User talk:Avatar317

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Housing shortage

I saw your posting on my Talk page a few months ago. I wanted to respond right away, but had not the time. My schedule has been hectic most of this year. Sorry I could not respond to your welcome request sooner. Good that your writing has been posted.

Today I looked at it, your "California housing shortage" article. It is a very important topic, and an interesting one. Many people are severely affected. Everyone on the coastal metropolitan areas are. I have been on both side of the supply and demand equation, personally and professionally.

I will try to read your article this month. In the meantime, one issue suggests itself to me. The 'Great Recession' quickly stopped new construction. Many construction companies made drastic cut-backs on skilled employees, or went completely out of business. Now that California needs a building boom, the housing supply factor is relatively anemic. It should be robust.

A dramatic increase in housing supply is clearly the long term solution. Ironically, short term fixes like rent control work to reduce future housing supply. Yet in the meantime rent control can alleviate some of the pain of the housing shortage, especially needed for low income renters. It's a difficult zero-sum calculus, at best. Studies have shown that rent control does not effectively lower rents over time for a region, but instead benefits certain tenants (who stay put in rentals in favored locations) and increases the rent for new tenants and those in adjacent locations that are not controlled. It also favors some more prosperous tenants, who would not qualify as low income.

It's difficult for government to intervene in the economy in the interests of a sense of political justice, to challenge the supply and demand reality, without serious unintended consequences. Rent control can alleviate today's housing pain, in exchange for prolonging the shortage. Yet sometimes the short-term realities are so abnormal that such intervention is warranted. Rent control is often a blunt instrument, but part of the political-economic tool kit.

Another major factor driving up the price of real estate in California is foreign investors. Obviously, through the influx of funds. But also, many buy homes as investments (for appreciation of their value) and then let them sit unoccupied. In not a few Los Angeles suburbs 10% of the homes are said to be idle due to absentee investors.

I salute your interest, and your contribution to Wikipedia. Elfelix (talk) 22:21, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Today I read some of your California housing shortage article, the first half of the text and sections of the rest. Generally it is clear, well-organized, and well-sourced. Thank you. Otherwise, at the this time I have nothing to add to the May 1st paragraphs above. Hopefully I can revisit it next week. One thing: you might want to add a "redirect" page entitled "Housing shortage in California". Elfelix (talk) 22:59, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

@Elfelix Sorry it took me so long to respond to this.

You are right, CA does have a shortage of both companies doing construction, and skilled workers to do that work, resulting in high market rate prices for construction labor...AFAIK, both these factors are actually true around the nation.

You are right about the problems that arise when governments distort markets. In my opinion, a smarter way to help low-income renters is to use government money to subsidize their market rate rents. Rent-control forces landlords (rather than government) to subsidize rental payments for poor, middle, and rich tenants. Subsidizing food for everyone (rather than just the poor as we do in the US) is what got Venezuela into their current food-supply predicament. Having LOCAL governments pay these subsidies would be a HUGE incentive for them to fix the factors that drove rents so high in the first place.

On your other comment, blaming "absentee investors," primarily Chinese (in the news, not what you said), is just a "blame the outsiders" mentality rather than face reality. (Why is there so much crime in America? Well it must be the illegal aliens committing it all, if we just get rid of them we'll have no crime....yeah, right.) Would this be any different if they were all "local" investors? Also, I've seen no DATA in any of the articles I've read supporting this...only conjecture from interviews with individual real estate agents....anecdotes do not make data.

In a normal functioning free market, more demand just yields more supply. EVERY investment is a bet: if people are buying homes in CA because they think it will be a good investment, they're betting that CA won't solve this housing shortage anytime soon, and that CA's economy will remain strong/improve to keep the demand side up.

Thank you for the re-direct suggestion.....done!

