I'm not familiar with Hetzner at all. But it seems they are running a single self managed VM to serve these updates globally, and then comparing that to the cost of egress on a globally distributed content delivery network? What am I missing here? This is not the same thing. Nevermind the fact that AWS is an ecosystem with hundreds of products working in tandem to deliver solutions not just EC2.
I don't think you're missing anything! We didn't need 100% uptime or a globally distributed CDN. What we did need is orders of magnitude cheaper costs. So we moved this particular part of our offering to Hetzner.
I think the interest in this comes from the idea of identifying the needs and optimizing appropriately.
Yes, but AWS egress on EC2 is still 0.02c outbound from EC2 (4x savings). The egress fees are still egregious via a comparable EC2 instance. Then of course, once you factor in that AWS push "S3 via CloudFront" as the gold standard in static asset hosting it smells even more.
Yes, one of the core benefits of a provider like AWS is that they provide tooling to treat individual instances as immutable entities that you simply replace without any interruption to your users. You should focus on expressing the infrastructure as code and using mechanisms like ASGs to roll out new instances based on the latest Amazon provided AMIs.
I'd be curious to see the typical rate of hearing degradation due to age graphed against typical income growth with age that would be required to support systems of this standard. Audiophiles are synonymous with diminishing returns, but I wonder if that is even more acute with age of the listener. Super cool nonetheless.
Hearing obviously (almost always) worsens with age, but it's not a linear degradation across the entire range of hearing, like adding random static noise to an entire television image. You can often still hear many/most frequencies very well even when experiencing moderate hearing loss.
Moderate hearing loss is almost always more severe in the higher frequencies a.k.a. treble. For example I'm in my 40s, and my hearing's starting to become crap above 8khz.
Meanwhile, the fundamental frequency of most musical content is quite a bit lower in the frequency range. The highest fundamental frequency of a standard piano with standard tuning is around 4khz, and most notes are an octave or five below that; "middle C" is usually defined as 262hz.
So, still plenty to enjoy even if one's hearing is no longer pristine.
typical rate of hearing degradation due to age graphed
against typical income growth with age
This correlation is not lost on speaker manufacturers. A lot of pricey speakers add (at least) a few extra dB of treble.
None of the manufacturers will admit it, of course, but you can't convince me otherwise: I've always been certain this is an attempt to appeal to the degraded hearing capabilities of their aging+affluent customers.
As a non-American I'm always surprised at how quickly people are fired there. I cannot imagine such a severe action been taking in any country I've worked in, thanks to robust workers rights.
As a European, I was also surprised to find out that the US has a very low unemployment rate compared to what I am used to. Then I moved to the US, and on a few occasions found myself in a position to be able to consider hiring a lot of people very quickly (and hence taking on a substantial amount of risk, both for the company and those employees). I can definitely tell you that if the US had the same workers rights as Europe, I wouldn't have hired nearly as many people - not even close, less than half for sure. In one instance it was the wrong call to hire so quickly, and all other instances it was the right call and generated value for both sides.
I know that in Europe you can let people go if the company is experiencing financial difficulties and all that, but there's no question that the commitment to any new European employee you hire is higher than in the case of their US counterpart. And it would be foolish to assume that by increasing the decisioning barrier there wouldn't be some kind of an action-reaction happening in the market. As an employer, you never have 100% certainty that a new initiative will pay off - there's always this doubt in the back of your mind. Well, if the cost of failure is higher in one case than another, you are simply going to initiate fewer bets and will also give fewer people an opportunity to benefit from them (and those bets that you do initiate, you will approach more carefully and with fewer people).
Does this explain the entire gap in unemployment? Of course not. But I really do think it is a factor. So what's better - a bulletproof job that fewer people have, or a more risky proposition that more people can get access to? I don't think I have an answer to this, but I certainly don't think that the answer is always in increasing the decisioning barriers.
This perceived gap in unemployment needs some actual sources.
Unemployment in northern Europe is lower than in comparable places in the US with the same labour rights.
I can imagine unemployment in Southern Europe to be higher, but I am curious what you think you are comparing.
Here is something else to think about: it's safer to hire Americans because they will work 60 hours a week, never take a sick day, won't get pregnant and even if you give them vacation days they won't use them. So they are about 3/5 of the price of your typical European employee. A much better value proposition.
In return some of this will burn them out and put them on edge. This will likely have cultural, political and social consequences. If only we could give our American friends the sleep, reflection and family time they so much deserve.
