John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

Belgium is also the national equivalent of a difficult marriage everyone had been expecting to end for ages now, yet it still keeps going.

You don't need to tell me how fractious the US is. I just need to look at Facebook, where all my friends are whining about the supposed mass influx of Californians.

I've heard somebody claim that 10,000,000 Californians have moved to Texas in the last few years. The population of Texas is about 26,000,000.

And part of that hostility is the "Red State/Blue State" illusion, where people think everybody from a particular state has the same political beliefs. As a lifelong Texan who's never voted Republican, that really annoys me.

And the United Kingdom is... interesting. I can trace much of my ancestry to England and Ireland, so their history is something I try to learn a little about, and... yeah.

I've heard people speculating that Brexit will lead to the dissolution of the UK. I doubt that's going to happen, but the idea has an odd appeal to me, even though it would probably upset a lot of people's lives.

Edited by MisterTambourineMan on Jun 18th 2021 at 5:44:34 AM

[insert rant about First Past the Post voting and gerrymandering]

Actually, this has me wondering about German politics. Sure there's the East/West divide, but it literally was a ton of kingdoms until the 1870's.

I think my original point about the US was more along the lines of states laws and the powers states have. While I could be wrong- I've only ever lived in the US- I get the impression that in other countries the states have less power compared to the US where different states managed lockdown differently, have different gun laws, prison laws, state taxes, etc.

Germany certainly has its share of regional stereotypes going back to those kingdoms. Prussians seem to be forever unpopular, and that was before the world wars.

We don't really have this political division between provinces in the Netherlands, probably because we are a multi-party system, so a blend of parties is always a given. There are some general trends, though: Limburg (in the south) tends to favour the PVV (Wilders), and the rural north provinces are still strong for the SGP (orthodox Christans; like "we're still not sure about this newfangled feminism thing you've got going" orthodox).

The SGP mostly has it's power base in the province of Zeeland, which isn't exactly in the North. Northern rural areas tend to favour the CDA, while the few industrialized regions (Twente, East Groningen) are socialist, sometimes even communist, strongholds.

Like the US, The Netherlands has a bible belt. It stretches from Zeeland in the South West across the Veluwe to the Drenthe/Groningen border in the North East. The region has all the problems you'd expect from a bible belt: low rates of childhood vaccinations, high incidence of sexual abuse, the occasional cult, etc. Oh and the SGP has issues with First Wave feminism, as in women's suffrage, but somehow they're leaving the fight against modern feminism to Fv D (the fascist party).

Belgian desire for independence from The Netherlands is mostly the result of poor governance by King William I, combined with the emergence of nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After Belgium gained independence, a francophone elite emerged. The Belgian nobility were all French speakers, and during the industrial revolution Wallonia got rich beause of its natural resources, coal and iron ore.

A movement of Flemish nationalists emerged, which still exists today, but since the importance of mining declined in the second half of the twentieth century, Flanders became more prosperous than Wallonia, and Flemish nationalism shifted from an emancipatory movement to a more xenophobic ideology.

Edited by JOZeldenrust on Jun 18th 2021 at 6:37:11 AM

PACE (Property Accessed Clean Energy). Specifically residential. Government program run by private corporations.

Edited by terumokou on Jun 21st 2021 at 1:33:16 AM

The underlying concept behind PACE sounds great. But the privatization of the program and essentially letting contractors do whatever they want and bill it as a lien are very problematic.

For the record, the house those two guys were living in looked like it was going to fall apart and no responsible roofer would take on that project with all the other structural problems.

Edit: Oh, right, they're packaging and selling the liens as investment instruments. Of course they are.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 21st 2021 at 8:10:10 AM

So basically a program sponsored by Obama and Biden is causing people to go into massive debt and lose their homes through this program. Which is of course made worse by Obama and Biden endorsing it in the first place.

The program is well-intentioned. However, like in many things Obama was likely persuaded to turn the majority of the actual work over to private businesses out of a desire to make it more palatable to conservative politicians. As such, it was transformed from a program that benefits consumers to one that benefits the finance industry.

There are sustainable energy subsidy and loan programs that have been used to great effect in communities around the world, so it's not like this is a complete non-starter. It's just the "American Way" of doing things that messes it up.

Why is it so hard for people to care about each other's survival more than making a lot of extra money?

When unregulated, the "invisible hand of the market" is impersonal. It cares nothing about individuals so long as the system continues operating and delivers profits. This is why we need the hand of government to steer the markets.

Edit: It is worth noting that John Oliver specifically picks out the bad outcomes of these programs to make his point. He doesn't mention the thousands of homeowners that may have benefited from PACE, just the ones who were exploited or had a poor outcome, because nuance doesn't put eyeballs on screens.

It's important to point out these bad outcomes, of course, and to correct them, but we would never know from this piece how many people had good outcomes.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 21st 2021 at 2:44:42 PM

He is talking about a potential second credit crisis, though, which seems to imply that things are indeed bad.

Because that's the inherit nature of capitalism. Profit over everything, including human lives. This was just its logical outcome, really.

Greed.

I find this unlikely, unless PACE has put literally millions of homes into lien debt. Doing a Google search turned up a different program for elderly care with the same initials. Ugh...

Okay, I found a US DOE claim that PACE has "benefitted" 200,000 homes as of 2019, but no current figures. Wikipedia also has an article although it has no specific figures either. John Oliver's segment could have been written directly from it, in fact.

While there could be micro crises — it's never good when people lose their homes due to unaffordable liens — the program isn't anywhere near the kind of scale at which it could have significant macroeconomic effects.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 21st 2021 at 3:29:08 PM

The warnings of a potential crisis are likely due to people looking into expanding PACE to more states etc.

I'd rather we be directly subsidizing/providing credits towards home renovations for energy efficiency and solar than creating these dubious loan programs.

Yeah, direct subsidies sounds like the right way to go.

I think the main issue is the lack of guard rails you get with conventional loans. These filter out more of the people who won't be able to afford it.

So basically PACE was a sound idea that conservatives fucked with to make it a not so sound idea.

"You know what would really help people? More capitalism."

Yeah, more unregulated capitalism doesn't help anyone but the people whom already benefit hugely from unregulated capitalism in the first place.

Edited by M84 on Jun 21st 2021 at 9:58:16 PM

I swear this sounds like a plot from the original run of Leverage.

The first season had an episode where the villain of the week was a father and two sons running a contracting business where they would put contractor liens on houses where they did shoddy, over expensive work and then would take the house. It pretty much was an episode of Leverage.