Thanks for your comments and suggestions!!! ---- Avatar317 (talk) 01:16, 1 June 2018 (UTC)Avatar317

One more thought on investors buying homes and leaving them empty. *IF* they are doing this, one has to ask "Why are they forgoing the large amount of money they could be making by renting out those properties?" Here are a couple of my theories:

1) If they are buying new or newly renovated homes, maybe the depreciation of a slightly used (and damaged) home reduces the resale value so much that it is not worth the risk of a renter? and they intend to resell the property in a short time frame.

combined with 2) A rental agency (if the investor were to have an agency rent the property for them) is required by CA anti-discrimination law to rent to the first person(s) who can demonstrate financial sufficiency...they are not allowed to look at 20 potential renters and choose the one they think would be the least risk of damaging their property. A landlord can disallow pets in the rental contract, but not children, and children often damage homes more than pets....These factors (essentially risk of degradation of investment) may be why homes sit vacant rather than rented. ---- Avatar317 (talk) 04:48, 1 June 2018 (UTC)Avatar317

The "housing shortage" article literally begins with "since about 1970".Qwertyuiop1234567898 (talk) 08:43, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

I'd like to ask you, then, what do those articles convey and can we include it in the article? Demand clearly isn't just from national demand. There is not one mention of immigration in the article. I feel this article is a well-intentioned piece which suffers from one-sided perspectives sometimes. If it's more balanced, it will be a great article. Your efforts have nonetheless made a very effective article.Qwertyuiop1234567898 (talk) 08:49, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the housing shortage article!

I stumbled upon California housing shortage, and wow, thank you for putting that together! I've requested a peer review in hopes of getting a Good Article (or even Featured Article) stamp. Is there anything I can do to help out? I'm pretty good with maps, graphs and research. grendel|khan 01:40, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

@Grendelkhan Hello, and thanks for the good words about the CA housing shortage article! I'd love any suggestions you have about any ways to improve the article, (or just do them yourself, of course) and I'm writing a reply to your talk page comments now.

Clearly, you have infinitely more familiarity with charts/graphs/data on Wikipedia than I (I have none, so far); thank you for contributing, and for nominating it for GA review!!!! ---- Avatar317 (talk) 04:59, 13 June 2018 (UTC)Avatar317

Hello,

Per-capita means per person, not per property. I removed "per capita" in my edits. Thank you for pointing out this discrepancy. I have added these relevant facts to the article. I think they help understand that a 0.42% rate does not necessarily imply the locale is getting a giant subsidy. I think that's important for readers of the article to understand--recent money has resulted in SOME people paying much more per property, but longtime residents don't necessarily pay less than the rest of the state does (median property tax in CA is under 3,000 dollars per source 59). Those longtime residents have paid decades of other high taxes that compensated for prop 13 too, and we need an accounting of how much that is (and I don't think this exists).

69Avatar69 (talk) 23:53, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Regarding signatures

Hi! I've noticed that when you sign comments on talk pages, your username appears twice. It looks like you are typing --~~~~Avatar317. You do not have to type your username after ~~~~, which is automatically substituted for your signature. Your signature already contains your username by default, and you can modify in Special:Preferences. For more technical details, see Wikipedia:Signatures § How to sign your posts. Qzekrom (talk) 00:34, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks for the info!! I appreciate it!! ---Avatar317^(talk) 06:33, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

February 2019

It appears that you have been canvassing—leaving messages on a biased choice of users' talk pages to notify them of an ongoing community decision, debate, or vote—in order to influence Talk:Rent regulation. While friendly notices are allowed, they should be limited and nonpartisan in distribution and should reflect a neutral point of view. Please do not post notices which are indiscriminately cross-posted, which espouse a certain point of view or side of a debate, or which are selectively sent only to those who are believed to hold the same opinion as you. Remember to respect Wikipedia's principle of consensus-building by allowing decisions to reflect the prevailing opinion among the community at large. Thank you.

• This is the only invitation you issued to join a discussion. It's generally fine to advertise discussions on WikiProject talk pages, or to various noticeboards, or sometimes the talk pages of other articles. You're on shaky ground when you're inviting hand-picked editors. That can be OK when you notify every single editor in a class, such as every editor who touched an article in the last year. But one and only one editor? The one who wrote "If you haven't studied economics, don't edit this page" in direct violation of the WP:OWNBEHAVIOR policy? That does not look good.

