thatfrenchguy

Yeah salaries in the US are higher in nominal terms

> Without Prop 13, a big chunk of the NIMBYs who are currently against more housing would likely change their tune if they had to choose between no new housing or much higher property taxe

I mean, the way you make housing units more affordable is to make more of them, but for existing homeowners of SFH, building condo buildings in their neighborhood will increase their property value because the competition for the remaining lots increase. Given we build close to zero family friendly multi family in this country (ie, appartments buildings have zero family oriented amnenities), there isn’t much in there for nimbys. It’s the right thing to do but you can’t except nimbys to join in on a purely monetary basis.

I mean, this is not what the article is about though.

What the author of article is describing is just bureaucracy ever expanding (anyone who’s worked at the same place for a decade knows that bureaucracy rarely gets better), mostly decided by mediocre admin people who have never heard of Goodheart’s law. Bureaucrats loves KPIs, shitty average metrics (because distributions are hard to understand for bureaucrats for some reason), and generally does not have to field the consequences of their actions (notably because they don’t measure them!).

Except you burn the oil once and keep the solar panel and batteries for one or two decades

Real estate is not the only reason why folks have less children, especially in cultures where people don’t mind having less space. Kids are expensive for other reasons in china

I mean, Piketty showed this a decade ago in capital in the 21th century: the higher your income percentile and wealth percentile, the higher saving rate and the higher returns on your investment (which is negative for folks at the bottom of the distribution).

Of course the other problem with the projection is that BLS average expenses aren’t super accurate to project what people are spending on at those income percentiles :)

Single stage forced air / air handlers AC systems are basically only found in North America because they are so grossly inefficient and because most people in the rest of the world realize they can save money by not having all of their rooms ran off the same system. The rest of the world runs on mini splits for that reason.

US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.

We do tax gross 1% of wealth, it’s called property taxes. Only applies to middle class folks in their 30s though.

We’re like, a lot richer than before the GFC in California though.

H-1B / L-1 are non-immigrant visas, immigrant visas are green cards yes. Pausing green card processing in consulates after (on sketchy legal grounds) forcing folks to not do adjustment of status for getting an immigrant visa inside the country is, indeed, how the admin is trying to get around doing their job the way the INA intends them to.

> Take "Medicare-level payments to providers". Hospitals have an operating margin of 2-5%. Medicare pays 50% less than private insurance. So doing this would require either layoffs, cutting salaries for doctors/nurses/etc, or both. This may well be the right decision for society as a whole--that's a big part of the debate here--but there's no free lunch.

I mean, admin costs at hospitals are ~25%, around half of that is directly linked to billing. Administrative costs in the US (because of course you have the same costs on the other side in the insurance side) are around 30% of cost in general, which is pretty insane.

The lack of regulation around pricing transparency and generally the lack of one-price-per-code (which the government uses to its "advantage" to get lower medicaid/medicare rates for sure) is what has caused this stupid arms race on both sides.

The fact that everyone in your peer group does it (looking at you, people who are faking research paper contributions by high schoolers) does not mean that it is a criteria for actual college admissions.

I mean, marginally, any data center (or mall, house, but the numbers involved are smaller) you'll build in Texas is going to be a lot of tons of CO2 just from their added marginal power consumption

You don’t get fingerprints collected on departure, just on arrival. Unless you go through automated gates maybe?

Cardiac events from Apple Watches is not “AI” though

Even for upper middle class parents, "using a screen as a babysitter" just means you're more stressed and have less hands around. My kiddo has not seen a screen at the age of 2, but that's just because he has two parents at home at 5pm everyday.

> 100 years old

It’s 2026, they’re more like 140 year old by now :)

> now crammed full of people and cars

Funnily enough, if you look at the 1950 census, in every single building I have lived in in San Francisco, there were more people than there are now :).

The city has so much underdeveloped land (come on, 2% of of the surface of of the second densest city in the US spent on the lowest density sport ever, golf???), tearing down our heritage does not make sense when we have so much usable space.

This is an issue in other cities that don’t have prop 13 fwiw, the United States just does not do redevelopment barring a few poor inner neighborhoods getting gentrified by foreclosures in like Houston or Dallas. That’s the natural consequence of individual ownership of houses.

Consequences for American car executives, are you crazy? Have you seen Stellantis cars recently? Large parts of the US (and European most likely) car industry is driving straight into irrelevance

It is though, like, 90-95% of suburbia, and why the US has close to 100% of car commuters ( https://vis.csh.ac.at/citiesmoving/ ). Even small cities like Rennes (or even Clermont-Ferrand, which has objectively mediocre transit) have less car commuters than NYC, which is insane.

Folks did not have kids during WW1 though: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalité_en_France#/media/Fich... :)

Yeah, the main issue with differential privacy is that you need competent government officials making decisions who understand math beyond a high school level.

Selective layoffs vs arbitrary people having to leave the country have very different consequences

> The law does have immigrant visas for people who can come here and say "I want to work here and seek permanent residency. I'm not intending to go back." H1B isn't like that.

you are, obviously, interpreting the law to fit your narrative:

""The fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 of this title or has otherwise sought permanent residence in the United States shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence for purposes of obtaining a visa as a nonimmigrant described in subparagraph (H)(i)(b) or (c), (L), or (V) of section 1101(a)(15) of this title or otherwise obtaining or maintaining the status of a nonimmigrant described in such subparagraph"

All this means is that you, indeed, can be dual intent and apply for permanent residency while holding a H-1B, like generations of Americans have done before ourselves.

I mean, the issue is that a large number H1B folks have vital skills for the US economy and that even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble

I mean, both GDP and average salaries in Czechia is higher so arguably at some point you might want playgrounds for your children

Compared to cost of living though?

You essentially have no data to back this up though, especially given the filed H1B/L-1 labor data for big tech is first year of employement with only base salary, which bears no ressemblance to what their wages will be even just 3 years in.

> There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits

I mean, humans sleep and do other things than work, so they likely don’t hit their weekly limits or their 5 hour limits every single 5 hour chunk :)