We're not critics, but we'd never ever recommend eating these. These are some of the internet's funniest examples of forbidden snacks.
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November 02, 2021
Most Supreme Court justices seem to understand that SB 8 is a direct attack on the Constitution.
The abortion providers suing to block SB 8, Texas’s aggressive anti-abortion law, came into Monday’s Supreme Court argument with four votes on their side. Two months earlier, four justices thought the law should have been temporarily blocked while the legal challenge against it was sorted out — although the five most conservative justices voted against the abortion providers the first time Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson was before the Court.
The same case is now back before the justices, this time raising a narrow dispute about who’s even allowed to sue to block the law. And the abortion providers appear likely to have picked up a crucial extra vote to gain the majority.
All four of the dissenters from the September order appear likely to rule against Texas. Though Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, did ask one or two skeptical questions of Marc Hearron, the lawyer representing the abortion providers, he seemed to grow increasingly annoyed with Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone. At one point, Roberts admonished Stone for resisting a hypothetical question asked by the Chief.
Meanwhile, it also appears likely that Justices Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett will switch sides and provide the fifth (and maybe a sixth) vote against Texas. At one point in the argument, Kavanaugh pointed to a brief filed by the Firearms Policy Coalition, which argued that, if SB 8 is allowed to stand, “it will undoubtedly serve as a model for deterring and suppressing the exercise of numerous constitutional rights” — including the Second Amendment.
Kavanaugh appeared to view such an outcome as untenable, and that’s bad news for SB 8.
That said, even if the Court does rule against Texas in Whole Woman’s Health, there’s no guarantee that such a decision will do much to help abortion providers in Texas.
The narrow question currently before the Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health — and in United States v. Texas, a similar challenge to SB 8 brought by the Justice Department that is also before the justices — is not whether the Texas law should be struck down. It is whether anyone is allowed to sue to block the law. The reason there’s any uncertainty about how to answer this question is that SB 8 was drafted for the very purpose of evading judicial review.
So even if the Supreme Court does rule that the abortion provider plaintiffs are allowed to sue, it is likely that there will still need to be more litigation in a federal trial court before SB 8 is actually determined to be unconstitutional and is blocked by a court order.
Texas’s law effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a clear violation of the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which guarantees a right to abortion until the fetus is sufficiently developed to survive outside the womb. Nevertheless, even if a trial court does find SB 8 to be unconstitutional, any order it issues blocking SB 8 could be swiftly halted by the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — forcing the plaintiffs to once again return to the Supreme Court to challenge the Fifth Circuit’s decision.
Looming over all of this is another abortion case — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which will be argued in December, and asks the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade altogether.
There is a risk, in other words, that by the time the courts sort out whether to strike down SB 8, the Supreme Court will declare that there is no constitutional right to an abortion. And then it won’t matter nearly as much what the courts do with SB 8 — because Texas will be able to pass a law criminalizing abortion outright.
SB 8 was drafted in order to thwart judicial review
Texas’s anti-abortion law is, Chief Justice Roberts wrote previously, “not only unusual, but unprecedented.” It effectively prohibits all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, but does so through a scheme that, in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s words, was “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”
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Under a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity,” private plaintiffs typically are not allowed to sue a state directly in federal court. But the Court held in Ex parte Young (1908) that private plaintiffs may sue the state official tasked with enforcing the law that such a plaintiff wishes to challenge. So, for example, if a law permitted the state attorney general to bring criminal proceedings against abortion providers, a party challenging the law would sue the attorney general.
But SB 8 explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. Instead, it may only be enforced through private lawsuits. These lawsuits may be filed by “any person” who is not an employee of the state against anyone who either performs an abortion or who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Plaintiffs who prevail in these lawsuits receive a bounty of at least $10,000, which must be paid by the defendant.
So the idea is that no one can sue to stop the law because no state official is a proper defendant.
This structure, it should be noted, does permit abortion providers to perform an abortion that violates SB 8, wait until they are sued, and then argue in Texas state court that SB 8 is unconstitutional. The problem with that approach, as Hearron told the justices, is that “no rational abortion provider would violate this law.”
Anyone who does so could be bombarded with thousands of lawsuits, forced to hire an army of lawyers to defend against them, and then be ordered to pay a bounty of at least $10,000 — which means that there is no upper limit on that bounty.
The abortion provider plaintiffs’ primary argument is that, under Young, they may sue state court judges who hear SB 8 lawsuits, and the state court clerks who docket those cases. Yet, while the justices did spend a good deal of time discussing whether judges and clerks are proper defendants, their most revealing questions focused on whether a law like SB 8 should be allowed under any circumstances.
The three most conservative justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — appeared likely to uphold Texas’s scheme, although Thomas did ask some tough questions of Stone, the Texas lawyer. Thomas noted that SB 8 is unlike other laws permitting lawsuits against private defendants because other laws typically only allow plaintiffs who’ve been injured in some way to file suit.
SB 8, by contrast, effectively deputizes anyone who is not a state official to enforce the state’s anti-abortion law — regardless of whether a particular plaintiff was actually injured by the person they are suing. As Thomas put it, SB 8 plaintiffs are “acting in concert with the state” to enforce the state’s law.
The three liberal justices, meanwhile, left no doubt that they view SB 8 as unacceptable. Sotomayor, for example, pointed to the Court’s school segregation decision in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), which held that the Constitution “can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes.”
Justice Stephen Breyer, meanwhile, quoted early 20th century Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, “I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as the laws of the several States.” SB 8, Breyer suggested, would prevent the Court from striking down state laws.
Roberts, meanwhile, seemed to share the liberal justices’ concerns. He imagined a slightly different version of SB 8, where the minimum bounty was $1 million instead of just $10,000 — and warned that no one would reasonably be willing to risk violating such a law because the cost of losing would be so high. He also criticized Texas for passing a law that allows abortion providers to be sued anywhere in the state, rather than following the ordinary rules governing which legal venues are appropriate.
