At this rate I would be surprised if the Texas HSR is complete before 2050. Texas has not come to terms with anything. I say that as a resident for the last 10 years.
Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.
I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: the US minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, while inflation never stopped. And minimum wage itself as it is today is broken; on the one side, it seems to be more of a suggestion anyway, given that the service industry does not need to conform to it (because the assumption is that wage is stipended by tips).
And the other thing to consider is that if an employer pays you minimum wage, they would pay you less if they were legally allowed to.
Are you saying that there is massive numbers of empty housing stock in areas in high demand?
Because when there are 15 people wanting to live somewhere and only 10 places, then the lowest the price will go is higher than 5 people are able/willing to pay.
If not, then you need to ration the housing in some other means. What would you prefer? Nepotism? Lottery? Sexual Favours?
I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.”
A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units.
I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors.
1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations.
2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star).
3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro.
At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords.
We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.
>A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others.
Unless there is a deficit of housing, then they don't have to compete because you pay their price or you live on the street.
With a housing crisis as in the UK the cost of housing rises to soak up everyone's income after other essentials (food, water, energy). Rents are higher than mortgages because you pay the landlord's mortgage, then pay the costs of leasing (such as the landlord's insurance and their property managers fees) and the landlord's profits. Very few want to rent, but most can't afford a mortgage (because 'I'm paying way more than that in rent' isn't proof you can pay a mortgage, apparently).
> the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up
Not due to landlords, it's because the amount that people can pay for housing has increased -- higher wages, more multiple-earner households, easier credit, secondary income sources, investment gains. Plus there are more "households" competing for the limited number of available housing units.
If there weren't land lords, where would renters live? Would they build shacks in the forest and fields? Would they build custom homes on lots in the desert? Im not sure if most are capable nor well funded enough. Do we give them houses?
> Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.
I mean this is one of the few spaces that every economist agrees on the biggest factors in causing housing to become unaffordable are rent control and
construction bureaucracy (zoning, environmental reviews, etc).
I'm not sure what your point is - most people will go extreme distances to avoid becoming homeless:
- commuting from a lower cost area >60m away
- using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off)
- begging or selling themselves on the internet
- negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction
None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
Not to mention crime like theft, fraud, burglaries. But yes, a perpetual underclass has giant negative externalities. The status quo is deeply ingrained to the American psyche - the risk of someone taking advantage of handouts trumps all other concerns.
Not having public bathrooms, but clean up shit from the streets. Not having preventative health care, but still providing legally mandated ambulance rides and critical care. Letting poor people who get an unexpected expense (say medical or car breaks down) fall into unemployment, homelessness and crime or – costliest of all – the prison industrial complex.
Paying the bill isn’t the problem. People are happy to overspend public funds, so this isn’t related to small government or just general tax aversion. The problem is simply that someone might get something they didn’t deserve. So in a perverted way, it’s a kind of a moralistic obsession with fairness.
Presumably the implication is that it's because lots of homes are being bought by real estate companies as long term investments that they may or may not even rent back out. This extra demand beyond people buying housing to, you know, live in it, drives up the price.
A different tax policy could disincentize this behavior, leading to lower demand and thus lower prices.
That's my current understanding of that perspective at least.
A 100% tax on property for those owning more than 50 properties would cause a large movement in the market. But people will say what about the value being tanked when all those houses go on the market? I say, good. The value of homes should go down. People need a place to live. Houses should not be considered an asset. You don't treat your home like an asset. You don't buy it when the market is right or sell it when it's right. You don't improve it in ways that are most likely to increase value. You live in your house. It's your place to be. Whether it's a flat, a house, or a boat in a canal, it's where you live and feel safe and spend a large chunk of time.
A tax on owning too many properties would be subject to gaming. Many large companies already hold properties in tranches of 5-10m worth of properties per limited partnership, so the tax policy needs to be written carefully to disincentivize holding empty properties in a way that can't easily be gamed.
I think the tax policy is prop 13, which is a handout to rich homewoners that means they will never sell their houses (very nice for them, not so for anyone trying to get new housing)
I can't really tell if this is a sort of satire or joke?
It seems to implement BigInts as BCD where each decimal digit gets it's own int32, implements division, then suggests kernel upstreaming. All as a solution for arbitrary spans of time.
> The number overflows and the date will jump back 278 billion years before the Big Bang? Needles to say, this needs to be fixed. Luckily, we have 33 life times of our Sun to solve this problem but we could propose some solutions even today.
Based on this, it has to be a joke, or at least a tongue-in-cheek exercise that is "solving" an imaginary problem.
hello,
truly, the code can use an optimization, that's why I presented it as an proposition or rather idea. E.g. the digits could be byte. However, the idea is no joke at all. Point was to offer complete software solution, dependable only on hardware.
But I am open to any feedback.
It's not? But it's predicated on the idea that human life hundreds of billions of years from now will be more or less the same as it is now, to the extent that they'll even still be using the same APIs and OSs. It's difficult to believe someone would posit that as anything other than a joke.
I hear your point. We truly don't know what will future bring, even less the future of year 292 billion. But again, I am proposing the software complete solution - even without current use case.
I think that however flawed, capitalism might prevail here. If enough money was on the line, institutional investors might get actual permission to [hire experts to] enter the assembly floor and do spot checks. Not welcoming such a thing would cause a huge stock hit. etc.
I’m not sure what we should be waiting for. The time for the free market to fix Boeing and “capitalism” (read: don’t regulate us please) to save the day would have been before Boeing killed 400 people in plane crashes.
I get that the idea of self-correcting markets are very appealing. But there are a ton of situations where they don’t work or don’t fix all of the problems they cause. Those situations are under the general umbrella of market failures. This particular market failure would probably be classified as adverse selection or more general information asymmetry.
I'm not advocating for less regulation in the slightest.
I'm saying that when a corpo breaks laws (don't follow regulations and lie about it), the fines need to substantially hit their shareholders, so that shareholders are generally aligned with following regulations and will demand additional diligence. Otherwise the game will be as it is - commercial aviation is highly regulated, but Boeing is so big that the fines don't matter to them or their owners (i.e. shareholders).
To summarize my objections, it seems like a “punish the shareholders” strategy has at least three problems:
1. Punishing shareholders doesn’t sufficiently discourage corporate management. They are usually fine even if the stock price takes a hit. The fact that corporate management may not act in the best interests of shareholders is a known example of the Principal-Agent Problem.
2. Shareholders might not know that bad behavior is happening, and even if they do, we want to discourage bad behavior that regulators might not find out about, and before it happens.
3. Many investors are not actively investing, but using robo investing services like Vanguard for their 401k. That means that even if you’re technically an “investor” you’re not actively investigating companies for fraud.
Which just muddies the waters because if collective bargaining is banned then the unions are toothless. The correct comparison is collective bargaining legal vs illegal.
In my state the "teacher's union" is basically liability insurance for stuff that happens in the classroom, they have no real collective bargaining power.
I read the more important earlier version of that part by the maintainer
"This will be painful for a year as users annoyingly do not read the NEWS files they should be reading but there's little that can be done about that."
> the only users who are actually at risk of a surprise change to the keepassxc package are those running testing or unstable releases
> when Debian Trixie is released, upgrades and new installs of the keepassxc package will receive a transitional package that prompts them to decide between "full" and "minimal" packages
If you are running testing or unstable and not reading NEWS files then I think it's your fault - or is that victim blaming :P