  Please do not canvass in this way again. Dennis Bratland (talk) 03:58, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I invited the one editor who I've encountered that stated that they had a background in economics, because I figured that an expert in the field could help improve this article. That person had stated: "As someone studying economics at the graduate level, ..."

This is the way encylopedias were written before Wikipedia, by experts in the field of the subject they wrote about, and that resulted in the articles all being of MUCH higher quality than the Rent regulation article is now. ---Avatar317^(talk) 06:52, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the Alex Berenson Edits and New Article

Hi Avatar317, I wanted to thank you for all the work you put into the Alex Berenson article and the new article you created about his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence. I heard his perspective on a podcast called The Argument from the New York Times in which 3 NYT opinion writers (one an anti-Trump conservative, one a left-leaning moderate, and the last quite to the left of the other two) debate controversial issues in a rational and factual manner, often times finding common ground on some points and agreeing to disagree on others. It's refreshing to hear such a reasonable debate about real policy and circumstance, but I digress. One of them did an interview with Alex Berenson about cannabis, and I found his arguments and propositions so filled with fallacies and factually incorrect information that I simply had to check how he and his book were characterized in his Wikipedia article, only to find it just briefly mentioned without any mention of the substantial number of criticisms laid against him and his book.

I wanted to make it clear to any readers that his position is not backed by science, and I really appreciate all the effort you put into reworking that article and creating a new article for the book to ensure that all readers of Wikipedia who may stumble upon his page understand that he is not an expert, nor does he defer to the actual experts, and, at least from my perspective, is trying to push an agenda instead of the actual reality of the consequences of cannabis use. Thanks again. Matt18224 (talk) 02:35, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

@Matt18224:Thank you for the edit you did to the Alex Berenson article in which you added the sentence: In particular, they describe his book as highly problematic because Berenson infers causation from correlation, .... I don't recall how I came across that article, but that sentence caught my attention, and got me interested to read more. (I think a neat feature of Wikipedia is how info in articles can bootstrap better articles in this manner; I hadn't heard anything about his book until I read that Wikipedia article; without your contribution I likely wouldn't have heard about this at all.)

I do think that we will be better off as a society when more people in the general public understand science and scientific methods, and respectful and rational ways of having discussions/arguments; especially considering that in a democracy, everyone is allowed to vote and is therefore expected (or asked) to give their input on public policies, some of which may be very scientific in nature (climate change and vaccinations).

I wonder whether Berenson started his inquiry into cannabis without a pro/con legalization belief, and simply made the mistake(s) of misunderstanding science, but that once he released the book, and heard the criticism, that he now cares more about "Being Right than Doing The Right Thing", (and selling books) and doesn't want to admit his mistake: that many months of his work and his conclusion therefrom are simply wrong. The book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) was an interesting read on this subject (though I don't agree with every one of their analyses of their case studies). Another way of phrasing this is that people can behave (to varying degrees) like "insecure narcissists", whose egos are more threatened by admitting that they are wrong than the threat of public ridicule from supporting unreasonable/ridiculous/crazy beliefs. It would be interesting/telling to see what his beliefs on cannabis legalization were prior to his beginning the "quest" that lead to him writing this book, that would indicate whether he started with an agenda, or whether my theory above is the more likely case.

Lastly, I don't know if you've seen this site, but I was thinking of asking the author (Tyler Vigen) whether he would open-source one of his graphs for either/both the Correlation does not imply causation and Spurious relationship article(s). See his site here: Title of the first graph: "US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation" Correlation: 99.79% (r=0.99789126) ---Avatar317^(talk) 20:45, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

