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BirdieNZon Inflation is differential and restructuring (2021)

> That's how we get figures saying that computers cost 20 times less than what they used to be when in reality it costs a little less than 2 times less.

Can't you buy old PCs for 20 times less than a (second-hand) modern PC?

I bet this Pentium 4 desktop cost around NZ$2000 new: https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/desktops/n... but now it's going for NZ$100.

BirdieNZon Is there a housing shortage or not?

> Someone with little income (retired) and property in a desirable location is going to lose.

Most advocates of a higher LVT also advocate for a provision to defer the payment of the tax until sale of the property for pensioners.

BirdieNZon Is there a housing shortage or not?

He does benefit from the increase in value, because land increases in value due to increased services and amenities. If you put a train station nearby someone's house, their property hugely increases in value, and they benefit from the nearby train (or school, or fire station, or port, or whatever else).

Now, we could certainly defer the payment of the tax until sale of the property for, say, pensioners, as no one wants to be kicking out retirees from their homes.

However, the issue of people losing their homes due to increases in value already exist for a massive section of the population: those who rent. As rents increase, many renters are forced to move. They don't even get to benefit from an increase in land value, from the community they helped build and improve.

A fantastic way to solve this issue would be a land value tax that taxes the economic rent of the land, in conjunction with removing all income and sales tax. This means that land sale prices are low, renters have more income to spend on things besides rent, and people sitting on land don't benefit enormously without returning that value to society.

The tax can be deferred until sale of the property for pensioners, for their primary residence.

BirdieNZon Is there a housing shortage or not?

> have driven up prices to an extreme.

So your land, through no effort of your own, has hugely gone up in value; don't you think there's something wrong with you benefiting from other people's labour that increased the value of your land?

BirdieNZon Rocket Mortgage to trim 8% of workforce as home-loan market shrinks

Most of the housing bubble is actually a land price bubble. Land is only a long-term depreciating asset in shrinking cities, because demand for the land is decreasing.

BirdieNZon Adjusted for inflation, a Single Family Home costs 75% more than it did in 1987

This is country-dependent. In New Zealand, you cannot walk away from the mortgage. You might be able to if you declare bankruptcy, perhaps.

BirdieNZon Adjusted for inflation, a Single Family Home costs 75% more than it did in 1987

> So many of societies problems can be traced to high housing cost.

While a significant portion of housing costs are due to materials, labour, and regulations that limit how much you can build, a very large amount of house price increases in recent years is found in land price increases, not the house itself.

The Elon Musk for that particular problem is Henry George, and his book Progress and Poverty.

BirdieNZon “Apple AirPods are so unreliable we don’t allow them at YC demo day”

Not the parent, but the big issue I've had with the Snowball (which I think is an issue with condenser mics in general) is that it picks up way too much audio, so if you don't have a very quiet environment and a good mic boom and shock mount then it will pick up everything. Breathing, keyboard and mouse clicks, a dog barking 3 houses away, a truck going past.

I've since switched to an AudioTechnica ATR2100X (cardioid dynamic mic) and have found it sounds much better for the environment I'm in.

BirdieNZon We can do better than “same, but electric”

Note that this is pretty US-specific. In New Zealand we don't use the word "condo", and usually you can purchase an apartment which will have an associated body corporate (a legal entity that all the other apartment owners in your building contribute towards to maintain and insure the building).

BirdieNZon We can do better than “same, but electric”

In New Zealand our sound insulation requirements mean that every shared tenancy wall I've ever had has been almost impossible to hear the person next door. It doesn't seem to be prohibitively expensive to do, although it certainly helps that it's a regulation from the city councils rather than up to the developer.

BirdieNZon We can do better than “same, but electric”

Can I ask who it is that you see pushing people towards urban life over suburban or rural? What I mostly see is people saying that suburbia and rural areas are being subsidised by urban dwellers and that people should pay their fair share of the costs of their lifestyle. You're not going to ever be banned from living rural or suburban in any Western democracy, but right now suburbia is subsidised in most cities in the West, and there are heaps of land-use restrictions that stop people doing reasonable things like building houses.

In fact, it sounds like what you want is the freedom to live the lifestyle you want, and that's all that YIMBYs really want: freedom to build houses on their land, and people paying their fair share of the costs of their infrastructure.

BirdieNZon Ask HN: Tech Salaries and Wealth Inequality

Have you seen Rognlie's addition to that book? https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

It pairs nicely with Henry George's understanding of land, capital, and labour.

BirdieNZon Bad Economics

Economics 101 might start with that, but you need to progress to Economics 201 and so on. "Changes to price will alter the equilibrium point and therefore quantity demanded." is only true if certain assumptions are true, such as "people are rational actors that have sufficiently complete knowledge to act in their own self-interest", and "people always work to maximise meeting their own needs and wants".

