Reading Recommendations, Pros & Cons
News from Ukraine, Housing in the Age of the Wealth-Divide, and the Politics of AI
PRO: Maxim Kolomiets
Before Russia invaded Ukraine Maxim Kolomiets was a Project Manager working in Interactive Design. Now he delivers semi-daily written reports from inside Ukraine with hourly updates of devastating hits at multiple locations, and other news. As of late, he has taken a new direction in producing marketing videos for arming Ukrainians in their war efforts. This is truly inspiring and not what you expect:
Also new from Maxim Kolomiets are editorials.
His latest post asks: “What are the positive aspects of Ukraine’s membership in the EU and NATO for Western countries?”
For Moscow, an unequivocal affirmative response from the EU to Kyiv will be an important signal. Russia will face a collective European declaration of Ukraine’s strategic importance to the EU. A positive message to the West on Ukraine would be at odds with the Kremlin’s vision of Ukrainians that has failed as a nation or hasn’t even exist. Maxim Kolomiets
Maxim has only seven followers and he deserves more. so please follow and share Maxim Kolomiets, a voice coming to you directly from Ukraine!
Maxim is not implementing the affiliate link that provides a share of the monthly subscription to content providers, so if you are not a Medium member, please sign up using my affiliate link. you will support my work by doing so. For only five dollars a month you have access to thousands of writers' work on Medium. You can also publish your own stories and create a Medium publication.
Then you can follow Maxim and me. Tip- make radical use of the function “Show less like this” to train the algorithm to deliver the stories that you want to see. Remember stories you don’t want to read stop you from seeing others in your stream that you may want to read.
Con: Ben Popper - The Overflow
serving a community of developers and technologists
In Remote work is killing big offices. Cities must change to survive, Ben Popper tells an insightful history about the past of the office and adds to the discussion about the future of work and community design centered around dual live-work environments.
Converting office districts to live-work zones would offer a much needed influx of new residential space, helping to combat the rising cost of homes and rentals. Citizens who do work essential to the livelihood of a community, such as teachers, healthcare providers, and service workers are provided with tax breaks, as needed, to ensure they can afford to live alongside those whose work can be done fully remotely.
Mr. Popper says that “Tech companies have become the most valuable organizations on earth, and the folks who write code at these companies command, on average, the highest salaries of any profession”. He doesn’t say what level of government will be subsidizing the essential services that are needed to exist alongside the remote worker’s community and so it comes across as a concept that he has not thought through. It is true that Mr.Popper’s term is “tax breaks” not “subsidies”- but tax breaks and subsidies are often designed to go hand in hand and tax breaks alone would not be enough to make a significant difference in housing affordability. Mr. Popper’s suggestion is left largely uninformed or examined, so I am projecting that it leads to housing subsidies.
Mr. Popper hypothesizes that when remote workers move into an area they can drive others out of the community but there are services the remote working community will be needing from others and so reasons that housing for those providing essential targeted services should be subsidized. Perhaps in a hidden chamber of his mind, Mr. Popper does realize that his entire industry is massively subsidized, and so by extension should be the services they need, just another corporate investment as entire communities are conceived as being one big corporation.
Mr. Popper is missing the larger picture which begins with the subsidization of his own industry and how it might be affected by remote working.
According to payscale.com the average salary for a Computer Programmer is $65,960 annually, Herzing University reports it as higher, in a highly subsidized industrial sector (see Subsidy Tracker Top 100 Parent Companies). States use subsidies and tax exemptions to barter with large corporations for “X number of jobs at higher than average wages and benefit for the area”. Since the deal is made based on the average rate of pay for the area, this may be why some corporations say they will pay less to remote workers moving to areas outside of headquarters location.
But Mr. Popper assumes that the pay rate of his industry will remain constant when workers relocate to a different area. Since the programmer industry is so highly paid it will drive others out of areas where tech workers are relocating, and, so. Mr. Popper reasons, let’s subsidize housing for the essential workers needed by the tech workers.
In suggesting that the housing of those providing essential services should be subsidized, Mr. Popper is acknowledging that for the average workforce, “earning a living” no longer includes being able to afford a place to live, but that’s just because their skills are not as valuable to society as are those of tech workers, even as he is trying to account for how those lesser valued skills can be made available in an upscale neighborhood dominated by the tech workers who need those services. He is not thinking in a free market paradigm, he is thinking in terms of the centrally managed hierarchal grid in which Tech companies have become the most valuable (subsidized) organizations on earth.
