rory

"Sorry, not sorry" is exactly a flamewar thing. You're not "speaking truth to power." First, as I pointed out you're factually incorrect. Second, who do you think is reading your HN thread that has power over the governor of Florida? So you're literally speaking lies to the powerless. Sick.

The author is using Toronto as a stand-in for a typical North American city, when in fact it's actually pretty bizarre and unique with respect to density-- I can't think of any American city structured similarly.

Also doesn't apply to Boston, Philly, and perhaps some smaller cities in New Jersey etc..

The author is Canadian and it seems like he's taking a lot of his perspective from Toronto, which is actually kind of bizarre in that it has clusters of high rises with single family homes in between, and leafy suburban neighborhoods right around downtown.

> expensive political stunts

Yeah wouldn't mind losing this $120B if they had saved that $600k, amirite?

FEMA subsidizes all kinds of wealthy people, Florida MAGAs and NYC Davosers alike.

> flying legal immigrants to other states

Can we please not do this flamewar thing? Asylum seekers are technically neither legal nor illegal immigrants yet, but everyone knows this will cause an argument that's completely unrelated to the article.

> these children were recruited from 6 of 10 cities included in the original cohort: Vancouver, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton, and Halifax

Probably just the difference between this cohort vs. all Canadians (urban and rural).

In the case of Germany, they invented a new currency worth a lot more and allowed exchange at a gov't-determined rate (they actually did this a few times).

This train of thought is logical, but what is the practical application for a given nation? Even if one were to abandon fiat money, there's no way to force their adversaries to do so as well. The game theory seemingly pushes everyone to run the printing presses, so to speak, now that the fiat toothpaste is out of the tube.

Largely governments: https://darksky.net/attribution

Where do you live?

> I imagine myself trying to cast a spell like that and having to go through fifty iterations to even begin to start doing the right operation without killing the person; and even when fully trained making tons of error while doing it complete with much swearing and cursing.

This is more or less how AonDor magic in Sanderson's Elantris works. You spell out what you want to do in a sort of kanji language, often with unexpected results. And you have to draw the characters really accurately for it to work.

??

> 2008 had one of the top 5 or 6 peaks of inflation over the past century!

More like the 9th or 10th, but nonetheless I see what you're talking about with the summer 2008 oil spike. The problem with this analysis is that a deflationary spiral is really more about price jerk than inflation itself. In other words, the rate at which inflation is changing is the bigger concern than the inflation rate itself.

> So not sure how you're deducing there was no inflation.

This is a strawman you've entirely made up, so I won't respond to this portion.

No, it's not at all actually: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=T1OA

2008 was on the verge of a massive deflationary spiral. Bank debt forgiveness likely did cause inflation, but we needed it then! We are now in a period of high inflation already, so we would very much not like more.

> People forget that the average home was ~700 square feet 100 years ago.

Interesting related graph: https://infogram.com/1pqdpn20vkmlelcq6qx7jzwz9pf00g9xnq5

Although we're currently in a frothy situation, scaled out a bit, it's not clear that housing prices are growing more than general inflation when adjusting for square footage. What _has_ happened is A) houses have gotten bigger and B) people per household has gotten smaller.

Yeah the 1031 exchange simply defers the tax to a later time. But if you defer it until you die, your heir (in many cases) gets off tax-free.

You're skipping over the (extremely important) part where you take out a mortgage on property.

So you buy the $500k property with $125k in cash and a $375k mortgage (25-30% down is typical for investment mortgages). Depreciation *plus mortgage interest expense* leads you to (for tax purposes) more or less break even on this investment after 10 years and so you pay no tax.

After those 10 years are up, you've now paid off around $68k of the principal, plus the asset has gained $250k in value. So from your initial $125k of capital invested, you now have ~$400k in capital that you can leverage into a $1.6M property in a 1031 exchange. That bigger loan comes with a much larger mortgage interest expense, so you continue to earn no taxable income while growing a larger and larger asset and taking a (relatively modest) cash-on-cash return.

Exactly, and it's clear that cultural exchange has already been quite strong in the European->Indigenous American direction, so it's interesting to see what we could learn in the other direction.

The article isn't helping itself with some its quasi-historical editorializations, though. "Indigenous Americans knew how to avoid starvation. Colonists were too hungry to notice" isn't exactly a balanced view of the history.

Infamous people are definitionally famous.

I've crossed three land borders to Canada in the past few years and none had an outgoing checkpoint.

> The latter isn’t a valid argument, because it would suggest the morality of murdering someone depends entirely on how many friends they have

I think you misunderstand my point. There are many reason murder is harmful, and abortion applies equally for some but not all of them. So the morality doesn't depend "entirely" on any of them (including the two I listed).

I do actually think its worse to e.g., kill a husband and a father of young children, compared to killing a hermit with no social ties. And it seems like society feels the same way-- otherwise we wouldn't hear about how victims are "a father of five" in tragic news stories.

I think most people basically understand that part though. It's not like no one has noticed the bans and restrictions in red states.

The much stranger thing that's happening is Europeans protesting in the streets against a ruling in America that declared a 16-week abortion ban legal-- when their own country has a 12-week abortion ban!

It seems that many people both inside and outside America are missing the fact that the laws of most European countries would have been declared illegal under Roe for being too restrictive.

There's no single Abortion in post-Roe USA standard either-- in fact it's more internally variant than Europe. So I guess it's kind of like comparing a basket of apples, oranges and bananas to a different basket of apples, oranges, and bananas (and maybe a couple grapefruits).

How would that settle it? Like if you go to get an abortion they extract the fetus and put it into an artificial womb, then put it up for adoption? It's not likely we're all going to stop inseminating each other just because we have a new gestation option.

A fetus generally isn't believed to be a conscious entity (nor is a newborn for that matter). The important distinction vs. a kidney is more that it's something that likely will become conscious in the future.

The question of abortion is really interesting in that it scratches at a deeper moral question-- precisely why do we consider murder to be wrong?

In my view, there are a few different reasons. One is that we are preventing future consciousness for a being by ending the body's ability to be conscious. That one certainly applies to abortion. But another is that we hurt the people that have relationships with or dependencies on that conscious being. That one doesn't apply to abortion at all.

It's not listed as a particularly safe or unsafe place by the measure of the Bloomberg article.

When I lived in DC I was several times narrowly missed by people blowing red lights, robbed, and once had to wake a driver up at a red light because they and a passenger had both passed out while driving at 11am. It definitely didn't feel like a particularly safe place.

For people wondering the drivers here: car crashes, drug overdoses, suicides. So the claim isn't really referring about the things people usually consider when it comes to "safety" (interpersonal attacks), although it's talking about things that we perhaps *should* think about more when it comes to safety.

If I'm being honest with myself, muggings in DC still scare me more than car crashes in Montana, despite the reality of these stats.

I love Warsaw and think I would personally really enjoy living there, but if the GP isn't willing to move to Boston, they're not going to like living in Warsaw.

Much smaller then NY, much more homogeneous, not a major world center of arts or finance.

There are very few cities in the world that check all the boxes he listed for NY, and they're all extremely expensive as well.

The use of freeports seems orthogonal to the fraud allegations outlined. Can you explain how they are related?