forgotmyoldname

Random land outside of the middle of urban centers isn't that valuable, especially when population isn't growing. What is someone going to do, hold onto it for decades and hope someone buys it from them at a 10x markup and be enough to offset the taxes they paid?

In some places (or at least the US), old houses generally gain value. Of course, land is valuable in and of itself, but there's no shame in buying a 100 year old house in the US. There's no worry of earthquake damage, generally no risk of extensive mold due to a drier climate than East Asia, nobody really worries about ghosts infesting the home, etc. Plus, 100 year old American houses are quite honestly probably better than the cardboard and paper mache houses that have been common recently. In my experience, 1920s apartments were much nicer than the post 1970s places I lived in.

One wonderful thing about Japan is that houses are as much of an investment as toothbrushes. The minute someone uses it, its value drops immensely.

10 years is old but still somewhat livable and generally cheap. Once you get past 20 years, locals basically see the house as scrap. It's really easy to buy cheap houses or apartments over 20 years old. Some clueless foreigners new to Japan see these prices and think they can flip them and resell to get rich, and they're always disappointed to find out it doesn't work that way.

40-50 year old houses can be bought for around car prices if you're willing to live 30 minutes from a smallish city. You're basically just paying for the land at that point.

Macs are a small market, but Apple definitely sets trends. Once they adopt a technology, people "know" it works and it's safe to switch.

If servers can run on cheap ARM hardware that uses less electricity and runs far cooler without much of a performance difference, that's a massive improvement. Electricity savings would more than justify a switch. Apple has shown that it's possible at the desktop/laptop level. Now they or someone else can prove it works at the server level as well.

I lived in the PNW and loved that I could take a bus just about anywhere. It was a big draw for me.

If it was a hellscape dominated by 26 lane highways and hours of traffic to get anywhere like many parts of the US, I never would've bothered moving there.

Plenty of professionals take business trips and present and share their work. It's not unusual to want to carry your work computer home, to a hotel, or to a conference and have enough power to comfortably continue working on it.

Yeah, I've tried switching to other search engines a few times, but one domain where a lot of them really lack is non-English results.

Google has increasingly turned to garbage these past few years. But searching anything non-English on other search engines really feels like randomly populated results.

Location and temporal results are also lacking on non-Google results. Google also over-optimizes for them, so sometimes DDG is nice when Google is for some reason absolutely convinced I'm searching from some random town in another country and is only serving up results for that area.

That doesn't mean they're currently homeless.

Being a Target employee also self-selects for low-wage demographics. Let's say the average target employee is in the bottom 20% of income (likely lower, maybe slightly higher, but definitely nowhere near the top 50%). This is saying 12.8% of these low-income individuals experienced a period of homelessness at some point. So 12.8% of 20% of the working poor experienced homelessness. That's saying that about 2.5% of the working poor experienced homelessness (potentially only days or weeks) at some point while working there (which many people work there for 5, 10, 20 years). Not unreasonable.

No different from saying 50% of people once went to college. 50% of people certainly aren't in college now, but at some point, they were.

I think you're responding to the wrong post. I said none of whatever you're aimlessly rambling about.

Seems like we're reverting to an old class divide. Aristocrats who get paid for having money, and peasants working the fields and told there's no money with which to pay them.

People might end up finding a solution by looking at history. France in the late 1700s and Russia in the early 1900s might end up being a reference point for some country in the mid 2000s.

As well as endless newsletter signups in a century where nobody checks their email.

Takayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Fuji, Tokyo, and Nagoya were most definitely full of tourists.

Kyoto and Takayama in particular were probably half tourists by population 2 years ago. Those towns are virtually ghost towns now that Chinese tourists are gone.

Visiting places with no foreign tourism and driven just by local industry, like Toyohashi or Yokkaichi or small islands, and you'll see considerably less cleanup efforts. Even going through Tokyo at 4 AM looks very different from Tokyo at 8 AM after some cleanup is done.

What's truly wild to think about is how eagerly and relatively easily humans completely shaped nature to our desires until recently, and now an uncomfortably large number of people today think any obvious harm being done to the planet is completely natural and humans are too small and insignificant to be a factor.

We went from being a few steps away from actively melting the Arctic, to people saying humans couldn't possibly melt ice.

Those are tourist-heavy towns. They're actively cleaned up to keep tourists wanting to come.

It's very different in locations where tourists aren't common, especially post-covid.

There's science proving that covering your mouth to prevent spread of germs and getting vaccinated doesn't work?

That's a bold claim. I'd like to see your science.

Signed, person living in a country with almost no ongoing infections and with a high vaccination and mask-wearing rate.

I don’t mean to bust your bubble, but I live in a town in Japan with basically no foreigners, but there’s plenty of litter and it’s gotten substantially worse since COVID started and the few foreigners that were here all left.

Beaches are also getting dirtier and dirtier with people having parties and just throwing plastic bottles, alcohol cans, food packets, etc wherever they please. Quiet places far from town I used to visit 2 years ago turned into absolute dumps this past year.