You talk about sources, and then you immediately dwelve into myths about how much US workers work. They do work more than the western Europe, on par with more hardworking EU: Poland, Romania, Greece etc. It's not 50% more https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
You should also cosider wages and disposable income. The US worker will have a substantially higher wage, and because of lower taxes and living costs, a higher disposable income.
If you think its reasonable to use Poland, Romania or Greece as your benchmark for Europe, i think its reasonable to use Puerto Rico, Missisipi and Lousiana as the benchmark for the United States.
>You should also cosider wages and disposable income.
As one would consider purcasing power, healthcare costs, student debts, good public infrastructure, public spaces, physical safety, quality of water, quality of air, amount of people owining firearms, amount of conspiracy nuts, reliability of things like heat and electricity, the level of institutational racism, human rights, freedom of speech, etc. Lets not even dive in the fact that healthy high quality food is so much more expensive in the US.
This notion that you are rewarded better for the same work in the US is just not true. You have to work more, you have to put up with more abuse, you have to spend more time travelling to work, your roads are shit, your public transit is none existing. If you get into a small car crash, you have to worry for a bit if the other person will drive on (stucking you with a bill), or bring a gun (because they might just be angry and armed!). Your kids live in a cage in suburbia and after working all those hours, you will have to drive them around for them to go anywhere except their own house.
It is part of the reasoning. Another part is that Europe generally has better unemployment benefits and health care not tied to employment. This drives people to take worse jobs in the U.S.
In addition you have to ensure you look at comparable statistics on who is counted as unemployed. This is toften tied to receiving unemployment benefits or being able to work etc. so different statistics might count based on different criteria.
I’ve found most private English firms have no difficulty letting people go if they need to.
It seems a different story for public orgs like schools and government positions. But private companies have a lot more freedom than some in here have been suggesting.
It’s likely a different story elsewhere in Europe though. There’s a lot of countries with their own laws in Europe
I think the other thing is that the US can hire people for very cheap (like 2$/hour) with the idea that maybe the actual customers can contribute to the worker's salary to make it up. Often you need to get another job to reach a living wage. It's a great way to enslave people and get good unemployment numbers.
You're describing so-called "server wages," which only apply to businesses with tipped employees (and do not apply in the seven "equal treatment" states, including California and Washington). I don't think it makes a huge difference in total unemployment numbers, because tipped workers represent something like 2-3% of all US workers.
(I agree that the concept of server wage is pretty awful and should be eliminated as a matter of policy.)
there might be a correlation to how quickly companies form, projects start, and innovation progresses in America (entrepreneurship) compared to Europe, and how the robust workers' rights might figure into making companies reluctant to hire a batch of workers that they can't easily terminate.
Any such correlation wouldn't be down to causation imo. I've always assumed the American attitude of "Do first, ask forgiveness later" was the more likely candidate for many of Silicon Valley's success stories.
It's also worth noting that there's plenty of innovation happening in Europe too.
edit: I'll add a little more detail as to why I don't agree with your theory: in Europe you can still make employees redundant relatively easily. So if a company hires 100 employees then realises it's not cost effective, it can easily make 80 of them redundant. The catch is you cannot rehire for the same roles (basically you cannot make someone redundant to get around firing them), but given the purpose of your thought experiment was to cull staff after initial growth, redundancy works perfectly fine here.
Europe also has such as thing as short term contracts. Not contractors, though we obviously have that too, but FTEs that are hired for 6 months / 1 year rather than indefinitely. I'm sure America has this too.
So there isn't really any need to hire people with the intention of firing them shortly after. In fact any company that does this would get a pretty bad reputation pretty quickly. That's true for America too.
I've also seen people fired at short notice in the UK too so it's not like it can't happen in Europe even with greater worker rights. Heck, I was unfairly fired from one job -- but I hated the job anyway so it wasn't worth my time taking the company to court. Instead I used that energy to find a job I did like.
Chill buddy, I wasn't claiming to know the answer. I was just saying I think your hypothesis is unlikely and gave a counter-theory. That's generally how discourse works and it's definitely not a personal attack.
I will say calling your own hypothetical link as "sensical" is a little presumptuous though. The very fact I disagreed in the first place should be evidence that it's sensical to everyone. :)
I heard all sorts of hypothetical links suggested in microeconomic circles. Some of them contradict other hypothetical links and it's hard to really prove these things given the huge number of variables involved. However this particular suggestion still seems rather unlikely to me.
