atweiden

> If you make money more expensive nominal house prices might drop but you also made it harder to acquire money in the first place.

In a deflationary environment, as housing/rent prices drop, savers are rewarded.

Renting doesn’t entail taking out a mortgage.

> It doesn't create more land or housing.

Nor does building more housing in an inflationary environment necessarily satiate investor demand for inflation-resistant assets in the form of residential property.

How would property development work? How are the much needed and widely adored characterful European style duplexes and lowrises in city centers going to get built if one person can only own one property?

> I'm with you about the undesirability of these investment firms who hog up properties; the tax structure could easily be set up to squeeze them out, while encouraging the small owner rentals: people who have two or three places.

But that tax structure would put downward pressure on rental unit availability, which would very likely raise rents. Wasn’t the goal of all this to solve housing affordability?

> It should be entirely unprofitable for someone to have like twelve properties.

Someone, as in ... a human? What about LLCs? It’s easy and simple to form several of them.

As someone who owns no real estate, and strongly prefers renting from individuals, my concern is all these plans to make it harder for individuals to own several properties will make it even harder than it already is to find a good deal as a renter.

> What's the fallout from that?

You mean, what’s the fallout of banning anyone or any business regardless of the circumstances from owning more than one property?

Starting with the obvious one, it incentivizes investors to form multiple legal entities to own multiple properties — thereby entirely defeating the proposed regulations. This is already how it works today amongst informed property investors (though for reasons of legal liability, privacy and wealth protection rather than skirting regulations).

But assuming you could close this (realistically impossible to close) loophole... I’m guessing people in this hypothetical fantasy would prefer buying huge tracts of land, and building ADUs? Rentals would likely become a lot more scarce. Maybe corruption would rise due to the general ridiculousness of the proposed regs. Dunno. What do you think?

Making it costlier to own a second or third property discourages small time investors from renting out those properties, which decreases the availability of rental units, and raises rents.

Alternatively, and worse still, it might erode profit margins such that rentals become exclusively the domain of big investment firms. How is this of benefit to ordinary renters?

Seconded. Currency debasement plays an instrumental role in real estate speculation. If investors could just count on their cash to retain and increase in value over time, their insatiable appetite to own real estate as an inflation-resistant asset would relent.

Fix the money, and fix the housing affordability crisis. Slash the demand to buy housing as an investment.

You cannot discourage ownership of “investment property” without also discouraging landlordship — which raises rents.

> Easily solved by not hitting people who own one property which is their primary residence.

This would discourage individuals from renting out their property for a small profit, which is exactly what you want to see more of to increase affordability (and liveability — not everyone likes renting from big investment firms and property management companies).

Tommykaira

Imagine if your tesla’s interior looked like this: https://youtu.be/oPAvyt9ZNrg?t=221

https://smallblogv8.blogspot.com/2020/10/oh-yeah-tommykaira-...

See also: internet reclamation projects [1]

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/23/Nitter-and-other-internet...

> Funny that when Vancouver was a 'backwater' as the article refers to it was when it was much more affordable and a lot less crowded. In other words much nicer to live in.

There’s no getting around it: increases in population density yield diminishing returns on quality of life. Returns may even turn negative if population density spirals beyond that which the natural ecosystem can support.

Quality of life must be balanced against human population growth. Life is expensive — my fear is if we don’t intelligently limit the number of humans alive, soon only the ultrawealthy will be able to afford having a reasonable quality of life.

> I feel like lots of people have some kind of weight on their shoulder, and/or one or multiple things bothering them a lot.

With very few exceptions, there’s nothing healthy or normal about living in chaotic, densely populated urban areas with high crime and endless noise, air and light pollution. In addition, there’s nothing natural about needing to work a bullshit job just to survive.

People ought to really start asking what is being afforded exactly when it comes to making city life “affordable”.

> Same thing, isn't it?

US dollar payments aren’t subject to the approval of stakers, and existing PoW miners have no on-chain mechanism to prevent new market entrants from competing against them for hashrate.

So, “no”.

To begin staking, you first need stake. But merely transfering a PoS coin from an exchange to your own wallet for subsequent staking is inherently impossible without the approval of existing stakers. Even this isn’t enough: existing stakers must also approve of your initial staking transactions.

