Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

I come from a small rural place in Norway, at the lowest point the municipalities started selling old houses for next to nothing, as in equivalent to $100. No strings attached.

But of course, the person living there would have to pay (equivalent to) $1000-$1500 / year on fees related to water, waste management, cleaning of chimney, etc. And you'd probably like to have the house insured.

And these weren't nice new houses. Mostly shacks built right after ww2, some not having been lived in for 10-15-20 years. Complete renovation projects.

What would happen is that some people from out of town would buy a house, plan to renovate it, but then mostly do nothing. Then many would forget to pay the municipality fees, often times for years. Eventually the unpaid bills would be sent to collection agency, and then a forced sale on behalf of the creditors. But now the houses were in even worse shape, so no one would purchase them at all.

Eventually they'd be torn down.

Maintenance of old crumbling European castles in inconvenient locations are also often famously bad deals for the owner.

Ha, yes. I found dozens of articles about castle renovations gone awry

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/no-way-back-1-15m-120000548....

https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/1212/12121.html

so how do you make it right, just bull doze it?

Find someone with a suitably bottomless supply of money who wants it as the status symbol it always was. Or somehow make it nice enough to be a public attraction, but there's a real oversupply of chateaux.

This might still be appealing to young people, especially those who do not like the noise/pollution of big cities and can't afford them?

I could see the appeal of a shack, but I suspect a castle would be quite a maintainence burden.

I guess nowadays one would not need to employ as large a retinue… but you don’t get to tax the local villages anymore. Seems like a wash.

I really enjoy the TV show Escape to the Chateau. A lot of couple buy an old run down French chateau and move in with their two kids. Each episode is roughly them doing up a part of it. Often with ideas for making money out of it.

Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.

Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?

If you spend 700k eur on heating instead of on the purchase price you can stay warm for quite a while

I wouldn’t count on that. https://www.lifestyledaily.co.uk/article/2021/03/23/how-much... gives £209k as an estimate for heating the main house from Downton Abbey.

Now, Italy is a bit warmer than the UK, and most castles a bit smaller, but castles in Italy can be on colder mountaintops.

1. Accept lower temperature in the stonework/bricks/concrete

2. Use heatpumps, wood furnaces, accumulator tanks

3. Only heat the rooms you use when you use them.

It's very doable, especially in Italy.

A lot of large castle owners in France have setup a small apartment on the side for winter and use the main rooms only occasionally and during summer. This is not something new, in Versailles you can visit the king actual private bedroom that is much smaller and easy to heat than the official one.

Second point has no point, heat pumps are overhyped on expensive electricity, accumulator tanks still need be heated up by something. Lot's of energy must be spent. 3 point is silly, such "houses" have massive thermal inertia, it's gonna take a while to heat those rooms when you start using them and heat is gonna "bleed" internally anyway.

It will cost you a lot anyway, can't escape entropy.

One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on.

Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.

Warmth from the inside out, to be honest I'm a little scared

I would not connect it to Alexa.

"It is well established that high-power microwave radiation can induce cataracts via its thermal effects"

But the previous comment said “low power”?

The point is that if you are feeling actual thermal effects then you're probably in the danger zone of high power. They implied the effect was thermal "to make rooms feel much warmer", "like stepping into sunlight"; without clarification from them then my assumption is good that they were not talking about milliwatts.

It was not an article in an engineering journal, so no mention of power.

I read about how they tried this in the 60s.

They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such.

So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.

Not the same effect exactly but I live in an 70s era apartment with heated ceilings in a couple rooms (which I didn’t even know was a thing).

It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.

I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.

Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.

Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.

This was probably 70s-80s. House heated to 10-15 C/50-60 F and microwave for comfort beyond that.

The “human heater” was literally a mock idea for a competition in the sitcom Silicon Valley. The jury canned it. https://youtu.be/Di3fPj0pUbQ

Train a LOT of models?

Turns out Sam Altman accidentally bought a vacation home with broken heating in Alaska and his subsequent obsession with expensing the heating bill on the company CC is what brought us ChatGPT ;)

Thermal inertia can be a benefit: while it largely prevents you from benefiting from turning off the heat when you’re not home, it smooths out diurnal fluctuations and lets your control just the average temperature. So your windows can provide lots of solar gain, for example, without overheating you during the daytime.

The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.

"I couldn't afford to live in the city, so I bought a castle".

In Japan, we have a special term for real estate that has become a financial burden on their owners: "負動産" (fudosan, negative real assets).

It's such a huge social problem that people choose not to accept the inheritance if it involves old properties in rural areas.

May i ask, is there also a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?

> a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?