It's the at-will employment where employer or employee can cancel the relationship without cause. In ENG you have crazy lengths of time to give notice like 2-3 months. Not a very pleasant experience for the employee. You also see attempts by European employers to AVOID taking on permanent workers. E.g. in ENG it used to be 2 years of contracting required a FTE contract but they'd cancel the contract three months shy. You also have terrible zero hours contracts in ENG.
I think that many companies prefer to fire their employees immediately in exchange for money, typically what the employee would have been paid if he stayed for the notice time.
It is expensive, but often better than dealing with a disgruntled employee for 2 months.
Honestly I could see this happening in Europe, mainly when such high profiles are involved.
Even with robust workers rights this still happens a lot. If the company wants you out they'll get their way. Employees can always dispute at the employment court, but it's overwhelming so few do so and companies leverage that.
It's crazy to me as someone who believes in mutually consensual relationships in all things (including business and trade) that doing something last week is implicit requirement that one does the same thing next week, and that withdrawing consent to additional future trade is seen as a "severe action".
"A job" is really a fictional abstraction. Every day one works is additional services-for-money. Either party should rightfully be able to say "no thanks, that's enough, tomorrow is a new day" at any time.
This is a fine mentality when you're running a lemonade stand, but gets complicated when you're talking about a person's livelihood in a country where something like 60% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. If ONLY we lives in a society that valued itself over the profits of a few individuals.
It's nothing to do with livelihood and everything to do with the liquidity of the labor market.
If a person can get another job immediately, you aren't harming them by declining to continue to be a customer. In fact, you employing them is no power over them at all (unless you were overpaying them relative to their market value).
It regularly happens in reality. I know people who have walked out of one job, crossed a street, and walked in to another less than a half hour later. With construction, bartenders, kitchen and waitstaff, bussers, and security it is ridiculously common.
It becomes more common the lower skill the job becomes, as the fungibility of the worker increases.
Notice how the USA is the top country in the world for getting ahead. If you want to work hard and become rich, that's your spot. Places with "robust workers rights"? Not-so-much.
I disagree with this actually - the effective savings rate is generally lower in the US compared to a lot of countries with "robust workers rights" if you're working in the US you end up losing a lot of wealth to problems that are generally societally insured elsewhere in the world.
I would look into stats on social mobility by country.
Social mobility in the US is still pretty good last time I checked. Most European countries have have lower income income inequality, but less mobility. Eg, the difference between the bottom and top 25‰ is smaller, but your birth class is more predictive of your future income.
Unfortunately, no data on social mobility was used in the making of this ranking.
The authors picked several factors like which they assume lead to improved social mobility (like births/woman), score countries out of 100, then perform a simple numerical average them to form the mobility index. Look at page 205 of the report for the list. They don't validate that the factors are actually related in any way to mobility outcomes.
Sure, it takes other things than income into consideration as well, but it's probably better that way if you really want to understand how easy it is to improve your life in each country. They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".
>Sure, it takes other things than income into consideration as well.
In fact, mean income feeds 0% into the index ranking. Intergenerational change in income feeds 0% into the index. Income inequality (fixed in time), feeds in 10% to the index.
> They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".
That is a reference to another study in the section explaining "why social mobility matters". It was NOT included in the Index ranking. That line data isn't sourced well, so it is hard to follow up on what exactly they are comparing and how.
That's quite possible. Americans also lose a lot of money unnecessarily to utilities (the cellphone bills are ridiculous) and keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses like a starbucks a day. I think it's pretty hard to distinguish those costs as we can see similar or higher standards of living elsewhere - but I do think the out of pocket expenses hurt a lot (and they hurt even more when you stop drawing an income - retiring in the states is a huge gamble).
Starbucks and fastfood, etc, I don't see it as keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses.
I feel in the US there is a lot of subconscious decision making that's essentially about buying more time with money, but in an actual monetary transaction as opposed to some implicit trade off. They seem to be chronically starved for time.
> If you want to work hard and become rich, that's your spot.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue there are far more who tried and failed than who succeeded, but I don't know if that ratio of success is better or worse than in other countries today (yes, today - not when the US economy was booming relative to other countries, or when immigration was easy, or in the early days of Silicon Valley, or back during the Gold Rush(es) etc).
In any case, though, I would argue this argument applies to a narrow slice of the population, namely those whose main goal is to get rich. Not everybody wants to "work hard and become rich". Not everybody wants life to be a competition to get ahead. Plenty of people are not deeply invested in a career and simply want to work 40h/week for a decent salary and still be able to afford a decent life.