Which is not how PoW mining works.

The difference being you don’t need to ask existing Bitcoin miners for permission to begin mining Bitcoin yourself. Conversely, staking is inherently impossible without first obtaining “stake” — and how can you obtain stake without the approval of existing stakers?

> Overcoming censorship is not possible in a PoS system, as the censor has acquired majority stake and cannot be unseated. As such PoS systems are not censorship-resistant and the theory is therefore invalid.

https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...

> Local control means wealthy control

We’ve known for years US central planning is in fact a kleptocracy [1]. So, “no”. Locals can always throw a monkey wrench in any plan a far off bureaucrat makes for them, irrespective of wealth and power disparities. There are countless real world examples of this.

In addition, why should the wealthy be the only ones to object to high density housing as the one and only prescribed solution to housing affordability? Couldn’t the root of the housing affordability problem lie elsewhere, e.g. in investors who lack long-term residency parking their cash in inflation resistant assets? How about the lack of high speed rail networks, or human overpopulation in general?

[1]: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...

Rosenberg contends AR will be practically impossible to live without [1], and that its most obvious use case is labeling persons in your environment — and labeling them in a way they have zero control over, and limited ability to opt out of. Rosenberg hints this may exacerbate interpersonal conflict, and that removing the shroud of anonymity from public spaces could make the metaverse difficult to escape from.

[1]: https://bigthink.com/the-future/metaverse-augmented-reality-...

> See [...] for the empirical research refuting that point and agreeing with the basic supply-demand issue

The issue I have with this analysis is where does it end? For example, if you assume most people eventually want to live in a townhome or similar, packing people in like sardines in the name of housing affordability is a kick-the-can solution. The unstated assumption of these researchers is it’s perfectly fine for every major urban area to morph into Hong Kong given a long enough time frame.

Visit “WTF Happened in 1971” [1]. That argument doesn’t hold water for middle and lower class persons.

[1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Year 0, you have $X dollars in your bank account with $Y purchasing power.

Year 1, you have $X dollars with $Y - 1 purchasing power.

Etc.

$Y > $Y - 1

Inflation is an anti-feature.

> What can it do for me?

It really sounds like you’ve never held Bitcoin. HN can change that for you really quickly if you’re open to it.

Currencies compete, and ones with inflation which punish holding the currency over the long term are fundamentally less user-friendly.

There used to be a cryptocurrency called Freicoin, which charged its holders X% per annum, deducting the proceeds directly from user savings and funneling the proceeds into charity “for the greater good”.

Freicoin failed to gain any appreciable adoption on the open market. Despite what people claim — e.g. “currency is supposed to be inflationary, cuz greater good” — when it’s their money on the line, they never choose inflationary money if they can easily opt out of it.

The failure of Freicoin underscores the reality that inflation is an anti-feature of money. No one actually wants inflation — if they have better options, they avoid it every time.

When the US government went off the gold standard, they doomed themselves to a Bitcoin future, because suddenly everyone could see the government’s money was backed by nothing. And if US dollars are backed by nothing, what stops a software developer from launching a competing money which is also backed by nothing? They removed all barriers to entry.

Now that everyone knows government money is backed by nothing, every available currency in this world has become an embarassingly hollow confidence racket. It’s merely a matter of whether you believe private sector confidence games made by competent engineers deliver superior technical/economic qualities compared to government confidence games.

Really, why would you want to hold a money in which a tiny group of people fully control the extent to which your money is debased year after year, when you could instead rely on an apolitical computer algorithm not controlled by anyone with a supply schedule known fully in advance which is auditable in real time using freely available open source software? Doesn’t that sound like a better form of money to you?

Visit “WTF Happened in 1971” [1] for another look at the impact of inflationary economics and currency debasement on middle and lower class people.

[1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax. Written in Rust, and I suspect scripting Rust libraries is in the cards.

Dreaming here: Lua is a fantastic scripting language, but the Rust FFI isn’t as ergonomic as it could be. Enter Luster [2], which is basically LuaJIT rewritten in Rust.

Embedding a scripting language in a Rust application gives you tons of power (e.g. scripting Rust structs from Lua [3]), and setting this up isn’t terribly difficult.

