It would be interesting to know if land prices have changed over the same period. Also whether any other comparable cities have had similar falls in price.
The article mentions "San Antonio, Dallas and Plano" as also having seen declines in rent, and that the job market in Austin has slowed compared to during Covid. There is likely a shared post-Covid-migration dip as the market no longer has a huge influx of relatively-desparate new money.
I wonder if every generation is doomed to feel this way. Socrates was horrified about the corrosive effect of reading upon young people's ability to memorise speeches. Plus ca change etc.
On the other hand, as the guy on twitter recently said, "it's not fair that I spent my childhood teaching my parents to use a printer and as an old man I'm spending my old manhood teaching my adult children to use a printer".
My older relative is complaining that their working life roughly coincided with the time where computers became mainstream but were still hard to use, and now that computers have become easy to use (think smartphones and tablets) their (the relative’s) productive days are more or less over and all their hard-earned difficult computer knowledge is becoming obsolete. So they were the generation that had it hardest, because they had to deal with computers (unlike earlier generations) but had to do so before computers became easy to use (unlike later generations).
To be fair, "reading" in Socrates' time was viewed as social media or Netflix is seen today. Mindless entertainment. There was more of an emphasis back then to focus on a few solid works, memorize and really chew on the content and not consume religiously.
To some extent I'm sure the answer is yes, so I think the operative question is not "Are kids learning what I learned?" Instead it has to be something more subtle.
Perhaps "Is kids' knowledge broadened and deepened by the media they consume?" more generally would do. It allows us to evaluate extent, change, and appropriateness more broadly. Not just the accessibility of a given topic, but how readily one can dive into the details and truly learn something.
The landscape of media then can change, but this question does not react to any and every change in the landscape the way a nostalgic argument does. Socrates would have no reason to worry; a book can broaden and deepen knowledge, too. Are we?
Agree to some context. Maybe every generation we have 'why is this thing so hard', so html/css was hard. I think in early 90's, one might say so hard with styling issue due to lack of standardization (page layouts and hacks needed to ensure working on all major browsers). Then there was Flash, jQuery. Now plethora of modern stack __how__ we do this and with magnitude more features.
If you don't need the features, React isn't an abstraction over HTML, it's a complication. Plus CPUs aren't getting exponentially faster anymore - that is a real game changer.
The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason. Removing them with no public discussion of the original reasoning is deeply undemocratic. At the very least, someone thought that the cost of having them in place was less than the cost to society of not having them there. Has that changed?
Didn't a democracy vote in the people that are saying they want to remove some agencies? Isn't that also how the agencies came to be in the first place?
You are right, but america use a two party system, there were only two options, and those options differed in many ways, it is difficult to say if "removing some agencies" was what the people that voted wanted, or if they just preferred that candidate despite them wanting to remove some agencies.
This is a pretty weak argument. Blaming the two-party system might feel good, but I don't think it gives us a better understanding of what happened in this election. People voted for the guy at the top of the ticket, and he was pretty clear about wanting to get rid of some federal agencies. I think we have to conclude that people were receptive to his message.
My hot take is that the two-party system isn't anywhere near as bad as people think it is. In countries with multi-party systems, parties often have to form coalitions in order to govern. In countries with two-party systems, parties have to do most of that coalition forming before the election. That's why we see far-left and center-left politicians in the Democratic party instead of having viable left wing parties.
One way or another, we get a coalition government. Is it better for those coalitions to be formed before the election or after? If it happens before the election, the electorate can see the results in time to change their decision. If it happens after the election, the fringe parties' arguments probably get discussed more, but there's no guarantee those parties will be part of the governing coalition.
you are right in it being a weak argument in this situation, and I'll refrain from arguing against a two party system in this comment.
What I should have said, is that as an outsider: I see lots of interviews with people who state that they are going to vote for trump (at time of interview), and they all seem to pick and choose from the things that trump says, some they take at face value, and others they consider to be just "the way he talk", campaign speech, or something along those lines.
Now, I don't know, maybe the majority of the people that voted for him actually want to dismantle institutions, maybe they don't and just saw it as an exaggerated way of saying that there should be some cutbacks. I don't know, I just don't think that it is an obvious conclusion from the result.
> In countries with multi-party systems, parties often have to form coalitions in order to govern. In countries with two-party systems, parties have to do most of that coalition forming before the election.