Others feel a calling to a profession that will generally not make you rich, but is still valuable to society. Case in point: teachers. Extremely valuable to society and extremely badly compensated in the US. If I wanted to be a teacher, I'd much rather be in most European countries than in the US.
> Switzerland and Luxembourg are way WAY richer per capita than the US, and have much robust employee rights.
When you say per capita, are you referring to median or mean figures?
Hong Kong is richer per capita than Switzerland at the median and does not have nearly as robust of employee rights.
The US is richer at the median than Germany and does not have nearly the worker protections. The US also has vastly more low skill labor immigration (for 40+ years now), which persistently debases its median figures. Why are German workers so relatively poor, if the claims about worker rights is accurate? Surely the dynamo of Europe, the German economy, combined with such potent worker protections, should lead to enormous median wealth.
Luxembourg has 613,000 people. That's a pretty ridiculous comparison. You're comparing a giant country of 330 million to a modest size city like San Francisco.
germany is only 10% or so behind the US in terms of PPP. They also have more vacation, fewer layoffs, cheaper housing, generally lower cost of living (by more than 10%), and many other things.
Perhaps they made a different trade off, more leisure, less work?
I've only brought up the two most obvious examples (there many others) that negate entirely that silly notion that somehow human rights are incompatible with technological advancement, which borders on hate speech.
I mean, should we really go back to slavery to become space-faring species? Not the kind of future I want to live in.
Could it be that NYC is simply garbage to begin with?
Norway (lets ignore because oil, but really it's not oil), Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland - also better? Longer vacations, better transit, definitely less hobos from what I remember, and no pervasive urine odour.
And bigger median annual incomes.
The weather is brutal in some parts of Nordics, I'll give you that. Not sure if I'd trade cold weather for urine vapours though. Very very difficult question, so I guess NYC isn't entirely hopeless just yet.
Interesting, because this sounds like wild speculation - yet you've stated it as if it is a cold hard fact. Do you have any sources or statistics to back this up?
In 2018 the Swiss financial sector accounted for 9.1% of GDP. For comparison, in 2018 the US financial sector accounted for 7.4% of US GDP. To claim that it is _entirely_ banking is just plain wrong. To insinuate that there is no innovation elsewhere, (but there sure is in good ol' America), is just insulting.
>Financial markets in the United States ... In 2018, finance and insurance represented 7.4 percent (or $1.5 trillion) of U.S. gross domestic product[0]
>Switzerland’s financial sector ... as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2018, it represented 9.1%[1]
Somewhat more true of Luxembourg than of Switzerland.
> Luxembourg remains a financial powerhouse – the financial sector accounts for more than 35% of GDP - because of the exponential growth of the investment fund sector through the launch and development of cross-border funds (UCITS) in the 1990s. Luxembourg is the world’s second-largest investment fund asset domicile, after the US, with $4 trillion of assets in custody in financial institutions.
3rd most globally competitive economy in the world.
Sure, yeah. no innovation at all at Sandoz, Nestle, Novartis and Roche, and ~200 other companies in life sciences and another 300 in precision manufacturing.
Many are simply legal predators using their enormous funds for legal lobbying. Selling repackaged water, sweetened water, sparkling sweetened water, coloured sweetened water.
I never understood it either. It's usually the wrong, honest, helpful employees that get fired first.
I'm not a loyal employee. I do most jobs just good enough to get by, and alway looking for a angle to extract more money out of an organization. (It was easier before being surveiled with cams). I always like a few coworkers, and we become friends, but despised the corporation, and everyone in charge.
Disadvantage of this is that the DAC in the echo dot is quite low quality. On a quality HiFi it doesn't sound very good. I started with this, and then moved to an Echo Link, which allowed me to output digital and then use the DAC in my amplifier, I may upgrade to an external DAC at some point, though I suspect I may have diminishing returns here, given the source is Spotify.
I don't understand how this would work. How do people rent? Obviously many people can't or do not wish to own their house for any number of reasons. Who will own houses that are rented? I used to live in Amsterdam as an expat, and rented from a landlord who owned several homes in Amsterdam. Would she not be able to own and rent these homes under this scheme?
The social housing system seemed to be abused when I was there. I had a number of Dutch friends still living in social housing places they'd rented as students on very low incomes, and were still renting 10 years later. For the same 300 euro per month, when they were now earning 6-7000 euro/month. I could never understand why this wasn't means tested continually.
Designations. That's how. Some houses are built and intended to be rented out to people. These houses are constructed entirely by companies (or people) for that purpose alone.
Other houses are meant to be for purchase, and purchase only. If you purchase a house like this and then rent it out, that should be considered breaking the intended designation.
