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All fair points. I'm an outsider, so I don't know what a "fair" price looks like, or how that's evolved over time. FWIW, I was looking for single family homes in Summerlin and Henderson. A quick Zillow search indicates plenty of inventory at $500+/sqft; it was at this price point that I found the homes began to compare favorably to other luxury markets around the country.

The NY Department of Taxation and Finance is incredibly aggressive in pursuing such cases, and the burden of proof is on the taxpayer to show that FL is in fact their primary residence. Those wealthy people that spend substantial time in New York keep careful location records (especially if they have a residence there).

An anecdote that I previously posted on another thread and will repeat here:

A couple months back, I flirted with moving from NYC to Las Vegas for tax reasons. I was shocked at the expense of luxury housing there, and construction costs were similarly high (I was quoted $450-$500/sqft, on par with NYC). My realtor explained to me that rich Californians were "stampeding" into Nevada and had increased the cost of all things high-end by 50-100%--basically in the span of a year! She was very bearish on the market.

It seems some measure of rich flight is playing out in California/Nevada; enough to transform segments of the housing market. It's not far-fetched to imagine the same with New York/Florida.

But to a first approximation, the numbers are the same! If anything, some of the biggest moves happen when a single (big) buyer or seller is active. It’s all about the prices participants are willing to trade at, not an imbalance of one group vs another.

Perhaps buyers nibble at the ask. Perhaps a big order slams through. Or perhaps the posted liquidity is canceled without any trading having happened. Whatever the case, the number of shares sold is exactly equal to the number of shares bought.

> There is no magical equilibrium

Your understanding is exactly backwards. Market makers provide the "magical equilibrium" by bridging supply and demand across time.

> and if there was, there would be no profit.

Wrong again. Even with infinite shares on the bid/ask, there's still a spread for market makers to collect.

More generally, what exactly do you think your comment proves? If a retail investor buys the sole 100 shares at top-of-book, the price (mid) moves up, but there's one buyer and one seller. Where's the "delta"? And if a big hedge fund buys 100,000 shares from 10 market makers... 100,000 shares demanded and 100,000 shares supplied. Magic!

You're arguing against an accounting identity. I know what you're trying to say: what moves prices is relative eagerness of buyers and sellers. You're just too inexperienced to be able to explain it.

> more buyers than sellers lead to rising prices and more sellers than buyers lead to falling prices

That's not how any of this works. Every share bought is a share sold by some counterparty. Buyers and sellers are always in equilibrium.

A data point for your consideraton: One month ago, I briefly flirted with moving to Las Vegas for tax reasons. I was shocked at the expense (and shabbiness) of high-end housing there. Construction costs were similarly high--I was quoted $450-$500/sqft, on par with NYC. My realtor explained to me that rich Californians were "stampeding" into Nevada and causing some serious dislocations in real estate. She thought the market was eventually going to crater.

Not at all naive. Asians used to face prejudice arguably as severe as that faced by blacks. Once discriminatory laws were lifted, they began a remarkable ascendancy--one that was in large part [1] due to the market re-pricing the value of Asian labor: " One explanation for rapid Asian upward mobility is, therefore, that earnings gaps driven by prejudice rather than productivity could not persist in a post-war labor market that eliminated most forms of legal discrimination against non-white workers"

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w22748

It was trivial to make the case, and that people didn’t see this represents a massive epistomological failure. Perhaps it would have been offensive, but adults should not be indulged when they engage in hysteria.

Very nice Burkean argument.

There's a fascinating related example of what you describe: cassava [1]. Proper preparation of this staple food involves multiple steps over multiple days. Few of the steps serve an obvious purpose, yet omitting any of them has deadly long-term consequences. What appear to be "superstitions" or "rituals" to the individual performing them are anything but.

[1] http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smar...

Of course. But we didn't really start off by arguing about state-level beliefs. You claimed the people most affected by sea level rise least believe in it--presumably as a dig at republicans (haha they're so blinkered by ideology they can't even see their own self interest!) And I claim that, no, republicans mostly do not live on the coasts, are not the most affected, and thus there is no tension between their ideology and their self-interest.

Half of your “red” coastline consists of Florida—the vast majority of the coastal population of which is blue (see any 2016 electoral map).

Great point, and the dismissive responses to your comment are revealing. So many hyper-rational, super-duper forecasters on HN who think they know better than the people who, you know, have actually succeeded enough in life to be placing these expensive real estate bets.

Your premise is incorrect. The parts of the country most affected are the coasts--and they are blue.

This advice is dangerous and misguided. If you think rates will rise, don't be long duration. Holding to maturity does not insulate you from interest rate risk--you will certainly make nominal dollars, but in real terms, you will under-perform or even lose.

There are reasons to avoid bond funds (management fees, trading costs, tax implications), but this isn't one of them.

https://www.northerntrust.com/documents/commentary/investmen...

Mr. Gould was not an honest customer. Huge gap between scientific and public reception of his work.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/5...

Oh, my comment was a concurrence. LWA is plainly obvious to any reasonable observer.

The standard authoritarian scales are indeed tuned to detect right-wing ideology. That being said, it's easy (though unpopular) to construct measures that capture Left-Wing Authoritarianism (the "Loch Ness Monster," as Altemeyer famously labeled it). Unsurprisingly, authoritarianism turns out to exist in equal measure on left and right. A couple samples of the literature; there are plenty more if you google around:

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12470 [2] http://www.bartduriez.com/sites/default/files/documents/PDF/...