Exactly. This is really obvious but no one seems to acknowledge it. I even think the coalition dynamic can become a huge distraction from governance on its own. Could we think of tweaks to the process to make things better? Sure. But a wholesale rethink or uncritical mimicry is unlikely to produce something better.
Democracy isn't as simple as that. When you get 49.9% of the vote and can form a government, that isn't carte blanche to do anything and everything. A long-lived democracy depends on governments that take care not to offend the voters who voted against.
Angela Merkel was great at that — even when she had a majority anyway, she'd take care to act in such a fashion that ~half of the opposition voters approved.
Also hard to ignore him nominating several of the authors of, and people involved in, p2025 to his cabinet.
A lot of people who weren't paying attention are going to be saying "I didn't know", "How could've I known", "Why didn't anyone tell me", in the coming months and years.
It's unfortunate so many will suffer at the hands of the disengaged and the misinformed / poorly informed voters of this country.
I'd like to think they'll pay attention after this, but I thought the same thing last time around.
they're literally talking about deleting agencies, which was explictly mentioned in the plan.
several of the authors have already received / been earmarked for appointments.
if someone says "i'm going to blow up a building", and then starts buying a ton of dynamite, it's pretty reasonable to assume they're gonna blow up that building.
What do you mean? There are people who wrote parts of Project 2025 who will be in the next government, or do you think the Heritage Foundation has no ties to the future Trump government at all?
The Republican Party Platform says: "We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run."
Trump also mentioned it frequently in his speeches: " 'I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,' he said in September during a rally in Wisconsin. "
That platform has some puzzling things in it, like saying that if they win the White House and majorities in Congress they will quickly "Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age".
That's puzzling because every time in the past few years that anyone in Congress has tried to take up addressing the projected insolvency of the Social Security trust fund in ~2033 Republicans have rejected any approach other than raising the retirement age.
Democracy isn't just blind voting. The votes mean nothing if people don't know what the candidates stand for. Manifestos outlining intent and reasoning are part of the process but so is explaining what a policy is intended to achieve as it is being enacted. Without knowing the intended outcome, how can people judge whether it succeeded or not and whether to vote for this candidate again next time?
Assuming you’re genuinely asking, this is a tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy who was not on any ballot this election, but was since appointed to a position that the elected candidate Donald Trump created as part of a net new agency he plans to create during his presidency.
>>The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason.
>>Has that changed?
'that' 'reason' for any government is to ensure its own survival till eternity. Though eternity might not be possible. Its really more on the lines that governments exist to ensure their own survival, and the survival of their interests. Its often a misunderstanding that Government work for the people, they just work for themselves. To that extent, unless the government is going down due to this very reason, Im guessing it doesn't make any sense to chop departments whole sale this way.
Another factor is budgets just don't work the way these people imagine, its not that budgets would reduce or that they would return some money back to the treasury. These sort of actions just mean that budgeting just goes on as is, the money that now is saved will be used up by the other departments. Im guessing the armed forces.
These people don’t want to understand anything. They also don’t want to change anything. They just want the appearance of a steamroller so they can raise more money. Rinse and repeat.
I believe that the agencies have lost the trust of the people. This is what happens under bad and corrupt leadership, e.g. forever wars based on a lie, a person with dementia at the top, a candidate for President with no primaries.
The danger in this situation is that the DOGE will dismantle the safety mechanisms of the state, some of which depend on the state inertia, i.e. it's much harder to execute a coup when there are 4 agencies with overlapping duties.
Time will tell, but it is an end of something for sure IMHO.
I think they are using the already existing potential, you can cause some effects, sure, but not of this magnitude. No one is ever held responsible, even after truly astonishing and costly failures. At the same time there's that alienating gibberish coming from the other side. It's a natural reaction to reject it, only amplified by opportunistic actors. But hell, we might be looking at the fall of the Republic and the rise of an Empire, perhaps with a Civil War in between, not sure what to make of it yet.
You really need to provide data to make that assertion. Shortages of buildings are not the only reason that property prices can be high.
Properties are made up of a building and a plot of land that it's attached to. Whilst we can nake more buildings, we can't make more land, so the land in a given location is by definition going to be in a permanent state of shortage. If more poeple want to live in that location OR (the main driver of this crisis) if more money is chasing the same fixed supply, then the prices rise. The land component is the part that has become more expensive recently, not the buildings.