So if you as an individual want to own multiple houses to rent out, you need to find houses with that designation and that are for sale. Alternatively, you need to find ground with the "rental housing"-designation and build a house or multiple houses on there.
You can do this in a collective of individuals, too.
And people who currently own multiple houses that were not meant to be rented out (but are rented out to other people) would need, by law, to either sell those properties (the current renter should get the first option on the house's current market value price).
And honestly, I feel that the people renting houses that were never meant for rental should get a discount. And that discount should come out of the pockets of the government.
And yes, I'm a Dutch citizen. I know that means my tax money is going to help these people buy their houses a little cheaper at my expense. I'm fine with that as it would create a healthier housing market for everyone. That's exactly what my tax money is for.
So the solution to government interference in the market (by preventing adequate building from occurring) is yet more interference, and that interference will by fiat somehow lower prices, but without dramatically increasing supply.
The government isn't preventing anything, it's a free market. The only thing that needs to change is to prevent companies from buying houses meant to be sold for ownership who then rent them out instead. That is working against the people. The law would work for the people.
Thanks. What if I purchase a home, to live in. Then I take a job overseas and move for 2-3 years. Must I sell the house rather than rent it out on a short term basis?
For homes purchased after January 1st, you can still get a license to temporary rent out the home. But you'll need to have lived in the home yourself for at least 1 year. Temporary rentals can be done for 2 years at the moment, and extended once more, I assume the same would apply under the new law. So the 2-3 years could be covered.
Existing ownership isn't affected, as far as I know. This only would apply to new transactions.
Markets don't need exceptions, they adapt. With property/price/rent controls, it comes down to a committee of "experts" or it becomes effectively closer to community property with the tragedy of the commons. IMO, reduce the restrictions on new development and creative use, e.g., by cutting back on zoning to allow higher density development and reduce the ability of neighbors to stop development of neighbor properties (due to aesthetic or other concerns). Building codes and regulations shouldn't protect the consumer from himself, but rather protect the physical safety of adjacent properties. But it's too often used as an excuse to limit competition and preserve the privilege of the early entrants.
We also need to acknowledge that cities inevitably increase in density, which necessarily means apartments, etc. Protecting single-family residences near city centers is a subsidy to them that we should not pay any longer.
"Adapt"? They've "adapted" by milking Amsterdam tenants dry for many years already.
And the "tragedy of the commons" is essentially a red-Herring fallacy. It is perhaps valid at the most in a free-for-all rather than a commons. Where you have a commons, you have relations between the users of the common resources, and social structures for decision making about sharing and use, which prevent depletion of resources.
> And people who currently own multiple houses that were not meant to be rented out (but are rented out to other people) would need, by law, to either sell those properties (the current renter should get the first option on the house's current market value price).
What is the 'would need' referring to, your ideal situation, current law, or proposed law? If it's any of the last two, I don't think you're correct but I'd be happy to read any references you may have to substantiate this.
This is one of those terribly myopic and symbolic policies that the Netherlands (despite generally one of the best governed countries in the world) keeps falling for.
Studies have shown over and over again that investors aren't causing the price increases in the Netherlands. Prices won't improve much.
Renting is going to take a beating, which is already an extremely small sector in the Netherlands, among the smallest in Europe. Remaining rental stock will be priced like crazy, pushing everyone desperately into a decision to buy. Due to systemic shortages that's not possible, exacerbating the gap between haves (who bought) and have-nots (who must keep renting).
Various studies have also shown a rental market is extremely important for labour mobility. Transient workers can't just move cities/regions in pursuit of jobs, when the rental market is completely destroyed and the only alternative is to buy a home and be stuck to that location for years (due to the friction and transaction costs of buying over renting).
> Would she not be able to own and rent these homes under this scheme?
She would, but she'd be unable to buy more off the market to rent out, unless they were already buy-to-let stock previously.
> I could never understand why this wasn't means tested continually.
Me neither. It seems like the least controversial thing that the left and the right should have agreement over: rich people not getting subsidised social housing. Things are getting better though, there's now means testing and accelerated rental price increases (up to a maximum) if your income is assessed as too high. But the new policy still way, way too generous to a class of rich people, while there's poor people waiting in line for 10 years in Amsterdam.
As above, you are presenting as a fact that investors aren't causing increasing prices. And as above, that is both uncited and, at the very least, a highly debatable 'fact'.
Even if not the only cause (is there ever just one isolated cause in economics), investing certainly is a big part.