I don't follow. Evidently, people could "afford to live" in 2000--almost all are still around to collect a paycheck. And now, they can live 19.6% (1.01^18 - 1) better than that! Real, not nominal. So why are the jobs "lies?"

Berkson’s paradox

The idea that these "hate speech" venues have caused deaths is thrown around quite often, but I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case. Gaping chasm between rhetoric and reality.

It’s not at all hard, and obviously so: for most crimes (e.g. assault, rape, robbery, murder), the perpetrator’s race is observable. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) measure exactly this, and surprise, surprise: offense rates and arrest rates line up pretty exactly for every race across every category of crime.

As a European immigrant to the US, it pains me to see such misconceptions so widely held. Some of this is complete nonsense, but some stems from a mix of unsophisticated thinking and a profound lack of understanding of the country.

> The US is philosophically much more egotistic than other developed countries

A weakness and a strength, see below.

> Politically the US is the most divided western country with its two party system

Political gridlock and fighting is largely irrelevant because the commercial sphere is the real motive force of the country. This point seems especially difficult to comprehend for Europeans accustomed to pervasive state participation in daily life. The vibrancy and diversity of the capitalist economy here is unparalleled.

> Money in politics means it's one of the most corrupt

The corruption flows from America's egotism; money is a red-herring. Political fund-raising is about relative success, not absolute (you just need to outspend your opponent), so the vast amounts in play are simply a function of a zero-sum arms race: American society deploying its ever-growing wealth to buy a fixed quantity of political influence. $1M creates no more obligation than $1000 if the latter is sufficient to win.

> Conservative media does a very good job at keeping at least 50% of the country comically uninformed

This is just silly. Fox News is 95% of "conservative media," and viewership on any given night is 2.6 million people, ~0.8% of the population. Multiply by whatever fudge factor you want to get to total viewership. You've got a ways to go to get to half the country.

> The billionare .0001% will probably do their utmost to keep the status quo

Paranoid, conspiracy-minded nonsense.

> The "American Dream" gives people the impression that working hard solves everything and that their country is the best in the world period.

This is very true, conditional on you being capable. The USA has an immensely deep bench of talent and does an excellent job assimilating talent from around the world. All of these talented people are immensely incentivized to deliver, and they deliver in spades! Their contributions pull the rest of the world up with them, despite all the inequality belly-aching from collectivist types. If you are a person of intelligence and ambition, there is no better place than the US to maximize your gifts.

> The US is doing very good in a lot of areas

You're damn right it is! Most curiously to me, many Europeans bemoan the state of our lower and middle classes, despite those same people doing _better_ than their European counterparts on almost every material measure at almost every decile! [try to play with e.g. EDHI by DECILE at http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/

> but I think collective egotism is preventing it from reaching its true potential.

Perhaps. It certainly makes it more difficult to solve certain collective action problems, but it also encourages citizens to tackle problems others find trivial. I doubt, for example, that Twitter could have been built outside the US: the a priori use is to selfishly broadcast thoughts about me, me, me; the vast social utility is an emergent property.

> There's plenty of research on the "entity theory" bias, mostly applied to gender.

Junk science if there ever was any. The effect sizes for these treatments are tiny, if they even replicate it all. It seems like every day now there's a new rebuttal of stereotype threat, implicit association tests, priming, etc.

Just from today: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09515089.2017.135... http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~acimpian/reprints/j...

> Google had plenty of reason to rethink his employment, not just because of his poor judgement, but because of the fact that he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way.

This is emphatically not the issue. Suppose for argument's sake that he had made an air-tight case. Wouldn't he still be advancing "harmful gender stereotypes?" It wouldn't void a single one of Sundar Pichai's points when he fired him.

And turn it around; suppose an activist had sent around a poorly argued pro-diversity screed that "cherry-picked" shoddy research on implicit association tests, stereotype threat, etc. Would Google seriously be rethinking her employment for tackling research in an "unreasoned and unscientific way?"

Damore is out because he took on the left's sacred beliefs.

Fair point. I'm here to defend the factual basis for his conclusions, not the logic that got him there.

At the end of the day, he told a just-so story; in this, he's no different than the "blame discrimination" camp. At least this story is an empirical one backed by self-reported work place surveys, cross-cultural analyses, etc. The fundamentalists opposing him just have some anecdotes, some unreproducible stereotype threat studies, and a healthy dose of religious conviction.

Start with Halpern's "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities" and follow the bibliography where it takes you (I really would like to provide the references, but just I don't have the patience to copy them now). For something rigorous that's digitally available, start with sapinker's slides from his 2005 debate [1]. Modern understanding is quite similar, only with new evidence and insights from evolutionary psychology and neurobiology.

[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/pinker.slides.html

The link doesn't explain a thing about the science; in fact, the author states in the very first paragraph that he won't even bother. What exactly do you think you posted?

The manifesto's claims are very much in the scientific mainstream. Evidence has only piled on since the Pinker-Spelke debate. You have very little to hang your hat on in this argument.

[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...

Speech=violence is perhaps the most hyperbolically nonsensical belief held by any political group today.