Whether or not we are in a bubble is increasingly the wrong question to be asking in an age where failure for sufficiently-large institutions is no longer permitted.
The question used to be pretty simple: "has a sufficient portion of the market been priced out to the extent that demand collapses"?
As we've seen in equities / derivatives (and increasingly, commodity) markets - the answer to that question is now perpetually "lol, number go up" because large investment banks have essentially infinite access to free money and will be bailed out if they get in trouble.
On a long enough timeline the end result of this is that more and more Americans write their rent checks to institutional investors. [1]
Sure, many Americans own their homes now (or have a nice cushion of equity). But what happens as wage growth continues to stay relatively flat while cost of living rises dramatically and folks need money for medical bills or their kid's college tuition (or w/e)? They sell and become renters.
There's a pretty bleak future for American housing absent regulation in this space.
> more and more Americans write their rent checks to institutional investors
Homes as a wealth vehicle has been the standing wisdom for a while. That being less and less true (by virtue of requiring a higher and higher degree of wealth to even play) is scary in that there isn't an immediately obvious alternative with nearly the same odds. Also scary in that a lot (a lot a lot) of rules have been written and enshrined with the assumption of that fading wisdom.
At what point does it cross a type of pandemic level where fighting it isn't the best strategy but mitigating it and finding alternatives is the only route forward?
I mean, regulation is why the housing market is so bad (SFZ environmental review etc), so really what we need is forced deregulation.
Edit:
Some people might have misunderstood what I said so here's what I mean:
What we really want is states to force localities to reduce zoning restrictions on new construction
Based on your subsequent comments, it seems like what you specifically mean is "reduce (probably zoning-based) restrictions on the construction of new residential buildings".
Phrasing this as "forced deregulation" is...not going to get people to recognize what you actually mean, because 95% of the time, when people say they want "deregulation," what they mean is they want big businesses to be allowed to exploit the middle and lower classes however the hell they want with no consequences.
If you do, in fact, mean specifically "reduce zoning restrictions on new construction", I suggest using phrasing like that, because it'll communicate your intention much more clearly. (If you don't, then I have misunderstood you, and apologize for the confusion.)
Also just as an aside, I'm in favor of large, expensive intervention for both climate change and the environment in general but Environmental review at least in California is basically worth nothing compare to investing a billion dollars in solar cell research or building a nuclear power plant.
In NYC, people call for multi-year environmental reviews to stall putting in something as good for the environment a new bike lane. Not sure where you live, but if you just look up where SEQR is referenced NYS lawsuits or sit in any local CB meetings on buildings and zoning, you'll see it often come up around both buildings and bike lanes as a way to kill momentum on a project for years.
Maybe not environmental review, specifically (which differs quite a bit state to state), but zoning and onerous building regulations more generally are a significant factor. At this point the burden is really on detractors to explain why artificially limiting supply for decades didn't affect prices.
I mean, there are specific regulations we can point to that are making houses and housing more expensive, I don't see how "allowing people to build more houses" could destabilizing living?
Oh come on. Obviously people aren't clamoring for bringing back asbestos or dumping sewage into the street.
Regulations are written for a wide range of reasons- legitimate safety issues, quality of life concerns, propping up values, funneling money to groups favored by the politicians or bureaucrats crafting the rules, political grandstanding against imaginary problems, particular rules favored by coordinated special interest groups, etc.
I once lived in an area where several suburbs all met, you could drive a few blocks and cross imaginary lines separating different legal cities. They had different regulations for minimum lot size, how close structures could be to the property lines, how trees on the property needed to be handled, whether you could put two separate structures on one property, etc. Obviously none of these things impacted safety, but did impact density, home prices, etc.
Less safe does not mean unsafe. Marginal gains in safety after a certain threshold may not be worth it. People wear helmets on bicycles, but no one wears a helmet just walking around.