Basic economic theory says that the price is determined by supply and demand. Investors buying house does not affect supply or demand, since they will simply rent out the house.
If you claim that investors are causing a significant price increase then I think onus would be on you to cite a source.
The problem is that people chronically overestimate the number of foreign buyers in the market. I can't find data for the Netherlands online, but for other western nations, it is around four or five percent of demand. Removing that will have essentially no noticable impact on housing prices as NZ has learned.
The advantage of a foreign ban is political in nature. Foreigners can't vote in local elections, so politicians lose very little, and the actual electorate is satisfied that government is 'doing something' about the problem.
It's a no lose situation for the politician, but at best it does nothing to reign in the issue of housing costs, and at worst it fans the flames of xenophobia.
That is real estate investment flow. That's not the same thing as housing. The graph you linked shows the majority of the investment going into things like office space, industrial real estate, retail, hotels, healthcare, etc...
It must also be noted that the vast majority of these deals aren't homes on the market for locals, they're existing investor real estate.
Sometimes you see articles stating '25% of all homes last year were bought by investors', but failing to mention that 20% of that 25% were homes sold by investors, too. i.e. company A selling to company B, an apartment block fully rented out. Sometimes company A and B are part of the same group structure, and they're simply restructuring. And so really the percentage of investors buying homes that could otherwise be bought by citizens, is actually only 5%.
Secondly, there's a lot of international capital flowing in because capital is extremely mobile and knows no borders. It doesn't mean foreigners own the real estate. Everytime a Dutch investor (e.g. a Dutch pension fund) buys real estate, it typically finances it with a combination of its own money and borrowed money, and the borrowed capital is typically raised on international financial markets.
I find the news is quite unsophisticated in detailing these nuances, and typically chooses the most incendiary headline that they can get away with.
e.g. "25% of homes bought by foreign investors." or hell even "50% of real estate bought by foreign investors", instead of 5% of available homes bought-up by Dutch pension funds", all three statements could be based on the same data-set.
No, that's not the claim. There's waterbed effects. Buy-to-let is done for the purpose of renting. If you take that rental supply away, rental prices go up, and demand for homes go up. Taking away buy-to-let demand thereby creates other demand that buy-to-let was supplying. You're just replacing the demand, not removing it.
It does just move supply/demand around, that's the waterbed effect.
If you remove buy-to-let investors, then buying a home becomes easier, but not necessarily any cheaper, because the rental supply (from buy-to-let) drops and therefore the prices of rentals go up, thereby increasing the demand for buying a home, countering the lower demand from buy-to-let investors. Demand has been moved around, the shortages are still as big, and there's no significant effect on prices.
> It seems like the least controversial thing that the left and the right should have agreement over: rich people not getting subsidised social housing.
The argument I've heard in Germany is that it's a good idea to have more socially mixed housing projects, so people who moved in as students are allowed to stay when they work full time. Initially they had to pay an extra fee ("Fehlbelegungsabgabe" = erroneous occupancy fee, but even with that it was much cheaper than regular housing), which was removed at some point.
Our social housing stock is already intended to be mixed (although the balance is often not great). You'll often find social and non-social housing units in the same apartment building, and definitely in every neighbourhood there will be a mix. I agree and think that mix is super important. But achieving it by giving rich people subsidised housing when there are poor people on a waiting list for these units, is one of the least optimal solutions, compared to alternatives.
Means testing would force medium-rich people to live on the streets (or with their parents), since there are no rental houses available between 700 and 1200 euro/month (that is, between social housing and the liberalized sector), and not all of them will be able to buy a home with the current prices.
We're talking about rich people occupying social homes intended for the poorest people. However bad it may be for 'medium-rich' people, it's much worse for poor. Any extreme outcome (like living on the streets) would have a much higher chance with poor, than medium-rich, who tend to have options. There's plenty of housing stock at 1200 a month that can be shared by two 'medium-rich' persons within a 45m commute from their work. No such options exist for poor people for whom social housing is intended. Of course means-testing will create issues for medium-rich, that's not the question, the question is if it's fair to protect them from these issues at the expense of the poor, by giving the rich subsidised housing intended for the poor. The answer is obviously (to me) no.
Fair enough. Though cynically speaking the people just above the social housing limit are probably a more interesting part of the electorate than the poor.
This is called scheefwonen – which roughly translates to "crooked living" – and has been a point of attention for several decades at least, more or less as long as I can remember.
It's a bit of a difficult problem, because you don't really want to kick people out of their house just because they have a better-paying job, and especially in the current climate these people don't really have anywhere to go; €7k people will probably manage, but €4k/month will have a harder time finding something affordable.