@Avatar317: Dear god, I had no clue science spending caused suicides! We need to STOP SCIENCE FUNDING NOW!!! (I probably shouldn't give anyone any ideas...) I always try to assume good faith, which, as I'm sure you know, is a common principle here on Wikipedia, and the impression I got from the interview (found here about 2 minutes in) was that Alex Berenson's wife, who is a forensic psychiatrist, anecdotally told him that she saw high numbers of criminals who also happened to use cannabis, which led him down the road of hearing anecdotes of individuals who had bad experiences with cannabis and cherry-picking the limited data and anecdotes that reinforced his belief based on his wife's assertion. I'll have to listen to the interview again to be sure, but I think he said he paid little attention to cannabis prior to his wife telling him her experience. Likely thanks to anchoring, I suspect that was his jumping-off point where he decided that if his wife, an admitted expert in psychiatry, decided cannabis was causing criminal behavior, that confirmation bias kicked in and sent him spiraling down the rabbit hole of "cannabis must be illegal for a good reason."

I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist (actually pretty far from it, computer scientist), but I took several psychology classes in college that didn't contribute toward my major in any way because I always thought the biases and fallacies to which we almost universally fall victim are so interesting, and I felt that understanding how people interpret information would both help me realize when I'm engaging in those behaviors myself and also make me a more effective programmer. I mentioned anchoring and confirmation bias, but what's almost certainly happening with him now is the backfire effect, which is related to, but distinct from, confirmation bias. According to him, his initial view on cannabis was something of a blank slate until his wife, both a trusted source and an expert in his mind, gave him the idea that cannabis and crime are associated, so he probably started looking for information that confirmed that assertion since it was his "anchor." Despite being presented with momentous amounts of scientific evidence contradicting his claims, he felt even more confident in his assertions instead of less, an example of the backfire effect. His argument that there weren't enough psychiatrists who signed the letter to validate any of its claims is a great example of the no true Scotsman fallacy. I suspect even if all the signatories were psychiatrists (who are typically clinicians, not researchers, which also means selection bias comes into play since patients of psychiatrists are usually people with pre-existing mental health issues), he would find some reason why all those psychiatrist signatories aren't actually experts.

One thing you pondered was whether he's "in too deep" to admit he was wrong. You essentially described irrational escalation, also known as the "sunk cost fallacy" where, despite an outpouring of criticism of his claims, he's put so much time and money into pushing those claims that he continues doing it because he's gone "all in" on promoting prohibition. He continues to promote the idea that cannabis causes violence, despite science and experts disagreeing with him. I can't say what's in his heart, but I suspect he truly believes what he's pushing and that he simply doesn't realize all the cognitive biases he's experiencing. He thinks the overwhelming majority of "real experts" agree with him, but, according to his words and actions, they're only "real experts" if they agree with him.

With regards to that graph, the author mentions the data source, and since it's from the US Government, the data should be publicly accessible in one way or another. I have some experience with graph design, and I'll definitely look into acquiring that data and creating a public domain version showing that surprisingly high degree of correlation between the two entirely unrelated phenomena. I'm surprised the Correlation does not imply causation article doesn't have a graphic demonstrating the phenomenon, since such a graph would make it very easy for individuals who are just skimming or who are better at understanding concepts through visualizations instead of reading giant blocks of complex, jargony text like the ones present in the article to grasp the gist of what the article is trying to say. I'll see what I can do. Matt18224 (talk) 23:36, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Recent Edits to Alex Berenson Article

Hey Avatar317, thanks for fixing the Alex Berenson article after it had been maliciously altered. I got my email digest showing the anonymous removal of information and immediately went to revert it, only to pleasantly discover that you had already done so. I geolocated the IP address, and it's suspiciously in the exact same area of New York where Alex Berenson lives. The editor also added information about Berenson's pet, with quite specific, unsourced details and poor following of the Manual of Style. While I have no definitive proof, the anonymous editor's seemingly visceral reaction to the content in the article debunking Berenson's claims, as well as Berenson himself being publicly annoyed by any criticism of his works, leads me to suspect that Berenson himself altered the article. He removed every bit of properly-sourced, reliable information in the article that was critical of his book, while leaving information simply stating what the book is and what he claims in it.