So that leaves Kavanaugh and Barrett as the justices in the middle, and both appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ arguments.
Kavanaugh’s worried about what an SB 8-style law would do to the Second Amendment
If SB 8 is upheld, and the Court permits the use of private bounty hunters to limit constitutional rights, another state could easily use this mechanism not just to restrict abortions and reproductive care, but also to chill other constitutional rights. As the Firearms Policy Coalition argued in its amicus brief, “it takes little in the way of creative copying for States hostile to the Second Amendment — New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, etc. — to declare that the ownership or sale of a handgun is illegal ... and set up a bounty system with the same unbalanced procedures and penalties adopted by Texas in this case.”
This possibility seemed to bother Kavanaugh, who asked about whether a state could authorize a million-dollar bounty against anyone who sells an AR-15, a popular form of semi-automatic rifle.
Even more significantly, Kavanaugh appeared to echo the liberal justices’ concerns that Texas is gaming the system. “There’s a loophole that’s been exploited here,” he told Stone, and suggested that the question before the Court in the Whole Woman’s Health case is “should we extend the principle of Ex parte Young to close this loophole?”
Stone, meanwhile, had a disastrous exchange with Kavanaugh where he argued that someone targeted by an SB 8-style law would have to lobby Congress to enact a federal law protecting their constitutional rights. It “would be difficult to get legislation through Congress,” Kavanaugh deadpanned in response to Stone — an acknowledgement the federal government’s dysfunctional legislative branch is not likely to do much of anything at all.
Barrett, meanwhile, played her cards a little closer to her chest than Kavanaugh, but she seemed bothered that there was no adequate way to challenge SB 8 unless the federal judiciary intervenes. At one point, she expressed concern that abortion providers “cannot get full review” of the law in state court. At another, she questioned whether an SB 8 defendant would be able to get a broad injunction blocking the law in state court.
So, while it remains to be seen how each justice votes, it appears that there may be as many as six votes to allow a lawsuit against SB 8 to move forward. The possibility that any constitutional right could be undermined by an SB 8-style law appeared to bother at least some of the conservative justices who ordinarily vote against abortion rights.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that legal abortions will move forward in Texas — as mentioned above, there is a risk that the courts do not effectively block SB 8 until after the Court hands down its Dobbs decision, which could allow Texas to criminalize abortion outright.
But it does suggest that, at the very least, the Supreme Court isn’t going to give states the power to give the middle finger to its decisions.
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November 02, 2021
Why hospitality employees won’t go back to work.
If there’s one thing many workers have learned from the pandemic, it’s that while money is a lot, it’s hardly everything.
Employers in almost every industry say they’re struggling to find workers, but the situation is especially severe in the leisure and hospitality sector. While workers in these industries are getting paid more than ever, it still doesn’t seem like enough. Bars, restaurants, and hotels across the country are posting signs advertising open jobs — or asking customers to be patient since they don’t have enough staff. In August, the latest available month for openings and turnover data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were a near-record 1.7 million open jobs in leisure and hospitality — 10 percent of all jobs in the sector — and a record of nearly a million people quitting.
While lots of breath has been spent suggesting people aren’t returning to these jobs because they’re lazy or on the government dole, the apparent shortfall in workers instead demonstrates longstanding problems with the industries themselves. Thanks to technology, the hospitality business has been undergoing a transformation over the past decade or so, as food delivery has become mainstream and automation has taken over many face-to-face interactions.
But human beings are still integral to keeping these industries running. As a result, restaurants and hotels are closing or unable to operate at full capacity, which is forcing companies to either change their working conditions or their business models to survive. The reasons it’s currently tough to hire in the sector are myriad and range from the romantic, like a push for worker empowerment and reevaluating the meaning of life, to the quotidian, like a lack of child care and opportunities for advancement.
“Hospitality jobs, especially front-line, are notoriously known for low-wage, low-skill kinds of work — it’s associated with working conditions that are not necessarily conducive to adequate life-work balance,” Bruce Tracey, a professor of human resource management at Cornell and editor of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, told Recode. “So that’s already a stretch to attract people.”
“And then go to the last 18 months and the industry broadly has shown its vulnerability and its fragility,” Tracey said.
Many Americans have been able to hold out for jobs in other industries or better jobs within leisure and hospitality thanks, in part, to an increased level of savings and decreased spending during the early pandemic as well as other cost-cutting. Additionally, unemployment benefits provided a much needed cushion to those working in food service, hotels, and entertainment — industries that were hit hard early in the pandemic.
The assumption that workers would be forced to go back to work once pandemic benefits ran out didn’t prove true. However, when individual states rescinded their unemployment benefits this summer, it didn’t have a meaningful impact on the worker shortage in many industries, including leisure and hospitality. Data from September, when the benefits were cut on a federal level, show a similar story, suggesting there are reasons beyond financial keeping people from taking these jobs.
Why people are leaving leisure and hospitality
Before the pandemic, Maureen Neer was a chef de cuisine who typically put in 70 hour weeks, much of it unpaid. “It was sort of like a badge of honor for chefs to be ultra-hardworking, sleep-deprived, to work as much as you can,” Neer said.
When the pandemic hit, she decided it was time to reevaluate her work-life balance and change industries. She convinced a telecom company that her skills ordering supplies for restaurants made her a good candidate as purchasing and operations manager there. She’s been at her new job for a year and is enjoying how different it is from her prior profession.
“I’m still getting to work from home, which gives me a lot more free time to do life things. And I have health insurance, which is nice, and it just feels a little more stable and less likely for me to get burnt out,” Neer said. She sometimes fantasizes about cooking again but keeps reminding herself that “there were a lot of very legitimate and valid reasons why I quit the industry.”
