#stagnate

[malakkc-poetry]

Double Diamond Certificate,  Barbed Wire Heart

[boyd-seabiscuit]

I'm not lazy

My upcoming book, ✨FEELINGS✨, is launching 6/20. It features feelings themed comics like the Walkin’ Buds 🐧 To get notified when it all kicks off, sign up HERE.

[buttercuparry]

Tumblr is more about reblogging social justice posts than anything. Everyone gets to have their moment of tongue clucking at the newest antics the racists on this website put up, and that's it. Let me tell you something; your continued attention on fundraisering posts would do more good to those these racist Zionists are trying to harass, than you reblogging the hundredth post about them threatening to snitch to the FBI.

Today is Thursday and Siraj Abudayeh still hasn't reached 50k. He escaped death yesterday, and today he had to risk his life again to get a hotspot connection- all so that he may continue to campaign...Him reaching his end goal of 82k, would help him better than you picking a fight with Zionists on tumblr. Please he is stuck at $49636 CAD.

I BEG YOU TO BOOST AND DONATE AND GET SIRAJ AT LEAST TO 50K.

(Vetting at 219)

[skellyjingles]

the gap

[clumxy]

Redrew old art from 2022!!

[sushiisiu]

thisis so fuckin embarrassing but the spirit of jayvik just wormed its way back into me after i realize how close arcane s2 is

[oneminutecalm]

Mindfulness: Showers to Flowers

One Minute Calm: Walk and Talk with Avalon Episode 171 “April showers bring May flowers.” An analogy not only for the spring turning into summer in the Northern Hemisphere but for life.  One concept is that you are literally stuck due to the rain, but once the rain finishes, you will be surrounded by beauty.  Another is that you are currently stuck in life but when this portion, this pain, this…

[deerspherestudios]

Sorry, this is a silly question but-

Does Mychael know how to whistle? I think he would be the kind of person who whistles songs or tries to imitate birds!

Just because I think it'd be pathetically funny,,, I wanna say he desperately wishes he can whistle but ends up blowing raspberries instead when he tries.

Why? Because:

Yeahhh sure, admittedly he can be charming and cool if he can whistle like a bird just because he's a nature guy. But listen, the scenarios that pop up from him not knowing how to whistle are a lot more endearing to me.

Imagine you and him are out on a nature walk. You praise some birds singing in the treetops nearby and you ask him that question, fully expecting him to know how to. He'd embarrass himself going for it trying to impress you (because he thinks you'd find it neat or something) only to fail miserably.

This guy has it too good with knitting and cooking and woodworking he must suck at something. /lh

But then,,, maybe you can teach him instead! Maybe you can gift him a bird whistle the next time you meet him! Maybe you can show him how to do it with your hands!! You can tell him you're just as bad at it as he is or impress him instead.

[zondearts]

Wxs, the sillies, the goofies, the goobers

wxsloids below cut

[stil-lindigo]

ARTISTS FOR PALESTINE 🇵🇸 - ROUND 2!! On the 16th and 23rd of March, I'll be doing art requests on stream with other notable artists to raise money for Operation Olive Branch and Project Watermelon.

This round's roster is very lucky to include notable webcomic artists like explodikid, Graveweaver, Curryuku and Speremint who respectively create Covenant, I'm The Grim Reaper, Not So Shoujo Love Story and Brimstone and Roses on WEBTOON. We also have Onstamonsta, an artist, streamer and Kiryu fan who Drawfee fans might recognise and the exceptionally talented Jessie Lam!

Last fundraising event was a great success, and I hope some of you might show up for this next round of streams. All money will be donated directly to Palestinian escape funds as the situation of Rafah is becoming exponentially worse (and if you'd like to donate directly, here's a link to a spreadsheet of over 750!)

As always, these fundraisers will always be available to watch over on my twitch channel. Thank you all and free Palestine!

[miikpal]

2025 vs 2018

since its year of deltarune... feels really nice seeing the improvement!

[fairsweetlonging]

just thinking about how binghe had no idea that without-a-cure even had a cure and he spent all his years as a disciple thinking his shizun would at best be disabled for the rest of his life and at worst die a slow and painful death, and it was to save him.

[bennizone]

now available on my itch-page:

→ STAGNATION SEED

Candy, heartbroken yet again, accepts her doting roommate Violetta's offer - to build a perfect android-girlfriend. The process excites and scares them both, but as metal takes form in Vio's hands, they're both faced with with what's most terrifying; the truth.

Originally created for SHORTBOX COMICSFAIR 2024, Stagnation Seed is a lesbian sci-fi story, about postponing the inevitable.

56 pages, limited palette. CW bodyhorror.

[greenbirdtrash]

Pleco, of course, is a superior fish.