I agree that evictions is an extreme measure and to be used as a last resort. I think it should be part of the policy instruments to be used, under the right circumstances. e.g. if you make 1.5x the wage that would give you a right to a social home, averaged over 3 years, then you get a 2 year period to move out.
That means you won't move out until 5 years after you've started earning more, and if your earnings were temporarily high, you get to stay. But if you're consistently earning a ton, you have to leave.
That's not so crazy considering that there's people who're low-income on a 10y waiting list for the home you'd be occupying, there has to be a mechanism that makes you have to leave. Yes it's hard to find something great at 3-4k, but it's even harder for someone at 2k who's 'spot' you're occupying. That could be limited to 5 years.
Everyone has a hard time finding a place, but why are some rich getting subsidised indefinitely at the expense of some poor?
But apart from evictions, I've never understood why we can't simply have dynamic rental rates adjusted to the market rate. I know people who live in Zuid for 500 a month in a home that's 1500 market rate, and their household income is 3x the average. Why can they not be made to pay 1500 to the social housing association? When they move out, the home reverts back to the subsidised rate for a low-income family.
I understand this can't be done on old contracts with no contractual clauses that make this possible, contracts are contracts after all. But we've had this situation for many years, and new contracts still allow the possibility of consequence-free scheefwonen. That's pretty absurd to me.
> Obviously many people can't or do not wish to own their house for any number of reasons
"Those reasons" being that the price of real estate in Amsterdam has grown exponentially in recent years.
Some large but unknown number of apartments here have vanished into private investments where no one lives or AirBNB etc where no one lives for more than a few days.
If houses in Amsterdam were reserved for people _living_ in Amsterdam, there would be a significant increase in supply, and therefore a significant decrease in prices, which right now, are such that your average Amsterdam worker can't live here.
> The social housing system seemed to be abused when I was there.
Still is, but I see this as rational calculation on the part of the Gemeente (municipality, these are much more powerful here).
Those apartments aren't palatial. Most of the time, people just naturally move out, maybe a few years late, but why force people onto the street when they're just getting started?
Some number of people do go on for years, but they calculate that it's better to have a more relaxed system, not to cause grief by going after a few freeloaders, and to spend their efforts on building brand-new public housing.
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I had to get over 30 years of NYC living when I moved here. But the Gemeente is pretty smart. There's a reason for most everything, often a good reason, and they are constantly tuning.
Sure, I have complaints, but generally if I wonder why something is there or what's going to happen in terms of public works, I say, "What would a competent person do?" That almost never worked in NYC.
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Did you know they're talking about banning cruise ships from part of the river IJ, raising the river bed there by 4 meters so they can put a bike path underneath it? And by gum, they might just do that.
> I could never understand why this wasn't means tested continually.
They've started some degree of means testing a few years ago: the maximum allowed rent increase on social/rent-controlled houses can now depend on income. This was controversial legislation for privacy reasons (it involves giving landlords information about tenant incomes every year).
I guess this is only for new sales. The point is that there is plenty of people wanting to buy a home in Netherlands, they just can’t pay the same price as investors. With this law the seller will have to lower the price till some person who wants to live there can afford it
We had housing cooperation's for a century until they were forced by consecutive right wing governments to sell their houses, and thus ruining a system that was well working, except for rich friends of the right wing government to speculate with the housing system, which is taking place now.
One of the dumbest things to do with government owned land is to sell it. You get a quick injection of cash and then the money runs out just as quickly. Meanwhile the land keeps going up in value forcing the government to subsidize housing for low income earners. If the government kept the land it could lease it out at reasonable rates and have an ongoing income stream.
Shades of Berlin here. They sold land and buildings for very cheap to big companies like Deutsche Wohnen, and now there is a vote to buy back the properties at red-hot market prices and give people cheaper rent. Lose-lose in every way for the Berlin taxpayer.
And before that we had woningbouw verenigingen. Non profits ran by their tenants. Something like: God fearing church goers wouldn't stand for hard working newly wed couples not getting a home.
I live in social housing (in the UK), and could easily afford to buy or rent non-social... and I was already in that situation when my current tenancy started.
You could say I abuse it, and I agree in principal. However, I'm only abusing it because social housing is scarce. The solution is to build more, and I do my bit by voting for a government that would probably do that.
If they ever decided to make it means tested, and my tenancy was at risk, I would just buy the house.