For starters, while pay for non-managers in the leisure and hospitality sector rose a dramatic 13 percent in September compared with a year earlier, the average wage is less than $17 an hour, according to the latest BLS wage data. That’s less than even the next lowest-paid sector, retail, which brings in $18.68 per hour. (BLS wage data goes by industry, not occupation.) And a $2 an hour raise also doesn’t mean that much in an industry where many people work part time.
Indeed, weekly pay in the industry averages out to just $416.08, with workers putting in 25 hours a week. In other industries, people are typically able to get more hours and thus bigger paychecks. (On average, for all private sector jobs, people work 34 hours a week.)
Leisure and hospitality is far from the only sector undergoing a hiring crunch, so many people are able to find better, higher-paying work elsewhere. People are leaving for a variety of jobs, including those in factories and warehouses, customer service, and health care. These are often jobs that have better benefits and more predictable schedules. Unsurprisingly, interest in jobs on the hiring platform Indeed skew heavily toward positions with higher wages as well as ones that offer remote work — something that’s not really possible in the leisure and hospitality industries.
Jobs outside that sector also have a clearer path to advancement, according to Cornell’s Tracey. He gave the example of a luxury hotel where it took people 15 years to rise from an entry-level position to general manager. “How long does it take for people to train up to be a brain surgeon?” Tracey said.
But as the pandemic wears on, the lack of affordable child care is perhaps the biggest hurdle to getting people back to work. Many child care workers left their low-paid industry during the last eighteen months, leading to child care deserts where even those with the financial means can’t obtain adequate child care. For people in lower income brackets, including those working in leisure and hospitality, paying for child care can eat up most of their wages, so staying home to watch children is simply a smart financial decision.
As Louis Hyman, a labor relations professor at Cornell, put it, systematically undervaluing child care — considered to be women’s work — has led to this situation.
“Instead of workers suddenly realizing that there is more to life than their service economy job (did anybody not know that?),” Hyman told Recode in an email, “It’s just the patriarchy.”
Still, living through a pandemic gave many people the time and the distance to take stock of their life, and some landed on reprioritizing the importance of work within it. That’s especially true in industries like leisure and hospitality, which disproportionally employs women and people of color, who were disproportionately ravaged by Covid-19.
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Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
“Those are people in our industry,” D. Taylor, international president of Unite Here, a union that represents workers in the hotel and food services industries, said. “They reassessed: ‘What am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Am I getting ahead? Do I have a shot at the American dream?’”
Even those who are benefiting from rising wages in leisure in hospitality are questioning the work. For example, a teacher in New York state who works at a winery on weekends, told Recode that he’s been making more, due to a raise and increased tips. But since the pandemic, he’s had a change of heart and wants to spend more time with his own kids.
“It’s hard to say no to money,” the teacher, who asked that we not use his name, said. “Before [the pandemic] I almost looked to be stressed, but now I’m good. I don’t need any more.”
A lot has been said about power being in the hands of the worker. A flurry of news about higher wages, signing bonuses, and employee perks, like the ability to work from home, has made it seem as though employees completely dictate their terms of employment. But while employers are certainly having to work harder to hire and retain employees, worker power is likely overstated, especially among lower-wage workers.
“If they held the power, they’d be making 30 bucks an hour,” Taylor said. “They have some power now.”
Leveraging a little bit of power
Problems within the leisure and hospitality sector predate the pandemic. The rise of online ordering and home-sharing apps has sent shockwaves through the industries, and was already causing unrest among leisure and hospitality employees. The pandemic, as it’s wont to do, just made the trend more extreme. It caused working conditions to deteriorate more, but at the same time, it’s also given workers more power than before, thanks to the ongoing labor shortage.
To compete in the online space, restaurants have partnered with tech platforms like Grubhub and Uber Eats to market, sell, and deliver their goods. While expanding their customer base, these platforms also cut into restaurants’ already low margins. And workers at those restaurants bear that strain. Additionally, many restaurant workers either lost their jobs or unwittingly became front-line workers during the pandemic, which put them constantly at risk of getting sick. The situation is similar at hotels, which have faced an existential crisis from competitors like Airbnb and were largely empty last year. That has meant less money going to hotels and, by extension, to their employees.
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Eduardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images
The nature of leisure and hospitality work is also changing. Some companies are using software and robots to complete more mundane tasks, and in turn making the jobs themselves better. By not having to take orders or schedule employees, some employees can focus on the more compelling components of their jobs.
So far it’s unclear whether using machines to flip burgers or bake pizzas will reduce the need for human labor overall or just redirect it to other tasks. Of course, some companies will simply get by with fewer people, say by reducing how often they clean hotel rooms or by opening fewer days per week or by offering fewer menu items or amenities.
Cornell’s Tracey, however, sees elevating tasks as a way to offer better jobs with better pay.
“The mindset is changing,” Tracey said. “I speak with operational managers and leaders all the time, and many of them are trying to express how much gratitude they can muster to anybody who’s willing to show up.”
That’s expressed itself in higher wages, better benefits, and more flexible hours. That is not just beneficial to employees.
“Some places have gone to try out what it means to actually be a high-road employer,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, said. “Reduced turnover, higher productivity, higher morale — through all that stuff you recoup the cost of the increased pay.”
But that’s by no means universal.
Yamir Contreras, a unionized housekeeper at a hotel in Rhode Island, hasn’t seen her pay grow since before the pandemic. Her workload, however, has.
Many of her former colleagues left to find better-paying work in other industries, she told Recode through a union interpreter. Where there were once 25 housekeepers, there are now 11 doing the same amount of work. Her pay has not been raised, but she doesn’t want to leave since the job is near her home and her kids. It’s also just what she’s used to.
