Whether the balance of how much plastic we use is leaning towards too much depends on the upsides and downsides, and this article is pointing out that one downside we thought was significant is less significant than we thought.
It’s a difficult problem not because we don’t know the simple solutions (supply and demand). It’s difficult because the people who have the majority vote also typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down. This is not just speaking about the US, many countries are facing this issue
But people who only own 1 house at most are still disadvantaged by this - sure, the value of their apt goes up, but if they want to switch to a larger house, the difference they're paying also increases, so do the property and wealth taxes, if applicable.
There are many stories of solidly low-to-middle class families who lived in an area where property prices soared, and had to choose between bankruptcy or moving out, because they could no longer.
The only people who benefit from this are the investors and landlords. So allowing housing prices to surge is literally taxing the poor for the benefit of the rich.
Buildings also deteroriate - ask a civil engineer. Building something that lasts 50-100 years is much cheaper than something that can be maintained economically indefinitely. If you own a house with copper or PVC plumbing, that they go bad after 40-50 years, and fixing burst pipes quickly gets expensive.
Why do countries allow housing prices to rise then? Simple, it allows banks to have a massive portfolio of loans, where they get a steady source of income for literally decades, while also getting a massive portfolio of real estate they can use as basis for leverage to grant loans (which they profit off of).
Governments can then tax the banks and get some of that money without the dreaded specter of increasing income taxes.
The only problem is that the everyman gets stuck with a 10,25, and now 50 year old loan (with a similar increase in price) for the very same median house.
There are a bunch of successful models, people usually mention Vienna as having a particularly effective housing policy - what they did is the city bought up a bunch of land, and built housing on top of it in various government subsidy programs, from non-profit public benefit corporations, to social housing for the poor.
They have strong renters rights, protections against rent increases, and high standards to which dwellings must conform to.
So while you can be a landlord in Vienna, you have to compete with affordable housing options, and you're forced to maintain a high quality yourself.
So that means that unless you can offer something the market's willing to pay extra for, being a landlord is not particularly lucrative thing.
Notice nowhere in my post did I mention the typical 'landlords are evil and must be taxed to death' approach.
Which is in stark contrast to most places where you're paying through the nose, the standard of rented dwellings is low and your rent can be increased or you can be kicked out on moments notice.
Investment companies own only about 2% of the housing market, and most of these are rented out. Investment companies aren't really the cause of housing prices remaining high - in moderate- and high-demand areas, we simply aren't building enough to keep up with demand.
Investing in housing only makes sense when supply is limited. The way to stop investors from hoarding housing is to make housing a bad investment by building a lot of it so cornering the market is impossible.
The De Beers cartel was able to avoid anti trust scrutiny because the best reserves are outside (Africa/Canada/Russia) of the most lucrative markets (US/Europe/Asia).
Corporations control only a small faction of housing supply.
That's not a different choice. LVT makes it more expensive to hold land that's less productive than it could be, the result of which is that development is encouraged.
I do really enjoy all the arguments coming up in this post that are pretty easily defeated by “build more housing”. No one has been able to come up with a compelling argument about why this doesn’t work.
It can be both affordable and an investment - it cannot (and will not) perpetually be a market-beating top-tier investment.
All of the items above can have drastic unintended consequences; the way to keep prices affordable is to make sure that supply is always outstripping demand by a bit.
Some examples of unintended consequences:
* I can't add an ADU to my existing property which would add one more dwelling unit
* Subdivision of property is discouraged; combining parcels reduces tax even if no new dwelling units are created
* This might be the closest to doing something though it could substantially discourage non-citizen immigrants (legal or not)
* This has been tried before and had well-documented issues, but might be doable if they can provide a "floor"
At least in the US, up until the rise of 'flipping' and AirBnB home values typically tracked with inflation. Personally owned real estate was a hedge against inflation and a tax shelter, not an 'investment'.
By definition if something is affordable, it’s not a good place to store money with the goal of it increasing.
> All of the items above can have drastic unintended consequences.
Yes, absolutely. These are not fully fledged solutions, but a starting point. Some of them may need an asterisk or two.
