> Speculation is less profitable than development, If you're getting speculation it's because the roi vs risk of development isn't justifiable.
Arguably, speculation should always be unprofitable and we should ideally regulate against it in every way, shape and form. I'd ask what purpose does holding onto a unproductive piece of land serve at all to society beyond an easy to grease financial vehicle?
There's tons of good speculation. Speculators are not buying and selling land, or corn futures, or what have you.
They're trading risk.
Sell to a speculator and you turn an uncertain future into cash right now.
Buy from a speculator and you get to enter the market at the moment of your choice.
It unlocks specialization - house builders can focus on building houses, and corn farmers can focus on growing corn. As soon as they're done with a house / harvest, either a consumer or a speculator buys it and they can focus on producing the next house/crop. Without speculators, they'd have to not only do their value-add, they'd also have to predict the market and hope enough customers show up in future. With speculators, this is significantly mitigated.
> As soon as they're done with a house / harvest, either a consumer or a speculator buys it and they can focus on producing the next house/crop. Without speculators, they'd have to not only do their value-add, they'd also have to predict the market and hope enough customers show up in future. With speculators, this is significantly mitigated.
Sounds like a great way to over or undershoot demand leading to market inefficiencies which the speculators have a perverse incentive to increase. It may be useful for a market like agriculture where production is variable and the produced goods are perishable - the loss from speculators may be less than the inefficiencies of noise. However, we've all seen how broken the real estate market has been despite the continued presence of land being one of the least variable things we encounter.
The real estate market got borked by the fact that municipal authorities answer to incumbent owners, who ~universally acted to limit new building. This breaks the mechanism by which some speculators go out of business.
If you can build anywhere, and a speculator is blocking development of a prime piece of land, you'll simply build elsewhere, making that land less prime with each passing moment, and eventually driving the speculator out of business.
Buy from a speculator and you get to enter the market at a price of their choice.
Vacant land is land that somebody could have built a home or a restaurant or a storefront or an apartment complex on, except it's being hoarded by speculators, who often refuse to sell at a loss.
In order to build a home / restaurant / storefront on that land, you first have to buy it. Buy it from whom? Ban speculators, and now you have to buy that land from the original owner, who is obligated to hold on to it even though he may want to use his capital for something else.
> refuse to sell at a loss
Speculators who won't sell at a cash loss are a real problem, but it's a problem that can easily solve itself. As the land value fluctuates up and down, the speculators' investment also goes up and down, whether he sells at that price or not. Carrying a piece of land on your books at a loss inflicts economic damage on the speculator.
In a free market, bad investors getting wiped out is just as important as useful ones getting rewarded.
Simply make the "default setting" to allow building things everywhere, and stupid speculators will go out of business more or less instantly. Useful ones will continue to quite literally make money for themselves and society.
> Buy it from whom? ... now you have to buy that land from the original owner, who is obligated to hold on to it even though he may want to use his capital for something else.
There's no obligation to "Own" land, if you want to put your capital elsewhere then either use your existing land as collateral for a loan or otherwise sell it. Technically everyone is actually leasing land from a government, it's not a commodity and it has a finite supply, so unlike corn or even housing, what is a speculator even speculating on?
I also want to be clear I think it would be very silly to ban speculators, the act of speculation is something that we all do when we own literally anything, but speculating on limited finite ground space that no one actually owns doesn't make any logical sense. Just properly tax speculation into a space that is unprofitable to hoard.
Ask yourself why and by what/who the incentives of living in society have been so thoroughly perverted that there is demand for "unproductive" (seriously, listen to yourself, this stuff is a liability) land for "finance bullshit magic" reasons? The perversions are what prevent "buy and do something to generate value" from outcompeting "buy and hold".
Even more tenement type layouts would be spectacular for increasing stock, but this is just half of the problem. It's all entirely dependent on reducing the level of greed landlords can get away with today.
NYC restricts building height to restrict population by land area. There isn't really a need for small apartments since population density is the limiting factor not space. You could build a not much more expensive apartment building instead of a dorm for the same population.
In that floor plan some units don't even have their own dedicated bathroom, let alone kitchens. By allowing this kind of housing to be built, you are actually increasing the level of greed landlords can get away with.
Is it inhumane or just inconvenient? I think we should have all sorts of housing including this sort, and people should be able to select their experience and cost (above a humane standard).
When I traveled through Japan a few years ago, my group stayed at everything from super expensive Onsens, to basic airport hotels, to capsule hotels in Tokyo. The flexibility to choose the kind of stay I wanted was fantastic and allowed us to stay within a budget while getting the full experience both inside and outside of metropolitan areas.
Your perspective disregards how little a post-grad college student should have to care about managing spaces they only sometimes use and would otherwise need to fully maintain themselves.
I can see the benefit to allowing more people to live in NYC, at cheaper prices, because it gives more people more options.
Can you explain what benefit could come from making NYC more expensive? Who benefits from that, and how? I could see landowners wanting that, but that's such a tiny fraction of the NYC populace that I doubt that's your motivation...