“What’s really sad is that there are people here who have worked for 10 years and they’re still not even making $18 an hour,” Contreras said. “And hotel jobs are hard. When you work your whole life in a hotel, you go home, and you retire with a walking stick.”
To wit: An aging population that’s retiring earlier than usual is one of the many reasons there aren’t enough workers to go around.
In response to poor conditions, there’s been unprecedented interest in unions — though union membership is still only at 11 percent, thanks in part to the difficult governmental hurdles to forming unions. Taylor, the union president, said worker discontent is higher than he’s seen in his 35 years of organizing.
“There’s never been a better time, frankly, to unionize because workers know that corporate America is not going to take care of them, governments aren’t going to take care of them,” he said.
The union hosted numerous actions among hospitality workers last month including marches and strikes. They’re asking for fair workloads, living wages, and an end to job cuts. Already, thanks to the labor shortage, leisure and hospitality jobs have been forced to become better than they used to be.
Dewayne Jamison, a stadium worker in Seattle who helps keep the many concession stands stocked with food and beer, recently got a promotion and a big raise to $24 an hour after a union agreement.
A high minimum wage in Seattle, as well as hazard pay, made it so that even entry-level jobs were making nearly $21 an hour there. That meant the stadium food and beverage company had to increase its wages and benefits to compete.
“I never thought we’d get a $6 raise just like that, you know? That’s a game changer for a stadium worker,” Jamison said. “That’s a life changer.”
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November 02, 2021
iBuyers want to be the Amazon of real estate. What does that mean for the rest of us?
Anything can be done online. Some tech companies, like Zillow and Redfin, think they can even buy and sell houses online, and are dreaming of becoming the Amazon of what has come to be known as ‘‘iBuying.” But they’re finding out that buying and selling assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is a bit harder as an online industry than buying and selling books.
Last week, Zillow made a startling announcement that it would stop buying homes for the rest of the year, self-reportedly due to a “backlog of renovations and operational capacity constraints” that it blamed on the supply chain issues plaguing the economy.
This news made a splash in the world of iBuying, a relatively new industry in which companies like Zillow, Redfin, OfferUp, and Opendoor allow homeowners to avoid the tedious process of listing and staging homes by selling directly (and quickly) to them. But it also caught traction on TikTok where Sean Gotcher, a Las Vegas real estate agent, posted a video with Zillow’s news laughing at the company’s troubles.
Gotcher had already achieved the sort of brief internet fame one can most easily get on TikTok when he posted a video in September that has now received more than 3 million views. In it, he insinuates that iBuyer companies are manipulating the market by intentionally overpaying for some homes in order to sell others that they’ve already bought in nearby areas for a higher price.
While some of Gotcher’s claims are far-fetched and verge on conspiracy theories (and since real estate agents directly compete with iBuyers, you should take claims either entity makes about the other with a grain of salt), the video went viral because it struck at the heart of a growing fear that housing is becoming less like shelter and more like a risky financial asset traded on Wall Street. This anxiety is not new but has become electrified over the course of the pandemic as a hot housing market and a historic undersupply of housing have locked out young and first-time homebuyers. Earlier this year, fears that BlackRock and other institutional investors were responsible for current market conditions were rampant despite a lack of evidence for the claim.
iBuyer companies make up a very small share of the market — roughly 1 percent of home sales in the second quarter of 2021, at what is their peak so far — but it’s important to take concerns about their growth seriously. While iBuyers contend that they are offering a clear solution to reducing the stress of the home-selling process, US policy has predicated financial security on homeownership, and the introduction of large firms into the space raises fears of potential anti-competitive and predatory behavior.
The Amazon of real estate?
The process of selling a house is stressful, to say the least. On top of the general concern —about getting the best price for the most expensive thing you have ever owned and in which you have likely already invested tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours — is all the logistical stuff. As a part of staging the house, sellers may have to do front yard work, repaint the interior and exterior, replace the carpets, hire a professional photographer for the listing, keep the interior clean in preparation for showings, figure out where to take the home’s dogs and children when there are showings, hire a real estate agent, the list goes on.
This doesn’t even include trying to time your home sale to coincide with the move-in date of your new home or city. Often, people will need to have sold their home in order to buy a new one, which means there can be additional transaction costs there too if you have to put all your things in storage and live at a family member’s place or a rental while you look for your new home.
This is the problem iBuyer companies say they are looking to solve. Instead of having to go through the hassle of this entire process and potentially incur some costs, homeowners can take an iBuyer’s offer — and then the company does the work of staging, listing, and selling the house to someone else.
There are are a couple of ways these companies can turn a profit: first, the difference between what they purchased the home for and what they are able to sell it for (minus any costs for renovations, upkeep, and selling), and second, the fees they charge homeowners to sell the property.
Whether any of them are actually turning a profit is a whole other matter.
iBuyers are growing quickly. According to University of Colorado Boulder’s scholar-in-residence Michael DelPrete, in 2018 iBuyer companies made up roughly 0.2 percent of the market; in 2019, his numbers show that iBuyers accounted for roughly 31,000 purchases or 0.5 percent of the U.S. market. According to research by Zillow, in Q2 of this year iBuyers’ market share reached 1 percent for the first time.
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But according to research by DelPrete, the profit margins in this industry are narrow. Looking at this past quarter, Opendoor and Zillow were posting net losses (-$144 million and -$59 million, respectively). While Offerpad did post a profitable quarter ($9 million), DelPrete notes that “the overwhelming majority of profits are coming from record home price appreciation, which is temporary, and appears to be falling.”
