I bought a Kobo Aura in 2013 or 2014. It handles epubs/mobis perfectly while PDFs are a terrible experience, but what impresses me is that the device works just as well as it did 8 years ago. The battery life is weeks or a month, the (modest) performance feels as good as when I bought it and no updates has screwed it up. I guess it is because it specializes in one specific task and tries to be nothing else than just that.
I have the exact same experience. Like many readers here on HN i love to get new gadgets. I've been looking for an upgrade for several years now just for the sake of it.
But, the device is still rock solid and newer ones don't add any relevant additional extra value to motivate the decision.
Since I read several books per week my Kobo Auro One is the single best purchase I've ever made. :)
For what it's worth, KOReader does a much better job with PDFs on Kobo than the stock reader (Nickel). PDFs with large page size and complex layouts (like multicolumn that's periodically interrupted by images not in the text flow) are still Not Great, but more manageable.
I replaced a Nook with an Aura One after the page turning buttons started failing. On the one hand the main thing I miss is the page turning buttons, which were great in the winter because I could read a book with my hands under a blanket and the book above it. But on the other, the Kobo should last longer without that failure point.
It's waterproof too, though again being touch only and no buttons it's not great to turn pages if it's wet.
I feel a bit confused about what you mean with that it is not about wealth. If two people wants to live in a place as much and they both are ready to give 30% of their net income, the richer one would get the apartment in a system with no rent control, right? Your point only makes sense if everyone had the same net income.
Secondly, why is the merit of high income more valuable than waiting in the line for longest time? None of them is a lottery in my opinion.
>Secondly, why is the merit of high income more valuable than waiting in the line for longest time? None of them is a lottery in my opinion.
People invest internationally. This gives a strong bias for money to chase large metropolis because of agglomeration effects. So now "everyone" has to move to the city to work for the investor money. There are people who just want to get their fair share of the money. If you let someone live there that can't find a job that gets him investor money then he basically displaced a productive worker bee and made the entire economy worse off. Social mobility takes a massive hit as a result.
That worker bee could have earned enough to live in a newly constructed apartment. If he actually managed to get a rent controlled apartment then congratulation, you just subsidized one of the richer individuals.
Think about it this way, you want vulnerable people to afford their apartments. Why are you subsidizing every single apartment instead of subsidizing people in need? In fact, the subsidy is greater the more expensive the apartment is. You're subsidizing the rich.
I said it's not just about wealth. Yes, if both a millionaire and an average salaried employee spend 30% of their income, the millionaire will always get the house. But they don't compete for the same real estate. Instead, the average person competes with others grouped around the average, and 30% vs 15% of income is a significant difference. If you really, really want to live in the prime location, you can, you just have to spend more.
> Secondly, why is the merit of high income more valuable than waiting in the line for longest time?
Because it correlates with useful stuff being done for society. Not perfectly, of course, but somewhat. Waiting doesn't at all. And it's usually not about "waiting", it's often about being part of some group, having the luck of the draw, knowing someone in the office that assigns priorities, or "inheriting" the right to live in some (publicly owned) flat from your parents.
What happens then? Person A lives in a very desirable place, person B does not, and person B has to subsidize A's flat.
I think there is an ideological difference. I saw in another of your comments that you only want to live in the city center of Stockholm, and that you could pay a high rent for that. This could lead to a city where all the rich live in the city center and all the poor live far out in the suburbs (probably past the subway line), and travel into the city center to work. This is in my opinion not a good society (even for the rich, considering that segregation is expensive for a welfare society). My ideological conviction is that a less segregated city is better, and that both rich and poor should live in the city center. Having both rentals (at different rent levels) and owned apartments mixed is a good way to make this happen. What is your idea of how housing should look like in Stockholm?
I mean, ideally I don't want a Stockholm metro area that's (even more!) segregated compared to today's situation.
If I could dream, my ideal Stockholm area would be one where I (and other's like me) would be interested in living outside of the city center. Where the whole Swedish model of Soviet-style housing blocks along the subways didn't really happen, and instead that the city grew organically outwards. More like Aspudden and less like Solna centrum. Imagine if Vasastaden style of housing extended outwards!
But I also feel that the current system is very inefficient in alleviating the segregation. For starters, the most socially exposed people haven't been in Sweden long enough to even dream about a rent-controlled apartment (anywhere in Stockholm). Then we have all the people who have been standing in queues for decades, while living in a villa in Bromma, and now sells it to move into a large flat in the city center with a rent that is a third of "what it should be".
Finally, my opinion is that nothing good comes out of pretending that attractive locations aren't more expensive. They are! If we want to give low-income people the chance to live in expensive areas, we should do that directly. Perhaps by subsidising their rent or have the government owned property companies save X% of apartments to people who are less well off.
Pretending that market forces don't exist and forcing Swedes in their 20's to borrow hundreds of thousands from their parents, or moving every 12 months is not a good solution either.
