Agreed. In fact, I think I'll mind it less. On my iPhone the only time it looks funny is in landscape, otherwise it just sits in the top-bar. On a laptop that isn't an issue.
I think for me it'll fade away, especially with a dark-mode UI.
6,836 karma · joined August 3, 2014
I think for me it'll fade away, especially with a dark-mode UI.
Ireland is not joining this agreement for no reason, they're doing it because non-membership will hurt them more in the end.
If you buy $10 of flower (including VAT) and turn it into $15 of bread (including VAT), you effectively only pay value added tax on $5. If you're generating no real margins and just have a lot of volume, you're effectively also paying no real VAT.
The difficulty is with cross-border transactions.
But at the end of the day, what does it solve? And what does it leave unsolved?
A single public transport marketplace is of course great, but many countries have those without the 'single ticket' system. For example, in the Netherlands I use one public transport card for bus, train, tram. I don't have a single ticket with one annual price, but I don't have different subscriptions or different cards for different transport methods (e.g. bus vs train), nor for different providers of the same transport method (e.g. two bus companies), it all happens on one card.
So what does it solve? Admissions checking? No, you still need to present your single ticket. The thing it solves is billing, from individual subscriptions or individual tickets, to a single annual payment.
But billing doesn't seem to be that big of a deal in modern systems, and it doesn't seem like it attacks the biggest issue in billing.
For example in the Netherlands I'm simply billed by use. If I go 5x as far, I pay roughly 5x as much. That's all done automatic, once a month. I don't have to load prepaid money on my card, I just use the card and it's billed after at the end of the month. Really no different to a variable-usage mobile phone subscription.
By introducing a single (e.g. average) payment amount per year, you're overcharging everyone who uses less than average, and undercharging power-users. Usage-based billing seems a much more fair approach. And the billing tech isn't all that complex.
Moreover, the fact a substantial number of people will get a single-ticket (e.g. say it's 60% of the users), doesn't change the fact you'll still need to upkeep billing infrastructure for the other 40%. It doesn't allow you to make billing/admissions infrastructure redundant.
It also doesn't allow you to differentiate at all in pricing and operators. I don't think this is a very big issue because I like public (i.e. not private) transport to be very egalitarian. But there's something to be said for allowing differences in quality/convenience etc in public, transport, too. e.g. business workers ride trains in the Netherlands in 1st class and do an hour of work on their laptops in quiet, comfy chairs, and pay extra, such that non-business users can ride cheaper in 2nd class. Having a single ticket removes any room for such differentiation, which can be useful to a point.
Very interested to see the results and I'm happy they're trying, but not convinced yet.
1% of US cows are grass-finished, the rest eat grain.
These grain-eating cows may be located in a place that has grass, couldn't be forest, and couldn't be agricultural land. And yet they eat grain nonetheless, from another place, that could be agricultural land, forest or otherwise nature that creates biodiversity.
The grain comes from somewhere. That creates land use issues. Not because of replacing forest with cows, but because 99% of cows sold in US stores are eating grain which must come from somewhere that is obviously not only useable for growing just grass.
Yes, in theory it's possible to have cows eat grass only, that's quite obvious. But if you were to limit beef in US stores to only those type of situations, you'd have to reduce the supply by 99% today and radically shift the way beef is produced worldwide.
And even that 1% / 99% isn't the entire story. That only tells you what is grass-finished vs cows that eat grain. An even smaller portion of that 1% are cows that are eating grass from a place that could solely grow grass and could not be used for other purposes such as forest.
In other words, a bit of a race to the bottom.
As for your appraisal company, I'm not familiar with it. I am familiar with the Dutch appraisal companies, which spam the shit out of municipalities with automated legal objection letters, overwhelming the paralegal capacity, and they make money off of a combination of upfront legal fees (paid not by the homeowner, but by the municipality, as 'everyone deserves access to the law' here) and savings on the property taxes. It's really approaching spam and has blackmail elements, as if the municipality doesn't respond within a legal timelimit, there can be fines or moneys awarded on-top.
All of this is great for the individual owners who use the service, but terrible for the municipality and thereby for society. After all, the municipality is now doing a lot of unnecessary work responding to automated and entirely free (spamlike) appraisal objections. Of course the municipality's budget is paid for by the tax payers. So everyone is in the end paying for this nonsense, in the form of higher tax rates.