Though these numbers are small in the context of the national housing market, iBuyers have historically been relatively concentrated in specific regions like the Sun Belt where there’s more new single-family construction, since it’s easier to accurately price new, relatively similar homes. In 2019, DelPrete’s research showed that in the largest iBuyer market, Phoenix, they’d reached a 5.5 percent market share. However, Zillow data from Q2 of this year indicates that that number hasn’t shifted much with market share at 5.7 percent in Phoenix. Other cities with a relatively high share include Atlanta (5.3 percent), Charlotte (5.3 percent), and Raleigh (5.0 percent).
Redfin, despite expanding its iBuying business, is still heavily committed to its traditional real estate model. In a statement, Jason Aleem, vice president of RedfinNow (the iBuying arm of Redfin) said: “Part of what makes RedfinNow different is our ability to educate sellers on all of their options in a single conversation. ... Many are drawn to the certainty of our competitive cash offers, but those who still want to list on the open market for the lowest fee can do that with a local Redfin agent.”
But are these companies big enough to manipulate the market?
Taking concerns about market manipulation seriously
Despite Gotcher’s TikTok video claims, I’m very skeptical that iBuyers could manipulate the market to systematically undercut homeowners on the initial price of their homes and then set higher prices when they return to the market.
Take the first part of that plan — to systematically buy homes for less than they’re worth. There’s simply too much competition to be able to do that reliably. For one, there are other iBuyer companies that compete against one another. They find themselves in bidding wars with the other companies not infrequently, and some research indicates that the price they’re willing to pay is going up faster than the rest of market. And it’s not just iBuyers competing against one another — there are also thousands of real estate agents who would be happy to sell your home for you.
These companies simply don’t have the power to consistently drive up prices on homes they sell. Let’s break down exactly what would have to happen for an iBuyer to be able to do something like that. First, they would need to buy a significant number of homes within a given market. What a market is is up for debate, but you’d need to get enough market share to shift prices — courts have defined monopoly power as greater than 50 percent. To emphasize how far away iBuyers are from this, in the markets where they are most active that have achieved roughly 5 percent of sales, not even all the homes, just the ones that are selling. And that’s all iBuyers, not one specific company.
But that’s not even the hard part. The hard part would be that they’d need to hold onto the homes until they’d achieved a high enough market share. iBuyers are usually putting houses back on the market in a matter of a few months. They’d need instead to pay upkeep costs, property taxes, and take on the huge risk that all the homes that they are holding onto within a given area don’t tank in value because of something unrelated like an economic downturn or changing living preferences or a hurricane.
This strategy quite evidently has some major downside risks. There’s only so much that even a regionally monopolistic firm would be able to charge before people would choose to live elsewhere.
It would also require that these companies can accurately price homes. Failing to accurately build an algorithm is very costly — Bloomberg reported that when Zillow “tweaked the algorithms that power its home-flipping operation to make higher offers ... it had to stop making new offers” after winning too many bids. The market is appreciating more slowly than earlier this year, which means when you take into account the renovation costs and selling costs, Zillow could end up selling those homes at a loss.
It seems as though iBuyers are not resting their business model on selling homes. Instead, as the Wall Street Journal reports, they’ve “been clear that their businesses are built to mostly make money off of ancillary services like mortgage, title insurance and escrow.”
But not all the worries about these firms’ power can be brushed away easily.
To start an iBuying company, you need to be able to raise a lot of money. That means it’s hard for new competitors to join the market. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars in order to be a serious competitor — you have to be able to buy a lot of homes, hire contractors to do the necessary renovations, and also have all of the employees and independent agents to sell the homes as well. That doesn’t even include all the work needed to accurately build an algorithm that prices the homes accurately.
It’s possible that iBuyers could have downstream effects not just on homebuyers, but renters too: They’re not just putting the homes on the market for regular people to buy; they are often selling directly to institutional investors (like private equity firms) instead. According to Desiree Fields, assistant professor at UC Berkeley, there is a “growing role for iBuyers” observed in institutional investor activity in the market. She cites reporting from Business Insider that one CEO expects that up to 20 percent of homes his firm is buying for an institutional investor will come from iBuyers.
While the impact of institutional investors is contested, Fields says that these firms are more likely to pursue eviction than smaller landlords and some even practice predatory “serial eviction filings,” a tactic that disempowers tenants from “reporting problems to their landlords and fosters housing insecurity by adding late fees, attorney fees, and other costs to rent arrears.”
The bottom line: iBuyers are providing a service. It’s not clear they’ve really figured out how to make money. Understanding it as a fledgling industry in need of oversight rather than a behemoth manipulating the housing market is important to understand where the power really lies: in the hands of regulators.
Whether iBuyers end up being an option for homeowners or usher in an institutional investor frenzy that harms renters too is a regulatory question.
First, the underlying reason that home prices have skyrocketed is because of historic undersupply. Experts are clear that issue is largely the result of exclusionary zoning laws that have made it impossible to build sufficient homes to meet demand, and in particular demand for starter homes for first-time homebuyers and lower-income homebuyers. Because there is artificially constrained supply, investors hungry for quickly appreciating assets have turned to the housing market.
Second, lack of protections for low-income tenants was an emergency long before iBuyers or institutional investors ever became a presence in the American housing market. While this past year has pushed governments to be more willing to enact tenant protection measures like eviction moratoria and rent relief, tenants often lack basic protections from landlords who openly flout even the few laws that are enacted, due to lack of consistent enforcement.
People aren’t irrational to fear what increased investor activity in housing could mean. But it’s important to accurately diagnose what’s going on here and the actual range of potential harms. If not, the policy solutions designed by the government could fail to protect the people who need it the most.
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November 02, 2021
The initiative could have helped millions of students, but it wasn’t a top priority in Biden’s spending package.