> Shortages of buildings are not the only reason that property prices can be high.
It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction.
Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): https://www.tiktok.com/@divasunglasses?lang=en
Land price is inherently tied to buildings though, in the sense that the cap of value one can realize from land is the maximum square footage you can build by zoning.
Land that you can develop into multifamily that still has capacity is getting ever rarer. If you poll Americans the preference split is 60-40 suburbia for suburbs vs dense walkability, and yet in metropolitan regions the residential land allocation looks more like 93-7. This shows up in square footage prices, where dense walkability is priced much higher per square foot.
It’s a shortage of floor space that is the issue. The problem is the Anglo countries have mostly made it illegal to supply it, in both dimensions. Auckland clearly showed this when it upzoned.
The reason for this is that the rent they would pay will fluctuate with the market. If a city grows and an area becomes more expensive, the landlord captures the uplift by raising the rent and WeWork would operate on a thin margin. On the other hand, if they buy the property, then (if its with leverage) the mortage should be relatively stable as surrounding rents rise making it cheaper. After the mortgage is paid off there is no rent to pay at all and 100% of the location value is captured as profit. Also, the value of the property goes on the balance sheet, giving you back most of the cash paid on the mortgage (or the upfront cash price), so little loss.
Given it's already been done before by Iridium [0], it's hard to see how it would take centuries for a more efficient version of the same thing to emerge if Spacex was not around. Especially given the general technology progress since Iridium initially launched.
Starlink offers highspeed (actually, not marketing gibberish), low latency internet around the world at a price people can actually afford and without unreasonable datacaps. This is possible because they are mass producing phased array antennas, something that was out of reach of common affordability before Starlink.
Starlink is comparable to Iridium like dial-up internet is comparable to fiber. Just go to Iridium's website and try to figure out what they actually sell to anyone who doesn't have elite pockets.
something that was out of reach of common affordability before Starlink.
True, but Starlink isn't what made phased array antennas affordable. The affordability of phased array antennas is what made Starlink financially feasible.
When the Iridium constellations were launched in the 1990s, the commercial phased array antennas in use today had not yet been invented. When the second-generation satellites were designed in the 2010s, phase array antennas were not yet commercially available, and did not become commercially available until around the same time that the 2nd-gen satellites were launched.
Land prices go up when poeple have more mooney and go down when people have less. The root cause is that land is unique in the economy because it both cannot be manufactured and cannot be moved. Each piece of land is therefore unique and no one can increase supply in response to demand. Renting or purchasing land is essentially an auction and the price is set by the highest bidder. Economists call this a "monopoly price" because it's the same effect you would get if someone has a monopoly and can raise prices at will. This is in contrast to competitive prices which sink lower and lower until they bump up against the actual cost of getting the work done to provide that product or service.
Land value is therefore a really weird part of the economy that allows people to charge money without doing any work or providing any value in return. If we confiscate all the money people charge to rent or buy land, nothing changes because no work was ever happening. The land is still there and still just as useful. Contrast that with anything where work is actually done - the industry would collapse if you confiscate the money. Taxing land value therefore allows the government to reclaim the money which those people should not be able to charge in the first place (if there was free market competition). When this happens, counter-intuitively, land prices do not rise (because the highest bid in the auction doesn't change) and there is no negative affect on production or jobs (because no one is employed to manufacture or maintain land). We know this because economic theory predicts it and various countries have already tried it. Instead, other taxes can be cut or eliminated due to the enourmous boost in government income, which has very positive effects on the rest of the economy. Understanding how this works is deeply counter-intuitive and so people usually think that a shortage of buildings is driving property/land values because it's easy to make sense of.
To directly answer your question: if you tax the land value as set by the current market, you don't have to worry about assessing other factors that SHOULD lead to higher taxes because the people trying to buy the land have already done that. That's why they are offering a higher price. It's simple and therefore cheap and easy to administer. Also essentially immune to tax dodging because you can't hide the asset.
> Land value is therefore a really weird part of the economy that allows people to charge money without doing any work or providing any value in return. If we confiscate all the money people charge to rent or buy land, nothing changes because no work was ever happening. The land is still there and still just as useful. Contrast that with anything where work is actually done - the industry would collapse if you confiscate the money. Taxing land value therefore allows the government to reclaim the money which those people should not be able to charge in the first place
You say they shouldn’t be able to charge for it, but instead of disallowing it you just change the beneficiary?