[1]: https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

[2]: https://github.com/kyren/luster

[3]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/kiwi

But anything less than an infinite tax on animal slaughter would be akin to outright tolerating extreme suffering of a living thing so long as someone is willing to pay for it. I can’t see any difference between an infinite tax and just banning animal slaughter.

Doesn’t this imply any level of suffering, no matter how extreme, can be tolerated so long as we attach a market price to it?

All the same, I’m sure it would fit in well with the general theme of the financialization of everything.

Regenerative agriculture is not a sustainability solution [1]:

    Written by FCRN’s Dr Tara Garnett in collaboration with Cécile
    Godde of CSIRO and a team of international experts, this report
    dissects claims made by different stakeholders in the debate,
    and evaluates them against the best available science. This report
    finds that better management of grass-fed livestock do not hold a
    solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions
    can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even
    then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed
    by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate. Dr
    Garnett explains the key takeaways from this report:

    “This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a
    climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the
    climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and
    consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing
    damaging greenhouse gas release and contributing to changes in land
    use. Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want
    to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current
    consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a
    solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.”

[1]: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-news-grazed-and-...

Don’t think marketing can work on you?

    McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It"
    Kit Kat "Give Me a Break"
    State Farm "Like a Good Neighbor"

Not even the cynics are “above” hearing repeated phrases. Repetition = familiarity = $$$ = incentive to do marketing.

Con artist expert Paul Wilson claims people who think they can never be conned are the easiest marks [1]. People who similarly think they’re invulnerable to marketing are practically guaranteed to be buying bad things from bad people, because they couldn’t possibly be misled by marketing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkz1ItKLAvk

What JPKab said is entirely true. The SAT is known to correlate strongly with general intelligence, which is determined almost exclusively by hereditary factors outside a person’s control [1]. The data clearly suggests lower class persons of east asian descent will disproportionately suffer the consequences of this policy.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/what-is-intelligenc...

[1]: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/1994/10/16/books/what-is-...

Still seems to be safer than a gasoline corrolary [1].

[1]: https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...

I’ve been stricken with enthusiasm for hydrogen-powered cars since watching a video from the 90s depicting a backyard solar-powered hydrogen generator which hooks up to a garden hose [1]. It’s supposedly a lot safer than gasoline:

> “These tanks can be shot at with incendiary bullets, or cut in half with a chainsaw, and you could throw a match on them — they’d just smolder like a cigarette. You can’t say that about a gas tank. Here, only the hydrogen you need is released from the tank. When the tank’s heated, it produces hydrogen and the car burns it. So there’s never much gaseous hydrogen in this system at any given time.”

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX2RxlXCZKA

In the early 20th century, “multiculturalism” meant northern, southern and eastern white Europeans living together. In the documentary Australia in Colour, vintage TV advertisements portray immigrant ships containing northern and eastern white europeans as being “good for Australia” — a point of controversy at the time. Tellingly, what modern Australians would consider actually multicultural, e.g. integrating with E.Asians or Australian Aboriginals, was utterly unthinkable.

Yet in Australia and the United States today, the zeitgeist is that we’ve “always been multicultural”. This is clearly only superficially true: multiculturalism was only recently redefined to mean the integration of non-white europeans into predominantly white european societies. In the documentary, they explain following World War II, it was feared that Australia would grow weaker than its Asian competitors oweing to Australia’s low population, which many in government thought made them susceptible to capture by aggressor nations. This, AFAICT, was the real impetus for the Australian government becoming increasingly accepting of Asian immigrants.

And more recently, during the pandemic, the Australian housing sector has been calling for more immigration. Apparently, immigration powers much of the Australian housing sector [1]:

> A fall in migrants during the pandemic is causing a sharp drop in housing demand, with the sector urging the government to create a migration plan and extend HomeBuilder incentives.

Modern multiculturalism seems to be primarily based on economic and militaristic concerns, and is in no way based on a desire for social cohesion. See also: One Billion Americans [2]. Some say the US should strive to increase its population size to one billion for more or less the exact same reasons modern day multiculturalism came about. These people were never concerned with social cohesion: they’re entirely concerned with militaristic and economic might.

[1]: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/lack-of-incoming-migrants-during...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans