CountSessine

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

The long system makes vastly more sense, but in the English world we use the short system, except of course for the English themselves who used to use the long system and tragically regressed to the short system officially in the 1970's.

Of course, in my perfect world, we would use neither because we'd be using base-12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

What we should be asking them is whether they’re now doing everything they can to scrub their datasets of information that could be requested by police and could be used in abortion cases.

This would kind of be like the Exxon case, but if Maryland had tried to prevent Exxon from having gas stations ANYWHERE in the US if they started doing business in Maryland.

"Enter if you dare, but all your business in the rest of the nation will be affected and you will lose your competitive edge vis-a-vis recruiting firms that stay out of Washington!"

Your city council is the People’s Central Planning Committee that runs the construction economy in your city. They decide what is produced and they decide who does it. Construction in your city is a planned economy - every bit as much as the Soviet Union or pre-Deng China.

And like every planned economy, it sucks and fails in just about every way.

If your “quality of life” is so compelling, why do you need to outlaw everything else, comrade?

“Tear down this wall, Mr Gorbachev”

But it was in a semi-experimental feature that did some really weird stuff - it was for inline assembly code without an `asm` block - you could just inter-mix MIPS assembly instructions with your C++ code statements. Or rather you could if it worked properly. It was an ambitious feature - a bit too ambitious I think.

In the meantime, it’s lithium.

99/1?

90/10?

80/20?

I don’t know this myself. But I figure that if no one is stepping into this market, it’s probably pretty damn small.

They’re hamsters on a wheel and the wheel isn’t going to slow down just because they’re upset about their situation.

Are you actually pretending that any of these cases compares to the scope and the depth of Volkswagen's treachery and lawbreaking with "clean diesel"?

Volkswagen was pumping tons of NOx into the air in EU cities for years and regulators there rolled over and looked the other way the whole time. But in the US they got regulated hard.

My prediction - warehouses that unionize will get split off into separate companies and be contracted out to by Amazon.com, the store. But they rely on Amazon.com for so much of their tech that they'll be beholden to them and have no leverage in negotiations. Warehouse workers will be even worse off than they are today.

Like, just the game-theoretic analysis here suggests municipalities will want nothing to do with this.

The poster is literally responding to a news article about housing affordability with the declaration about blind-bidding, "This is such a huge deal".

It really isn't. This is the difference between English vs Dutch auctions and the relative merits in an open and sane market can be debated. Sealed auctions are not a market failure. Sealed auctions do not necessarily lead to higher bids. Sealed auctions do not necessarily lead to market asymmetries. The effects of these two auction choices is largely irrelevant as long as we have the demand curve pushed out to crazy-town.

Do research on the property! One of the big advantages of Dutch auctions is that bidders don't get information on how you value something! Except of course that everything is valuable because of scarcity so yeah actually I guess sealed bids won't really provide a lot of value for the buyer.

Adjust your bid as others bid! English auctions allow you to make lots of adjustments based on what other bidders think something is worth! Oh, except of course everything is in demand so everyone just keeps bidding and the frenzy makes other participants unpredictable... so yeah, actually I guess open bids won't really provide a lot of value for the buyer.

I get it, you have a point you want to make. There are more constructive ways to do so than to misconstrue the arguments of the people you are replying to.

I'm really just tired of the bs.

That scarcity exists is the whole reason we're focusing on foreign buyers in 2022. And blind-bidding in 2021. And investors in 2019. And money-laundering in 2018. And Chinese money in 2017. All of these things should be addressed, but every one of them has provided political cover for the real reason that housing is so expensive in popular cities, which is scarcity.

None of these things will matter one whit to housing affordability. "Helps in some way" is fine as long as we understand that it has nothing to do with high housing prices. "Helps in some way" is fine as long as we measure our claims and admit that this is about basic fairness and respect for the law. "Helps in some way" is alright except that "helps in some way" has been sold for the last 6 years, politically, as, "this is the reason you can't buy a home! Surely it has nothing to do with NIMBYism and our suburbs! Please don't ask me, as your elected representative, to take on suburban voters and start talking about housing equity as it relates to affordability!"