Norway, Denmark and Finland all have no rent control and at least in two of the three the bad places is close to the city center.
In Stockholm, it's completely the reverse. I think rent control and where poor people live has nothing in common. It's impossible to get an apartment in the Stockholm city centre if you want to rent it.
Especially when the cities lets immigrants cut the queue. Most wealthy people can afford the super expensive apartments and the medium wealthy can buy contracts illegally.
All you're doing with rent control is to give incentiment for people to hold on to their contracts no matter what, cheat the system or buy/sell contracts illegally. It is really widespread and landlords are making a lot of tax free money on it.
Even worse is the situation if you buy apartments, you cannot rent it out to whomever you want or for how long you want since you don't really own it. You only own a smaller piece in the economic foundation that owns all apartments and give you the right to live in it. They can require you to not rent it out or limit the timing to a couple of months increasing the instability of the second hand contracts. Also, if the economic foundation makes bad decisions and gets a bad economy they can be forced to sell the entire apartment complex and you'll loose the apartment to a presumably shitty price.
The only good way of owning your housing in Sweden is to actually own the entire property OR own one of the new types of "äganderätter" which are very few and far between.
Finland has social housing and also has much larger housing subsidies than Sweden. When Finland abolished its rent control, rents in some places almost doubled. Seniors and others couldn't afford to pay the higher rents so they had to increase housing subsidies to them so that they wouldn't become homeless. That Finnish tax money directly becomes profits to landlords doesn't seem like a great situation to me.
I don't understand what the difference is, at least you can get an apartment in Finland. Prices in Helsinki (even if its a much smaller city) is a lot more reasonable and you have a lot more rights than you'll have in Sweden.
If you think old people can get an apartment in Sweden, that is just laughable. Even in smaller cities the queues are like 10 years. You'll have to pay up
In Helsinki rents rose by 40% after rent control was abolished and in other parts of the country by 26%. The average rent per m^2 is 11.3 euro in Stockholm and 19.5 euro in Helsinki. Furthermore, Finland spends three times as much on subsidizing poor tenants that can't pay their rent than what Sweden does. There is subsidized housing in Finland called Ara-housing, but the queuing time for those apartments is six to seven years. References here: https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/sa-blev-konsekvenserna-av-marknad...
> The average rent per m^2 is 11.3 euro in Stockholm and 19.5 euro in Helsinki.
With the difference being that 19.5 EUR would give me a square meter in Helsinki tomorrow. 11.3 EUR doesn't give me anything in Stockholm for the next decade. ≈ 30 EUR give me a second hand semi-short term contract in Stockholm.
ETC is a leftist media organisation so that they would promote rent control is a given. I wouldn't trust what they have to say about the matter. Do you know why no one builds new renting apartments in Sweden? It is because you cannot make a profit on them. You can instead build BRFs and make a lot of money. So everyone is doing that. They maximize the loans of the new BRF so they have to spend as little as possible of their own money.
Six to seven years is nothing compared to Sweden where you can have queues about 20-30 years easily for the big cities. My GF have 12 years in the queue and she can get a decent apartment in the outskirts of Stockholm but that is about it.
There are special housing for elderly, which is a bit shorter in the queues but still very long.
That's a rubbish objection. Attack the message - not the messenger. I cited the paper so that you can verify that the figures I provided are correct. Furthermore, new rental apartments already are excluded from rent control so rent control can't be the reason so few apartments of any type is being built. 20-30 years is for the most desirable areas of Stockholm (Gamla stan) and is not the median queuing time.
> Norway, Denmark and Finland all have no rent control
Norway does not, not sure about Finland, but Denmark definitely has a form of rent control. There are ceilings on rent that will be determined by appeal to a local rental board. There are exceptions however, anything built from 1992 and onwards, as well as some different rules for units that have undergone major renovations.
> I think rent control and where poor people live has nothing in common.
So you really think there is no connection between housing politics and segregation?
> All you're doing with rent control is to give incentiment for people to hold on to their contracts no matter what, cheat the system or buy/sell contracts illegally
Holding on to a contract is not necessarily a bad thing, if you enjoy living in your apartment and it is priced according to its size (giving incitament to switch to a smaller one if you don't need a big one anymore). Of course people try to cheat the system, but it is illegal ... and tenants paying illegally high rents can take the contract owner to court and get all excess rent back.
> Even worse is the situation if you buy apartments, you cannot rent it out to whomever you want or for how long you want since you don't really own it.
This has nothing to do with rent control and depends on which BRF you live in. Considering the lack of interest for äganderätter I'm not sure if so many people are with you on this opinion.
> So you really think there is no connection between housing politics and segregation?
That is not what I said.
> Of course people try to cheat the system, but it is illegal ... and tenants paying illegally high rents can take the contract owner to court and get all excess rent back.
