How I Used Eve Online to Predict the Great Recession (2013) | Hacker News Reader

How I Used Eve Online to Predict the Great Recession (2013)

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92 pointsnosuchthing34 comments

This guy basically re-discovered Henry George's land tax theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

IE, if people can hold onto valuable property and keep it out of use hoping its value will go up, they will, and you get speculation and thus property value bubbles. Tax the land in such a way that landowners HAVE to do something useful with it to justify the price of holding it, and that happens less.

This makes me wonder if raising the cost of domain registration would see less domain parking.

The difference being that there are infinitely many domain names, but not infinitely much land.

Georgist here - tax 'em! If we could put a lid on land speculation how much better the world would be.

I'm in Australia. Is this why I can't access http://firsttuesdayjournal.com/the-rises-and-declines-of-rea...

I get:

journal.firsttuesday.us - Access Denied Error code 16 This request was blocked by the security rules 2015-03-07 01:51:36 UTC

Edit:

Google cache works but no images. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4JhJyDG...

2015-03-07T01:51:36Z

jesus christ people RFC3339...learn it, love it, live it.

aaaaaaaargh

What exactly is the problem? The date he provided seems to be correctly formatted on a superficial (5 minute) comparison. Venting without explaining what you're upset about isn't likely to change anything.

The lack of a trailing Z to denote UTC time (because that's all you should be using anyways, but that's neither here nor there). Also, the use of a space instead of a 'T', while compliant, means that any sort of parser that splits on whitespace or does something clever will break things.

But RFC3339 says:

NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T". Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.

Yes. I don't live in the US either and had to use a VPN.

This is why we need to raise domain registration rates. $20 or $30 should reduce speculation to the point where good names start flowing back into the system. The .com rates are way too cheap right now.

Agreed. It's so annoying to see parked domains, yet it's so easy to setup parking with sedo and the likes. I once had a site, but didn't renew registration, and guess what? It's been "successfully parked" by somebody who saw "ludicrous opportunities" to raise a few cents/yr. Sometimes I thought to restore the site, which was very informative, but I couldn't, because it's deeply linked to the domain it was on, and that somebody wants a ridiculous sum to hand me back domain ownership; I would have been happy if only he had used the domain to provide some value instead of click bait.

Lesson learned: never give up a domain, because it won't ever be free again. Instead, put it on sale.

Yeah, it's absurd nowadays.

For several years, me and a friend ran a reasonably popular website and associated forum. I paid for the hosting, he paid for the domain. He gradually became less and less active, but eventually he forgot to renew the registration. I tried every way I could think of to contact him, without avail. I tried calling GoDaddy, explained the situation, and told them I'd gladly pay for renewal and to consider it just a "donation" on his account. No dice.

I asked them would it would be available for purchase, and they told me some day x days in the future. I figured well, this really sucks, but maybe I can just snap it up the second it goes live.

To my shock and anger it was bought up by some kind of domain parking organization in (x - n) days. They told me sure, you can have the domain. For $800.

Needless to say, not being able to afford that, I ended up buying a new domain and trying to contact all the community members, but the site has been basically dead ever since. As for the domain, they had a landing page with ads on it for a couple years. Now the domain is some kind of weird blog-spam.

I have wondered about that too, but I have a feeling companies with deep pockets would be more than happy to pay the higher price? The brokers would then just mark up their prices when they decide to sell to the little guys?

I would like to change the way expired domains are reintroduced into the marketplace. It seems like the best expired domain names are kept by the domain registrar if the owner doesn't pay their bill? Why is Godaddy/generic domain registers allowed to buy expired domain names before the general public even sees them? (I might have got the process wrong? Please correct me if needed!)

If anyone really know the process of buying an expired domain name--the actual steps; I would really like to know how the game works.

The first question I have is this; I buy a premium name from Godaddy. I forget about the name and all the renew/reclaim dates? After ICANN determines it can go back on the market, why do the good names always seem to be bought by domain registrars before they hit a site like expireddomains.ooo?

I heard it has something to do with Verisign, and domain brokers type companies that flood ICANN web servers with buy requests from multiple locations, but would like a detailed walk through.

The process of snagging a good expired domain has been cloaked in secrecy for too long.

p.s. I did a little research and I answered one of my questions. The question I asked was how Godaddy retains the best expired domian names?

The answer is Domain Warehousing. "Domain name warehousing is the practice of registrars obtaining control of expired domain names already under their management, with the intent to hold or “warehouse” names for their own use and/or profit."

This practice should be modified immediately! I don't understand why on earth they would be able to keep these names?

One other thing, the cost ICANN charges Godaddy for the privilege of registering a domain name is approximately $7.00 and change. Every other dollar above the $7.42? is revenue.

> The brokers would then just mark up their prices when they decide to sell to the little guys?

Why would you think the brokers aren't already charging the absolute maximum that the little-guy market will bear? Because they're all such fundamentally decent people?

alternatively, just have a "use it or lose it" policy, where if nothing real is being done with the domain or you don't have an "intrinsic right" to it (say google should probably own google.co for various reasons), then someone else can just register it.

How would you judge 'real' and who would do it?

I have a domain whose only use is to provide me a pointer to my home IP address. Is this doing something real with this domain? If it is, how would one go about determining that I was even doing this?

Or, do you intend to determine realness of use by the absence of blogspam and/or domain parking web pages at the domain in question?

It is dangerous to try to predict something as complex and interrelated as investment, based on such simple parameters. The OP could have been right just by sheer chance and is claiming insight, but is likely just luck and survivorship bias.

>How I Used EVE Online to Predict the Great Recession

Alternatively the posts we dont see are:

"How I used <X> to predict the Great Recession wouldn't be here for 2 more years but never posted a blog about it because I was wrong and it was just a theory anyway."

Did the author make any investments based on his prediction, other than the friendly bet?

next up on forex trading charts : mmo economies.

a lot of btc traders used to track SecondLife lindens due to there being a conversion scheme between the two currencies.

Are you the author of that post? If so I'd love to get your thoughts on Bitcoin. Given your field of expertise as an "applied virtual economist" your view is probably a lot more relevant then the "old money" economists of this generation.

I don't quite follow how they extrapolate the housing economic bubble to a pyramid scheme.

One of the fundamentals of a pyramid scheme is that early entrants profit, and continue profiting as the scheme plays out. How does this apply to the housing market if you don't get continual returns on resale?

An interesting correlation between Eve factories and the housing market which they don't mention is that no rational actors are incentivized by depreciation. There is only positive pressure on the price to push it up, which is interesting because for many assets you have investors that can bet on it going down (i.e. shorting).

> "One of the fundamentals of a pyramid scheme is that early entrants profit, and continue profiting as the scheme plays out. How does this apply to the housing market if you don't get continual returns on resale?"

You buy your first house, flip to to the next sucker/investor for a profit, use that profit to buy a second house, rinse and repeat. As long as property prices continue to increase, you'll always win. Until the world runs out of suckers.

At least, that's what's happening right now in my home country.

The key point here is leverage... because property is funded in part by debt when you increase your equity from the first sale then you can purchase a more expensive property (with even more debt) or possibly multiple second properties... in fact you can even do this without selling the first house by just increasing the mortgage.

what's your home country?

The Github profile says Australia.

While Australia might be facing a serious property bubble soon, I'm not from there...

Using returns to buy more assets is still not a pyramid scheme. I still don't get how they're extrapolating here.

I lived in Phoenix during the early-mid 2000's.

I certainly didn't need a simulation to tell that housing was an out-of-control financial scheme that was about to crack and bring the economy to its knees. You simply can't keep doubling property values every year without wages or some other method of servicing the dept rising accordingly. The only thing I wonder is why more people didn't see this.

Seeing that a trend can't go on forever is not difficult: Almost no trend, ever, can go on forever. The trick is knowing what will happen to disrupt the trend, and when it happens.

It's easy to say that there will be a recession in the future of the US and be correct. It's almost as easy to be correct if we say we'll see one before 2025. But when, exactly? How big? If it was actually easy to predict those things in detail, they'd be priced into market prices already.

Just look at property all over the country. In some cases, the bubble deflated, and prices are still pretty low. In others, there was no real popping of a bubble: A minor dip due to global economic conditions, but prices are higher than they were 7 years ago. The difficulty comes from predicting which ones will recover and which ones will not.

If anyone could do this, we'd see them get insanely rich in the financial markets, but when we compare mutual fund behavior over time, the number of people that beat the market in any period is no different than random chance. We ignore the efficient market hypothesis at our own peril.

> If anyone could do this, we'd see them get insanely rich in the financial markets

Can you expound on this? I fail to see a scenario where anyone gets rich off the student loan bubble letting off its air.

causation and correlation bias. classic freshman logic.

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