generalpass

> They won't because they don't want to keep their property taxes affordable.

The tax rate has nothing to do with building houses.

Nothing bold about it. Nothing correlates as strongly as campaign contribution, especially in enormous districts.

The voters matter less than you think, largely because in these huge districts there will be an incredibly diverse range of opinions. Short of ordering troops to come in and murder people in broad daylight, getting such a huge number of people to coalesce around any single anything almost never happens.

I suspect you are being down-voted because a lot of landlords are renting out their first home while they have moved out and into a newer, nicer home and are now just exploiting the underclass.

Presumably the mortgage on the first home is quite far below current market prices, but this is not enough to drive the landlord to offer a price that is necessarily in line with rents at the time the home was purchased.

The mortgage interest is no longer tax deductible, so effective cost of ownership is higher than when compared to someone paying a mortgage on a home they live in.

The profit from renting is compared against profit from selling. If the rental price is driven too low, the owner will prefer to sell and collect the profits (and the home will likely be taken off of the available rental inventory, which will further drive up rents).

If I understand it correctly, when people die the state and IRS collect taxes from the estate based on the value. Since most people these days die in debt, it's most likely the property will have to be sold to cover the taxes owed by the estate.

This would mean the inheritance in many cases will be the cash left over from the property sale.

> A well-funded campaign is useless against pissed off voters.

The re-election rate of incumbents in California state senate districts approaches 100%. Getting into office in a district of a million people is about money, nothing else.

Campaigns cost millions of dollars. Where do you think that money comes from? Principles and integrity?

Principle over efficacy, donchyaknow.

I assumed you were referring to the politicians voting against the bill.

Make it as hard to build a new residential unit in Texas as it is in California and that trend falls through the floor.

Pay them more money than the other guys are paying them.

Do you feel that it is fair to evict an old couple because they purchased their house in the 70s when it was in the woods, but now that people have built up a town around them, they have to go because they didn't plan on paying $7,400 per year in property taxes in their retirement planning, and then also can't afford to take on a new mortgage in the region, so move really far away from where they saved for and planned for retiring?

> California does NOT have the lowest property tax. It is very distasteful for you to try to win an argument by lying. (moderators @dang)

> http://www.tax-rates.org/taxtables/property-tax-by-state

> And if you rank the states by percentage revenue from property tax, you'll see they are right in the middle

> https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative....

Since the California median home price is more than double the national average for median home prices, your two claims seem clearly to not tell the whole story.

What prop 13 does is keep tax rates from increasing beyond a very small percentage of the original purchase price. Thus, property values increase by a lot while taxes collected do not.

So the first sentence is sort of true. Anecdotal, but a guy on my street purchased his property with no house on it in the 70s and pays like $100 per year even though it is easily worth over a million, which will heavily skew the stats. The second sentence is completely true:

> People who have held property for a very long time are taxed very little relative to how they would be taxed in other states, and people who are new are taxed a lot.

> Prop 13 has a TON to do with high housing prices, because it eliminates the downside of high housing prices: higher property taxes.

> Once higher property taxes are out of the picture, higher property values are purely beneficial for homeowners, which means there's every incentive to vote for anti-housing policies to enrich themselves at the expense of transplants and immigrants.

I will agree that it will impact the absolute price of the housing.

When we talk about "housing prices", what we are really talking about is "monthly payments". Increasing the tax rate will just result in an exchange of dollars previously going to mortgages to dollars going to taxes. The monthly payment will remain the same, largely unaffordable, rate.

So, I disagree that it makes housing more affordable, because it has done nothing to change the supply or demand.

If you have some sort of refutation for the claim that supply and demand affect price, you should publish and collect your Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

All governments want to point fingers. The municipalities get away with murder because of state laws that define "urban growth boundary" regions which essentially state that there cannot be any new urban growth where there are not currently urban areas.

Predictably, the municipalities behave as an oligopoly because they know that people can no longer move just outside city limits, which is what people used to do when cities were behaving badly.

> Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.

This seems to always be stated as if stating it makes it true. Prop 13 has little to do with high housing prices and a lot to do with getting more revenue for governments.

Prices are influenced by supply and demand. The artificial limiting of supply by all of the governments in California is the biggest factor in why the prices are outrageously high.

I wonder if hosting images elsewhere helps out with reducing load?

Lithium-cobalt can be profitably recycled due to the value of the Cobalt, but nobody wants to pay the price for the batteries at that size.

Lithium batteries can explode when the lithium comes in contact for water. I'm not clear on what the waste stream is doing for all the non-cobalt chemistries (mostly manganese).

Take a look at the domestic manufacturers, such as East Penn, and you find that they have their own recycling plants and they charge their customers money when they don't receive a scrap battery on purchase of a new one. They also own most of the distributors of their batteries which run trucks to their customers.

The lead acid battery industry is incredibly competitive and prices unbelievably low due to this vertical integration and mechanized production. Pretty much the only way to beat the U.S. car battery prices is to subsidize (Korea) or pollute like hell (Mexico).

The U.S. is a net importer of lead, largely because all of the SLA batteries coming in from Asia end up in the waste stream as scrap, so there isn't very high demand for virgin (smelted lead concentrate) when all that scrap is sitting around.

I'm pretty sure Gartner predicted that by 2010 there would be 15,000,000,000 Palm Pilot users.

Is there any demographic data on that 1%?

I think the only question at this point is will Coronavirus kill all of us or just most of us.

Tareq Haddad said on a podcast that he plans to put together a site that promotes and informs about the more general principle of freedom of the press and how it is being very damaged worldwide.

https://tareqhaddad.com/contact/

A honeypot for dissidents.

Not to mention that the content of the blog is developer focused.

How would his techniques perform if he were writing about consumer goods such as quadcopters or coffee makers?

Regression to the mean?

The U.S. motorcycle market has yet to return to pre-recession levels. Harley's inability to attract younger customers is the same problem affecting the entire industry.

For an old device project of the sort the OP is asking about, there must be an OS that supports the old device, otherwise the device become a members the dreaded IoT botnets.

I really hope postmarketOS grows.

> Oh, I think they recognise the damage to their brand.

Today, yes. Two years ago?

> How much did five days of panic cost them? Their customers? Their brand?

Intangibles. Whenever you go to talk to management or even co-workers about this stuff, they look at you like you are crazy. I think it is just human nature to not even think that something could go wrong, let alone make decisions based on this.

I realize everyone here seems focused on the file system, but one of the things stressed by the OpenBSD project is that difficulty in upgrades are the root cause of the biggest problems.

Case in point.