giaour

The $580MM transaction described in the article is already 1,000 times larger than the alleged congressional insider trading by Paul Pelosi that caused Sen. Hawley to introduce the PELOSI act.

You're right, but I think everyone is looking at second-order effects where causal links are impossible to prove. [0] is recent research on how expanding housing stock (even just at the top end) will "expand affordability," although they, too, are mostly looking at the effect on rents.

The most overt statement of "we don't want to build more houses because it will decrease the value of existing houses" in recent memory was Trump[1], who is not exactly a reliable source (and whose whole brand prior to politics was destroying the character of established neighborhoods by building giant condo complexes).

[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5780364 [1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/trump-says-the-quiet...

> Do you believe that small drop is a result of new development or just a blip in the market?

I don't know, and I don't believe it's possible to know in a specific instance. Like I said above, I believe that in the long term, denser towns raise the property values of their suburbs by making the area more desirable.

But there is definitely a plausible case that increasing the supply of housing immediately lowers or slows the growth of property values by reducing scarcity. It's the argument made by both sides of the "missing middle" debate in Arlington -- the pro side says it will make housing more affordable, and the con side says it will lower everyone's property values. The article we're commenting on found that at least some version of this is true for the Austin, TX -- increasing housing stock lowered rents, even if the new stock is luxury units.

The article we are commenting on is literally about this happening in Austin.

Yeah, I live in Falls Church, which has seen more build-up than other areas in Northern Virginia because the city has never had the kind of restrictive zoning that the anti-"Missing Middle" campaign is still fighting in Arlington. The value of my single-family home peaked in 2024 and has dropped slightly since. To my understanding, this is generally true of my zip code and not true of comparable zip codes in the area.

But Falls Church is much nicer now that a few mid-rise apartment buildings with ground-level retail have gone in! As a resident, I am very happy about all the new development. I expect that over time, that will have a positive effect on property values, but there is an observable short- and medium-term effect working in the opposite direction as the increased housing supply eases demand on the existing housing stock.

> I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no?

It's a commons problem. In your scenario, you have absolutely increased the value of your property. 20 apartments is more valuable than a single family home. However, you have also reduced aggregate demand by housing 20 people. That reduced the value of your neighbors' properties (or at least reduced the rate at which their value increased).

NIMBYism posits that values will continue to increase without forcing any property owners to invest in improvements so long as they collectively block any efforts to increase supply.

Are you saying there is no difference between the aggressiveness shown by the Department of War since it was renamed vs the years prior to the renaming?

Because it sure looked to me like they renamed the department and immediately started bombing fishing boats, then affirmatively decided to start a war with Iran, all while the guy who came up with the new name goes on TV and screams about how we're free to kill more people now.

Yes, but there is protocol-level support for "commenting" on a friend's post via a post of your own.

In the FAQ at the bottom of the post, the author mentions that this proposal is just the AT protocol (BlueSky) without the active, "firehose" component.

I don't think this is a real proposal, but more a thought experiment about how a static site could integrate into BlueSky. I saw a few similar efforts to integrate the "passive" components of ActivityPub into static site generators so that you could make your static blog consumable via the Fediverse.

In reality, if you really wanted to publish your static site blog posts on BlueSky, this is probably a good place to start! As you mention, there are some serious usability issues with doing everything by hand, but you may find that acceptable or invest in workarounds. Maybe it's possible to use your BlueSky identity so that you aren't in the business of managing keys. Or maybe you could use a script or static site generator plugin to pull credentials from somewhere.

Perhaps CZ's prosecution was generally regarded as political among the people you talk to regularly, but the contemporaneous media consensus (at least to my recollection) was that Binance had openly flouted US law for years and was finally being reined in. E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/binance-crypto-c... was representative.

> What is a border when crossing it without permission is not illegal?

There aren't good statistics on how many undocumented immigrants overstayed a visa (and therefore legally crossed the border) vs how many entered without a visa, but experts estimate that it's somewhere around 40-45% [0]. It's not a criminal act to overstay a visa, though you do become subject to deportation. So a good chunk of "illegal immigrants" are doing something less illegal than, say, driving a car whose registration has expired (which is a criminal act), but, as another commenter noted above, we don't refer to "illegal drivers" on our roads.