Several years ago I read a German interview with a construction engineer who complained about the industrial lobby that pushes more and more regulations that, incidentally (/sarc), increase a (forced) demand for their products.
He gave several examples, of which I remember one. It is now law in Germany that new homes with French windows must have extra strong glass in them. The reason? What if a toddler on a tricycle ran into the glass and suffered serious injuries or death?
Now, said the engineer, there are no cases in Germany of this actually ever happening, or at least we do not have any records of them. But this what-if theoretical scenario increases construction costs of new German homes by a thousand euro or so. (And increases a basically guaranteed demand for products of a few certified safety glass vendors A LOT!) Take forty or fifty such extra requirements together and their cumulative effect on price of the finished home starts being significant.
But no one wants to be known as a potential child killer, so it is not worth opposing such measures.
The level of safety gained by such measures is nevertheless dubious. People didn't die in homes built to the less stringent standards of 1990 like flies.
Yeah, just to be clear, I was specifically talking about land-use regulations. I don't know anything about how stringent material requirements are for building houses, but i'd wager we have some dumb ones on the books in the US.
>The securities that were so instrumental in triggering the financial crisis of 2007-2008, asset-backed securities, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were practically non-existent in 1978. By 2007, they comprised $4.5 trillion in assets, equivalent to 32% of U.S. GDP.
This is a total nosequitor, building more apartment buildings would make apartments cheaper, being allowed to build two houses on your one house lot would make houses cheaper etc. Like do you have a reasonable path from "people have more latitude to build on their own property" to putting families or individuals in a dangerous financial situation.
Ownership of single-family residential properties by large financial institutions should be limited to their traditional role - i.e. custodial ownership of a home for the duration of a mortgage.
We certainly need to build more, but that's no panacea. If you want the market to be efficient we first need to account for the systemic inefficiencies.
There exist good arguments for the existence of rentals in some capacity. However, the rentier class have abused their power enough to distort the market in their favor without adequately maintaining their properties. Once property has decayed too much to provide an adequate return the owners are left with a few options: massive capital investment that they won't make back for ages and in many cities won't justify a rate hike, insurance fraud, go bankrupt and walk away clean leaving a toxic eyesore to rot while keeping the all the illgotten profits. Holding corporate stakeholders personally liable for their properties externalities, and management failures, would help chill the burgeoning rentier class buying up everything they can rent, flip, or airbnb without a thought about how their actions effect everyone else. Sure, people will take a bath on their misguided 'investments', but that's what happens in efficient markets. 90% of Americans shouldn't suffer so a small class of people can make gains out of inefficient distorted and government reinforced markets.
Development companies aren't innocent here either, the crap they get away with doing and not doing is insane and dangerous. I don't think regulation is the answer to developer fraud, instead I believing strengthening the rights of owners/tenants and funding actions against bad developers to chill the industry against taking shortcuts is a better solution. If a developer knows that their own house can get taken for cutting corners they're going to be very invested in doing things right, and having the paperwork to prove they did it right, the first time. Sure massive companies building cardboard boxes might go bust, but that's what we want in an efficient market right?
I don't know about you, but for me the obvious way in which politicians and other powerful sorts have abused and perverted religious devices (and systems of control) to achieve their own ends has left a really bad taste in my mouth generally w.r.t anything "control-y' about religion.
The religious motivation behind control in monasteries is something different, though (at least when uncorrupted by politics and power).
Monasteries are, by design, very controlled environments. That's _exactly_ what they are supposed to be.
A place where you can safely get lost in ecstatic bliss, altered states of consciousness and the sometimes-difficult psychological territory of self discovery that typically follows these experiences.
The guard rails are put there by people who have travelled the road before and know what the pitfalls are.
For anyone curious about that (from a Christian monastery context):
* Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous)
* The Dark Night of the Soul (St. John of the Cross)
* The Interior Castle (Teresa of Ávila)
Similar material exists for guiding e.g. Buddhist monks through the sort of territory that comes up when people spend a lot of time alone in contemplation (The Visuddhimagga, The Vimuttimagga in the Theravada tradition, The Tibetan Book of the Dead in the Vajrayana tradition).