Not only that, but in the Netherlands it's lead to a system where the appraisal values are severely distorted downwards, and compensated with higher property taxes. Instead of taxing 1% of $1 million market value, they'll simply appraise it at $600k and set the property tax at 1.6666%. Nobody can reasonably argue the $1m home is worth less than $600k, so the municipality is freed from these appraisal spam companies, and is still raking in the same tax revenue. But these unnaturally low appraisals are distorting other things (e.g. the national wealth taxes which are based on these undervalued municipal appraisals) and it's all not pretty.
None of this is good for society and I'm pretty disappointed that we're now seeing tech move further into the field of spam, even in a physical sense.
> The problem of childcare cost is unsolvable with women at work, it's as simple as that.
What kind of nonsense is this?
One in six women never go on to have children, it's great news that these women's access to the labour market has improved.
Second, childcare ratios aren't 1 to 1. In fact they're about 1 to 4 for babies <1 year, 1 to 10 for 5 year olds, and 1 to 12 at school age. Suppose all women had children (they don't), society still greatly benefits from the efficiency of a childcare ratio as high as 1:12 as opposed to women caring for their child 1:1.
Third, children aren't permanently children, and certainly not permanently babies. The first few years requires a lot of parental or private childcare, but afterwards kids mostly go to school for most of the day. A woman will have at least 45 years between adulthood and retirement and most of that kids won't need constant parental care like the first few years. Making sure women stay active in the labour force (even part-time) will greatly help their chances in the labour market throughout their career.
Fourth, I see no reason why we're speaking about women rather than about parents. Providing income and childcare are shared responsibilities. It's fine to arrange it in your own family as you wish, but society shouldn't speak about these topics as if they should only apply to women.
Not sure I see the issue. Renting and owning has very different risk profiles, which is why you'll find people can rent a place they're unable to buy.
The risks are with loss of income, e.g. due to job loss, sickness etc. Such things are somewhat inevitable in the span of a 30y mortgage. In such a situation the tenant can move to more appropriate alternative housing, e.g. moving to a smaller home, a home that's not as well located, sharing a home with others, friends, family etc.
In the case of an owner it gets trickier, typically the person would eventually be forced to sell the house to be released from the contractual obligations to pay the mortgage. The risk events' probabilities correlate, i.e. you're more likely to lose your job in an economic downturn, as does everyone else, which means home prices are more likely to be low during an economic downturn, meaning a forced-sale during such times can mean you're selling your home for less than the value of the loan, leaving you not only out of income, out of a home, but also with a sizeable debt.
In other words, there can be reasonable explanations for why a government could buy homes and rent them out to tenants who can afford the rent, while those same tenants could not afford an equivalent mortgage.
Second, I think it'd be very sensible to assume that the government is not going to be renting out these units at market rate. In other words, they're subsidising the tenants, with taxpayer money. That's why the rent would be affordable, but the purchase would not, for the tenants. If anything that implies this decision is lowering the effects of inequalities, due to in-effect a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor.
Not promising equity if you never sell can be a sensible decision, because otherwise you create expectations of a cash-out that never comes.
Not promising equity if you do sell can be a sensible decision, because you keep more of the money to yourself. As long as you're transparant about not selling, employees can evaluate your remaining value proposition (salary, profit-sharing, perks) and decide whether it's worth it.
All 12k employees evaluated that value proposition and said it's worth it.
At some point the founders changed their mind. And that's okay, people change their minds. Unless they lied about it from the beginning and tricked people into a company vision they knew was bs, but the evidence doesn't clearly point to that.
I personally feel I used to have quite a good memory, able to remember things I was told without being interested. Now I feel my memory is sharp with those items I find important to remember, but details of random conversations I don’t automatically store anymore. When revisiting those conversations later I find myself noticing I forgot things. I also search for words a bit more often. But it’s hard to recognise the pattern and even harder to trace it to MDMA.
But it is all in line with the impact on memory tasks from academic studies on MDMA users.
Not familiar with the symptoms you noted personally or academically.
My hunch is that damage will be partially temporary and partially permanent. But really it’s just a hunch.
Not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive but it's likely leaning hard towards one of the two.
I've got a bit of a love/hate relationship with MDMA. I tried it for the first time around age 26, and did it about 4x a year the 3 years after, usually with my girlfriend. In the past year I've not done any drugs and am conflicted about where to go from here.
The initial experiences the first year were really just pure bliss in a way I'd not experienced before, and the feeling of being on cloud 9 lasted pretty strongly for weeks, and months later I could still relive the good feelings by recollecting it, or listening to certain music. As you describe, speaking comfortably with your partner was amazing. The feeling of having empathy for a loved one, and receiving it back, was one of the most wonderful aspects of it, the one I probably enjoyed the most, and longed for while sober. (more-so than the body-feel, the touching, the music, all of which was amazing too).
In the second year of use that developed into a more black/white experience of a heavy-upper and then a complete lack of it the day after. I don't think I had any downers, but the contrast between pure bliss one moment, and a very regular mundane living room setting that same evening, was definitely strange. It put the presence or absence of happiness in the spotlight, whereas before I didn't generally pay that much attention to my state of happiness. Feeling bliss wasn't an obsession, and lacking it wasn't an issue. After MDMA, that calculus changed a little bit.
In that year I also realise how artificial the experiences of drugs were. MDMA still gave me amazing experiences with friends and my SO, some of the conversations we'd not normally have really did have lasting effects in a positive way. At the same time, it felt like we were cheating. Feeling comfortable enough on drugs to discuss certain things is great, but it also highlighted we weren't communicating completely honestly without drugs. And lastly, there were some indications that we weren't the same person on drugs, either, and that the drug personality wasn't necessarily the 'real one' that lies underneath without inhibitions. I've seen friends cheerfully smile as they told me their phone was stolen at a festival due to drugs, whereas they lost precious pictures/data and money (which they couldn't afford), and were devastated about this the next day.
I still enjoyed MDMA without any cynicism, but the rose-tinted glasses had come off.
In the third year of use I think I noticed I was slightly less happy generally, and while on drugs the highs weren't as high. It's hard to isolate this, it could have a million causes. But my feeling was my brain has been altered for the worse due to the drugs and that it was time to stop. It's been a year now and I'm quite happy to have stopped. At the same time, an amazing experience unlike any other is a few dollars and 30 minutes away. I'm happy to have tried drugs, but I kind of feel it's probably best for me to stay away from it from now on and treat it like a middle-class family treats a Michelin star restaurant: every few years, on vacation, you may indulge, but otherwise you don't think about it. I think those who can limit it to once a year or even less, will find MDMA is quite amazing. For those like me who went down the rabbit hole a bit and tried it multiple times a year for years (or worse, those who do it every weekend), probably will suffer at some point.
Sometimes you see articles stating '25% of all homes last year were bought by investors', but failing to mention that 20% of that 25% were homes sold by investors, too. i.e. company A selling to company B, an apartment block fully rented out. Sometimes company A and B are part of the same group structure, and they're simply restructuring. And so really the percentage of investors buying homes that could otherwise be bought by citizens, is actually only 5%.
Secondly, there's a lot of international capital flowing in because capital is extremely mobile and knows no borders. It doesn't mean foreigners own the real estate. Everytime a Dutch investor (e.g. a Dutch pension fund) buys real estate, it typically finances it with a combination of its own money and borrowed money, and the borrowed capital is typically raised on international financial markets.
I find the news is quite unsophisticated in detailing these nuances, and typically chooses the most incendiary headline that they can get away with.
e.g. "25% of homes bought by foreign investors." or hell even "50% of real estate bought by foreign investors", instead of 5% of available homes bought-up by Dutch pension funds", all three statements could be based on the same data-set.
If you remove buy-to-let investors, then buying a home becomes easier, but not necessarily any cheaper, because the rental supply (from buy-to-let) drops and therefore the prices of rentals go up, thereby increasing the demand for buying a home, countering the lower demand from buy-to-let investors. Demand has been moved around, the shortages are still as big, and there's no significant effect on prices.
For example: https://www.kadaster.nl/documents/1953498/3407456/Onderzoek+...
Happy to read your sources as well.
