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Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

> Even the housing bubble had some upside: It created more housing inventory, and since the new houses were quite standardized, that made it great training data for “iBuying” algorithms — the rare case where the bubble is low-tech but the consequences are higher-tech.

Yeah who cares that people lost their homes and their mental health. Honestly, wtf is this hell I am living in?

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He's not saying the net result of the housing bubble was positive. He's only pointing out that there was a non-zero upside despite the heavy heavy downsides.

Honestly, comments like this make general discourse so much harder. At the mere mention of a controversial topic, the top commenter likens the experience to living in hell.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're literally 'flagging' (removing) my comment because I am quoting and critiquing the blog of a powerful venture capitalist firm? Seriously dang?

No, the problem is that you posted a low-quality flamewar comment attacking someone for what they obviously didn't say. I totally get why the housing bubble, and housing in general, brings up strong feelings, but you plainly broke that site guideline. Is that so hard to see?

In fact you did the same thing in the past and we responded exactly the same way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25991731. That's what we do when we see any such comment, regardless of who makes it and regardless of topic. I assume no one will accuse us of trying to protect powerful medieval friars.

HN has the rules it does for good reasons based on many years of experience. We're trying for at least a little bit of a different internet here.

(Btw, your comment has not been removed; flagging isn't the same thing as removing.)

Would anyone seeing this mind explaining to me how to view flagged comments please? I didn’t know this was possible and thought flagged comments were removed.

Turn on “showdead” in your profile settings.

It's a finance person trying to justify their existence. Finance people love variance (bubbles in the extreme case) because it's the only way they make money. If stocks grew 5% a year with little variance, the best strategy is just to hold, wait and cash out when you need to spend the money. But if it goes down 15% one year, then up 22% the next, there's a lot more money making opportunities. Financial analysts love bubbles. They make tons of money and if things go really bad, they get bailed out. The worst thing in the world is consistent growth without variance. It's a way to make money without actually making anything. Most people in finance will try to justify themselves through some sort of liquidity argument but the author appears to be getting more creative.

Idea: an efficient market would be one with zero long-term covariance between investments. So, index funds would disappear. So, index funds are not really based on the efficient market hypothesis, they are based on the assumption of plutocracy.

That doesn't really make any sense. Prices will always correlate as long as there's any connection between asset prices whether it's a supply chain or shared customer base or shared economic conditions. Businesses don't live in an isolated bubble. Index funds are nothing but arbitrary groupings of assets enabling diversification along whatever lines the fund chooses.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make but the argument is poor.

You're right. Sloppy thinking. I had something in my head about what might be causing the tendency for stronger gains toward the top end of capitalization-weighted indices.

And the implication isn't even true: the rate of change in new housing starts and total occupied units is relatively low after 2000. [0] The median occupied unit age also increased over this period [1], so unsurprisingly, A16z is just pulling things out of thin air that feel right.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ELEk [1] https://www.housingwire.com/wp-content/uploads/media/images/...

Many lost homes they either would have never had under a regime of tighter lending standards, or never should have had. It is not like anything was stolen from them. It's like buying a crypto coin for $1k, it goes to $4k, and then falls back to $1k. Was $3k really stolen from you or was it never really yours to begin with?

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