BirdieNZ

Land value tax.

The same problem exists in other games, like Ultima Online and FFXIV. There's a solution for this, which was used in EVE Online: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a...

It works in real life too: https://gameofrent.com/

I can't speak for everywhere in the world, but in New Zealand it has usually been possible to cover total costs with rent. It's not possible right now due to higher interest rates. I believe this is common in many other countries (e.g. Australia, Canada, UK etc.).

This suggests it's common in the USA too: https://www.moneypenny.com/us/resources/blog/how-much-renter...

I lean towards renting out housing at market rent in my city to be unethical, so I refuse on ethical grounds to become a landlord. In the long term if the opportunity (e.g. money) arises I would like to build housing charging at-cost rent, but that'd be a charitable activity rather than a profit-seeking one.

I live in New Zealand, which is quite addicted as a country to profiting from real estate. The ability to leverage your money into an asset that provides both enough cashflow to cover costs and interest servicing as well as appreciates in value ~7% annually means that for most people, becoming a landlord is the most reliable path to easy wealth.

Yes, you can become a margin trader, but the cashflow management is much harder, the margin interest rate is higher (here at least), and it is much more difficult compared to buying an existing house and renting it out.

If you think of it in share market terms, it's a 4.2% dividend from a stock with a long-term price growth rate of ~7%. Not only that but you can use leverage (e.g. like a margin trader) in the form of a mortgage. In the USA, you can even lock your interest rate for 30 years, and only re-fix the rate when it drops!

It's very profitable!

No, even in 2024. I'm in New Zealand; there are a handful of big tech companies here, and they all offer compensation approximately the same (maybe on the upper end) as other New Zealand tech companies. There aren't that many remote jobs for US companies, and often they're also trying to save money by offshoring.

Why don't the local NZ tech companies offer more, though? Mostly because they don't have the same scale, so the revenue per employee is much lower.

FAANG (as in, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) make something like $1.5-$3 million USD per (white collar) employee (excluding Amazon warehouse workers).

Compare this to some well-known NZ tech companies (some of which even operate internationally!) Xero has revenue per employee of ~$150k USD. Pushpay maybe $200k USD revenue per employee. Datacom has revenue per employee of ~$130k USD.

It would bankrupt these companies to offer anything like what FAANG can offer, because they simply don't have the scale and revenue per employee to do so. Tech companies specifically have the rare ability to hugely leverage relatively few employees into huge revenue due to scaling, but only if you actually manage to scale. Most tech companies (probably even ones in the USA) don't have the kind of global scale and presence of the big tech companies.

You can't make more of unique locations. Dirt isn't the issue, it's location. Times Square doesn't use that much "land", but it's a unique, non-commodity location.

Sprawl in NYC wouldn't create more Times Squares, so in this sense, "they aren't making more land".

There's plenty of land in Siberia. There are very few locations that are in the middle of dense cities.

It's hard to think of many businesses that require lower capital investment and maintenance than a car wash. The ones I see in my city that look like land banking are a big plot with asphalt covering it (don't even need to mow lawns), a few awnings with some plumbing for hoses and soap and other gear, and nothing else. Even a laundromat would cost more to set up.

For land assessment, many countries or municipalities assess it regularly. In my country (New Zealand), most city councils re-assess land value and improvements value every three years (and charge council rates based on them).

I definitely agree with this, and have seen in play out in both directions both for myself and many others before. Now, writing down your goals concretely along with timelines helps you achieve them, but something about telling others before achieving something seems to make it much harder to achieve.

This feels like missing the point; of course CFR is in tension with speed of delivery! It's to stop gaming the metrics. If you don't have CFR to balance the lead time for changes and deployment frequency then you can make a pipeline and delivery process that very rapidly deploys very buggy code.

DORA metrics can be summarised as "are you delivering high quality changes quickly"? It's not a bad incentive to encourage less buggy code.

(This is not contrary to you, I think):

See https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-auckland-myth-th...

Let's start by defining "cheaper" as "cheaper rent" specifically. Rent will only decrease or stabilise when supply outstrips the absorption rate of the market. In New Zealand, for example, at least one analyst sees the equilibrium absorption rate of rentals to be 2.5% vacancies to total rentals. This means that to make rents go down (or stop going up at the same rate as household income), the available rentals must be greater than 2.5% of the total rentals.

One way to achieve that is to build a whole lot of housing and rent it out, far in excess of population growth in a city. To enable building a whole lot of housing, you can upzone a city. However, increasing potential housing does not actually increase the amount of housing.

To do that, you need to actually build houses. Now, anyone who wants to build a house will usually only do so if it makes financial sense to do so; essentially, when the risk-adjusted return on investment is high enough. Upzoning doesn't really change the risk-adjusted return on investment for developing a house.

Now, lowering rents WILL change the risk-adjusted RoI for building a house; it will LOWER the RoI! So builders will stop building when rents start decreasing, because the financials stop making sense. This is a natural hand-brake on (private) house-building rates, regardless of upzoning. Build enough housing to lower rents, and house builders will stop building houses!

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The kind of counter-factual we are looking for is not really expensive cities that become cheap as density increases, because density brings about more jobs, income, competition, and so on that mixes in with housing data as confounding variables.

Instead, we want: cities where rent as a proportion of disposable income goes down, while increasing population and density. Most likely, any city in that situation is going to be increasing housing units faster than population growth.