President Joe Biden’s promise to offer tuition-free community college to students across the country — a plan he said would boost the middle class and help the United States compete with other countries — fell through late last month as his administration scaled back its sweeping $3.5 trillion social safety net bill to $1.75 trillion.
The plan would have spent $45.5 billion for states to offer two years of free community college tuition to every student for the next five years.
College tuition has risen dramatically in the past few decades. The average student receiving the Pell Grant, a need-based federal program for low-income students, could only afford 41 percent of two-year public colleges, and just 23 percent of four-year public colleges, in the 2018-19 school year.
And that’s before the fees, books, and room and board expenses students must cover, or the struggles that community college students face to stay in school as they battle housing and food insecurity, among other challenges.
Despite evidence that free tuition for community college can combat the affordability gap and lead to higher college enrollment and, ultimately, higher wages for low-income students and students of color, the plan had few champions in the face of other Democratic priorities. The bill will likely still include tuition assistance through expanded need-based financial aid, funding for historically Black colleges and universities, and money for workforce development programs, according to experts who spoke to Vox.
But the result illustrated a big problem for free college in America: Among most Democrats, the idea might be popular, but it’s just not a top priority when up against the likes of child care initiatives like universal preschool and the child tax credit.
Biden maintains that free college is one of his administration’s top agenda items. “I promise you — I guarantee it — we’re going to get free community college in the next several years, across the board,” Biden said at a CNN town hall last week, after the first reports that the plan was axed.
For now, free-tuition community college will just have to wait. But some advocates remain optimistic.
“It’s only the beginning of this movement, and so far it’s been robust,” said Michelle Miller-Adams, a political science professor at Grand Valley State University, researcher at the Upjohn Institute, and author of the book The Path to Free College: In Pursuit of Access, Equity, and Prosperity.
Community college enrollment has plummeted during the pandemic
About one-third of all college students in America attend community colleges, which, since their creation in the early 20th century, have come to mostly serve working-class students — as well as students of color who are underserved by traditional four-year colleges.
In 2018, 55 percent of all Hispanic undergraduates, 44 percent of Black undergraduates, 45 percent of Asian undergraduates and 41 percent of white undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges. From 2015 to 2016, about 37 percent of students at two-year community colleges came from families earning less than $20,000 a year.
The affordability gap is only widening. A report from 2017 by the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that students from households that earned less than $69,000 a year could hardly afford to attend 1 to 5 percent of colleges in a pool of more than 2,000, even taking financial aid into account. Students from households making more than $160,000 a year could afford about 90 percent of the schools in the pool.
For 15 years, states and localities have led a grassroots effort to experiment with free tuition college programs, viewed as one solution to alleviate the burden of rising costs; at the same time, there’s been a national discussion about college affordability. In 2015, former President Barack Obama called for legislation to make two years of college free; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has called to make all public colleges and universities free.
Nearly 20 states, from Tennessee to Michigan to California, already have some version of a free tuition college program, all developed within the last decade.
Tennessee was the first state to create one, Tennessee Promise, in 2015. After the program was created, community college enrollment increased, and the percentage of Black and Hispanic students at the state’s community colleges also increased.
These results have mostly held up, according to a recent report from the Tennessee comptroller’s office. The college-going rate increased from 58.6 percent to 64.4 percent between 2014 and 2015, in the first year of the program. In the three following years, the college-going rate decreased to 61.8 percent. The number of students who attended college in Tennessee from 2014 to 2017 increased by 15.3 percent, or about 5,400 students.
But between 2017 and 2019, the number of students who attended college decreased by 2.3 percent. Researchers concluded that the rise in the college-going rate is a result of the Promise program, meaning the initiative has a positive impact on enrollment — though not as significant as in its inaugural year. The same trend exists for retention at community colleges in Tennessee as a result of the program.
“It really was the sort of shock to the system that we needed in Tennessee and we discovered that the most vulnerable populations — low-income students, students of color, students who thought that college was never an option for them — are benefiting,” said Krissy DeAlejandro, executive director of TNAchieves, a scholarship and mentoring organization that brings high school students into the Tennessee Promise pipeline. “Going to college became the culture in Tennessee and we were talking about going to college with students in a way that we had never done before, and that is the magic.”
Other research shows that the benefits of free community college tuition outweigh the costs across the board: The programs contribute to higher completion rates for students and lower student loan default rates.
One randomized trial in Milwaukee that tracked students’ high school, college, and life outcomes for eight years found that free college enticed students who wouldn’t have otherwise gone to college and increased graduation rates. The researchers also conducted a cost-benefit analysis of multiple free college programs including in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Knox County, Tennessee; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Nebraska’s statewide program and concluded that the positive effect on college outcomes and future earnings is “much larger than the cost to society as a whole.”
Biden’s plan would have tried to entice more states into offering tuition-free college.
“Right now, whether you get to go to community college or a four-year college tuition-free depends on where you live,” Miller-Adams said.
States would have had to opt into the partnership. For the first year of the program the federal government would fund 100 percent of the grant, with funding decreasing by 5 percent each year. By the final year of the program, the federal government would cover 80 percent of the bill and states would pick up the remaining 20 percent. Each state would be given the same amount of funding regardless of how much they currently charge for tuition.
“The federal program would have at least offered the opportunity of a tuition-free path to community college to everyone in the nation. It would have been tremendously equalizing,” Miller-Adams said.
What’s next for tuition-free college
What states without free tuition programs are missing, DeAlejandro said, is the culture shift that emphasizes “college matters and that every student is college material.”
But ultimately, as the bill was put together, there were other priorities that were higher, like universal pre-kindergarten. Biden needs the votes of all 50 Democrats in the Senate. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have slowed the progress of negotiations. Manchin said he supports means-tested programs and has said he wouldn’t back free tuition community college for all students.
