So a Housing Finance Corporation is a thing in Texas that's supposed to help provide affordable housing. I remember hearing this from back in 2022 that basically said they're tax giveaways in exchange for not-very-affordable housing:

The property tax break is worth close to, on average, around $1 million a year. So you would expect to see, given that level of tax break, a pretty significant discount in the rents at properties giving these tax breaks. And that just hasn't been the case.

That article doesn't clarify exactly what goes wrong - insufficient quantities? rents still unaffordable on the units deemed affordable? - but hints that the complexes aren't providing enough low-income housing. Anyway, that part is par for the course.

This part may be new though: there's something called a Traveling HFC and it's wild:

Ross said it all started late last year when TDI, a Dallas-based real estate developer, approached Arlington's Housing Finance Corporation about getting a tax break in exchange for a pledge to make the Jefferson North Collins apartment complex affordable.

Under Texas law, cities and counties can create HFCs, which serve as independent non-profits capable of buying property, exempting it from all taxes, and allowing companies to own developments on them that pay no taxes at all.

When the city declined the proposal, the developers traveled 400 miles west to Pecos, a small Texas town with fewer than 13,000 residents, but with an HFC willing to approve deals all over the state.

,,,

The I-Team found similar deals Pecos HFC has undertaken in Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Lewisville, Haltom City and Azle. In all, the HFC has removed more than $500 million worth of property off North Texas tax rolls, costing local cities, counties and school districts millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The article implies that the housing isn't actually affordable, but doesn't actually give hard details on rents relative to AMI.

Here's another one happening between Cameron County on the border, and Williamson County in Austin:

Two Texas counties more than 300 miles away from each other are engaged in a legal fight over tax breaks for affordable housing.

The housing finance corporation for Cameron County, along the southern border, plans to buy two properties in Williamson County, outside Austin. Counties in Texas can set up housing finance corporations to encourage developers to build more affordable housing through tax breaks.

Williamson County officials have filed a lawsuit to prevent the deals from going through. Officials there claim that the Cameron County authority is exploiting a loophole with developers, and depriving Williamson County of its rightful tax dollars.

It seems like the legislature is in the process of trying to ban these. You'd think it would be a slam dunk, but let's not get too sure of their ability to clear the lowest bars.

New pope time.

We're not that close to the college search - Hawaii is finishing up her sophomore year - but I figured this would be a nice distraction and useful for me.

Heebie U is part of two tuition exchange programs. The websites are both onerous to navigate - like you can get a list of schools, but very little information about them. And there are many tiny, regional schools.

- List of Tuition Exchange schools here.
- Unhelpfully organized map of CIC-TEP schools here.

I know all the Texas schools, but not many beyond that. In your region, which are the strong/medium/weaker schools on those lists?

Hawaii is interested in going out of state, to somewhere with winters, but hey, there's a lot of Geeblets, and who knows where they'll go.

I hit up Moby with the Pennsylvannia version of this question earlier this year, when I thought we might take a trip, and I'm including his fantastically helpful answers under the cut, so that you use that as a template, or argue with him, or whatever.

Moby wrote: First off, I haven't heard of many of these schools. If they are in the eastern part of the state, that doesn't mean they aren't strong (though it probably does) because I don't know much about the eastern part of the state. I know nothing about New Jersey except that they must run short of universities because at every college visit in Pennsylvania or Ohio, New Jersey was the most common origin of the out-of-state visitors. I know about the central Pennsylvania universities more.

Pitt and Temple are the only public schools on your list that I have covered. They are state-related, which gives them more political insulation than Penn State. Neither is going to equal Michigan in general reputation, but they are very good. The rest of your list is mostly small private schools.