The next part of the analysis would be to figure out how they managed to do that despite absorption rates being a handbrake on the market :)

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A side-note; Auckland, which did upzone in ~2016 and again more recently, has not had a notable reduction in rent as a proportion of household income, despite increased density. Population growth meant that it hasn't really beaten the absorption rate of the market, except during Covid (lots of house-building going on at the same time as population decrease).

Developers aren't a cartel, but they respond to incentives just like anyone else.

https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/upzoning-predictions...

For one example of how upzoning alone doesn't result in developers exceeding the market saturation rate.

To be clear, I support upzoning but I think it should be accompanied with an increase in the holding cost of land, so landowners are incentivised to develop now rather than later.

I'm basing the reasons for why people don't want development in their neighbourhood off real-world observations; I didn't intend to be uncharitable, just realistic. To be honest, I toned back the reasoning quite a bit from some of what I've heard before.

Maybe the underlying truth is merely "I don't like change", but the actual literal reasons given by many people when blocking development in their neighbourhoods in my city are not saying they don't want change, it's far more targeted at the kinds of people who will move in. I tend to operate on the assumption that the true reasons they have for not wanting development are worse than what they will voice in public, and at least certainly not better.

> Except for house flippers, people don't care about the financial sense.

I agree that typically this isn't the issue; the person I responded to did seem to think it might be though.

Agglomeration effects mean that any city that tries to split up offices away from the city cores would end up "losing" compared to cities which allow offices and industries to cluster together freely.

485m² of land in one of the highest-income urban areas in the world is for rich people only, yeah.

Upzoning increases land prices. It only results in a decrease in per-unit average house prices if it is accompanied with development (more housing units per square metre of land).

Upzoning doesn't guarantee increased development as developers only build when it makes financial sense to do so, and flooding the market with more units would decrease the potential profit they can make.

Existing residents who don't develop their land usually end up with a big windfall of higher land prices, because their large lot sizes could have many more housing units built on it with new upzoning laws.

Now, they still might revolt for other reasons, like not wanting undesirables like people poorer than themselves to move in next door, or not wanting to see as many houses in their morning walk, but from a financial sense, upzoning is a big positive for existing landowners.

I'm not gonna argue with your choices in life, and I might make the same ones if I had a family that goes through 12 gallons of milk a week, but it's not impossible to pull that off with fewer cars and a smaller garage.

Scenario 1: dense urban living, somehow you can afford an apartment big enough for everyone. No car, just good transit (e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo). Grocery store is <3 minutes walk from the front door of your apartment, so you get 2 gallons every day. With a family that big, you're probably picking several items up, but you'd use a trolley (like this: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8653909?clickPR=plp:4:6 or bigger: https://www.kmart.co.nz/product/foldable-beach-trolley-42365...)

Scenario 2: big terraced/row/town-house (shared walls on two sides), has a 1-2 car garage. Suburban-ish living, car dependent, but definitely not rural or outskirts of a city. You own a van, which you'd need anyway if your family is big enough to need 12 gallons of milk a week, and then you have your big chest freezer in the garage and you go once a week to the grocery store and get 12 gallons of milk.

> This is not wage inequality because these are not equal things. More productive employees are not equal to less productive ones. Productive men are not equal to less productive (article's words not mien) women. If 2 different things are not equal, then there is no inequality.

The paper is saying that higher-earning men are more likely to work for companies which pay higher wages (to all their employees). Put another way, 100 men who are equally high-earning across their work experience are not randomly distributed in high- and low- wage companies, but are more concentrated in high-wage companies.

In the HN context, maybe it makes sense to say "higher-earning men are more likely to get jobs at FAANG rather than earn the same amount at Microsoft/some non-OpenAI startup/a bank".

(Good) baristas dial in their grind size multiple times a day due to environmental changes like humidity, and I daresay the decor of a coffee shop is designed to motivate appetite. Not sure if that completely answers your questions but they've certainly been considered before.

What's the issue with hexagonal architecture?

Sure, but that has nothing to do with what I said. There will be many HN users who are earning as much or more as Apple engineers, even if many are earning much less, so assuming that someone here would definitely jump at an Apple offer is not particularly reasonable.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of software engineers employed at companies that are of similar prestige and pay as Apple, and many of them will be on HN. If you're getting paid $500k at Netflix/Google/Meta, why work for $400k at Apple?

> Side note : that's one of the reason I think I may have ADHD, I still have the reminder to take an appointment with a psychologist on my phone....

Set many alarms, right now, to book that appointment. If you don't have ADHD or another disorder then you're only out a chunk of money, but if you do and can get medication then it can be life-changing.

I've seen this but producing Python scripts that you run in Blender, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x60zHw_z4NM (but I saw something marginally more impressive, not sure where though!)

Is this an imputed rent tax? That sounds like a good thing to me, not a bad thing. It has a similar effect to land value taxes or government-owned land leases, which are some of the most effective ways to reduce rampant property speculation and property value inflation.

The even better variation on this is land taxes (see Henry George's Progress and Poverty, or the summary here: https://gameofrent.com).

There are heaps of advantages to this approach, like no capital flight (can't take land overseas with you), no economic inefficiencies (taxing land doesn't get rid of land, whereas taxing pretty much anything else reduces the supply of that thing, taxing land doesn't reduce house-building the way property taxes do).

You are correct, and my memory failed me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3876754/

People with autism are highly likely to have comorbid ADHD.

People with ADHD are more likely than normal to have autistic traits, although nowhere near as commonly as the first statement.

ADHD and autism are comorbid in one direction (people with autism are more likely than the general population to have ADHD, but people with ADHD are not more likely than the general population to have autism).