It’s so tragic that we have no records of Washington, Tesla, da Vinci, Newton, Faraday, or Kant. If only they’d thought to have kids they might have left a mark on the world.

New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.

The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.

Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.

Largely agree with all your other points though.

Not a huge fan of the Israel situation but it does seem like they often stay out at the US’s request:

During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Iraq carried out a missile campaign against Israel, in which it launched 42 modified Scud missiles (designated Al-Hussein) at Israeli cities with the strategic objective of provoking Israel into launching retaliatory attacks and potentially jeopardizing the multinational coalition formed by the United States against Iraq, which had full backing and extensive contributions from other Muslim-majority states; Israel did not respond to the Iraqi missile attacks due to American pressure, and Iraq failed to gather support for its occupation of Kuwait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq–Israel_relations

DW news (dw.com) is pretty good and not too sensational. They’re like German PBS with a whole English side of the site.