can't reply to your comment below so i will comment here
> why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?
clearly it does to you?
thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement
the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building
what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict
my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant
I think the issue is that we have under built so much for so long, that it often feels futile to build more. NYC can feel like this, because due to zoning and general difficulties in building, all that seems to happen is a new building goes up and drives up rents. But if we built 20x more of those and sated demand, we would. On a micro level though, it can appear that "new building makes rents go up."
And this pattern repeats across the US. Add in the fact that people want to freeze the area they moved to in time (like suburbs refusing to increase density, even urban yet car reliant neighborhoods panicking if a single parking space is removed: https://hudsoncountyview.com/outraged-jersey-city-residents-...) and we get constant blockers to housing supply growth we so desparately need.
Its been frustrating watching the half baked measures to make housing "more affordable" by making mortgages cheaper when really they need to stimulate the supply side. It seems like an easy political win IMHO as long as you can sell it up front- stimulate GDP by juicing house building, and everyone gets cheaper housing. Just keep it under control lest you end up in a China type situation.
I'm with you, but many people still question this. Here's a recent pre-print paper that was in the news arguing that inequality, not lack of supply, is the real source of housing affordability: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/95trz_v1
Are the comments in the thread with us right now? At best, from what I’ve seen, this is a strawman against the people that argue that building housing is not the only thing that should be done regarding housing. I’ve seen no comments that claim we shouldn’t build housing to alleviate the housing crisis.
Most comments that I see are about how from a policy perspective it’s more complicated. There’s no single “build more homes” magic wand that works for every market. And in some markets there are real people with real issues who could be helped by temporary policies that make landlording less profitable on the margins while people figure out how to best “build more homes” for that market.
I think it's not that people question free market dynamics, it's that they question a market is free in the first place.
For example, healthcare in the US is basically exempt from typical free market dynamics like supply and demand because of how the market works. Consumers don't choose, everyone has a moat and parents, and costs are often subsidized.
100%. I see more and more young people appreciating Carlin’s “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it” quote because they have come to terms with the rigged game. I think the GFC was the starkest exemplar of this.
There was an article on HN front page a few months ago which stated(paraphrased) "building more housing to reduce prices is a right wing ideology that doesn't match reality" or some such. I'll reply here if I find it.
hn.algolia.com is a great search interface. I searched “housing” and top posts in the past year and didn’t see anything related to your quote on the first two pages. Maybe I need to search deeper.
Housing and immigration are two areas where people just can't accept basic economics. You can see some olympic level mental gymnastics routines all over this comments section.
They are often happily blinded by ideology. Try to tell someone in Britain that wages have been seriously suppressed due to mass immigration and most of them will look at you like you’re stupid.
Yes, supply of workers and demand for houses. So not only is mass immigration cutting wages, it's increasing the cost of living. British people are being squeezed between stationary salaries, rampant inflation, insane taxes and huge cost of living increases.
Eh, people really need to be questioning econ 101 more often.
It's built upon untrue assumptions
- infinite buyers / sellers
- perfect information
- no switching / transaction costs
---
The article itself has 3 different year ranges provided so I'm not sure how you can use it as evidence. Plus overall the rent is still up by a lot since 93% - 4% is still at least 80%.
- Rents increase by 93% from 2010 to 2019
- Housing increase from 2015 to 2024 (this overlaps with when rents increased ...)
- the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input.
- economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction)
- more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.
Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand.
"Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!"
No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true.
We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world isn't a perfect vacuum either. They know this, don't be silly.
The movement of satellites is not modeled using distance = speed * time. It would do well to consider if econ 101 is an accurate way to model the world since for other domains the 101 course is not.
Yet the overwhelming factor in modeling the movement of those satellites is still distance = speed * time.
The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle.
The equivalent to arguments made by 'economics deniers' in this thread would be if you argued: the satellite moving at 7.8 km/s actually causes the earth to spin 8 km/s faster, so trying to make the satellite move faster makes it go slower! Applying acceleration doesn't help!
No. Making the satellite move faster generally makes it move faster. Building more housing generally makes it cheaper.
Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.
> The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle.
Eh, ok throwing out all of physics 101 is a little strong. But you still don't use the original formulas you learned to do actual analysis. So using the basic models from econ 101 to do analysis can lead you to incorrect answers (but also correct ones; from a False premise you can imply both True and False; see "Material Implication" [1]).
So sure on a forum like HN it can be appropriate to use basic econ 101 logic but when somebody is trying to be an expert or write an article for thousands+ people you should really question why they're only using 101 logic.
> Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.
Lets actually do the not HN thing and read the article.
