ZoomerCretin

> hoarding of real state and making it a miserable investment.

Homeowners are a powerful voting bloc and do not want this. Many EU states also have excessive rent control, which creates another powerful voting bloc who also is opposed to any change in the housing market.

There is only ever one problem that makes housing too expensive: zoning restrictions that make it illegal to build huge volumes of cheap housing. There's a huge amount of evidence to support this, and very little evidence to support any other theory. Even in towns with a lot of tourism and AirBnBs, the problem is a lack of hotels (which are almost always superior to paying a cleaning fee and then having to clean your room yourself).

> and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile.

That is the entire goal of interest rate tightening. To impoverish the masses until much lower wages are finally considered "worthwhile."

Look at the incredibly strong and quick knee-jerk reaction in 2021 to enhanced unemployment schemes as soon as the vaccines went out. Employers wanted to hire at the same low rates of pay, but couldn't find enough workers of sufficient quality, so all levels of government treated this as a policy emergency: they cut unemployment, they cut food stamps and many social programs, they lowered the legal age at which you can work at all, work dangerous jobs, and work overnights, and the Federal Reserve illegally defied its mandate to maintain full-employment first, and then a *3%* inflation target when it jacked rates up very quickly.

> But I don’t think this is something groundbreaking isn’t it?

The vast majority of employment-related issues do not occur to elites and policymakers. These issues are completely invisible to them. Articles like this make real issues legible to the important people who are in a position to do something about it.

It was sold to the insurance industry so they could more accurately gauge the risk they face. It came to light because some particularly dangerous drivers found their insurance premiums rise to $500+/month.

The counter-example is the world where safe drivers much more heavily subsidize extremely bad drivers. If I have no accidents on my record in 10 years, and have every observable behavior that indicates low risk, why should I pay substantial amounts of money every year because the government does not want insurers to have the data to tell I'm not a high-risk driver?

I'd really like a Khan Academy-like site, maybe with explanations from different textbooks for each concept. Of course then you'd need a good set of diverse problems or a way to generate such problems.

It's easy to see the market producing a lot of cheap renewables now and think the government was never necessary, but without the government's early and heavy investments and mandates, we would have reached this point much further in the future.

To give an example, in the late 80s/early 90s, California mandated that 10% of major automakers' car sales be zero or very low emissions. GM started leasing EVs in 1996, and Toyota start selling the first hybrid in 1998.

Could you talk more about HuggingFace's new benchmark for LLMs? When did it become obvious that the old benchmarks were no longer sufficient:

Date (MM/DD/YYYY)-

(tab) Task

(tab) (tab) Details

etc

I've always done this. My coworkers have been frustrated with me in the past for asking them to write things down, because some of them overestimate my ability to listen to them speak for 5-10 minutes and remember every detail. It's very hard to forget what is written down.

Recently, I neglected to write down my thinking and progress for a week, and I was at a loss for where to begin the following Monday. Keeping a work journal (in my case, a linear text document with an entry for each day) is the most important productivity habit I have.

The first example is a bit confusing.

Example: input: a = [[1,2],[2,4]], b = [1,2] output:[5, 10] reasoning: 11 + 22 = 5; 12+ 24 = 10

Which 1 and 2 correspond to the 1 and 2 from a and b?

> Trying to keep barriers for entry low seems worth while.

With Section 174 (increasing business taxes on SWE salaries) + high interest rates, this is a big ask for US employers who loath hiring at the entry level in the best times.

To me, the real problem seems to be solving US employers' unwillingness to hire anyone without experience, after which the rest (hiring underrepresented groups) will follow. But why would they do this when they have all the experienced and senior engineers they want?

Is this not the exact problem DEI was created to solve, and is now being dismantled?

> There will be four ways in which ISA systems will work to slow the vehicle down, and it will be up to the manufacturers to pick which one they want to use. The EU regulations permit a system that can use a cascaded acoustic warning, a cascaded vibrating warning, an accelerator pedal with haptic feedback, or a speed control function in which the speed of the vehicle will be gradually reduced.

> "Even in the case of speed control function, where the car speed will be automatically gently reduced, the system can be smoothly overridden by the driver by pressing the accelerator pedal a little bit deeper," the European Commission adds.

So not speed limiters, but speed warners. Still, given that ebikes and escooters have been limited by legislation to 20-25mph, it only made sense to do the same for the much more obviously dangerous vehicles on the road. I hope we can do the same in the US, or at least make your car annoy you when you speed the way it annoys you when you don't have your seatbelt on.

Do you understand the implication of the answer to that question being "No, and it cannot delegate those powers"?

Congress would have to vote on giving approval for each new drug, not the FDA's bureaucrats.

Congress would have to vote on each individual edge case for welfare programs (SNAP, Social Security, Medicaid, etc), not their respective agencies.

Congress would have to vote on which individual people get Pell grants, how much, and how much their parents are expected to contribute to their university schooling, not the Department of Education.

Congress would have to vote to approve contracts for every federal agency.

The federal government would not function without some degree of delegation.

The constitution very explicitly grants Congress the right to strip jurisdiction from the federal courts.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S2-C2-...