Shamanic traditions likewise have very strict schedules of diet and spiritual preparation before aspirants can consume psychedelics - and ceremonies are (traditionally) performed under exquisitely controlled conditions.
Incidentally - westerners who play with meditative technologies or "psychedelic" therapies absent a regular, working relationship with a guide who know the territory do so at their own peril, IMO.
Thousands of years of contemplative and meditative practice have yielded independently arising systems in many different cultures which call for a controlled environment where a practitioner is surrounded by peers who know what to do, and more importantly what _not_ to do when things get a bit weird.
That's JUST for the individual practitioner.
Now add another layer for "things that can go wrong when trying to manage / lead a large community of people doing these things together".
Many mystical traditions (particularly eastern ones) solve this problem by having rules about how long monks and abbots can stay in one place.
Here, we see some western solutions to the common problems of community governance (at least: the sorts of problems one was likely to encounter at the time).
I've meandered really widely around the point! :)
Really I just wanted to call out that there is a valid (within the context of the goals of spiritual practice) use for a very controlled environment that should be considered separately from the common understanding of "religious control" (i.e. the powerful and political abusing religious devices to exert control over the masses).
For a very good (but not exceptional) developer, I wonder if ending up "out on the street" would be a reasonable expectation if something like this became truly widespread.
If companies like Google were no longer able to filter false positives __at Google scale__ using their current hiring practice, I wonder how long it would take to decide that the next best thing is to contract some tunable number of N contractors for K positions where N >> K and only keep the best M (K <= M << N) of them. (I expect a company like Google to occasionally keep more than K because they can't afford to throw away rockstars if they get a great cohort).
So, even if you're pretty good - if you aren't better than the bottom x% of your cohort (or some other aggregate measure) - you're out. Stack ranking for C2H, basically.
There are cryptocurrencies like monero whose primary purpose is to facilitate transactions between wallets that cannot be observed (I think).
If they've traded into that currency somewhere, how does one know where that money pops back up - on however many exchanges, under however many identities, in however many amounts, over whatever period of time they drip it back in?
I'm reminded of a paper I read a while back about deanonymizing VPN traffic if you have sufficient observability of nodes in the overall network and something else I can't remember at the moment.
Seems different though. The time they could take to drip money back in to the visible network (for conversion to fiat or appreciation in a "visible" coin) feels like a factor.
edit - heh, just now seeing the article you posted about the FBI's team explicitly mentions a case like this with Monero.
Apologies in advance for the wall of text, but this is a topic that has occupied a considerable portion of my attention for nearly 25 years. :)
If any of what I share here is helpful for someone, it will be well worth drifting significantly off topic and perhaps over-sharing my personal experience.
That said, my experience is my own - other people's mileage may vary depending on their background and personal makeup. Trust your intuition (and your doctor / therapist if you have one)!
From your comments below (about being able to notice yourself out of existence), it sounds to me like you experienced both udayabbaya-nana (knowledge of arising and passing away) and bhanga-nana (knowledge of dissolution), as well as the other dukkha-nanas (knowledges of suffering) that follow [1].
It also sounds like you are familiar with the Zen analogs for these Theravada terms - sharing them here mostly for other readers.
These are well-known and understood phenomena, at least in Buddhism. Some modern yogis refer to this territory as the "Dark Night", a term borrowed from St. John of the Cross' work describing the experiences from a mystical Christian perspective[2].
The Atlantic had a good piece on this (touching on some relevant research at Brown) several years back [3].
I went through something similar to what you've described here with meditation, and similar to what many others have described here with psychedelics.
It took years of searching, research and growth for me to process and integrate these experiences and return to both a stable, consistent meditative practice and enjoyable / helpful use of psychedelics, including cannabis (which gave me panic attacks for many, many years).