> The CIA even lists the Dutch housing market as the largest risk factor in the stability of the Dutch housing market.
I don't understand?
If you read it, you'll find it explicitly states they could not establish a causal relationship between investors and increased prices. (i.e. it says exactly what I stated).
They do find a correlation (which is heavily referenced in the news and misinterpreted), which would be expected. Investors who study the market and are investing professionally, are more likely than the average, and definitely more likely than below-average, to invest in neighbourhoods which turn out to see more price increases than neighbourhoods that investors chose not to invest in. That's of course because it's their job and their expertise. It doesn't mean they're causing the price increases.
It's a bit like saying there's a correlation in prices between prices of stocks of companies that professional investors choose to invest in or not. That's obvious, professional investors seek returns, and are expected to invest in such companies. But the investors aren't causing the tech stocks to become valuable. They simply are, by way of their profits. Google (once established) isn't high-value because investors choose to buy its shares. Investors detect the value and pursue to own it. Real estate is no different. Which is why the study found a correlation, but explicitly did not establish a causal relationship.
It can be a misleading to say this means only 50% or 37% of your interest can be deducted. It could still be fully deducted. i.e. if your income is taxed at 37% rate, then the 37% rate of 2023 will mean your entire interest can be deducted from your income (100% interest deduction).
It means that at higher progressive tax rates for higher incomes, e.g. at 50%, only 37% of the 50% can be deducted.
What you mention around Airbnb shouldn't be addressed through a buy-to-let ban, but an airbnb or short-term rental ban, which already exists in various forms. If there's problems with enforcement, address that. The ghost-town you described happened regardless of airbnb but due to literal lockdown measures that affected everyone, in particular the local population, you don't see the effect anymore despite tourists still largely staying away.
> Because of the rising prices, the annual property tax to be paid also increases dramatically.
No that's not correct. Typically Dutch municipalities tax based on what they need. If they need 1 million, they'd charge 1% of 100 in property values, or 2% of 50 million in property values. Price increases don't translate into higher property taxes.
You can see a video of how Utrecht does it, on their own website: https://bghu.nl/belasting/ozb
In fact, in Utrecht property tax rates decreased by about 22% in the past 6 years, due to increasing home prices.
Of course there is inflation, in absolute terms the number is increasing. But what you're describing isn't happening. I own a home in Utrecht, too.
Many studies in the Netherlands have shown investors aren't the cause of the price increases, I don't think this policy will solve things. It'll just relieve some pressure on the buying market and put extra pressure on the rental market.
> People blame the low interest rate
Yes, these people are economists, including the Dutch Central Bank, the AFM, every bank, every professor, in countless studies. The effect is clear and obvious.
That means you won't move out until 5 years after you've started earning more, and if your earnings were temporarily high, you get to stay. But if you're consistently earning a ton, you have to leave.
That's not so crazy considering that there's people who're low-income on a 10y waiting list for the home you'd be occupying, there has to be a mechanism that makes you have to leave. Yes it's hard to find something great at 3-4k, but it's even harder for someone at 2k who's 'spot' you're occupying. That could be limited to 5 years.
Everyone has a hard time finding a place, but why are some rich getting subsidised indefinitely at the expense of some poor?
But apart from evictions, I've never understood why we can't simply have dynamic rental rates adjusted to the market rate. I know people who live in Zuid for 500 a month in a home that's 1500 market rate, and their household income is 3x the average. Why can they not be made to pay 1500 to the social housing association? When they move out, the home reverts back to the subsidised rate for a low-income family.
I understand this can't be done on old contracts with no contractual clauses that make this possible, contracts are contracts after all. But we've had this situation for many years, and new contracts still allow the possibility of consequence-free scheefwonen. That's pretty absurd to me.
For homes purchased after January 1st, you can still get a license to temporary rent out the home. But you'll need to have lived in the home yourself for at least 1 year. Temporary rentals can be done for 2 years at the moment, and extended once more, I assume the same would apply under the new law. So the 2-3 years could be covered.
Existing ownership isn't affected, as far as I know. This only would apply to new transactions.
What is the 'would need' referring to, your ideal situation, current law, or proposed law? If it's any of the last two, I don't think you're correct but I'd be happy to read any references you may have to substantiate this.