fennecfoxen

> solving these problems... where they happen (would also be much cheaper)

You assert that it's much cheaper to solve these problems without moving the people. It is not nearly so cut-and-dry.

When someone seeks to flee their homeland for Europe or America, it's generally because something is very wrong where they are coming from. Often, the problem includes some sort of kleptocratic, warmongering, authoritarian, or incompetent government. (Sometimes it is not strictly government — e.g. terrorism, cartels.)

It's often much easier to move people than reform institutions, and open migration worldwide would be a reform worth about $78 trilllllllllllllion. https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of...

There are equivalent cases in the meme stock world. GameStop, in particular, had an abnormally high market cap because of anomalous trading. If you hold onto it forever all you have is a dumb little videogame sales company worth a fraction of what you paid for it.

Meme stocks are quite interesting in that they are essentially like blockchain-driven asset bubbles, but without the blockchain. This has many advantages! It’s quite easy to trade stocks.

For more of David Gerard discussing blockchain topics, be sure to follow Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain at https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/

As usual, the “speculators” and “out of towners” and others are convenient scapegoats, lest we have to face the underlying supply and demand and barriers to development.

You want to have a monopoly on housing in a major city? I’d be hard pressed to point out an industry where that would be harder. You have literally millions of competitors.

Indeed! The economy might grow significantly if people worked longer hours!!

what do you mean that's not what you meant at all

It was initially an internal tool at GoCardless (YC S11). Good team. Would gladly work with any of them again.

Politicans hiding the cost of things is the fact of nature. No proposal for Medicare for All that has ever been floated has ever seen a realistic price tag attached. The trust fund's depletion is no fact of nature, it is merely an occasion when this will become a little clearer to the public.

When this happens, voters will not like what they are being offered quite as much as they do now, when the costs are some distant abstraction; there will be a whole lot more hesitation and skepticism. And if pointing this out is a "right wing talking point" then go ahead and call me Margaret Thatcher.

Public support for Medicare for All is going to look much more interesting in a few years when the Medicare trust funds are running out and they have to cut costs by 15% or more, and it’s clear there’s actually a price tag on the proposal.

It’s not the 250 year head start that gets you. It’s the temperature differential.

excuse me; i commented on the legislature's allergic reaction to actually making changes to the law in this area, noting the difficulty of the task which you have chosen.

It's not quite as simple as "they can use discretion", because there is no single "they". There's a boatload of states and the federal government, and states have sovereign power on these topics, and states that have outlawed the practice have collaborated with the federal government through "equitable sharing" practices.

Something at the top could help.

No they didn't. The justice department announced their interpretation of that policy and how they'd use discretion.

You want meaningful reform on anything within 500 miles of this topic from the legislature? Good luck.

No better than any random orbiting lump with the same mass, and quite possibly worse. If you want to clean space debris put up something like a big disc of aerogel.

> The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given how often science is misrepresented and how often preliminary findings are reported as facts, often in some misguided attempt to help make it easier for people to understand.

Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen the post-WWII era, when the backlash against Science was rooted about efficient new ways of killing people and destroying the environment (both with and without the atomic bomb), and against authoritarians touting Progress while demanding the regimentation of society and destruction of traditional values and ways of life.

> Don’t assume the only options are a 100% fix or do nothing dropping prices by even 1% makes a significant difference.

This is hyped as the Big Headline Fix For Everything and its impact is trivial. 1% impact on rents? No way. Zero-point-one percent, maybe, but I still doubt. Why is anyone even wasting time talking about it? Where is their vision?

No one has made credible plans towards supporting a settlement on the Moon in the last 50 years, either.

> If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction.

Is 1,893 vacancies in the entire city of Vancouver close enough to "nobody" for you? Is it enough to fix the crisis and render housing affordable again?

Google Maps also has an unfortunate tendency to go route-flapping, telling me that first one route, then another, is better. Often these routes diverge quite some distance away, and the "best" route switches back and forth a lot. I am also assumed to opt in to each route change unless I click "No thanks" — even if I was previously offered the route and chose another one. I am not going to click No Thanks, because I'm riding a motorcycle, thanks; therefore I use Apple Maps.

Okay, Craig, you can have your monolith back when you can get your engineers to care in the slightest about keeping the codebase organized instead of turning it into a big ball of mud. I'm talking encapsulation. I'm talking well-defined interfaces that aren't glued to specific implementations. I'm talking some sort of dependency inversion, dependency injection, service locator patterns, any of that. I'm talking real use of the single-responsibility principle, all that software-engineery stuff that everyone ignores. Because I understand what you're getting at 110%, but by and large, all this stuff doesn't happen otherwise.

Until then you're going to have these things forced on you by your local Architect, forced on you by running a bunch of separate processes on separate containers with DNS as the cluster's service-lookup framework.

Banks generally invest in something related to productive activity which is expected to provide an income stream. Crypto banks invest in something valued only for its popularity which is unrelated to productive activity.

All investments are speculative and involve some risk. But outside of crypto, few of them are purely so.

You’re talking about economic profit, not accounting profits. Accounting profits just take the use of capital that can be employed at normal rates of return.

Huh. People who find themselves abused and at risk on a job, walking away from the job, is now "Atlas Shrugged fanfiction"? I'll be sure to notify all the labor unions of their new patron.

This is probably the funniest comment on HN.

"essentially indentured servants" is a bit rhetorically distracting, don't you think? Let's pin that down. What's a reasonable amount of work that a human should be expected to do to live? Not just housing, but food, and whatever else.

Because for all that today's sales prices are driven by that consensus, you can do math on the expected future income stream (including imputed rent) (adjusting it for interest rates and inflation and risks) and determine that it comes up a bit short by most measures.

One could argue that in the original, he didn't escape either. "The text bears no specific mark of being a polemic against child sacrifice."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_chil...

Oh, and Song of the Roustabouts is something too.

"We work all day, we work all night / we never learn to read or write / we're happy hearted roustabouts!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75mur1xF7U

But the whole premise of "the mixed race kid gets all the bullying" is a reflection of a pretty bleak society, beyond any of these specific depictions.

If we're talking about bleaker topics in older Disney works, I'll ask you to take a moment and consider the entire premise of _Dumbo_ (1939). Why are the other elephants scandalized by the baby elephant with the big ears, asking what Mr. Jumbo would think? Why did they mean, just a few moments earlier when they said elephants are "a proud race"? Why would they shun him, declaring that he is not one of their kind? ... What kind of elephant has big ears?

You might be thinking of contract manufacturers like Foxconn.

Tesla isn't a mass-market software/online-services business. They manufacture, which means a lot of capital going into factories and a lot higher of material-input costs, and they're kind of a high end brand.

This gives their business different performance characteristics from Facebook (mass market social-media and ads), Amazon (mass market sales and logistics), Apple (which is at least slightly luxury, but contracts out its manufacturing, and does mass market hardware — look at that iPhone sell), Netflix (mass market entertainment), and Google (mass market search, mail, advertising).