It may be necessary to keep a close eye on this situation, including potentially requesting an IP ban from an admin, if he continues to remove unfavorable, factual information, since this would be a blatant violation of WP:AUTO. I know you've put a lot of work into improving the article (as well as the topic overall), and I wanted you to know I'll staunchly back you up if it ultimately comes to a conflict. I strongly suspect other editors will also support the inclusion of that information in the article, since its inclusion objectively improves the quality and breadth of the article and is not "slanderous" or "partisan" as the anonymous editor claimed. Matt18224 (talk) 18:25, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

@Matt18224: Thank you for also keeping an eye on this; I do think it may be an article which might see other edits like that one. I looked at Wikipedia's policies on page protection, (WP:Protection_policy) and it says that a page cannot be prophylactically protected; but after repeated vandalism, protection can be asked for:

Semi-protection prevents edits from unregistered users (IP addresses), as well as edits from any account that is not autoconfirmed (is at least four days old and has made at least ten edits to Wikipedia) or confirmed. This level of protection is useful when there is a significant amount of disruption or vandalism from new or unregistered users, or to prevent sock puppets of blocked or banned users from editing, especially when it occurs on biographies of living persons who have had a recent high level of media interest. An alternative to semi-protection is pending changes, which is sometimes favored when an article is being vandalized regularly, but otherwise receives a low amount of editing.

So WP:Pending_changes might be the best thing to ask for if this starts recurring, since these two articles don't seem to have had that many edits.

I also did the IP-geolocate to see the same info as you, though I didn't know what area of NY he lives in, but I do also suspect him of being that editor, as you said, based on the edit summaries and other info added. I agree with you about the ridiculousness of (and similarity to his current statements) the claim of "...purely slanderous and partisan non-facts." All the sources used to reference those statements are listed as "Reliable sources" here: WP:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources, and I specifically include quotes so that editors and readers can have reasonable confidence that the article is appropriately paraphrasing the reference.

Lastly, thank you for the good psychological overview in our last discussion of some of what you suspect is going on here, and thanks again for also keeping an eye on these articles!!

September 2019

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A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Just to show my appreciation for your edits. Doug Weller talk 09:09, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

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Minimum wage

Hello, to avoid an edit war with regards to the minimum wage article; the USA Today article that I removed was actually updated after the researchers who conducted the study published further findings (which you can find in my original edit summary) that contradicted the original results. However, even after the update, the article does not mention the new findings in any way. You can check the dates yourself. The article is therefore not a fair representation of the researchers' work. Furthermore, the article was cited in a section titled "Employment", even though the study and the article focused on earnings, a different issue entirely. We can therefore conclude that the paragraph that I removed does not serve much purpose in the article. If you still insist on reverting my edit (which, again, wouldn't make sense due to the reasons I just cited), then at least fix the spelling ("employers's") and retain the formatting fixes that I made to the paragraph above it. You seem like a reasonable person ("show me the data" and all that), so I hope we can put this behind us amicably. Thank you. Gagwef (talk) 11:15, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Um, Wikipedia /does/ allow OFFSITE links in body ...

In regards to my WP:GF to Facebook Messenger page about a month ago, you stated in your reversion, that "Wikipedia does not allow OFFSITE links in articles", which is categorically FALSE. The Wikipedia page you linked to as justification, WP:EL, explicitly states that your perspective is false, which says, quote: "Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia (external links), but they should not normally be placed in the body of an article." This means that external links are allowed in the body of the article, but only under certain special circumstances. So, the issue here is what constitutes the special circumstances to allow the exception to "should not normally". In this case, the link is not just some link to an external website, that should go into the "see also" section. The external website itself "Messenger.com" is what is cited directly in the article, as such, that would seem to be a very reasonable reason to allow an in-body external link via the "should not normally" exception. WP:EL goes on list far more trivial exceptions than that as being perfectly valid in-body external links, quote: "Some acceptable links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy." WP:EL also cites WP:COMMON for commonsense, which would seem to strongly apply here, i.e., articles mentions name of website, article should link to website. If you still disagree, then I would suggest that you also remove "(Messenger.com)" mention from the article, as it's mention is irrelevant if the article doesn't link to it.