Some seems to use the term "富動産" to mean that, but I don't think it's catching on.

Side note: normal real assets are called "不動産" (which pronounces as "fudosan"; it originates from Immobilière in French) in Japan. It's all about puns.

Sounds like there were many strings attached actually.

Apparently not very strongly attached.

There's an irony in that there is often a regulatory issue with the local government, not just some "shortage of humans".

The same thing happened in one of the most populated regions in the US. The area between Boston/NYC and DC, containing Baltimore, was once a city of a million people. It contains an underground subway and was once referred to as the Paris of America, however through regulation and unions it became completely impossible to do business in or live in, and the city collapsed. They also sold $1 row houses, which should have been a dream come true, except in practice the issue was never the house, it was the city government.

Cities offering $1 houses just means the government has ignored the actual issues for decades and is probably incompetent.

The history of Baltimore is a far more complex story than "regulation and unions" results in "and the city collapsed."

I would argue it really isn't. Massachusetts still has some of the strongest union protections, is one of the most unionized states, and Baltimore has worked hard to maintain an incompetent government for decades. Given the outrageous rents in nearby states and cities Baltimore should have kept growing but has instead shrunk to a half million.

The rust belt as a whole was primarily just companies escaping unions. Cheaper labor may have been an incentive but it fundamentally started with companies who were forced to move production, and US regulation which prevented them from benefiting from local supply chains once they became unionized.

chat, what would David Simon say in reply to this

I'm far from a union sympathizer, but you've already moved from your initial, absurdly simplistic description of the issue to a major symptom (decades of ineffective government, ranging from benign incompetence to intentional malice).

Also, the rents in nearby areas to the north are far from outrageous (hint: there are no major cities for a couple hours), and the Baltimore metro area continues to grow because the area is desirable, even though the city is completely mismanaged.

He did say that the city is badly regulated…

It's poorly managed, but not due to over-regulation IMO as the other commenter implied (not to say that there aren't some areas where deregulation could improve things).

The core issue today is that the population of Baltimore consumes significantly more resources than they produce because the city managed to drive away a significant portion of the middle class and the government is so inefficent, leaving too many people who are unable to move, are actively part of the problem, or are one of the few that is so wealthy that they are largely unaffected by the happenings around them.

How it got there is a much more complex story than "regulation and unions" but is to some extent irrelevant if they want to look forward to solve the major systemic issues that exist.

If they want the city to recover, they need to provide the basic social services that most people want: clean streets, physical safety, acceptable schools, and minimal interference in everyday life. That has not been a priority of any city government for decades, though I think the current mayor is trying.

If poor economic choices, inept management, and inefficient government don't qualify as “badly regulated”, then you are using a stricter definition of regulation than we are.

Who is "we" exactly?

The original commenter clearly was stating that overregulation was the issue. You're the one who keeps bringing up that it's "badly regulated", which is both an odd term and not what was originally stated.

I agree it's "badly regulated", aka mismanaged.

Baltimore is in Maryland.

Indeed, with five seasons of The Wire, no city has had it's decline so eloquently illustrated.

Or at least it's continued decline. Great show. All the pieces matter.

> was once referred to as the Paris of America

Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0]

Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_West

I've seen "Paris of the X" and "Venice of the X" applied to many (often not particularly attractive) cities worldwide...

It's aspirational, not descriptive.

Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years.

It’s not like there was a “Paris of the…” certification process. If Detroit was, it was well before my first visit 50 years ago. As another commenter alluded to, it is an aspirational marketing phrase. Like how Redmond, WA claims to be the “bicycle capital of the Northwest” without having a single protected bike lane.

I would argue unions in particular destroyed Detroit, it's arguably even less complicated than Baltimore.

I think there was ~13 major auto factories in Detroit at one point, and what would happen is when the UAW would protest, they'd leave one factory and go to another, more important factory (often wherever they were producing engines) to apply pressure. The result is auto makers were forced to build new factories outside of Detroit, first in other MI cities and eventually in other states and countries. Now I think there's only ~three factories in Detroit, including for products that aren't really that exciting like spark plugs.

I didn't realize so many cities were referred to as an american Paris though, that is interesting. It was, certainly however, a beautiful city at one point.

They weren't "forced" to outsource their factory work, they chose to rather than increase wages or worker rights. And the only reason Detroit got so big to start with was because the auto manufacturers claimed they could pay people more than elsewhere and incentivized them to come move to Detroit for work, only to pull the rug on them later when profits didn't continuously rise as fast as they wanted and outsourced.

And that's why they should have put the "must renovate" clause!

With a bond that can be returned with proof of renovation.

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