In reality, people act against their own self-interest, people don't always act rationally, and people have limited knowledge.

This is why when we look at specific real world examples of price changes, sometimes a change to price does not affect quantity demanded. With minimum wage, a common explanation for this is that minimum wage workers have limited knowledge of the available supply of workers, and don't realise they could bargain for higher wages. In other words, there is a market inefficiency that they are unable to exploit because of limited knowledge; moving the minimum wage higher results in that inefficiency being reduced or removed, despite the workers not having increased knowledge.

We can see this at a very simple level: I have worked with colleagues who are unaware that they are being significantly under-paid for their skills and experience. Technically, the price on offer for their services is set at a higher point than what they are being paid, but due to limited information, they are not selling their services at that point.

Sometimes, even though they have the information, they don't act in their own self-interest and don't change job or bargain for higher pay, for a variety of reasons. Now, if the software firms around collectively increased pay to all those under-paid workers by $10,000, there would be no reduction in employment. There would be a reduction in profits for the software firms, because they were exploiting a market inefficiency that was reduced, but they are still making sufficient profits that they won't change their number of employees in response.

BirdieNZon Bad Economics

Yes, economists thought for a long time that minimum wage increases reduce employment, as their models showed that it should.

Reality doesn't care about models, though. In reality, you can increase minimum wage without decreasing employment.

BirdieNZon Bad Economics

https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers.html#6

"Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania." (with Alan Krueger), American Economic Review 84, September 1994.

BirdieNZon Bad Economics

Last year's Nobel Prize in Economics went to researchers who showed, via natural experiments, that raising minimum wage does not decrease employment.

It's counter-intuitive, to be sure, and there are vested interests who want minimum wage to stay down or be removed, but "the facts" are there and observable in the real world.

BirdieNZon How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

We could change the zoning laws so that it isn't illegal, though.

One of the ways you can reduce cars is by zoning to allow greater density, which enables forms of transit which are more space-efficient than cars are. It's a chicken and egg problem, but people will be crying out for better cycle ways and trains and buses if housing becomes more dense.

Also, having commercial spread throughout residential areas reduces the amount of travel between areas, because you don't need to go far to get to the amenities you want.

BirdieNZon How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

Per-unit rent will go down if you increase supply of housing, but the value of the land underneath will go up if you increase the amount of houses allowed to be built on said land. There's one part of "standard economics" that a lot of people forget with property, which is that land in desirable locations is of limited supply and you cannot increase its supply.

Land at the boundaries of a city is not equivalent with land in the centre, because of location value.

I do agree that #2 should stop, but be warned that it doesn't solve land values going sky-high; it actually increases land values. The solution is land value tax, a la Henry George.

BirdieNZon How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

> Let's take this to the extreme, do you think you have a right to set up a commercial kitchen in your home, and set up patio furniture for random people to show up and order take out?

You can do this in Japan. Why shouldn't you be able to do this?

BirdieNZon How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

Think about this: land value appreciation is so crazy that you can not charge rent and still make enough money that a property has a good return on investment.

BirdieNZon 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

No, although the median of the bell curve of ranked players is probably further to the right than the median of the bell curve of unranked players.

BirdieNZon Acute aerobic exercise to recover from mental exhaustion

> It's as if ADHD is a manufactured diagnosis to pathologize a healthy response to living conditions humans should find intolerable: sitting at a desk all day. I won't link to Born to Run, but it's easy to see that pre-industrial humans (i.e. 99% of the homo sapiens lifestyle) had lives full of physical activity. We call exercise "self-medication" when it is really a sick society that we should address.

I'd love for this to be true but all the evidence we have is that it is not true. I don't know if you're diagnosed with ADHD yourself or not, but as someone diagnosed with ADHD this sounds like a cool fantasy. I've also heard people say "well it's just cellphones and TikTok giving everyone ADHD, people just need to practice focusing". I grew up playing ~3 sports at any one time year round, with plenty of outdoor physical activity, running around the neighbourhood. I read books constantly, had very little access to computers, no access to cellphones. I also had terrible ADHD symptoms my whole life, and the only thing that helps reduce the symptoms effectively is medication. I have plenty of coping mechanisms that help but they are not preventative.

I would love not to take medication, as I'm generally averse to taking medication unnecessarily. It's the only thing that lets me choose to work on the things I want to work on, whether chores, listening to people, projects at my job or in my personal life.

The scientific evidence we have about ADHD is that it's highly heritable, that there are clear physical differences in size of certain parts of the brain in people with diagnosed ADHD, and that some children grow out of it as those parts of their brain catch up. It's one of the best examples we have of a disorder with clear physical causes, and the mechanism of the medications we have is also one of the best understood of all brain disorders. It's a dream to suggest it is just some hunter-mode human capability that modern society doesn't have a place for.