Every one of these things should be dealt with. Canada should probably have anti-racketeering laws. Real-estate boards should have less power and should be compelled to publicize their sales data. Etc, etc, ...

Just quit the bullsh*t about this being about addressing housing affordability.

And yet here we are.

Folks love their suburbs. And they love those laws protecting their suburbs and excluding everything else the market might want to try.

Of course some millennials will enjoy a windfall when mom and dad eventually downsize. Not all, by any means - but some.

I hope you're lucky enough to have some house-rich parents! It's always good to be an aristocrat!

I can't do it because it's illegal, that's why. And I would have to go to city council to have them change the law (rezone the land). And the neighbors will campaign against me and argue against density. I own the land - I paid good money for it and it's mine in every sense of the word, but the neighbors will argue that their preferences and whims outweigh both my property rights and the rights of other Canadians to have a home.

That is not an accurate summary. Earlier...

Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you'll be swimming upstream, politically

Perhaps you and I should get together and we can explain to a group of detached-house-owning baby-boomers/empty-nesters why liberalizing or eliminating zoning laws would lead to optimal land utility and that they should be ok with allowing row-houses in their neighborhood. And that would be an interesting conversation.

I completely agree with you - housing prices are high, mechanically, because of scarcity. But scarcity exists because voters like high housing prices. The truth is that most Canadians own property and are perfectly happy with their $1-3 million in equity. And regardless of their stated preferences for affordable housing, the revealed preference for scarcity and expensive housing is clear.

All I want is to shut down people looking for someone to validate their cognitive dissonance.

<sigh>

As long as we have folks buying with the intention of parking money or using homes as an "investment" you're going to have competition with much deeper pockets

Why do you think foreign investors want to overpay for a Vancouver Special? And what do they do with it once they buy it?

Do they live in it? If so, what you're upset about is population growth. Sounds like scarcity!

Do they rent it out? If so, that's a social good in a city with a 1% rental vacancy rate and sky-high rents are as bad as high housing prices. Sacrificing the rental market to save home-buyers sounds like scarcity!

Do those foreign investors leave the house empty? Who cares if we can just build more? And we know (https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2022/02/14/unoccupied-c...) that Vancouver doesn't seem to have more empty homes than most cities it's size. But of course we can't "just build more". Scarcity!

The truth is that we've seen developers market condo pre-sales in China playing-up the region's dysfunctions - pointing out our 2% population growth rate and the difficulty in building new housing. Investors come to Vancouver because they know the game is rigged - they know that housing prices are mostly one-sided and hedged by political interference. Canada's real estate is "too-big-to-fail" and is mostly up-side.

Don't talk to me about housing prices unless you deal with scarcity.

Of course not, and I didn't say that I'm completely against reforming the real estate industry and the bidding process. But it won't fix expensive housing.

It's all bullsh*t if it doesn't address scarcity. In 2016 we had had 10 years of 2% population growth in Vancouver and 1.2% housing stock growth and we wanted to blame foreign investors, so we enacted the foreign-buyers tax. That was going to fix high housing prices.

In 2017 we all got angry about dirty money and our casinos being used as money-laundromats so we commissioned the German report to detail what was going on and surely that would show that real estate was expensive because of money-laundering. It said prices might have gone up by 6% because of money-laundering. So that's 6% of 400%.

In 2021 we started talking about investors driving up the cost of housing, ignoring the fact that investors typically become landlords and in cities with rental vacancy rates hovering around 1% (Vancouver's was 0.4% in 2017!!!), that sounds like a good thing.

It's all bullsh*t and it's all a distraction that let's us ignore scarcity. I've decided that no matter how justified that housing reform is (ie open-bidding), I refuse to support it before we deal with scarcity because we'll deal with open-bidding and then say, "Ok ... let's see where we are in 3 years time now that we've fixed that!"

Deal with scarcity or f*ck off with talk about housing prices. Don't expect me to validate your cognitive dissonance.

Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you'll be swimming upstream, politically.

While you're at it, you could go after other wildly popular policies that lead to high housing prices, like the primary homeowner capital gains tax exemption (probably, by value, the biggest tax dodge in the industrialized world), and Canadian cities' extremely low property tax rates (0.3% of assessed value in Vancouver, for example).