In the short term, what free tuition advocates have to look forward to are concessions like an increase in the maximum Pell grants, which help low-income students attend college, and funding for HBCUs, Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) — measures that matter, but don’t send the same kind of clear, impactful message as “free college.” The administration will invest in community college workforce programs, industry training, and apprenticeships, according to the latest framework, though specific funding commitments are yet to be announced. On the broader education front, lawmakers also plan to expand preschool access for six years for 6 million children.
DeAlejandro welcomes the increase in Pell grants. Students need more support to address housing insecurity and food insecurity, and to buy their books. Rural students in Tennessee can drive 30-40 minutes one way to get to class, so the doubling of Pell grants also helps out with gas money, she said.
With the rise in online learning, students have even tried to take classes using their phones, an obstacle that could be addressed with more Pell grant money, among others.
“I hope this doubling of Pell also comes with a message from states and local communities that we will work to ensure that every student has access to completing the FAFSA, because it’s intimidating and not always easy to complete,” DeAlejandro said.
Experts also hope that national leaders can recognize the importance of messaging for the next stage of the free college fight.
“What we’ve learned from Tennessee is that a very clear and simple message that college is affordable, and even tuition-free, brings a lot of people into the pipeline, rather than saying, ‘Oh, hey, you might be eligible for Pell grants,’” Miller-Adams said.
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November 02, 2021
How do slasher villains slash slashlessly?
Horror films — and specifically slashers — are known for abundant on-screen violence. Making that fake violence look real often comes down to props. Prop masters and special effects workers prepare knives, blood, and explosions to slash people ... without actually slashing them.
To pull this off they might use rubber, plastic, retractable, or even digital knives. Blood recipes have been improving over the decades to flow more realistically, and better soak into clothing. And explosions, both with air and squibs, push out blood to make scenes feel more realistic.
With movies, it’s often what you don’t see that makes the difference. After prop masters, makeup artists, and special effects artists complete their work, they pass the baton off to other members of the crew. Actors sell it, camera operators get the right angles to highlight the action while hiding the tubes and wires, and editors cut the different takes together. When pulled off well, it’ll make you feel like what you’re witnessing is real — even though it’s just movie magic.
You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
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November 02, 2021
Your local McDonald’s probably looks a lot more like Starbucks than classic McDonaldland these days. What happened?
If you’ve ever had a hankering for a Big Mac in Orlando, Florida, there’s a good chance that you wandered into a very special McDonald’s. With its hideous red-and-yellow checkerboard exterior and its neon-lit french fry monolith, the so-called “World’s Largest Entertainment McDonald’s” (now known as Epic McDonald’s) bears down on innocent customers like a monument to bad taste.
But while that McDonald’s might not win any awards for its architectural prowess, it at least lingers in the imagination. The muted colors, large glass windows, and overall boxy appearance of a modern McDonald’s are forgettable, and a far cry from the garish red-and-yellow buildings that many recall from their childhood. Slowly but surely, fast food restaurants are giving up their once brand-defining facades to follow in the path of “fast casual” eateries like Chipotle, which have become much more popular over the years.
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While this standardization might make good business sense for a style of dining that is sometimes seen as out of fashion or simply outmoded, some in the industry wonder if the company has lost something in the process of turning its back on its McDonaldland origins. As enthusiasts like Max Krieger attest, characters such as Ronald McDonald and Grimace might seem dated now, but they at least provided an identity for the brand that was original and appealing — even if only to its target audience of children and parents.
Krieger is a game developer from Pittsburgh who runs a popular Twitter account that documents unusual or downright tasteless McDonald’s restaurants from across the world. The “Nonstandard McDonald’s” account has managed to garner more than 150,000 followers in just a year. But while he takes a certain amount of glee in documenting these strange buildings, he doesn’t call himself a McDonald’s fan — the account’s Twitter bio jokingly refers to its mission as “preserving the only architectural heritage of the western world.”
“One of the things I really try to be clear about is, ‘Hey, we don’t stan a massive corporation,’” Krieger says with a laugh. “I was just surprised at how hard it was to find photo evidence of these weird McDonald’s that I had been to a couple of times, including the so-called Mayor McCheese mansion in Independence, Ohio. ... One thing you figure out very quickly is that most of these places are no longer operating. They’re defunct.”
happy independence day from the independence mcdonald's in independence, oh (active) pic.twitter.com/yYoY4jFSUg
— nonstandard mcdonald's (@nonstandardmcd) July 4, 2021
Many of these offbeat McDonald’s were pilot restaurants for culinary concepts that were eventually abandoned by the corporate mothership, such as “McDiners” that served classic greasy spoon fare. Others were the result of creative franchisees who wanted to make their restaurants stand out from the crowd, such as the aforementioned World’s Largest Entertainment McDonald’s in Orlando, which featured a truly disturbing hand-drawn mural of Ronald McDonald’s electric-yellow hands gripping the world. (“It’s like something out of Judge Dredd,” Krieger observes.)
Today, the revamped Orlando location has shorn its checkerboard exterior for a more standard appearance, though it still boasts its signature neon lighting. Viewed side by side, the two images are a testament to how much the company’s franchisees have modernized their restaurants in the past decade in response to prevailing trends. Krieger in particular points to the negative PR fostered by the book Fast Food Nation and the documentary film Super Size Me as damaging the family-friendly reputation of McDonald’s, which forced the company to change its image in order to appeal to an older clientele.
Chef and restaurant consultant Mark Moeller fondly recalls family outings to Mickey D’s with his five siblings when he was growing up in the ’80s. These days, though, he says fast-casual eateries largely serve the same purpose as quick-service restaurants (or QSRs, an industry term synonymous with fast food). Customers are looking for healthier options than your classic calorie-rich burger and fries. The gimmicks that had once brought droves of kids swarming in are now a liability, making the restaurant seem dated and cheap in comparison.