It sucks to have it and I wish I didn't, and that's because I want to be able to pay attention to the people I love when they talk to me, not because of some desire to be a perfect cog in a corporation that wouldn't exist in pre-industrial society.

BirdieNZon More on housing price inflation (2021)

All property discussions won't make sense until you separate land from capital improvements (houses). Property prices will not stop climbing if you build more houses, and in fact, land prices go up if you build more houses. Rents go down per house if you build houses much faster than increasing demand, but you can't build more land.

Supply and demand is not the issue when dealing with something of inherently limited supply, such as location/land.

If you want rent to go down, absolutely build more houses. If you want land prices to go down, tax land value.

BirdieNZon Why Galesburg has no money

You can have both, if you have a grid of main through-roads for transporting people around and then inside each "square" of the grid you have a continued fractal of sub-grids which aren't for through-traffic (slower speed limits, narrower streets, traffic calming measures, difference in material to make clear the difference from through-roads and local streets etc.). People traveling past won't use the inner streets because they aren't efficient for that, but people living in the neighbourhood will use the inner streets.

BirdieNZon 2021 Letter

> You will know then that Apple Daily and Stand News were pushing "freedom of the press" into territory that no western media dares to push in their own countries, including actively calling for foreign military intervention in Hong Kong.

I recall very recently some US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia; doesn't seem very different.

BirdieNZon The Price of Discipline

> Do you want to take out the rubbish? Or do you start out wanting to and then want to do something else?

Both can occur but the first one is more problematic: I want to take out the rubbish but it feels like torture to force myself to start the task. It's not something easy to explain if you haven't experienced it, but it feels something like there's an invisible wall that prevents me from starting.

On meds there is almost no wall. I simply choose to do something and start doing it. It feels miraculous to me. Society has nothing to do with it.

BirdieNZon The Price of Discipline

I did get it from society, of course. I wouldn't equate changing society's accommodations with changing how easy the normal adult finds life, though. Changing accommodations has no impact on how easy my non-ADHD friends find their lives compared to me. Society can accommodate my difficulty in doing chores but that doesn't change that most of my friends don't find it difficult to take out the rubbish if they want to.

BirdieNZon The Price of Discipline

How is society being more accommodating going to help with me wanting to be able to live my life like a normal adult rather than struggling with simple things? It isn't society's expectations that make life most difficult for me, it's my own.

BirdieNZon The Price of Discipline

That's a fair statement.

For ADHD medication specifically, for most people diagnosed with ADHD I would expect to see both improved life quality AND life expectancy. Of course, specific individuals may experience worsened life quality on medication, in which case they will have to weigh up whether they want potentially longer life with lower life quality.

Given the kinds of mortality causes from ADHD, I would think the calculus looks more like "ADHD meds make me feel yuck but maybe that's worth it to not get fired regularly, because my family needs me to support them financially and being fired regularly makes me depressed and suicidal".

BirdieNZon The Price of Discipline

There are actually a lot of causes. Barkley (2018)[1] says:

> The reduced ELE linked to ADHD was found to be a function of the first order variables of less education, less annual income, greater consumption of alcohol and tobacco, diminished sleep, and poorer overall health status relative to the control group. Moreover, ELE was also shown to be a function of the second order traits of deficient behavioral inhi- bition in daily life and, much less so, of low verbal IQ, greater interpersonal hostility, and deficient nonverbal fluency.

and:

> For instance, besides ADHD-C itself, this study showed that behavioral disinhibition (as assessed by EF ratings in daily life), verbal IQ, the comorbid psychopathology of hostility, and the EF of nonverbal fluency (and its associa- tion with nonverbal working memory) all uniquely contrib- uted, in descending order, to variation in life expectancy. The largest percentage, however, by far was contributed by behavioral disinhibition.

Nigg (2013)[2] says:

> ADHD is clearly associated with worse physical health outcomes across multiple domains. These include unhealthy behaviors and outcomes like smoking, illicit substance use disorders, accidental injuries, obesity, and even suicide attempts and completed suicides.

----

Basically, having ADHD means you have less self-control, engage in riskier behaviour (including riskier eating habits, substance abuse, driving, sex. It also means you struggle in life, resulting in suicidality, aggressiveness and anti-social behaviour. You sleep worse. You're more likely to smoke because nicotine is a stimulant which has a medicating effect on ADHD symptoms.

[1]: Hyperactive Child Syndrome and Estimated Life Expectancy at Young Adult Follow-Up: The Role of ADHD Persistence and Other Potential Predictors, Barkley 2018

[2]: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and adverse health outcomes, Nigg 2013 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4322430/)