There's too little rigor in the article to support the argument in the title. The articles _own numbers_ are that after building 120k housing units the rent went up 85% (4% decrease after 96% increase). Just looking causally at this the only data in the article supports more housing = more rent; the article is only casual observations so little reason to do anything else ...
this is hard to evaluate, but we cannot replicate the old web search experience not just of Google, but Altavista, Lycos or Yahoo, when most of the web is siloed and increasingly botted - simply because the stuff you see in the siloed internet is actively "protected" out of your control
perhaps the best we can do is this "small web" thing which can be seen as some sort of retrofuturistic solution, but of course the siloed internet is a black hole of content and effort, and of course if the small web gets enough traction, astroturfed generative AI content will target it
Right. Not knowing human nature doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by it in ways that you just haven’t thought of or don’t believe could happen to you.
Hamas turned Gaza into a terrorist military installation with tunnels and operatives under and within a heavily populated urban environment. Their civilians were heavily dependent on foreign aid, much of which was used to buy arms and construct the elaborate tunnel system used to stage the Oct attack. If they were in my back yard and I had power and military force, I’d try to minimize civilian casualties but I wouldn’t stop until all of said military infrastructure was completely dismantled. I would prioritize the safety of my own anrmed forces over Gazan civilian casualties. The ideology of those in charge of Gaza and Iran is dedicated to killing Jews and oppressing their own people. I’m not Muslim or Jewish. I just have empathy for Israelis having to live being terrorized constantly while they live in a society that values education, entrepreneurship and freedom. No Jews got into planes to kill Americans. No Jews go out and buy assault rifles and mass shoot American cities. I think there’s a mind virus rooted in Muslim cultures that damns them as well as anyone they are hell bent on terrorizing. Oh, and no Jews killed civilians just because they drew a cartoon of their God.
unironically those pushing for blatantly unconstitutional laws should be charged for sedition and moved to a death penalty state
but that is an American solution, not a worldwide one and this is happening everywhere
would be great if the US provided a safe haven against all of this garbage, because this would essentially derail other efforts and other jurisdictions dead-set on them would have to go full China/Russia/Iran/NK and segregate themselves
> would be great if the US provided a safe haven against all of this garbage, because this would essentially derail other efforts and other jurisdictions dead-set on them would have to go full China/Russia/Iran/NK and segregate themselves
Good news, this is already happening, with pushback against foreign attempts to meddle domestically. Look up Wyoming’s GRANITE Act which is spreading to other states.
because the laws are coming with massive fines and penalties that will apply to people not even selling anything
unless you can confidently dodge American law enforcement, which is a big ask unless you are solidly anonymous somehow, then you are forced to react in some way
These days it seems best to not be in the US or any vassal country, in order to avoid this ridiculous overreaching of "we are the center of the world" lawmakers in the US.
There's a huge fine in North Korea, perhaps even death, for saying "Kim Jong-un is a poopyhead" but I just said it and I don't care because I'm not in North Korea and I don't do any business there.
America enforces their law all around the world. They also have a strong power to lobby and set legal trends all over the world. It's a good thing NK don't have the capability, and perhaps the will also to do so.
Either Kim or his father had a family member murdered by poison in an airport. Putin has undoubtedly had people killed outside the borders of his territory. Lots of countries enforce their will upon people. The USA is just somewhat uniquely empowered to do it out in the open and with a guise of "respectability" due to outsized power.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Just pointing out an additional bit of detail.
tbf, when most of those posting here were children, access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connection wasn't a problem
but i do remember my parents actually raising me pretty hands-on, taking care of me not watching stuff I shouldn't be watching which of course existed and was easily available
Access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connection is only a problem today when parents give their children access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connections.
Cell phones and tablets don't spontaneously appear whenever a child wants one. Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.
> Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.
Sure, if we assume the kids are kept in a locked box at all times, I suppose.
What about when they go to school and use internet devices there? Some of them are even issuing personal laptops. Or they hang out with their friends or go to the library or visit a pc cafe (a bit rare in america, but still...)
Even beyond that, exactly how often are you monitoring what they do at home? Are you watching over their shoulder every hour they have access to an internet device?
Like, kids have been smoking/drinking/having sex/etc while their parents are ignorant for 100s of years, what makes you think parents are suddenly going to be able to supervise all internet access?
When I was a child we didn't even have wifi of any kind and I still did things like sneak down to the family desktop after my parents went to sleep and "surf the web".
None of this is to say that we should created nanny-net that controls the entire internet in the hopes of protecting children, but there's a lot of room between that and doing literally nothing.
I'm reminded of fairly recent efforts to strongly discourage people smoking in movies/tv and banning actual advertising and how effective that was at decreasing the population of smokers, at least until vaping came along.
The point is sometimes we can identify seemingly small areas that will make a large impact and take action there.
> why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?
clearly it does to you?
thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement
the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building
what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict
my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant
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