“The original thought with restaurants like McDonald’s was to aim at a family audience, so you could get customers for life,” Moeller says. “That’s what drove the playgrounds and the toys, all very kid-friendly stuff. Over the past few years, they’ve decided to become more adult, with clean lines and colors that will appeal to you while you’re eating. No more of those hard chairs that are designed to get people up and out for the sake of throughput. They try to make it comfortable so older adults from 30 to 60 can go in and feel comfortable enjoying the fast food they grew up on but in a more welcoming environment.”
From an industry perspective, Moeller feels that fast food restaurants are somewhat confused about what audience to attract. As many fast-casual restaurants continue to use the assembly line model popularized by Chipotle to deliver the convenience factor that undergirds all “fast” restaurants, it’s unclear exactly what older brands like McDonald’s can do to compete — other than following in their footsteps. In Moeller’s opinion, the company has removed so much of its legacy branding that it seems almost generic. During a recent move, he happened to find some of the old McDonald’s figurines he collected as a kid, and it reminded him of pleasant afternoons spent eating at the restaurant with his family.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia there for me, but I definitely think it’s missing in its current form,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine a kid going to a modern McDonald’s and forming memories like that today. They’ve lost sight of what makes their brand unique.”
Why so many new buildings are covered in rectangles
Like Moeller, restaurant architect Glen Coben also has a certain amount of nostalgia for old-school McDonald’s. For Coben, McDonald’s is synonymous with the automobile society produced by 20th-century American capitalism, with the golden arches serving as a miniature roadside attraction that could catch motorists’ eye when they’re flying by at 55 mph. (Similar roadside attractions include the world’s largest yarn ball and “Lucy,” the elephant statue in Atlantic City.) When it comes to modern fast food, however, Coben agrees that the visually arresting quality of those early restaurants has fallen by the wayside, and they’ve lost their identity as a result.
As Coben attests, this visual homogenization — or Chipotle-fication, if you will — is marked by exposed lighting, comfortable seating, and antiseptic steel surfaces. (Perhaps the most telling detail: The double-sloped mansard roof that was long associated with McDonald’s has largely become a thing of the past, much like the red roof of Pizza Hut.) This shift is hardly unique to the yellow arches. For example, Taco Bell has recently moved away from its sloped roof and colorful logo to embrace the boxy-building concept as well.
“One thing that I’ve learned in the industry is that fast food restaurants are essentially just designed in a lab to produce the biggest returns possible,” Coben says. “When I look at fast food restaurants today, that’s exactly what they look like. They’re soulless. ... As an architect, it just seems unfortunate that these buildings don’t look interesting or reflect the concept of what the restaurant is about. Their idea of a concept is, ‘Oh, we want it to look clean.’ Well, a well-lit, antiseptic environment is not a concept. It’s just nonexistent.”
Coben compares the current boxy, sleek designs of fast food restaurants to cavernous sports stadiums that were built in the latter part of the 20th century, such as Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, which was demolished in 2004. In his mind, entrepreneurs are aware that customers prefer a more focused concept even in their casual dining, and that’s why so many fast-casual restaurants have sprouted up in recent years to compete. However, that doesn’t mean that all of those concepts will be successful. “When you start seeing Edison lightbulbs and reclaimed wood in the big chains, that’s when you know that trend is pretty much done,” he says. “There’s a big lag that happens there.”
Jessica Farrell is an archivist who worked for years at the Golden Archives, which is McDonald’s official corporate library and history center. To Farrell, the uncanny appeal of the “nonstandard” Mickey D’s is a symptom of the tension that runs throughout the company’s corporate history: diversification versus uniformity. She points out that the concept of a nonstandard McDonald’s is in itself a contradiction — enthusiasts like Krieger visit particular locations because of their unique attributes, but the only reason those specificities stand out is because the rest of the restaurant is exactly what you expect, including the food. She also questions if the apparent wave of homogenization is actually a modern trend — in her mind, McDonald’s were always uniform, it’s just that the older design is considered more aesthetically pleasing by those who notice these changes.
“In my view, I think it’s just another era of homogenization, it’s not newly homogenized,” she says. “Since [then-McDonald’s CEO] Ray Kroc decided on the mansard roof design back in 1968, the company has always wanted owners and operators to use their standard design. If they push people to update their restaurants to what they view as a modern standard, that’s a pretty normal business practice. I think a lot of people who don’t necessarily know how things work behind the scenes might view that as something sinister, but if I was running McDonald’s, I would do the same thing.”
When reached for comment on whether the company encouraged nonstandard McDonald’s to change their restaurants for the sake of their corporate image, McDonald’s Corporation provided the following statement:
We have so much love for these unique and creative McDonald’s locations around the world and the sense of nostalgia they bring. At the same time, we’re constantly modernizing and innovating across our restaurants through new menu items, tech and digital innovations to give our fans the best possible experience, whenever and wherever they visit. And as we have for the past 66 years, we’ll continue to work closely with designers to create environments which are on brand and uniquely McDonald’s for our fans worldwide.
Given existing trends in the industry, it seems unlikely that your local McDonald’s will bust out the yellow and red paint anytime soon. That said, even if you aren’t an abiding fan of the Big Mac — or any of the chain’s healthier fare — it’s hard to deny the company’s potent legacy as the firm that arguably created fast food in the first place. The unique and strange locations that Krieger and his fans document might soon fade into the past, but it’s likely that McDonald’s and other QSR brands will need to imagine a more sustainable future for their brands beyond copying the Chipotles and Starbucks of the world. Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from the goofy franchisees that garner thousands of likes and retweets — the overall appreciation might be ironic, but there’s a sincere curiosity underlying the laughs.
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