How long until you grab something that has a price of $5 and it's already $7 by the time you get to checkout?

We need better pricing laws. Already, half the gas stations I go to don't have any price tags at all. And of the stores that do have price tags, none include sales tax.

Like a lot of anti-monopoly laws, the harmed party is not the consumer but other businesses.

No, you cannot simply refuse to give Apple their 30% (unless you are yourself big enough to negotiate an exemption; including waiving a 30% fee of your own for Apple's apps on your platforms) if you want access to their huge and very lucrative market.

Microsoft lost an anti-monopoly case because they bundled a free browser with Windows. Forcing your competitors to pay 30% and thus have higher costs and prices than your own competing services is a much more straightforward violation.

Why should speeding ticket funds not go to local governments? Noise may be damaging, but to a much lower degree than a violent death by car crash which speed limits reduce.

It's one of those "yes, obviously" situations that are surprisingly controversial if you mention it in conversation. There are a lot of people (likely the already heavily hearing-damaged) that have zero problem with road noise and are very dismissive of any and all noise concerns.

60% of new infections are women, yet they had a completely women-only trial?

The question may have been why the TRC and not the company that drilled it.

> I think it's time to require this on a national level. This is getting ridiculous.

How would you have known to opt out from your data being retained? Were you aware of this site before reading this article? I know I wasn't.

Nit: the hummer EV is 4.5 tons. The average SUV only has 2 tons of mass.

And what's the next sentence you didn't quote?

"Through an interagency process" of people handpicked by the President is not meaningfully distinct from what I said.

And the fourth says nothing about computers and hard drives. And yet, they are safe from search without a warrant.

The sale must be personally approved by the President of the United States. Every buyer will be blocked until they find one that is sufficiently hostile to the idea that Palestinians deserve human rights.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/tiktok-ban-china...

The "national security" argument was BS in 2018, and it's BS now. The only difference is now it's a real thorn in the side of the establishment in the US, because it's the only source of news and videos of Gaza that is not actively censored in the United States.

We have Russia Today in the US. We have CGTN. Both are okay because their viewership isn't sufficient to challenge the pro-Israeli propaganda put out by the MSM.

Even Mitt Romney admitted a lot of the pressure to ban TikTok came from the pro-Israel lobbyists: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/tiktok-ban-china...

You clearly did not look at any of my sources.

>I think my suggestion that finance is the most significant factor here is a stronger argument than a supply shortage.

You have zero evidence for this claim and cited zero sources.

>The number of homes per 1000 people changed very little between 2011 and 2022. At the same time prices went from NZD350k to NZD900k.

You cannot look at an entire country's housing/population ratio and think that explains everything. New homes in Queenstown don't reduce housing costs for people in Auckland or Christchurch. You need to look at the supply of housing in an area where it is a substitutable good: where you can switch housing without switching your job, school, friends, and life.

A new house 6 hours from me does not lower the price of housing in my neighborhood.

Vancouver has obscene housing prices because the city and the politically connected spend tens of thousands of hours fighting against any new housing, and any new supply. Just look at what happened when the Squamish Nation decided they were going to build high rises on the land they were given: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/14/canadian-indigeneous-na...

The entire city and all of the NIMBYs cried about their "neighborhood character" and tried every legal trick they could to block the development: threatening to not connect it to utilities.

Vancouver literally has single family homes within half a mile of downtown! Clearly there is room for growth.

This is akin to denying the existence of climate change or evolution, or that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Yes, housing prices are determined by supply and demand.

This was found to be true by a California Circuit of Appeals: https://x.com/CSElmendorf/status/1774115015551074434

This is found to be true by Blackstone, who frequently notes that shortages and low increases in new supply are fundamental to their strategy of buying and building housing for rent: https://x.com/RikAdamski/status/1643477536695803904 https://x.com/IDoTheThinking/status/1378737834824060931 "We could also be adversely affects by overbuilding or high vacancy rates of homes in our markets, which could result in an excess supply of homes and reduce occupancy and rental rates."

There are plenty of sources which show a strong correlation between new supply and housing prices: https://x.com/sam_d_1995/status/1762597879154123241 https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1761205726230216943 https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/1770961181093859375 https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1761028332781478227 (STRONGEST:) https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1761205728356802806

There is plenty of unused space in our cities for new housing: https://x.com/ftw_cool/status/1779228107754623084

Texas vs California; Texas builds a lot and has lower housing price growth, California builds little and has high housing price growth: https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1760995124690231526

This effect holds regardless of if the new housing is "affordable", "below-market rate", or "luxury": https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211

That supply and demand applies to housing has been reported repeatedly in the news: https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1757939504126832802

Lots of new apartments have been built lately. The effect on rent growth is obvious: https://x.com/mnolangray/status/1755818637750161540

Landlords themselves acknowledge the difficulty of finding tenants and getting high rents when there is a glut of housing inventory: https://x.com/sam_d_1995/status/1752346758254887132

Surprisingly, supply and demand also affect housing prices in the Midwest: https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1752008654734147718

Real estate investors and landlords acknowledging that new construction lowers rents and increases vacancies in their properties: https://x.com/SmackTrout/status/1652396524389961731