bendmorris

It would take some effort - you'd need to transpile the original AS3 source -> Haxe and then recompile that.

That's not really true (something that land value tax advocates will gladly point out) because supply of housing is fixed in the short term. Landlords charge what the market will bear for housing; rent isn't anchored to their actual costs. They bear the burden of increasing costs.

There is a risk that property tax could suppress supply of housing in the long term, since it makes rentals as investment vehicles less profitable, and therefore indirectly contribute to increasing rents.

They certainly could, but they'd be fighting the, generally very politically active, current homeowners every step of the way. Increasing supply will reduce their property values.

Proponents of building more housing need to step up their political activism to match the NIMBY crowd.

One or two out of hundreds of openings. For a definition of "nobody" that really means "next to nobody", you're making the parent comment's case.

No offense, but I don't think it's especially surprising when people support one set of political views when it affects other people, but deviate from it when it affects their own bottom line. See for example the powerful in Silicon Valley, who are mostly "progressive" until it comes to economic issues that affect their personal finances.

>My mother-in-law is a land lord in Los Angeles ... She is a staunch opponent of rent control.

Is this supposed to be surprising...? Regardless of whether it works for tenants, obviously rent control isn't there for the landlord's benefit.

Not knowing the details, I would say that if both parties agree that behavior was abusive, it was abusive. There's no reason for anyone else to second guess at that point.

You may be confused about the difference between a standard library and a runtime. Rust has a standard library (which can be disabled in resource-constrained environments) but no runtime - there's nothing to initialize or tear down, code is just executed. Languages like Go, Python etc. have a runtime (which includes for example the garbage collector.)

This is pretty annoying, but you get used to it. After so long it would be a major pain to break everyone's strings by flipping the syntax.

There are several ways to do it: compile to C++, compile to the Neko VM, or use Node (there are official bindings: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hxnodejs) In development it's Haxe (which is a lovely language to work with) but in production it can be something you're familiar with.

It's not so simple. Wealth can be used to gain access to limited resources such as land. Greater wealth inequality means a small segment of the population can afford to buy up all of the housing, driving up prices and blocking others (who may not otherwise be any worse off than they ever were) from owning land. They can then perpetually rent out this land, creating an effortless income for themselves and siphoning value from everyone else.

You're missing my point. If women would naturally have more representation and were disadvantaged by this policy, and the policy was 100% effective (unheard of), their representation would drop from >50% to 50% - it wouldn't somehow switch to women being significantly underrepresented. This assertion doesn't make sense based on the actual situation we have today.

>I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage.

This makes zero sense considering the reality that women are underrepresented. "Aiming at 50-50 representation" could at best lift the disadvantaged group closer to 50% representation. It could in no way cause an underrepresented group to dominate a field.

>Based on the fact that there is now transportation available, you get mile after mile of hastily-constructed bland, dystopian nowhere suburbs that breed ennui, conformism and fascism.

The level of condescension here is overwhelming. I would love to live in a "bland, dystopian" suburb where I can afford a yard, more space for my family, access to necessities and a reasonable commute. If you'd prefer to live in a crowded city, do it, but don't think it makes you superior to anyone else.

There's a separate policy statement supporting by-right housing development: http://unitedslate.samaltman.com/by-right-housing.html

Evaluating this proposal by itself, I agree that local infrastructure spending would likely be more useful, sooner, to more people than a high speed rail corridor. I don't think anyone believes or claims it will single-handedly solve the housing crisis.

>Steve Jobs did the same with his children after all

Is there any reason to believe that Steve Jobs is an authority on raising children?

My side project is something my young son is interested in, and he loves following along and making suggestions as I work on it. I don't feel like I'm missing anything.

>Yes.

I'm pretty skeptical, do you have any supporting evidence?

Is the amount of value speculators capture proportional to the efficiency gains? If there were less or no speculation, what would be the net result?

Maybe I was unclear, but it sounds like we agree: "A land tax on the unimproved value of the land is an elegant solution which incentivizes adding value to property rather than using it to park money."

Vacancies are caused by the fact that we live in scenario #1. Speculators can buy up properties, keep them empty, and reap a financial reward (as long as they time it right) as demand for the location increases.

I believe this is responding to a symptom (vacancies) without addressing its primary cause (land speculation.) Housing is viewed as an investment; speculators capture the value of location and public spending by increasing the rent they charge, but don't add any value themselves, essentially siphoning value out of the community. The result is a boom/bust cycle and unaffordable rents. Disincentivizing vacancies may increase supply and lower prices, but occupied properties still have the same fundamental problem. A land tax on the unimproved value of the land is an elegant solution which incentivizes adding value to property rather than using it to park money.

Edit: I'm surprised I'm being downvoted so much - maybe you disagree, but this is at least an attempt to add to the discussion.

>an area that we can infer is generally less desirable to live

Lower cost of living does not mean the area is undesirable to live. Building adequate housing supply (I know, unheard of in the Bay, but some cities do it) can cause cost of living to stay low.

A major weakness of this policy is that it doesn't scale by regional median salary. Under exigency a company in SF could easily pay $130k to bring in a foreign worker with a needed rare skill. A company in Alabama could not.

How would you define "profiteering?" By granting them the patent we have eliminated all possibility of competition, giving them the ability to charge whatever they want, anchored by what the desperate are willing to pay instead of the cost of production. To what extent can they use this power before people get up in arms about it?

I think we need to rethink the entire system. There should be incentives for drug research and discovery, but we still need a functioning competitive market if we expect prices to stay at reasonable levels. One idea is, rather than giving the discoverer monopoly rights, require anyone else who produces the drug to pay a percentage of their production costs as a royalty. This preserves the competitive advantage of the company that discovered the drug, but anchors the consumer price to the cost of production.

A land value tax is a tax on the unimproved value of the land itself. If you improve it (build a house for example) you've created value, and that isn't included. The value added by the landowner is a small portion of the amount of rent you pay in San Francisco.

Rent is also value that one didn't create. A way to fund basic income that particularly appeals to me is a land value tax, because resources that no one created (land, oil, etc.) don't rightfully belong to anyone and the benefits from those resources should be shared.

(missed the survey link: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/python-developers-survey-2...)

>That should be a non-issue unless you require one of those libraries.

That's kind of a truism, isn't it? I don't understand the dismissiveness - there's certainly a sizable portion of users that use libraries other than the top 50 most popular.

"Modern" for its own sake adds no value, so no, we won't port our existing code bases to something "more modern." It's funny that string interpolation, a port of a feature other languages like PHP have had for decades and the fourth way to do the same thing in Python, is being held up as something modern.

Most? Do you have a source for that?

As a counterpoint, this JetBrains survey [1] shows only 40% of Python users ever use Python 3. Considering it has been eight years since the initial release, that's a very low share.

[1]

>Now the problem is getting people to realize that...

I realize it, but (1) even after large libraries support 3 there will still be a long tail of libraries that aren't ported (and will never be), and (2) I see very little value in porting our very large code bases to Python 3, with its breaking changes and subtle behavioral differences that need to be thoroughly tested. There's no must-have feature for us to justify that effort, so we won't be making the switch for the foreseeable future.

IMO Python should have put a lot more effort into backwards compatibility when releasing Python 3. I'm genuinely concerned that this release has killed Python, and I'm not alone.