Of course, unintended consequences are perfectly fine if the final result is better than what we have today
> I can't add an ADU to my existing property which would add one more dwelling unit
Your wife or kid could own it. If you don’t have either of those, you don’t need two homes.
> Subdivision of property is discouraged
Subdivision and sell is perfectly encouraged.
> This might be the closest to doing something though it could substantially discourage non-citizen immigrants (legal or not)
I am a non citizen immigrant in Canada. I just had to bide my time until I became a PR then could buy a house. Perfect.
> This has been tried before and had well-documented issues, but might be doable if they can provide a "floor"
Again, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just better than what we have now.
So like what California did, which resulted in only a couple hundred thousand units over half a decade when they were hoping for/needing a couple million statewide.
Not the mention that ironically, the private owners with the space to build an ADU on their lot are the ones most likely to already be wealthy, and not actually rent it out to anyone below their socioeconomic bracket.
The majority of voters would vote to make income tax zero, that doesn’t mean we should accept that simply because the majority wants it.
In the US the majority of voters just voted for a racist, homophobic pedophile convicted felon.That doesn’t mean everyone should shrug and say “it’s the will of the people”
I refuse to believe you would have this attitude if you and your family had to rent drinking water while people profited wildly from it.
The situation is unacceptable and needs to change, irrelevant of what certain people want.
Sure, I agree, but this isnt a technocracy. If you want the government to change you do need to convince the voters at large.
> The majority of voters would vote to make income tax zero
Im not sure this is true. Most people recognize the taxes are needed for the government to provide services.
> That doesn’t mean everyone should shrug and say “it’s the will of the people”
This is the reality though, it doesnt matter that you or I disagree. Trump is the legitimate president even if he's a racist, homophobic pedophile convicted felon.
That's part of it, but I definitely have known quite a few renters who opposed building more housing. Denial of supply and demand, as well as general dislike of "rich developers" is strong in many groups.
Incentives are typically the strongest force to watch, but so are various cultural/political narratives people come up with. People clearly don't all vote in our own economic interests in many situations. I'd assume this is largely because in the current information ecosystem, people don't understand what's in their economic interests.
This!
>> I'd assume this is largely because in the current information ecosystem, people don't understand what's in their economic interests.
It's wild that even renter's aren't voting for more housing. I think it's because basic economics isn't taught in k-12 or even college anymore and this is causing a lot of problems.
Of course, there are other solutions too, like starting new cities and incentivizing companies to move there in the beginning. People follow jobs, they have to, now more than ever. if companies move there, people will follow. How is that we used to be able to create new cities and yet now, we all the sudden can't. has our material wealth really dropped so low that we can't afford to build new cities?
and what about down-sizing? in hong kong, you could create bed sized units at a fraction of the cost of a full sized apartment. microapartments? etc? all NOT legal. i think it's wrong of the city to decide that for people. individuals should be able to decide whether they want that or not, rather than being forced onto the streets.
Many people are not driven entirely by their economic interests, thus you can see people wearing clothes not from the Walmart bargain bin, driving cars with electric windows, and eating out instead of cooking rice and beans at home. Renters, just like home owners, want to live in the most comfortable home they can afford in general.
People who lament the lack of rentable pods and don't understand why anyone would pay more for a bigger house in a quitter neighborhood or just for a nice view exist, but you are in the minority. Thus renters are not going to vote to live in a ghetto so they could save a few hundred on rent.
> It's wild that even renter's aren't voting for more housing. I think it's because basic economics isn't taught in k-12...
Teaching economics is not the solution (see papers on financial literacy). Rationality is hard and even highly educated people have terrible models of cause and effect. Even your own dependency analysis implies that voting for X helps to get Y (which hasn't been my personal experience).
Do you recall exactly what kind of housing they were opposing? Because that is a major piece of context we are missing here. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who simply said “no more housing.” It’s usually much more specific than that, such as opposition to house flipping and STR’s, or wasteful planned communities of McMansions and concrete.
Generally these people oppose the building of "luxury housing" because they don't get how ALL housing increases supply/reduces market price. Also the idea of a developer building a kind of... predistressed property has never made any sense to me.
> ALL housing increases supply/reduces market price.
I can tell you firsthand that that is absolutely not true. The massive rush to renovate or build new short-term rentals in the 2010s had a disastrous impact on rental prices around my city, especially coupled with historically low interest rates that made these enterprises far less risky. It’s also incredibly disruptive to neighborhoods/communities, not just because of bad guests but because it can rapidly drive up value, leading landlords to sell and/or rapidly drive up rent which means kick out lower income tenants whether it’s intentional or not. Most of the STR’s in particular were also not being done by locals. 70%+ were out of town developers. Currently almost 90% of STR’s here are whole home which means not local owner/operators living there. It’s just hotels by a different name taking up housing in residential neighborhoods.
When interest rates and home insurance went up a few years ago, coupled with stricter rules for getting an STR license, a lot of people sold their properties (usually rentals/STR’s), and the price to buy as well as rent noticeably came down pretty rapidly. It’s still too high, but the drop was noticeable and quick. The purpose for construction absolutely factors in to these discussions.
Taxing short-term rentals would handily address these issues while still allowing people to derive some income from their otherwise vacant pieds-a-terre and vacation homes.
But that’s the thing, that’s not what these properties are generally here. These are homes bought in cash by developers in neighborhoods occupied by residents. People lived in these homes prior and somebody else would have likely bought and lived in it if they left.
When my wife and I were buying our first house we had two houses taken out from under us because somebody came in with an all cash bid tens of thousands higher than ours. Both are still Airbnb’s.
> These are homes bought in cash by developers in neighborhoods occupied by residents.
This happens because hotel accommodation is generally overpriced. But if you tax the airbnb rentals, it deters profit-minded developers from engaging in this practice, while still allowing it as a last resort for homes that cannot be rented long-term and would otherwise sit empty.
Maybe in theory but that’s not what happened here at the end of the day. That’s the entire issue. This type of construction and renovation is bad for housing. My city’s story is very common - it was especially in the 2010’s.
House-Hotels managed by companies based in other states (sometimes even other countries!) don’t belong in residential neighborhoods. We have zoning for a reason.
> Maybe in theory but that’s not what happened here at the end of the day.
If you mean that levying targeted taxes/fees to mitigate the bad side-effects of STR's has not been tried, I agree of course. I'm not denying that the detrimental side-effects exist.
I think my larger point here is that we can’t say “all construction is good” if we have to have a ton of qualifiers that ignore when it isn’t and/or expect all sorts of parameters and rules that aren’t being implemented. Tons of bad building goes on all the time, and it is reasonable of people to oppose it. Belittling them and accusing them of not understanding basic economics is not fair at all. There are plenty of examples of construction that should be opposed.
The local subreddit for my area always has tons of negative comments about any new housing development.
Some people complain it is "luxury" or even just normal and not "affordable."
If it is single family housing then people complain about the lack of density. If is apartments or condos they complain that there is already so much traffic in that area and adding thousands of new people will make it even worse.
When small old houses are bought up, torn down, and a new apartment / condo complex goes in they complain about the lack of character and soulless new development that all looks the same.
I have to agree with some of the other comments that many people never learned supply and demand or are completely incapable of understanding a for profit business.
I've seen comments about memory / RAM prices going up. Gamers are now so anti-AI because it is making their GPUs more expensive and now memory, flash, and hard drive storage as well. I've seen comments that say the government should step in and force companies to make GPUs at affordable prices. We can argue over whether health care or clean water are a human right but some people seem to think cheap GPUs are a human right.
An ex of mine mentioned to me that she was going to join a local community group trying to prevent development on an empty lot near her apartment. I asked why she would want to do that? Her concerns, and the concerns of the people she was showing me on facebook, were:
1. "They didn't do an environmental review"
2. She didn't want to hear construction noise.
3. She didn't want the construction to cause rats to leave the lot and go to buildings.
4. She also said she didn't want her rent to go.
Apartment complexes. Mostly "luxury" apartments, but including ones with some % of affordable units. Some were replacing houses, but mostly replacing parking lots, vacant lots, or even older, smaller apartment buildings -- in a neighborhood that was already almost entirely apartment buildings.
