Wouldn't this be primarily due to lack of car travel, rather than the city generally? As I understand it, urban dwellings and populations are per-capita more environmentally efficient, because density enables economies of scale.
575 karma · joined September 1, 2016
They must surely make sense, given that there are people who "flip" houses (buy a house, do a quick paint/bathrooms/kitchen renovation on it and sell it for a nice markup).
What's insane about this? I grew up in a pretty basic old house with a wooden floor in the kitchen, I don't recall it being an issue in any practical sense.
"ACC is the sole and compulsory provider of accident insurance in New Zealand for all work and non-work related injuries. The corporation administers the ACC Scheme on a no-fault basis, so that anyone, regardless of the way in which they suffered an injury, has coverage under the scheme. Due to the scheme's no-fault basis, people who have suffered personal injury do not have the right to sue an at-fault party, except for exemplary damages."
Exercise and get good sleep. Caffeine helps but isn't as good as ADHD medication.
Remove distractions aggressively. Don't beat yourself up when you fail; expect it and move on.
Use people in your life to help be your executive function for you. It isn't really fair on them but if they love you they may be willing to anyway. A gym buddy or sports team is another way of achieving this without needing them to love you particularly.
Block all the sites you lose hours to, aggressively. You're not smart enough to build a system you can't get out of but you can make it high friction. Same for games or media or whatever it is.
Pair programming is tiring but it works for using an external party as your executive function. Keeps you on track.
Negative external consequences are motivating but stressful, use sparingly.
Try find a job with or structure your life with enough variety to keep you entertained; I find people to be stimulating but YMMV.
Medication is far more effective than any coping mechanism.
You may not have it but if you do then it can be a life changing diagnosis and subsequent medication and learned coping mechanisms/coaching.
I really hope it keeps working in the longer term because it's been life changing so far.
Land is generally not very valuable by itself, it is locations that are valuable (specifically desirable locations in growing cities). There are highly limited locations available in Canadian cities, particularly the desirable cities of Toronto and Vancouver.
Same with the Bay Area, NYC, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland etc. Singapore does probably the best job of the above at keeping housing relatively affordable despite very limited locations.
This is in aggregate, of course; individual landlords may charge less than what individual tenants can bear but across the rental market, landlords extract monopoly rents already.
That's why you will find rents increase proportionately to incomes, not landlord costs. This is highly apparent in New Zealand, where mortgages are not fixed rates for more than 5 years; interest rate changes have little to no impact on rents, but supply and tenant incomes do.
Owners of monopolies stand to benefit from not just a reasonable return on investment, but an excessive return on investment proportion to their contribution to society.
Many countries and societies have handled this in different ways, such as the idea of the commons, or Norway's taxation of oil extraction, or land value taxes and land leases.
> You feel like you are salty that you couldn't get a hold on such a resource in time.
I am a software developer, and as such am able to comfortably acquire land in a good location and provide for my family. However, many of my generation are unable to, unlike previous generations, because the good locations have all been taken by the previous generations. This is why we see enormous poverty next to enormous progress, because late comers to the party are so far behind as to be basically unable to "get on the ladder". The ladder is being pulled up before their eyes.
A great solution to this is to tax the excess economic rents that monopolies create, rather than taxing labour and capital. Henry George is the most famous proponent of such a system, and you can find out more here: https://www.gameofrent.com/ or at astralcodexten's book review of Progress and Poverty.
This means that those who contribute to society through labour and capital are not discouraged from doing so, but those who leech off others through monopoly rent extraction return that rent to the society that created it in the first place. This is a far more just and equitable solution.
Of course, many existing monopoly owners (e.g. landowners, and particularly property investors) hate the idea, because people tend to act in their own self-interest to the disadvantage of others.
The building-lord should receive some return for their investment, as they have created value and added to it through maintenance.
The land-lord receives return for doing no work, no addition of value, and only through extracting the excess economic rent from their tenants.
Unfortunately, conversations around property investment and land taxes and so on tend to derail because the land-lord and building-lord are often the same person. The response to "the landlord is a leech on society" is "no, he built a house and maintains it!", but in reality it is "the land-lord is a leech on society, the building-lord is a contributor to society".
The closest I can think of are people who think parking minimum regulations should be removed, so that stores and house owners can decide for themselves how much parking they want to put in; certainly a far step different from not wanting an adequate number of parking spaces.
You can certainly fit a lot more people in most major Western cities, without even much difference in lifestyle. Simply allow people to build what they want on their land, within reason. We've seen this in New Zealand, where recent law changes have allowed townhouses (terraced housing, with shared walls but otherwise freehold) and many many townhouses are being built everywhere.
Most houses are still standalone houses, no one is forcing you to develop your property, but if every 20th section is turned from a single house into 6 townhouses, a lot more people are able to fit into a smaller space while still having a comfortable, quiet home in a good location.
Our intertenancy walls have good soundproofing, enforced by regulations, so you don't really hear your neighbours. You can pay more for a standalone house, or less for a house with shared walls.
It wasn't turned into a scheme by anyone, it's the nature of land. See Ricardo's Law of Rent; owners of land are able to extract rent from the tenants, and in desirable locations they can extract larger amounts of rent. If you want to make money without doing any work, buy land in desirable, growing locations and rent it out.
The solution is a land value tax, accompanied with a citizen's dividend or a reduction in other taxes such as income taxes.
The Georgist proposal is that you should own all the fruit of your personal labour (no income tax) but that the proceeds of the labour of society should be returned to society at large, through a land value tax that captures the rental value of the land.
The current status quo in most countries is that you can own a piece of land in the middle of a metropolis and do no labour, and yet reap significant reward. This is in essence a theft from society, as the citizens of the metropolis are labouring and building capital that creates value for the piece of land, yet the land-owner proportionally does very little to create value for their land. If you want to discourage theft and encourage keeping the fruits of your labour, the Georgist proposal is fantastic.
This sounds like a ridiculous straw-man; who's pushing to take away freedom of people to not live on top of each other?
People advocating for suburbs to pay their fair share of taxes, and for less car subsidy, and for less restrictive zoning are not restricting freedom but increasing it.
I'm expecting house prices in my country to drop at least 30% in the next couple of years and I'm only expecting interest rates to get to around 10%, 18% would destroy the housing market.
It isn't comparing like to like to compare the cost of a modern PC to one 20 years old, with modern games, modern websites, modern Office products etc.