NYC doesn’t have any physical gates, but living in manhattan in particular, has a high financial gate, keeping out people who can’t afford it.
Generally people paying 5k+ rents aren’t committing violent crime, homeless sweeps actually happen here and it’s not really possible to sleep on the street.
If you live in an exclusive neighborhood, it’s pretty clean and safe.
there’s angst cheaper rent would change that
EDIT: In a lot of ways NYC’s wealthy and the upper middle class that mostly lives in manhattan have mutual interests the biggest being public safety
interesting interview if you’re interested in more
Can you explain what the benefit is of giving “people” more options (putting people in quotes because they could be current residents, it could be visitors, it could be hypothetical would-residents, it could be people in Alaska - I don’t know what you’re referring to).
Also while it may “give people more options” it inevitably would increase density in one of the most dense cities in the western world. Can you explain why that’s a good thing too?
People move to New York City because they want to live in a dense environment. Currently, options to live in NYC are severely undersupplied compared to the demand to live there. If there was more housing in NYC, a lot more people would choose to live there.
Giving people an option to choose a better life for themself is good in and of itself in my opinion.
Further, density is far better for the environment, greatly decreasing our impact on the environment, and making it easier for us to prevent climate change. It's also far better for the economy, for arts, for science... nearly all human endeavors benefit from the density of cities.
>Can you explain what benefit could come from making NYC more expensive?
People in cities have fewer children, and since children are the future tax base you might want that to occur so that you're not ground up into dogfood in your old age to pay down the national debt.
I do wonder how people think office buildings will comply with fire code which demands multiple avenues of escape from bedrooms during such a catastrophe.
I think that's confusing correlation and causation on childbirth there.
Other places in the world that do not require multiple exits for fires tend to have lower rates of fire death than we do in the US. The multiple exits thing is not actually for fire safety, it's to make multifamily housing harder to build and have less pleasant floor plans. Better fire suppression technology, having closer access to the stairs, are things that actually improve fire safety in practice.
Cowardly, weak, and pathetic are the only attributes you can use to describe this behavior. I'm not saying this in order to "get a rise" or "inflame" a discussion here, but how can anyone really justify this?
I'm enjoying this holier-than-thou attitude that seems to pervade a lot of comments, as though following the "rules" is all we need to do and is morally justifiable.
These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?
Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.
Did the person I was replying to say any of that? You’re putting words in both their mouth and mine
I’m receptive to various arguments here that invoke power differentials, pragmatism, even deliberately breaking the terms of a service to help affect change, etc. I’m not necessarily someone who always follows the rules, and even though I do pay for YouTube I don’t view it as a real moral failing to use the free service with an ad blocker turned on
The comment I responded to didn’t have any of that, it just boiled down to “I can do it and they can’t stop me, so they can suck a dick”. Maybe not the end of the world when it’s directed towards Alphabet, but I hope that mindset doesn’t extend to everyone they interact with
I'm the person you were replying to, and I endorse spaceribs' comment.
My computer is my property, it will do what I ask it to just like my refrigerator, my tv, and my paper and pencil. I will remove corporate logos from my belongings, and entirely fail to look at the advertising that comes in my mail box. And if google tries to tell my computer to show me advertising, I am _entirely_ within my rights to tell my computer not to.
I've used both, and while I think Vega has it's uses, it's not nearly as web developer friendly. Frontend engineers want a clear delineation between logic, composition and styling. By combining everything into a JSON document, you sacrifice that developer experience while introducing a lot of bespoke approaches.
That said, I absolutely love the idea that a blob of JSON living in my database contains everything I need for my visualization. The reality is that not enough other people are willing to put in the effort to learn that syntax, making it somewhat of a selfish tech choice.
As a big user of vega lite I think that's fair. I think it really shines when used by data vis experts, where charts need to be precise, such as in research and analysis contexts. For something like a simple a metrics dashboard I think I'd agree that it may be difficult for devs.
I'm a big believer that the reason for the level of government bureaucracy and busywork described in this article is not a bug, it's a feature.
Government's job within a capitalist country in a lot of ways is to ensure stability, a stable populace and stable society leads to stable markets theoretically. But what do you do if there is not enough jobs to go around to ensure that stability?
Simple: you just make jobs up, you make busywork up, you increase the bureaucracy to subsidize people who would otherwise be destitute and rioting on the streets. Technical innovation has driven out so many people from jobs at this point that we're reaching a true crisis against the cultural expectation that everyone that's "useful" works a job.
You also have to ramp up the propaganda, because you need people to believe that things are fine, and that working hard can improve their lives just as much as it could in their grandparents' day. That becomes a harder sell all the time.
See I suspect that the problem is not taking any sort of capitalist return concept when implementing a socialist policy... Even if you assume that the government needs to create jobs, it's like nobody has ever done a cost benefit, at any stage.
You see hundreds of thousands being spent on one individuals care needs, something that is essentially never going to have a positive return, while productive initiatives either lack funding, or have triple thier cost added by pointless additional steps (that nobody has ever done a cost benefit of either).
I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.
For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.
In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.
That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than:
1. Spotless.
2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.
3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.
And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.
You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)
Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
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