Yeah but that never happens. All parties involved have interest in making it stay in the shadows. They don't pay illegally high rents, they pay normal rents but buy the contract to live there in the first place. A LOT of people is doing that, because the queues are impossible.
> This has nothing to do with rent control and depends on which BRF you live in. Considering the lack of interest for äganderätter I'm not sure if so many people are with you on this opinion.
The biggest reason why there is a lack of interest is because of loans. Builders take out massive loans on every new BRF, as much as they can which makes the new BRF sensitive for economic shifts.
Yes but basically all large BRFs have rules that say that you can only rent out your apartment for 6-12 months at a maximum time. They also need to vet the one your renting out to and can say no. If you have a bad relationship with the BRF, they can mess with you easily.
I agree that having a mix is good. Many times this occurs without intervention by having a mix of old and new (or renovated) buildings. An old city like Stockholm I imagine could have a large spectrum of buildings in various states of decay and thus prices. But on the other hand cities that are experiencing a rapid inflow of migration can quickly have their aged housing stock bought up and flipped. Many of these issues are exacerbated by restrictive planning and zoning regulations in city suburbs which prevent the higher density city life people desire to be replicated in new places.
Number of apartments being built has increased by a multiple of five during the last 10 years (25 000 apartments per year now [1]). During this time, no rent control was removed. Newly built apartments already have (for most young swedes) a high rent (around 10k SEK / 1.15K USD for 50-60m2). If you can accept an apartment 45 min from Stockholms inner city it will be cheaper and easier to get, [2] is the housing queue filtered for newly built apartments.
I fail to see why removing rent control would lead to anything else than higher rents. If the housing companies can take a higher rent they will do it, and sure, perhaps build more apartments for a while. But from their perspective, wouldn't it be stupid to build cheap apartments for young swedes outside of the city center when that 1. would lead to less housing shortage (less demand in relation to supply) and 2. give less profit than fancy apartments closer the the city center.
In my opinion, the best way to solve the housing shortage is to build apartments, and if the apartments built by the private sector are too expensive for young people, the state has to either subsidize or build their own apartments.
That's a bit out of context. The full quote radically changes the meaning:
"There are two groups of poor people. One is, you don’t work hard. You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard. Second is, you work hard but can’t succeed. I think we should help the second group of people."
Which is still ridiculous because the Chinese are the hardest working people I've ever seen. I would assume she and her friends are by far the least hard working demographic in China. It's a just world fallacy if anything.
By hard working Chinese people, are you talking about immigrant Chinese workers or Chinese people in China? You could easily make the argument that migrant workers are historically a hard working demographic, but I don't think the same could be argued for the world's most populous country.
It's a selection bias, because the lazy and stupid ones don't qualify for economic immigration, and there is no easy way to illegally cross the pacific ocean.
There’s a saying, jiu ji bu jiu pin—‘We’ll help you if you have an emergency, but we cannot help you if you’re poor.’
Which is something I think about every time there's a global appeal after an earthquake or tidal wave, yet that contrasts with general indifference or outright hostility to helping with general poverty.
Just need to figure out how to pronounce that phrase correctly so I can drop it into conversation.
I had some trouble finding the characters for that, so in case anyone else is curious -
救急不救贫。
My non-expert analysis, emergency is the characters jiu4ji2. The character jiu4 is save, ji2 is urgent, so save+urgent = emergency. The character bu4 is no, negative, not. The next two characters are jiu4 (save, from before) and pin2 (poor). These don't combine as a single word and are read separately.
With all that in mind, I read it as "It's save+urgent, not save poor". Interesting play on words.
No, the report says nothing like that. It says that immigrants have a 4.5 times higher possibility of being suspscted of rape. This does not mean that 85% of all rape cases are committed by non-western immigrants. This is of course troubling though.
Some families send the strongest/healthiest male in the family since the trip to Europe is so dangerous, but the families often come afterwards. It's easier for them to come legally if they already have a family member in the country.
During the first half of 2015, 2000 women and 4500 men came as refugees to Sweden from Syria, but 3100 women and 2000 men came afterwards as asylum searching family members. In total ~5300 women and ~6800 men (including working visas) came to Sweden from Syria.
I wonder, do you think people from non-western countries has a bigger potential of commiting rape? How different do you think the values of these people are compared to "us"?
I think that the extreme cases become more likely for non-Western cultures, even if we assume that the distribution of rapes per ethnicity follows a similar average between populations of West and non-West. Islamic countries are not known for their respect for the sanctity of women, particularly in the Middle Eastern clades of Islam.
(I've had Somalian, Malaysian and Sudanese Muslim friends which were extremely well-adjusted to Western culture and make good claims about women in these countries; but likewise I've had Bangladeshi friends who deplored the situation of women. So I think cultural temperament comes before religious law, but a religion can serve as a strong post-hoc justification for the strongest aspects of that temperament.)