Lots of people have kids and want them to be able to a) not be a victim of crime, and b) be able to afford a house. Anyone who has loads of money to afford high house prices and private security can afford luxury beliefs, as espoused in Oscar acceptance speeches, but everyone else with housing and kids is either voting for less crime and better affordability, or is not yet voting for those things.
Plenty of people with kids are voting to block new housing. It's not that they don't want their kids to be able to afford to pay rent. They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand.
This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the construction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest and most active anti-development voices were from Trump supporters. Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left, but the Republicans are making real inroads in rejecting free market principles, so there's some amount of political realignment. Luxury beliefs indeed.
In an area entirely filled to the brim with the "evil" Trump supporters ... new housing is going up, apartments, row homes, single family homes, it's all there.
Nobody really seems to care ... yet.
It's often very instructive to find out who is "behind" both promotion and resistance; because both groups will attempt to find ways to "play both sides" and get opposition moving.
> Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left
IMO the right is not really the right that most of us remember, so it's not worth trying to reconcile their current ideology with the fiscal conservatives of decades past. The current GOP is unserious, their base consumed by conspiracy theories and driven by grievance.
>They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand.
They don't like my beds. There's something wrong with them! I can't be the problem! -Procrustes
Yes. It's the people's fault for not understanding markets. Couldn't be that markets are fundamentally structurally fucked by an inversion of the demo pyramid. Couldn't be that market participants are just delusional about how much other actors should have extracted from them.
The tragedy of the commons is a real thing. People focus on their own personal short term economic gain at the expense of long term sustainability and gain - even for themselves - because people in general find that longer term outlook difficult to reason about.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others we've tried. This short term thinking is one of its classic failures, because in many ways you're codifying the tragedy of the commons.
"typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down."
I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no? You're already dealing with home valuations that have faaar outstripped wages, the only way you go any higher is to build more homes on the same property.
Counterintuitively, the "I don't want to live next to apartments" line of thinking actually seems more potent in the regular NIMBY headspace? Like people will forego higher valuations to keep their suburb a suburb.
> I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no?
It's a commons problem. In your scenario, you have absolutely increased the value of your property. 20 apartments is more valuable than a single family home. However, you have also reduced aggregate demand by housing 20 people. That reduced the value of your neighbors' properties (or at least reduced the rate at which their value increased).
NIMBYism posits that values will continue to increase without forcing any property owners to invest in improvements so long as they collectively block any efforts to increase supply.
Are there any real examples of this actually happening?
Local to me, Arlington and Reston VA have both seen massive building sprees over the past 20ish years (mostly adjacent to the Metro). Home values have never been higher in either location.
My own personal example... I live ~1 mile from the Metro, so just outside the building boom zone. There was next to zero housing in that zone - it was all office parks - and now it's a mix of $1+ million townhomes, $1+ million luxury high-rise condos, and dining/retail. My own home value is up 50% since COVID and that's true for just about any house in my zip code.
And without the redevelopment/infill, I posit the whole area would be less desirable. NIMBYism feels more about "change is bad" than property values.
Literally the entire peninsula of the bay area is an example of this happening. You have people voting to "keep their small town feel" sandwiched between San Francisco and San Jose.
Ah, well I still think it applies as a counter example. Avoiding density makes values rise, especially when combined with increasing office space density/local job growth.
In general I don't think it requires all that much thought in terms of why/how price changes happen. Housing demand is inelastic, and you can find examples of that causing both rapid price increases (metro areas with high friction building requirements) and rapid price decreases (metros with population declines) when out of equilibrium in either direction, which is exactly what you'd expect of a good with inelastic demand.
Yeah, I live in Falls Church, which has seen more build-up than other areas in Northern Virginia because the city has never had the kind of restrictive zoning that the anti-"Missing Middle" campaign is still fighting in Arlington. The value of my single-family home peaked in 2024 and has dropped slightly since. To my understanding, this is generally true of my zip code and not true of comparable zip codes in the area.
But Falls Church is much nicer now that a few mid-rise apartment buildings with ground-level retail have gone in! As a resident, I am very happy about all the new development. I expect that over time, that will have a positive effect on property values, but there is an observable short- and medium-term effect working in the opposite direction as the increased housing supply eases demand on the existing housing stock.