You give your money to X in order to facilitate buying Y. Y is a potential investment opportunity that promises explosive growth. X promises that your money is backed by cash, so there's nothing to lose. People give their money to X and purchase Y. Some people make loads of money and cash out.

How exactly is X making a profit when they're just working as an intermediary? Why do they absolutely refuse to show their finances? How exactly are they getting the resources to do all this?

Now, am I talking about Ponzi or Tether?

I’m 100% against having a ruling upper class and hard labor lower class, especially one determined by nationality. It’s disgusting and something we left behind in the 19th century until international capitalism reinvented it.

Tether takes a bunch of money to facilitate users converting to Bitcoin or other currencies. The maintainers of Tether keep sucking up real money, minting Tether that they claim is backed by cash (real currency), but the real cash backing goes poof and they aren't demonstrating that there is any stable backing. But so long as other crypto isn't crashing, they can reliably take real cash, skim off some for themselves, and pay out small amounts of what they receive to people cashing out on Tether. More people are putting money in than taking money out.

This is all elaborated in the article.

Now if, for some reason, too many people decide to withdrawal and cash out on their Tether, there's not a sufficient cash backing there. It'll completely collapse and people will be left with a bunch of Tether that's no more valuable than any other bunch of random sequences of 0s and 1s on the internet. This is no different from the original Ponzi scheme. Just replace crypto with stamps/international reply coupons and it's absolutely identical.

Keep in mind that the original Ponzi scheme ran for quite a while and even had the media defending it as a great investment.

Tether (and most crypto) seems like someone copied Ponzi's original scheme 1:1. Put in some money, transfer it to another format (Tether to other crypto, with Ponzi it was stamps), then eventually pull out loads of cash. Some people will undeniably get rich off it. But it's not sustainable.

Nobody has a switch to just turn off all power in the Philippines either. That wasn't the point. The point is that it's a massive energy waste that grew the same exact way a cancer does--out of virtually nowhere and uncontrollably. If it never would've existed, that's a huge amount of waste that simply wouldn't exist either.

Bitcoin is anything but efficient. It takes massive amounts of energy to make a simple transaction. Far more than any current currency transfer network. If it continues to grow, and if it would horrifically become mainstream, energy usage would be several magnitudes higher than it is now.

Right now its primary uses are for bringing more people into the scheme to eventually dump for cash, and to exchange for illicit materials online. It's a very niche case used by a tiny, tiny fraction of the total population, and it already consumes more energy than many entire countries. Extrapolate that energy usage to 1000x the current population and 1000x the current usage to assume everyone is in on it and using it regularly for normal transactions--at a minimum, we're hitting 1000x energy usage rates.

That's energy usage exceeding China and America's total energy usage combined. Just to send bits on a network. You'd be more efficient carting blocks of gold manually across the world for every transaction.

America, India, and China? Those are fully functioning, massive economies that power the entire world and have people commuting, working, eating, farming, manufacturing, and doing all the normal processes that life entails.

Are you saying we should compare a digital coin with very niche usage to the collective impact of all of those actions taking place in the most massively populated and economically significant nations to ever exist?

And you're saying it's an insignificant amount of power, yet it consumes more power than an entire nation of 110,000,000 people? There are 110,000,000 people in the Philippines using cash every single day to drive their economy and live. Are there even 100 million people using bitcoin for daily business and consumer transactions involving physical goods? Or even 10 million? Or 1 million?

Is there a reason you're pretty serious about downplaying the impact of electricity equivalent to 110 million people and saying it's not globally significant? Because it's pretty significant. If that many people stopped using all electricity overnight, the impact would be pretty significant. Wiping out the entire Philippine economy would absolutely send shockwaves around the world. That'd be a huge hit to manufacturing and food industries on every corner of earth.

Would Bitcoin suddenly vanishing be more impactful than the Philippines vanishing overnight? Or, to choose a different country from that previous site, The Netherlands?

So Bitcoin uses more energy than an entire country of 110 million people (the Philippines).

That's absolutely nuts. If you said you could reduce an entire country's CO2 emissions to zero overnight, and you had a valid plan to do so, you'd be on the cover of every newspaper for your revolutionary plan to help save the earth.

But say you want to flip a switch and turn off a single cryptocurrency in order to do it, and you'll have floods of people trivializing it, saying "well, let me tell you why 110 million people's CO2 emissions aren't that big of a deal..."

I hear this a lot. It sounds nice.

Yet trying to set up crypto as a person in a developed country in 2021 is kind of a pain in the ass. It's not too hard to exchange between types of crypto, but getting real money that I can buy a pizza with in and out of an exchange? Not too easy. There are requirements for credit cards or confirmed bank accounts for payment, scans of an ID card or driver's license to prove I'm a human, the possibility banks can at any point determine it's a scam and block transfers to any exchange, and so on.

If it's that hard for me, a person in a developed and ostensibly free country to do it, how the hell is some average person--not a government official or wealthy person with connections--in North Korea or Eritrea going to set it up and secure their financial future to any degree better than a pocket full of cash and old jewelry?