The salary for the tech worker has been negotiated by the terms of an agreement subsidized by taxpayers in another state or another municipality. Then it was “higher than the existing average pay for the area”, now, Mr. Popper's thinking assumes the tech worker takes that rate of pay with him when he moves to an area where the average rate of pay is considerably lower than that where the negotiations were struck.
While Mr. Popper recognizes that working at home can make housing more affordable, at the same time he envisions the high pay that his profession receives as making housing less affordable for others and suggest that those working in services that his industry might need should have housing subsidized by the government. This is an awful idea as subsidized housing often means that the government controls the inhabitant’s life, limiting upward mobility. Furthermore, it suggests that those in a servant class to his own class should have housing subsidized but not those in other occupations that do not specifically serve the interests of Mr. Popper’s class, driving other industries out.
Mr. Popper’s world of innovative technology is so immersed in a subsidized economy that he can’t think in any other terms than to keep on subsidizing one class after another, in different ways- appropriate to a class structure.
Since the highly valued tech workers covet essential services offered by other classes of workers, how about if the essential services workforce charges the remote working class workforces what amounts to a living wage that includes home affordability? If the government subsidizes the class that serves the needs of Mr. Popper’s class, precisely because it is serving those targeted needs of that targeted class, then the government is subsidizing Mr. Popper’s class by proxy while applying government restrictions and requirements only to the proxy, not to Mr. Popper’s class.
If the essential services working class charges enough for its services to pay for its own housing, they are free men, not owned by the government.
One class that is always included in “affordable workforce housing” are teachers. The schools, including the teachers, are a municipal expense. Municipal expenses are paid by property taxes. Can we assume that highly paid tech workers own their homes? If the municipality pays teachers enough to afford a home in the community in which they teach, then that expense is covered by the property-owning classes who need the teachers’ services. Pay the teachers a living wage that affords housing costs instead of subsidizing their housing. That’s more expensive to do when most rentals are Airbnbs and so it means paying the teachers enough to afford home ownership in the neighborhood where the school is located. That means the more Airbnbs in a neighborhood- the higher the cost of paying teachers. Maybe regulate Airbnbs?
What if the State Legislature passed a law that said municipal schools must pay their employees enough to afford housing in the neighborhood where they work, then maybe we might see some Airbnb regulation. A recent Boothbay Register story is about the difficulty the school is having in finding a custodian. Can that be because persons making a custodian’s pay can neither afford to live in the community nor afford the high cost of gas to travel to work on a peninsula?
The solution advocated by peninsula leadership is wall-to-wall affordable workforce housing as city blocks for the downstairs community in an upscale rural wealth culture. Current leadership wants ordinances that will reduce the amount of land per structure so that workforce housing can be stacked wall to wall. The workforce is conceived of as those who work for others rather than independent contractors or small business owners.
The ordinances in Boothbay have long been very restrictive of work-living environments. It’s time for new thinking. Businesses in residence and artists in residence are economic development stimulators. When I went to Pratt in the sixties, Soho, NY was a barren deserted textile factory district. Then the city zoned Soho for artists in residence and by the 1980s there were more galleries per square foot in Soho than anywhere else in the world and only the wealthiest artists could afford to live there.
Considering the subsidies required to attract corporate jobs, and considering the size and rural character of the Peninsula, and its water sustainability issues, why isn’t the consideration of zoning the Industrial Park for business in residences part of the discussion (other than the fact that alternative voices are blocked?)? The park should not be the only place that businesses in residence are allowed to exist (and grow) in a rural community - but it’s a start. It could stimulate more equitable economic growth and cultural creativity
PRO: Tongjal, W. N. OF Ramdon Dispatches
I love this young writer’s style. Part of it may be because English is a second language but that does not hurt at all. Tongjal has his own unique way with words that can turn a tale of purchasing some books, Of Unwritten Principles, into a fascinating ride. He is a philosopher who always has something unique to say.
PRO: AI Supremacy, Sublink, and Artificial Intelligence in the News by Michael Spencer
Talking about the coding profession, it may be facing some competition from artificial intelligence, Read all about it in Google DeepMind's AlphaCode is a Game Changer for AI Coding by Michael Spencer.
Michael is a futurist deeply engaged in the tech world, bringing it to life in critical narratives such as The Metaverse Hype is Real But Its Reality is a Myth, in which escalating centralization under huge tech companies is examined. Easy to get lost for hours on Michael’s home pages.
Thanks for the mention MA, that's a first on Substack. I'm a fan of your voice and all Substacks that deal with some of the larger issues of our times.