Do you believe that small drop is a result of new development or just a blip in the market? Price increases near me definitely slowed as interest rates increased, but we haven't yet seen a drop. But, as far as I know, this is one of the only walkable areas outside the Beltway, so there's a lot to like if you want to be untethered from a car for much of the week. It's also a relatively affordable area (vs inside the Beltway and some SFH neighborhoods) - my TH 1500sqft (1800 if you include finished basement space) would currently sell for ~$700k. The new-build THs are 2500sqft, with a garage or two, and sell for just over $1 million.
> Do you believe that small drop is a result of new development or just a blip in the market?
I don't know, and I don't believe it's possible to know in a specific instance. Like I said above, I believe that in the long term, denser towns raise the property values of their suburbs by making the area more desirable.
But there is definitely a plausible case that increasing the supply of housing immediately lowers or slows the growth of property values by reducing scarcity. It's the argument made by both sides of the "missing middle" debate in Arlington -- the pro side says it will make housing more affordable, and the con side says it will lower everyone's property values. The article we're commenting on found that at least some version of this is true for the Austin, TX -- increasing housing stock lowered rents, even if the new stock is luxury units.
But rents aren't the same as property values (though they are linked). Rents could go down while the value of the underlying land goes up (extreme example - build a high-rise apartment, land and building value goes up, even though the rent for each unit comes down). And the apartment market and SFH market are linked but also not exactly the same.
Also agree it's difficult/impossible to know for a single piece of real estate. And impossible to know for sure since the market is complex (impacted by rates, other policy decisions, etc)
You're right, but I think everyone is looking at second-order effects where causal links are impossible to prove. [0] is recent research on how expanding housing stock (even just at the top end) will "expand affordability," although they, too, are mostly looking at the effect on rents.
The most overt statement of "we don't want to build more houses because it will decrease the value of existing houses" in recent memory was Trump[1], who is not exactly a reliable source (and whose whole brand prior to politics was destroying the character of established neighborhoods by building giant condo complexes).
It's not a common problems in Austin at least. You (a property developer) buy a single home in bad shape on a big lot in the city. Then you redevelop the single home into 20 apartments, greasing the wheel appropriately (of the local government) to get the needed rezoning and permits. No one else can do this because they don't have the connections and monetary resources you do. You pocket the increase in value of that property (minus the cost of grease) by selling it off as "condos" which have dubious maintainability going forward. You never lived here anyways, you have a ranch in Bastrop.
I live next to a sprawling apartment complex after rezoning allowed it to go in.
Now we have a large homeless encampment partially on the apartment complex lot - that the complex can't deal with because their lawyers told them off.
Now we have a significant uptick in petty but quality of life impacting crime.
The roads around the apartment complex are now swamped because the entrances were placed stupidly.
And the people who live in that apartment complex are also upset about all of this.
None of this is about "my investment". It is about not letting commercial outfits hurt my quality of life to subsidize their profit margin. It's not the fault of the tenants, nor me.
Now we get to sue the stupid property management company until they fix their issues.
The thing that is prized above all else is privacy and exclusivity. People are paying money to ensure that few people live near them and that those people are the "right sort of people."
Dating back to the 1930s the original core goal of zoning was to restrict apartments so as to keep poor people and minorities out of certain areas. We know this because it's well documented in the newspapers of the day because back then people were more comfortable explicitly saying how classist and racist they were.
I occasionally wonder if it would be a net positive to make political office terms a little bit longer, but limited to exactly once. No reelection pressure.
Same part of my addled brain that thinks we should increase dramatically our count of representatives, abolish in-person legislating, and then fill the roles with sortition.
Things are so party focused nowadays I don't think the person behind the mask really even matters.
It might slightly help, you'd probably have less votes on giving themselves pay raises, but at the end of the day the majority of ads and voters are going to revolve around party lines.