Strong schools (have a reputation that draws students nationally)
Bucknell University - PA - Lewisburg, PA
--Kind of preppy, big on sports, in a small town. I suspect these are rich people to an even greater extent than you could expect in a list of private liberal arts colleges.
Dickinson College - PA - Carlisle, PA
--Carlisle is a bigger small town with very good ice cream and some history.
Franklin & Marshall College - PA - Lancaster, PA
--Very strong school. Lancaster is a small city, not a town. Ready access to Amish people outside of town.
Gettysburg College - PA - Gettysburg, PA
--Good school, small town with a fuckton of history and plenty of rednecks just outside town. I've heard lots of the male students are Trumpers, but the faculty aren't.
Lafayette College - PA - Easton, PA
--Good school, further east of any I visited. Focused on engineering. There was a WaWa nearby and the sandwiches are good.
Temple University - PA - Philadelphia, PA
--Very strong school in Philly. It's a state-related school (like Pitt) and a very strong one. But I've never been there.
University of Pittsburgh - PA - Pittsburgh, PA
--You've probably heard of this. Very strong school, state related. It is very vulnerable to NIH cuts.
Villanova University - PA - Villanova, PA
--Never looked at this, but I know it is a good school. Probably a basketball thing?

Good schools, but not as good.
Allegheny College - PA - Meadville, PA
--Very sad town, pretty campus not tied closely to it. More local reputation than those above. One of the lesser-known presidents went there and got kicked out for a joke involving a cow.
Muhlenberg College - PA - Allentown, PA
--Stronger in the arts than the others I have mentioned. Maybe it should go above? It's in Allentown, which sucked enough for Billy Joel to sing about it.
Washington & Jefferson College - PA - Washington, PA
--This has a strictly regional reputation, but I know the chair of the philosophy department and he's a good guy

I don't know
Drexel University - PA - Philadelphia, PA.
--I feel this might be a good school, but I might have it confused with something else. I'm not very strong on Philadelphia.

Not strong
(These are local schools that I would not recommend to anyone not local or wishing to become local. Some of them I wouldn't recommend to anyone.)
Carlow University - PA - Pittsburgh, PA
Chatham University - PA - Pittsburgh, PA
Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC)-PA - Pittsburgh, PA
Duquesne University - PA - PIttsburgh, PA
Juniata College - PA - Huntingdon, PA
Point Park University - PA - Pittsburgh, PA
Robert Morris University - PA - Moon Township, PA
Saint Vincent College - PA - Latrobe, PA
Seton Hill University - PA - Greensburg, PA
Thiel College - PA - Greenville, PA (not named after Peter)
Westminster College - PA - New Wilmington, PA

I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have more questions. I think I recall one of us was at Fairleigh Dickinson University. They would certainly know more about New Jersey and I do and probably more about eastern PA.

You know how I enjoy being overly reductionist. Let's dive in!

Specimen #1: American boys are quickly becoming total misogynist turds.

Specimen #2: There are two Gen Z's, split roughly by whether or not they came of age before Covid (age 22-29) or after Covid (ages 18-21). The younger half are Republican jerks, loosely.

The most obvious takeaway is that maybe it's dumb to define your generations before giving generational landmarks a chance to actually occur!

Harrowing article that Mossy sent me without comment, trusting in my undisputed authority on migration patterns of Ethiopia: "I am going to Saudi Arabia, or my grave": The exodus of Ethiopia's frustrated youth.

It's actually a pretty quick and readable article, with pictures and a map. Basically, mass numbers of young men (mostly) are fleeing towards Saudi Arabia, and human traffickers are feasting on them. It's pretty awful.

Lurid Keyaki writes: What does this reveal about Reddit?

(archive link)

Heebie's take: I was also thinking about this, seen here!

Basically, researchers in Zurich sent a bunch of bots over to r/changemyview. From the Atlantic article:

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Zurich researchers' defense was that, as they saw it, deception was integral to the study. The University of Zurich's ethics board--which can offer researchers advice but, according to the university, lacks the power to reject studies that fall short of its standards--told the researchers before they began posting that "the participants should be informed as much as possible," according to the university statement I received. But the researchers seem to believe that doing so would have ruined the experiment. "To ethically test LLMs' persuasive power in realistic scenarios, an unaware setting was necessary," because it more realistically mimics how people would respond to unidentified bad actors in real-world settings, the researchers wrote in one of their Reddit comments.

Anecdotally, Reddit definitely is inhabited by more bots than it used to be, and people more clever than I can call them out and give them orders, which the bot will then carry out.