blah ...
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, you and 6ix are hollow. Inflated with hot air. Vinyl blow up dolls. You are lightweights pushed around by the breezes. This is why you don't prosper in America. This is why you indulge in intoxicants, to help you forget what you are.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
SECOND:
Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.
Oh look. It's the unconvincing robot mimicking emotions ...Quote:
SECOND:
TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427
Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow) blah blah blah ...
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump?
The historian Stephen Kotkin analyzes what a President who governs in the style of professional wrestling gets wrong—and right—about an unstable world.
By David Remnick | March 9, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/can-ukraine-an
d-america-survive-donald-trump
The first time I met Stephen Kotkin, I was a young Moscow correspondent covering the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era for the Washington Post. Steve was an energetic young professor of history at Princeton, who was studying what he called “Stalinist civilization.” Unlike some professors in the field, he was not a constant presence on television, unloading opinions on demand; his sources of information ranged beyond the usual, and he preferred to retain a measure of discretion for the sake of his real work. Kotkin certainly knew many dissidents and prominent Communist Party apparatchiks, editors, and security officials, but he also cultivated connections in the nascent world of Russian business and elsewhere. Early in his career, his canvas was the steel city of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where so much of Stalin’s war machine was built. In recent years, he has been at work on a three-volume biography of Stalin; he is working now to complete the final installment of that masterly work.
Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of prodigious research and linguistic facility. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, we have had a series of conversations for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our latest discussion came just a few days after Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s tag-team assault on the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You are hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past, or around, his performances, which you’ve compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what’s behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?
Trump is of the opinion that America has been on the wrong side of a lot of deals, not just the Ukrainian deal, and that a rebalancing is necessary. Now, Trump’s style is very off-putting—some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a hugely important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don’t matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.
Let’s remember: once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin—yes, Stalin—was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that the Soviet Union was the future. The left was all in—not the entire left, but a really big part of it—on this fantasy of the Soviet Union as the future, while everybody was either starving or being murdered, as you know.
Now we have a fantasy Russia on the right: that Russia is about traditional values, that Russia is defending Western civilization, that Russia is the future, that Russia is our friend. And this fantasy is complete rubbish, if we can use a technical term. We went from a fantasy on the left to a fantasy on the right about Russia. I don’t share either fantasy. They’re not equivalent fantasies, certainly, but they’re nasty regimes in the Stalin case on a world-historical scale, and less so, but nasty, in Putin’s case. I don’t like these fantasies, but those fantasies are big drivers of a lot of our politics.
You’re right that in the thirties, there were people on the left who were pro-Soviet, pro-Stalinist. But you also know that a huge part of the left was anti-Stalinist.
O.K., that left that was pro-Stalinist was in my field until recently. They were the dominant trend in part of my field that I’ve been in for forty years. The right today also has people who are anti-Putin, I need to add.
Do you not share the view—and it’s my view—that if taken to its logical or w
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