For anyone who is in similar territory but wishes they could continue exploring: Bhajan / Kirtan [4] (example [5]) and Yoga Asana were both incredibly helpful for me, as was a-melodious chanting of various mantra and stotra.
Coming at the problem as a programmer with some understanding of machine learning - I looked at chanting practices as training data for my own biological neural network. A way to re-wire my relationship with meditation / spiritual practices / ego death.
The transition from my atheistic Buddhist practice to a sort of mystical pluralist practice that integrates many traditions was an interesting one, for sure.
I stopped seeing "god" as an absurd, surely-non-existent (for everyone) personal entity and began recognizing "gods" as undeniably-existing (for me) hybrids of:
* helpful anthropomorphic representations of key truths
* helpful anthropomorphic representations for lawful phenomena
* at the highest level: helpful conceptual placeholders for things that are completely impossible for me to describe
As a former atheist, I slowly became more and more comfortable with this framework. I think this was a combination of having grown up in a religious environment; having mystical experiences, searching for answers and finding documentation (independently arising in many different traditions) that closely mirrored my experiences; and feeling like there was tremendous mind-shaping power in a shared subconscious framework transmitted through trance-inducing chants practiced by millions of people over many centuries.
Like many, I would encounter truths through various mystical experiences and find great relief - only to fall back into unhelpful habitual patterns later. A daily relationship with one's personal Gods (in whatever form they take for you) is a very powerful psychological anchor for remaining tethered to truths discovered through mystical experience.
Lectures by Ram Dass[6], talks by Mooji[7] and dharma talks from many different teachers at Dharma Seed [8] also helped considerably.
I have some conjectures rattling around in my mind about _some_ manifestations of mental illness having _some_ of their roots in the territory of ego death (or close brushes with it). Many of us live in a society where all of our basic needs are met and there is ample time for introspection. Moreover, many of us fill a good deal of our non-introspective free time with music, cinema and television which has been shaped (directly or indirectly) by artists and thinkers under the influence of mind-expanding drugs, leading to further introspection (at least this was the case for me and many of my peers).
That is, I don't think someone necessarily needs to even be a yogi to wander into Dukkha-nana territory. Though, to be sure, the proliferation of superficial "mindfullness" practices will add to the aforementioned dog pile of causes and conditions for initial "spiritual awakenings" (for lack of a better term).
I'd love to share my entire journey and more thoughts on this (including 8 years living and traveling in Asia, trying to find answers). One day!
Lastly: if you find yourself in this territory and things are really bad, there are resources available to you! Check out: https://spiritualcrisisnetwork.uk.
> I don't get what introvert has to do with focus.
A common object of attention for Samatha (one-pointed concentration / tranquility) practice is a Mandala or Kasina.
The copy on the site and the mandala-like art the app generates leads me to believe the author hopes people can use the app for this (or a non-Buddhist equivalent concentration practice).
I just did a 10 minute session. It's excellent for this purpose!
At first, I thought maybe this was just a shady property management company hocking two otherwise-legit, similarly-furnished condos with the same floor plan in the same building through two different accounts - but they are in different buildings separated by about half a kilometer according to the map.
The question used to be pretty simple: "has a sufficient portion of the market been priced out to the extent that demand collapses"?
As we've seen in equities / derivatives (and increasingly, commodity) markets - the answer to that question is now perpetually "lol, number go up" because large investment banks have essentially infinite access to free money and will be bailed out if they get in trouble.
On a long enough timeline the end result of this is that more and more Americans write their rent checks to institutional investors. [1]
Sure, many Americans own their homes now (or have a nice cushion of equity). But what happens as wage growth continues to stay relatively flat while cost of living rises dramatically and folks need money for medical bills or their kid's college tuition (or w/e)? They sell and become renters.
There's a pretty bleak future for American housing absent regulation in this space.
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...