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Comment by bobwernstein | Hacker News Reader

don't fall for it. The market says these aren't worth buying. Don't go against the market.

> There's an old joke that has two economists coming across a $20 bill on the sidewalk, which goes:

> The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!"

> Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."

I swear I've seen this pasted in 10+ times over the years on HN and this is probably the most directly relevant of them all.

I wish pennies would listen to the market and just disappear in a poof of logic

but these are more along the lines of "there's nothing more expensive than a cheap bmw"

I think that:

> If it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Is more appropriate here.

Finding a $20 on the street falls within the realm of reason, and is not likely a scam. Finding a suitcase full of cash however, and picking it up probably has strings attached.

I you stop at the attention grabbing headline, sure it's too good to be true.

It's probably clear to everyone that the cost in the end is going to be bigger. If you watch Raed667's video, the municipalities involved are quite upfront about it and not really trying to scam anyone.

But basically you can see that as a subside or a promotion. The fact that there is going to be other costs associated doesn't means the market ruled it as a bad deal as bobwernstein claimed

I saw a poster in the police station (where we get our passports), saying: would you buy 500SEK for 100SEK? ... Etc

It really depends on the price. At 150k€ they're not worth buying, at 1€ plus taxes, deposits and various renovation works... Maybe.

One might get a nice vacation house for cheap.

One of such houses (not those shown in the video) was actually near the places where I grew up. Such place is nowadays decently connected (still sub-optimal, but decent). If somebody was forward-looking enough could have bought property for extremely cheap and would be working from there now.

In my opinion, one of the big factors in evaluating a house is the nearby infrastructure, mainly connectivity and railroads / public transport in general. You'll need those anyway. If they're either not present or subpar then you should value the property less imho.

Edit: decently connected means a fttc (fiber to the cabinet, copper on last mile) connection, max speeds being 1gbps down / 100 mbps up, for 25-35 €/month -- you'll never reach such speeds of course, but even one tenth of that would still be usable for most things.

How would you ever get 1Gb/s over a copper last mile?

The last mile in FTTC is more like the last few meters.

Sure, but VSDL will still top out at 300/100 Mb/s even over short distances:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL

But apparently there is indeed a new standard for Gbit DSL up to 100m:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.fast

You don't of course, because you mostly can't. Yeah there might be some kind of technology to push the speed to that limit, but I don't expect to see speed pushed in the kind of areas where houses are sold basically at loss for 1€.

So, long story short: that's the advertised speed.

Advertised speed usually means it's technically possible, even if it doesn't happen in practice. It seems there is indeed 1Gb/s VSDL technology but at least Wikipedia doesn't list any such deployment in Italy. But even 100Mb/s is good enough connectivity in my experience with fiber and apparently that's common for FTTC deployments.

Might not be DSL, but DOCSIS (coaxial), as part of an HFC system[1]. Version 3.1 can reach over 1Gbps, though that rather depends on how many people you are sharing it with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial

Maybe starlink?

Starlink is not live for general usage yet.

The market is stupid and inefficient. When the market tells you to do something, it's too late.

The market (especially in real estate) is not totally frictionless and arbitrage-free. Plus people can have genuinely different valuations for consumable assets (like housing) - that's the entire point of a market, to facilitate trade where both sides make a gain on the transaction.

I don't think anyone would buy these houses as an investment, but if you wanted a quiet house in the countryside and spoke Italian already, maybe it could work for you.

Maybe rewrite that as "if you wanted a quiet house in the countryside and spoke Italian already, had experience managing a challenging renovation in a foreign country, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spare to put towards the required renovations, maybe it could work for you."

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