fennecfoxen

I understand Celcius is better for times when you want to do math, such as when you are figuring out how many joules it is going to take to boil water for your morning coffee, in the manner that any perfectly normal human being does on a regular basis. Why, it’s just as natural as consulting the periodic table so you can the use nutrition fact Dara on about sodium to estimate the impact of swapping out unsalted butter for salted in your recipe. Which I have done. Once. (It was a very small impact.)

Value it based on the discounted future income stream like everything else. Sell if offered a price above that. Buy if offered a price below. It’s great to avoid reinvestment risk but inflation risk is real.

It’s like a NYC housing project. Just put the people into a machine for living and call it a day.

We have a history of similar measures to draw from. In the 1950s lots of people believed that banning single-room occupancy buildings was the proper solution to a lot of problems - they were small! they were inhumane! they are associated with crime! New York City lost about 100,000 units, mostly converted into two-bedroom apartments, occupied by good people™ who belonged in families. "Consequently," said activist George McDonald in the wake of this policy, "people sleep on grates outside."

Maybe your laws won't quite achieve this! But to the extent they enjoy success in influencing housing prices, they will be harming those who cannot afford homes.

If you want to fix housing prices (or if you just want to screw over these corporations for funsies, which is fine) then you want to increase the supply of homes: that is, you want homebuilders to build, build, build, build, build, build, build — and where necessary, you want to drive the political reforms that make this possible. All the evilcorps™ are betting that you won't — and I'd bet that too, given where you're focusing your attention and efforts.

This accusation would make a lot of sense if the corporations in question are either (a) a monopoly or (b) an illegal trust, colluding with each other, and through (a) or (b) the corporations enjoyed sufficient concentration of the housing sector that they had pricing power — the ability to restrict the supply and raise prices to make money.

This is not the case. The housing market is fairly competitive, and many different buyers, sellers, homeowners, and home-builders participate and compete with each other. Prices are rising for other reasons: a reduced number of homebuilders, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash; various political land-use, zoning, environmental, and similar homebuilding restrictions; a reduction in the overall labor pool, which impacts the labor in new home construction; labor and other supply chain impacts on the availability of components that are used in new home construction; and a significant pandemic-induced shift in real estate usage patterns (almost everyone wants more space now).

> they are playing with funny money

YES YES YES YES! Negative real interest rates are pretty damn funny! We should have ended them long ago. We are now beginning to pay the price. You have identified a key way to help end the trends that you do not want to see.

> People's income is so crushed

They are being crushed by inflation! Another blow against ultra low interest rates! RATE HIKE! RATE HIKE! RATE HIKE!

> Why can't people rent to other people like it was done in the past? Why aren't regular people being allowed to play this game?

You're totally allowed!! Go buy a house, and rent out the house. You will probably need money for a down payment, but you can still get a mortgage at negative real interest rates — and if it is in the US and it is a conforming mortgage (<$647200) you will benefit from an interest rate subsidy from the quasi-public mortgage-buying entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It might be a great investment! I am buying a house (for myself) and have locked a rate; with current inflation numbers I can expect $2000/month in return simply from inflation eating away at my debt!

The main contraindication here is that you will experience risk, and you may be intolerant to that risk. Your investment could end up underwater, and it's hard to diversify because it's such a big asset relative to your income. This may explain why corporations are better able to do it these days.

> Even if it was a bad game to play, they're still taking houses away from those who want to buy and not rent.

It's true! Existing home-owners are not required to sell to another aspiring home-owner, and are free to sell their property as they see fit. This means that aspiring home-owners must compete with renters (and the people who renters pay, corporations). The renters (and the corporations they pay) may be willing to offer more! The existing home-owner benefits, while the aspiring home-owner does not!

There are lots of ways to use the law to strongarm people into dealing with a politically favored class, at the expense of a politically disfavored class! Some of them are discussed in these threads! I'm not a fan, myself, and believe it will harm the nation and its economy by distorting the economy into doing different things that make less sense and leave the nation overall poorer as a consequence with less money to spend on things that are more meaningful, but if you would benefit maybe you would be a fan!

Renting something bought by an individual (or a very small corporation) was possible and remains possible. But if there was enough of this happening, the corporations who rent might have serious difficulty finding a profit.

It is worth noting that, in a major shift, major home builders expect 50% of their business will soon be in built-to-rent neighborhoods, up from something like 6% today. This is an illustration of how prices are a signal used across the economy to determine what gets done. (Taylor Morrison Home's numbers, from this recent article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/built-to-rent-suburbs-are-poise... )

I refer to the US because it is closer to me. I understand that Canada experiences similar trends.

In short, they’re offering homes to rent. You can live in the home without buying the home. That’s the value. It’s kinda huge.

And to some extent it becomes class warfare to deny this to renters. These investors are betting big on the houses’ value going up, and expect them to go up a fair bit. This is essentially a bet that the housing market will fail to add new supply, and that anyone who does not own a home yet will suffer greatly from increased rent. And if we’re fighting over is rules on specifically who can buy, instead of doing things to actually make new homes, it seems a fairly sure bet to me.

SROs, residential hotels, boarding houses and the like were all banned in the 1950s (and the surviving ones dismantled through the 1980s), a loss of about 100,000 units of affordable housing.