The traditional term for someone who has not fulfilled a positive legal obligation like renewing their car registration is a "scofflaw," and I would not object to anyone referring to "scofflaw immigrants" the way I object to the phrase "illegal immigrants."

[0]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/aug/24/kevin-mcca...

Beyond the reasonable suspicion of a threat to their life, the officer must believe that: a) the threat is imminent, and b) the threat will reasonably be mitigated by the application of force. An officer cannot, for example, immediately shoot someone who plausibly promises to murder them in 36 hours.

Just because some people who say "no one is illegal" also say "no more borders," that does not automatically mean that the former implies the latter. If that were the case, we could paint everyone who agrees with Nick Fuentes on any point (including, in the extreme, "nice weather we're having today") as a antisemite. The old joke linking dietary choices to Nazism ("You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!") is meant to make light of this logical fallacy.

The grandparent post accurately captured what I have understood people to mean by "no one is illegal" -- it is meant to protest a dehumanizing way to describe a class of people.

Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.

Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?

The predatory pricing pattern the FTC would in theory sure over would be: selling items at an artificially low price until the competition goes out of business, then raising prices once you are the only seller left standing. It's the second step that makes it anticompetitive instead of just competitive

I don't think Amazon was producing anything they sold in their grocery stores. They were probably buying the same white label items as everyone else for their store brand.

Standard grocery margins are usually lower, in the 30%-40% range, and are often much lower for promotional items. Rotating "loss leaders" to get people in the door are standard practice. IMHO that would make it hard to bring an antitrust action against a grocery chain, as pretty much every store engages in a limited amount of predatory pricing as a marketing technique.

50% is the standard retail markup, but it varies by industry.

It depends on where you lived. NYC had a large number of "black car" livery services where you would call, arrange a ride, and typically get a price up front. It wasn't legal to hail them on the street, but in practice it was pretty common to hail a black car (a "gypsy cab") and negotiate a price up front. Source: I lived a few blocks north of Central Park and in Hamilton Heights before Uber was a thing and took gypsy cabs a couple of times a week.

Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days.

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

I would probably go for natural resources management or population biology.

Masters degrees are (from my experience in the US workforce) generally only professionally useful when there is an explicit requirement for one set by a professional standards body or codified in law. As in, you usually need a masters to get tenure as a teacher in a public school, and some government jobs have specific and inflexible degree requirements. But for private sector employment, masters degrees are mostly just for personal enrichment.

I don't think the percentage has changed since I moved here, though the dollar amount I pay has gone up significantly as the assessed value of my house has risen.

Like with any tax, I'm guessing the rate would change if the county's revenues didn't match their expenses?

I don't know what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that wealth should be taxed but only at the county/municipal level? Or are you saying wealth can't be taxed because of federalism?

You owe tax based on your percentage of ownership. The taxing authority doesn't care about equity because you own 100% of your house (albeit with a lien) even if your outstanding mortgage obligations exceed the value of the house. Generally, when you close on a house in the US, you walk away with the title to the house and a mortgage equal to a large percentage of the house's value. The bank only owes property taxes if they foreclose on the property and take the title from you.

I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but all the property taxes I have ever paid (which, to be fair, has been in one county) have been a fixed percentage of the value of the property.

Huh, I could have sworn the goalposts were over here in the "tax it" debate, not the "ensure it is taxed by a specific entity" debate.

Yes, I pay property taxes every year that are based on the current assessed values of my home and car. Only special classes of assets are subject to property taxes. "Wealth tax" proposals are a generalization of the idea of real property taxes so as to stop penalizing specific asset classes like homes.

Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine is a good overall history of the Luddite movement (though be aware it does not strive to be ideologically neutral).

Genuinely curious: what did you see in GrapheneOS history that indicates that the OS is specifically designed to defeat law enforcement (as opposed to their stated goals of defeating ad surveillance and stalkerware)?

I get it, but I still wish I could use a non-realistic skin tone to match my mood instead of my body.

Sometimes I'm really into your suggestion of Taco Bell for lunch and want to give it a rainbow sparkle thumbs up.