...A creature of sorts, even.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The housing crisis considered as an income crisis

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

A paradox: in 1970, everyday Americans found it relatively easy to afford a house, and the average American house cost 5.9x the average American income. In 2024, Americans find it nearly impossible to afford a house, and the average American house costs…5.9x the average American income.

Feels like a puzzler, right? Can it really be true that the average American house is as affordable to the average American earner as it was in 1970? It is true, as you can see from Blair Fix's latest open access research report, "The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage":

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/10/23/the-american-housing-crisis-a-theft-not-a-shortage/

Fix also points out that is even more true of rents than it is of house prices. The ratio of rent to average income has actually fallen slightly since 1970. Rents are also, in some mathematical sense, "affordable."

Now, those of you who are well-versed in statistical card-palming will likely have a pretty good idea of the statistical artifact at the root of this paradox: the word "average." If you remember your seventh grade math, you'll recall that "average" has more than one meaning. Sure, there's the most common one: add several values together, then divide the total by the number of values you added. For example, a nonzero number of people have one or zero arms, so the average human has slightly fewer than two arms.

That average is called the "mean." The mean US wage is pretty robust: $73,242/year:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A792RC0Q052SBEA/1000

But the majority of Americans are not earning anything like $73k/year. Since the Reagan years, the number of Americans living in poverty and extreme poverty has climbed and climbed. And while their declining income sure drags down that average, it's dragged way, way, way up by another group of Americans – the ultra-rich.

You see, as Fix writes, back in the Reagan years, America initiated an experiment in redistribution. Reagan enacted policies that moved most of the nation's wealth from the great majority of working people to a tiny minority of people who ended up owning pretty much everything. Throw their income into the mix, and the average American's income is sufficient to finance the average American home, with plenty to spare.

In other words, this isn't an "average human has fewer than two arms" situation, it's more like a "Spiders Georg" situation. Spiders Georg is a Tumblr meme about a guy who eats 10,000 spiders every day and is thus single-handedly responsible for the (false) statistic that the average human eats two spiders a week:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg

The American rich – Reagan's progeny – are the Spiders Georg of house prices. By hoarding the great mass of American national wealth, they create a statistical mirage of affordable housing.

Now, that's interesting, but where Fix goes next with this is even more fascinating. If the average price of housing (relative to average income) has stayed fixed since 1970, then it follows that the price of housing isn't being driven up by a problem with supply. Rather, these numbers suggest that America has enough housing, it's just that (most) Americans don't have enough money.

If that's true – and I have a couple of quibbles, which I'll get to in a sec – then the most common prescription for solving American housing (building more of it) is somewhat beside the point. For Fix, using public funds to subsidize cheaper housing is like using public funds to pay for food stamps for working people whose wages are too low to keep them from starving. Sure, we should do that: no one should be without a home and no one should be hungry. But if working people can't afford shelter and food, then we have a wage problem, not a supply problem.

Fix – as ever – has a well-thought through, painstakingly documented "sources and methods" page to back up his conclusions:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/10/23/the-american-housing-crisis-a-theft-not-a-shortage/#sources-and-methods

And while Fix acknowledges that reversing the mass transfer of wealth from working people to their bosses (and their bosses' idle offspring) is a big lift, he rightly wants to keep the question of wages (rather than housing supply) front and center in our debate about why so many of us are finding it hard to keep a a roof over our heads. We need progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, protection from medical and education debt, and hell, why not a job guarantee?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#tcherneva

I love Fix's work, and this report is no exception. He does it all in his spare time. Some nice progressive think tank should give him a grant so he can do (a lot) more of it.

That all said, I do have a quibble with his conclusion about the adequacy of the American housing supply. In California, we have a shortage of 3-4 million homes, a number arrived at through the relatively robust method of adding up the number of California families that would like to have their own homes and subtracting the number of homes available near those families:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage

How to explain the discrepancy? One possibility is that the price of housing is artificially low, because more than 181,000 people are homeless here. Hundreds of thousands of more people are living in overcrowded housing, with multiple families inhabiting spaces intended for just one (or even a single person). If all of those people were competing for housing, the price might rise even higher.

Think of the people who have given up looking for work – because they're not in the workforce, wages go up. If they were competing in the labor market, wages would fall. Maybe all those people would prefer to have a job, but they're missing from the statistics.

That's one theory. Another is that we're getting tripped up on averages again here. California does have some towns with many vacancies, extra supply that is pushing down prices; it's also got many places with far more people who want to live there than there are homes for. It's possible that there's enough supply on average across the states, but – as we've seen – averages are deceptive.

Ultimately, I think both things can be true: we have a wage problem and we have (many, localized) supply problems. Both of these problems deserve our attention, and neither is acceptable in a civilized society.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/#mean-ole-mr-median

[chalkrub]

svanhildr my beloved returns