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There are more photos at the tweet.

Igor Vasilevsky's classic Druzhba Sanatorium (1978) in Crimea, designed so each room had a balcony view of the sea but privacy from the other balconies.

The building was intended for discreet treatment of Soviet elites, not, as with some Soviet mental health facilities, forced treatment of people considered Undesirable.

Like George Chakhava's transportation ministry building in Tblisi, Georgia, the Druzhba came from a period where Soviet architects were enchanted with the idea of building on steep land using massive columns to lift the whole structure. Creates a great hovering effect.

it me, in the parallel life where i became an architectural historian but somehow still ended up in Peoria

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tl;dr The expert's recommendation is "to make moving out of the region a goal."

How making $300,000 in San Francisco can still mean you're living paycheck-to-paycheck

Dec. 7, 2021

Editor's note: This story originally ran in 2019, but has been updated with 2021 figures.

With the median price of a home in the U.S. at $300,000, you can can achieve homeownership and the idealized middle-class lifestyle in most parts of the country making a salary just under or above six figures.

In San Francisco's land of $2 million fixer-uppers, the income needed to reach this status is obviously more. But how much more?

S.F.-based finance expert Sam Dogen pinned that number at $300,000, after surveying dozens of readers on his Financial Samurai blog and asking about their incomes and expenses living in the notoriously high-priced coastal cities.

With their feedback, Dogen broke down the budget of a couple with one to two children in San Francisco, Seattle or New York. He found $300,000 is the income necessary to put something away for retirement, save for your child's education, own a three-bedroom home, take three weeks of vacation a year and retire by a reasonable age.

"It's not an extravagant lifestyle," Dogen says. "It's a middle-class lifestyle if you consider a middle-class person should be able to afford a modest home, have at least one car, have a kid or two. There are no private jets in this budget."

Dogen has put together a detailed post where you'll find analysis and explanation on each expense, but here are a few points to note:

• The $29,400-a-year childcare expense takes into consideration a babysitting rate of about $20 an hour, the standard charge in a city such as San Francisco. Preschool easily costs $18,000 to $20,000 a year in metro areas.

• The mortgage is based on a $1.5 million, 1,750-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on a 2,500-square-foot lot.

• The car expenses are based on a single car that accommodates a family.

• Entertainment expenses include everything from Netflix to tickets to an occasional ball game to date night, which easily costs $200 in San Francisco when you consider expense for dinner and babysitting.

Dogen adds that at $300,000, a family is still living paycheck-to-paycheck and not saving outside their 401K and 529 plans.

"We're in this perpetual grind in San Francisco, and it's a city for people who are willing to hustle," he says. "At one point in the past, $300,000 was a lot of money. Now at this amount, you're probably always going to end up working a long time and having a constant struggle to keep up."

His recommendation is to make moving out of the region a goal.

"There's a moving truck shortage in places like San Francisco because so many people are moving out of this expensive city and other expensive coastal cities," he writes. "If you live in an expensive metropolitan area, consider relocating to lower your cost of living or at least try and take advantage of the valuation differential by investing in Middle America.

"Thanks to technology, there's no need to grind so hard in cities where the median home price is over $1 million."

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I know it's like crazy sci-fi to think Biden ever would. I just want to know if the following article by Ryan Cooper is accurate. I find it nearly impossible to believe.

I've got a simple and easy solution for this. Biden declares judicial review null and void.

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Democrats have a better option than court packing

There has been comparatively little attention to the simplest and easiest way to get around potentially tyrannical right-wing justices: just ignore them. The president and Congress do not actually have to obey the Supreme Court.

The weird thing about judicial "originalism" is that the explicit principle of judicial review is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. All of that document's stipulations on how the courts are to be constructed are contained in one single sentence in Article III: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." Actual judicial review was a product of a cynical power grab from Chief Justice John Marshall, who simply asserted out of nothing in Marbury vs. Madison that the court could overturn legislation — but did it in a way to benefit incoming president Thomas Jefferson politically, so as to neutralize his objection to the principle.

Jefferson famously hated judicial review. In one letter, he said it is "a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so." But because of Marshall's canny political strategy, from that day forward Congress and the president have mostly deferred to the court's views and allowed it to strike down laws or establish entirely new legal principles even on completely spurious grounds.

As Matt Bruenig argues at the People's Policy Project, it would be quite easy in practical terms to get rid of judicial review: "All the president has to do is assert that Supreme Court rulings about constitutionality are merely advisory and non-binding, that Marbury (1803) was wrongly decided, and that the constitutional document says absolutely nothing about the Supreme Court having this power." So, for instance, if Congress were to pass some law expanding Medicare, and the reactionaries on the court say it's unconstitutional because Cthulhu fhtagn, the president would say "no, I am trusting Congress on this one, and I will continue to operate the program as instructed."

No doubt many liberals will object to this idea. It would be a fairly extreme step in terms of how America's constitutional system functions, and a lot of Democrats fear the idea of a Republican president not being hemmed in by the legal system. Big chunks of liberal political advocacy (like the ACLU) rely on pressing political cases through the courts. Conversely, conservatives have long advanced the idea that they are against "judicial activism," which makes liberals favor it more through negative polarization.

[...]

Most Americans are taught from a young age that the Supreme Court being able to strike down laws is what it means to have the rule of law. But this is not true. For one thing, as Doreen Lustig and J. H. H. Weiler write in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, judicial review is not nearly as intrusive in every other country as it is here. Some nations, like Austria or France, have a special Constitutional Court which rules on constitutional questions, but relatively infrequently. In others, like Finland or Denmark, judicial review basically never happens. In no other developed democracy does basically every piece of major legislation have to run a years-long gauntlet of tendentious lawsuits trying to get through the courts what parties could not get through the legislature.

Moreover, simply refusing to agree to judicial review has happened before in American history. As historian Matt Karp writes at Jacobin, when the Civil War broke out, President Lincoln and Congress ignored the Dred Scott decision in a law banning slavery in all federal territories, and when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled Lincoln did not have the power to suspend habeas corpus, the president ignored him. As Karp argues, storming the citadel of reactionary court power was necessary to destroy slavery.

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