Making use of any scarce resource intended for the poor, while you're rich, because it's so scarce, is beyond backwards... I have trouble being generous and playing devil's advocate because I simply can't see the argument you're making.
OK, I worded that very badly. I'm not using it because they're scarce. I mean to say:
The reason someone could say I'm "abusing" it, is because they're scarce.
They shouldn't be scarce, and they're not intended for just poor people.
To be clear, I'm not here for financial reasons. In fact, I would not object to paying more, if it meant putting more in the pot for poorer households to benefit from.
If you're not there for financial reasons, then clearly you should not be benefiting from social housing. You are making it more scarce for people who actually need it, by holding onto it.
The tax your landlord will pay on their profits, once you move out to a market-priced property, will be adding to the pot for poorer households to benefit from.
I'm a hobbyist tig welder. 1-2% thoriated electrodes emit alpha particles that won't penetrate skin. It's really only a risk if you breath in a lot of the dust created by grinding the tip of the electrode to a point. That said, ceriated, lanthanated and pure tungsten electrodes are widely available.
The referenced research mentions Belchatow power plant in Poland as the most polluting of all. This was an interesting fact about efforts toward carbon capture at the plant I found. [1]
"Carbon capture initiative at the Belchatow thermal power plant
PGE signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Alstom in December 2008 for the design and construction of a pilot carbon capture plant (CCP) at the latest unit of the plant.
PGE signed a grant agreement of €180m ($245m) for the installation of carbon capture, transport, and geological storage facilities in May 2010.
The project was expected to be completed by 2015, but canceled in 2013 following environmental opposition to underground storage of carbon.
If completed, it would have captured 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 a year."
I don't understand why there would be opposition to storage of carbon?
> I don't understand why there would be opposition to storage of carbon?
The biggest reason is that most of the time "we're gonna store carbon" is just smoke and mirrors and in practice never happens. It's the biggest excuse for fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual while promising some solution in the future that never comes.
This PDF says it was cancelled due to delays in "transposing" (implementing at country level I think?) the necessary regulations to allow funding: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154669777.pdf
I have noticed, more and more, energy concerns (like NS Energy seems to be) attempting to discredit environmental groups with this exact accusation:
"We, the energy industry, came up with a Green Solution but environmental groups stopped it for reasons x, y, z"
Where x, y, z is some plausible, fungible combination of "they care more about the spotted owl/some other endangered species" and "they care more about punishing us than being solution-focused" and "it's more of a modern-day religion" -- whatever the reader needs to be willing to accept the energy industry's story about how they're trying to do better but it's the environmental groups' fault.
What's interesting about this to me is, where seeing the propaganda round the Iraq War was obvious and obviously crafted, this is much sneakier.
But I think you'll see this more and more -- the energy industry is trying to solve our environmental problems, they say, and would be able to lead us to a greener world if not for those irrational, quasi-religious, badly-prioritizing environmental groups.
There may be propaganda here, but it also does happen. In California, every solar power station has been sued by the Sierra Club at some point. Usually over some endangered toad, but the real force (and funding) behind the suits is the labor unions, who want the projects to pay them more. It’s a big shakedown.
I cannot tell you how much "the labor unions are using environmental groups as muscle to shut down the good work the energy industry is doing" sounds like propaganda.
I know right? It is hard for me to repeat to be honest, because it sounds exactly like crazy Fox News fantasy. But, I have seen it with my own eyes. The phenomenon first came to my attention in the matter of "Kern County Citizens For Responsible Solar" versus First Solar's Willow Springs Project. The bogus citizens' group is a front organization for union labor who are trying to extract higher wages in project labor agreements. They file their objections on the draft environmental impact reports, which preserves their standing under CEQA to delay the project in the courts.
This site has an extensive archive of such DEIR comments and subsequent lawsuits for hundreds of projects around the state. It's just how labor negotiations are done in California, now. All the letters and motions are the same, all the front groups have the same name except with different cities or counties, and they are all drafted by the same law firm. A typical example is at [1].
Seconding this one. Great lightweight tent without major compromises, but still at a reasonable price and mainstream availability (unlike most of the ultralight tents made of exotic materials)
I enjoyed this article, and had never heard of Bowie Bonds! But isn't the sharing of risk in exchange for value just the concept of a full time job in any country with labour laws?
I work for a large multinational in a country other than America. I put up with additional bureaucracy compared to the life of a freelancer/contractor because I know that A) The company has a high chance of existing in 12 months B) I won't be fired without cause. In exchange the company is provided value in excess of my wage, training and other overhead costs. How is this different?