Consider this lovely e-book for further reading: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

Or this lovely Simon and Garfunkel song about the NYC homeless on the streets of SoHo, contemporary to that era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVnPIE3juc

Light strikes objects in a scene; generally speaking, at each illuminated point reflected light radiates away in all directions, a sphere (subject to caveats: occlusion, unequal strength in all directions). Rays from each point reach the viewer's eyes, where the lenses of the eye project the image onto the retina. This image is then interpreted by the brain.

To create an image, you are doing one of two things: either you take this three-dimensional scene, project it onto an imaginary two-dimensional plane in front of the viewer, and render a (generally planar) artifact which reflects similar colors and light -- that is, your painting. (You will be subject to various challenges, like mismatched lighting that reflects from that painting, materials limitations, resolution limitations.)

OR...

Reverse-engineer the brain itself, such that it perceives things in a similar way, despite a difference in the actual rendered image.

If your state is California, as I suspect it is, its housing policy is a miserable failure worthy only of derision and scorn. The price of housing is a bona fide humanitarian disaster, and the mandate you refer to is well known; it has solved almost nothing, what pathetically few solutions it has delivered are distributed by lottery (a key indicator of its abject failure), and — as your own description makes clear — it is just one more hurdle to make things more uncertain, drive up prices, and to drive away developers and the new construction they pay for.

The laws of economics are real; increased supply will generally depress prices, damaging an asset's speculative value; increased prices will generally mean increased profits from building and thus attract more supply.

It is always something to find those who deny the laws of economics so vigorously, in the manner that many deny climate change. I am certain that you had a cold winter in Missouri last year, and I am certain that you have found a neighborhood where someone is renovating old housing stock into luxury homes which some weirdoes are renting unused. Nevertheless the general laws hold: the globe warms, and new supply lowers prices.

There are a finite number of people who will buy luxury homes of the sort you describe, they have finite amounts of money, many of them have alternatives in which to invest, and it is such a pathetically small and ineffective thing to make an campaign of class warfare against these people the centerpiece of one's housing policy, instead of simply encouraging more building by any reasonable means necessary, public or private, and removing barriers to that building.

I don't think affordable-housing is actually considered a real "threat" to private developers in most of the nation, but suppose that it were.

Imagine that you had a business. The government says they'd like to fund a competitor.

It's not just any competitor! This new competitor will be empowered to use a ton of tax money to compete with you. This competitor will be headed by someone who is politically connected. The politically connected owner will be able to take a fat cut of this tax money, and donate it back to the political machine, to fortify their position. They can expect a cozy relationship with regulators and special approvals you can't get. If you're unlucky they will add legislation passed to support their business while hindering yours.

And, of course, their allies will insult you as villainous, greedy, and unreasonable. (Which you may be! And yet...)

Would you fight all of that, or would you embrace it?

— And if you think government projects aren't lousy with a corrupt politically-connected fat cats skimming money off the top, well, I have a delightful bridge to sell you!

You say all this as if there isn't any meaningful supply-and-demand to be had in the secondary market.

> Today, built-to-rent homes make up just over 6% of new homes built in the U.S. every year, according to Hunter Housing Economics, a real estate consulting firm, which projects the number of these homes built annually will double by 2024. The country’s largest home builders are planning for that future. Backed by banks and private investment firms, they have already bet billions on the sector, and will put down some $40 billion more during the next 18 months, Brad Hunter, founder of Hunter Housing Economics, projects. Built-to-rent subdivisions have been constructed or are under development in nearly 30 states. Taylor Morrison Home Corp. , Mr. Wood’s development partner and the nation’s fifth-largest builder, has said built-to-rent could soon become 50% of its total business. The company didn’t disclose the current share.

> Homeownership is expected to decline over the next two decades—a trend that started with the generation after the baby boomers, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for homeownership. Prices are rising faster than ever, leaving more people, including those with higher incomes, more likely to rent.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocks

"Global blocks are technical actions performed to prevent an IP address or range of IP addresses from editing all Wikimedia wikis, for a fixed period of time or indefinitely. Global blocks disable account creation from the blocked IP by default, and can also prevent editing while logged in to an account."

Most certainly not. The people in charge actually want it to be open. You are simply watching those ambitions splinter somewhat as they are beset by the crashing waves of the harsh reality that is the Internet.

Wikipedia doesn't block to punish individuals. It blocks to protect itself. There are plenty of ways around most blocks, like simply creating an account.

If you wish to improve way you hire in an industry like the airlines, where candidates make multi-year and even multi-decade commitments to one of a very few companies, this requires you to invest in a recruitment pipeline, and do outreach. This is part of it.

Career search is terrifyingly inefficient. People don't just land in jobs randomly, but they often don't realize the best career path and pick that one. Rather, labor market has a variety of structural inefficiencies and a strong component of path dependency. If your friends are all going into programming, you might think about it more seriously and decide to go into programming. If you were a white kid and none of your friends are into programming and every time you saw a programmer it was some, say, some very talented young woman of Indian descent in a sari, making references to Diwali that you didn't understand, well, you might not think programming is the career path for you. But if someone puts a bunch of ads in your neighborhood and bus stop and the newspaper and the local community college for a career in programming, emphasizing that you're welcome there too, that might change, and you might find some people you can relate to there, easing your onboarding into the community in general until you understand and can make all the jokes about Kennedy Steve squawking 7500 at the ramp.

Amazingly, fantastically useful.

People want the government to have that power and to start inspecting and regulating speech so we can be more like China and we can fix the crisis of anonymous dissent and wrongthink? Oh well. I suppose it’s not really surprising.