“Show me the incentive and i’ll show you the outcome”
I’ve learned a long time ago that we’re not always aware of how incentives drive our own behavior, it just happens naturally. This is exactly what’s happening with housing.
that's true, but plenty if people oppose building new apartments because, in general, the price will be high and they see this high prices and incorrectly conclude rents are rising when in reality, people move in, freeing up the less expensive places they were in before.
similarly they oppose because "gentrification" even though the evidence is that gentrification is net positive, even for those already living in the area. gentrification or not, people leave at the same rate. Those who stay see their income/wealth rise compared to the case of no-gentrification.
That’s why California has had dozens of state laws passed in the past 3 years that override many city and county ordinances to force additional supply. Lawmakers knew the only solution was more housing.
These bills permit the construction of denser housing near transit, force cities to actually meet housing quotas, allow the state to override a city’s zoning to permit more housing if they don’t make a good faith attempt, loosen the rules to build ADUs, and many other changes.
Is it ideal that we had to get to this point? No, but housing wasn’t being built.
Nah, unsubscribe links absolutely work. I’m religious about unsubscribing the first time I get any email notification I don’t want from anyone. The result is I basically get no unwanted emails unless I sign of for something new. Compared to basically every other email inbox I’ve ever seen where people don’t unsubscribe… yeah it’s super clear that it works.
I also use email aliases for every single account I have so if my email somehow leaks and I’m getting spam, i know exactly what account leaked it. That’s basically never happened though.
The only problem I have with unsubscribe links is that sometimes the website is straight up broken, like the link is dead or the page unresponsive, and I wonder about how far down fixing that issue is on the engineering team’s todo.
Oh god, this is the new version of every device having Bluetooth and an app and being called “smart”.
I just wanted some toast, but here I am installing an app, dismissing 10 popups, and maybe now arguing with a chat bot about how I don’t in fact want to turn on notifications.
Banning 0s might be to avoid conflicts of with testing? Kind of like how you’d want to block logins with emails that have a domain example.com. Idk I’m grasping at straws
Having played many city building games though I’ve always desired more depth and realism. Like the more I play them the more I want out of them. I wish power lines were limited in capacity and had to be stepped up and down via transformers (Workers & Resources does this) I wish I could make decisions about every intersection and every lane (cities skyline mods allow this) etc. Anyway I think there’s an audience for more realistic games in general, even if most people would find them less fun.
Well probably more people want to be city planners than the number of city planners society actually requires. Also, I think I would draw the line somewhere way before the real world. I want most of the technical details of the real world without having to deal with the politics. I don’t want to attend town hall meetings and stakeholder consultations in my game, but then again maybe someone else wants that.
Making a new account and seeing doing the exact same thing to see if it happens again… would be against TOS and therefore is something you absolutely shouldn’t do
Claude shows me more than one personal account, as I registered via single signon and then - via e-mail, and I paid once only for one of them.
It’s effectively a multi-tenant interface.
I also used individual acc but on corp e-mail, previously.
You could generate a new multi-use CC in your vibe-bank app (as Revolut), buy burner (e) sim for sms (5 eur in NL); then rewrite all requests at your mitm proxy to substitute a device id to one, not derived from your machine.
But same device id, same phone could be perfectly legitimate use case: you registered on corp e-mail then you changed your work place, using the same machine.
or you lost access to your e-mail (what a pity)
But to get good use of it, someone should compose proper requests to ClickHouse or whatever they use, for logs, build some logic to run as a service or web hook to detect duplicates with a pipeline to act on it.
And a good percentage of flags wouldn’t have been ToC violations.
That’s a bad vibe, can you imagine how much trial and error prompting it requires?..
They can’t vibe the way though the claude code bugs alone, on time!
It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars!
Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.
Right, which is why I wrote "It wouldn't work well in our specific games."
There's an obvious appeal to sim racing for those who want realism and My Summer Car for those who... Well, it's an interesting project which I respect, at least.
The thing to think about is always how well something fits in the specific game you are making. If it completely warps the focus and disrupts the intended moment to moment gameplay loop, then it probably isn't a good inclusion. But it might still be a great idea for another game. In some cases, and this happens often in early development, it can even mean that other game is what you should be making instead. But that rarely happens when working on a big established franchise.
Whether the balance of how much plastic we use is leaning towards too much depends on the upsides and downsides, and this article is pointing out that one downside we thought was significant is less significant than we thought.
reply