Given it's an auction mechanism, it's hard to stop people offering to pay for the land they want. The options seem to be either allowing that money to flow into private hands so someone gets a free lunch, or to capture it as tax, enabling all other taxes to be reduced or eliminated. The latter seems fairer to me as it eliminates the free lunch and keeps people's earnings in their own pockets via e.g. eliminating income tax.
I initally had the assumption (no idea why) that I was supposed to spend most of my time standing if I had a standing desk. Initially I thought standing desks were not for me because I'd start to feel tired after 20-30 minutes. I've now learned that a far more effective approach for back pain and general good posture is to vary your position every 20-30 mins. i.e. got from standing to sitting, or sitting to kneeling (if your setup supports it). The more viable postures you can use, the better.
To enable this, I have invested in an Hag Capisco chair, which supports multiple postures: https://store.flokk.com/uk/en-gb/products/hag-capisco Again, I initially thought it wasn't for me until I realised how it was meant to be used. The intention is to mostly sit on it with the small of your back unsupported, like you're on a stool, but with the option to relax and lean back when you get tired. I now spend very little time in the traditional sitting posture and change regulary to sitting sideways, backwards, or even kneeling on the chair. It's not for everyone but it's made a huge positive difference for me. Places that sell these will often let you try them or hire them for a few weeks to see if you like them. I'd strongly recommend having a go.
Additionally as others have mentioned, having a standing mat is a big help. I used to find that the soles of my feet would become uncofortable quite quickly. The solution I am using now is an Aeris Muvmat https://en.aeris.de/products/aeris-muvmat-schwarz-ohne-bezug which appears to be flat, but actually has irregular hard lumps under the surface. It's designed to mimic the feeling of tree roots on a forest floor. It encourages you to keep moving your feet around without you really relaising you're doing it, effectively massaging your feet slowly, so the circulation keeps going and the soles of your feet don't get tired. Thsi has been really effective for me, so highly recommended.
I dont recommend the capisco for work where you are very concentrated, such as software development. I do however like it for meetings and presentations.
TBF I don't think this is bad. The "cheating" involved seems a closer match to the actual real world conditions of the doing the job than the artificial "no internet allowed" assessment. If the candidates can get stuff done but need the internet as a reference, that's still getting stuff done. Not surprising that they are now getting promoted given they can not only get stuff done, but were resourceful enough to find a method to "cheat" and also pull it off successfully whilst being monitored.
That's a silly argument. There are many jobs at which being smart is an advantage. IQ tests correlate fairly well with being smart. Giving an IQ test could then give you a group of people that are more likely to be smart than the initial interviewing population. Assuming the job is not "taking IQ tests" is the assessment unjustified?
As much as I hate the current interview process, this isn't true.
The justification foe the assessment is that the assessment is the defined set of hoops that the company who you are trying to get paid by has assigned.
When presented with a problem she not only found a solution, but shared that solution with her peers. And has been promoted at her jobsite. As far as I can see, the interview properly assessed her abilities and found her qualified for the job.
In short, the interview process worked as intended.
Technically, it would be better if everybody had internet access.
BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber.
Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
> Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
People are just riding these organizations down as they crash, starting at the very top with the CEOs. The same feeling extends to the countries and societies where these things operate. Vultures upon a corpse.
“No internet during dev” is not a business requirement, it’s hazing
When I used to run interviews (no longer working) I’d learn the most from seeing how candidates resourcefully used google, skimmed results, found relevant info. That was immediately revealing.
I think it’s a popular approach to see the hiring process as hazing, at least in some companies. I.e. to throw random hurdles, later check who’s doing best and hire them.
I saw companies state that openly. E.g. saying: we’re all competent programmers, none of us like leetcode and we don’t use that in our actual job, but we need a way to filter candidates and this seems the best practical solution.
Again, perhaps desperate people and/or hustlers make for a good workforce, especially in some companies.
If you're willing to go to such lengths in order to be deceptive, it reflects very badly on your moral character. I wouldn't want to work with people like that and we should not reward that kind of behavior.
I am not particularly fond of this kind of moral flexibility. It's lying and the person found ways to justify themselves. This isn't the kind of person I can trust to be honest with me, they don't seem reliable either. Thanks, but no thanks.
