whybroke

>Repealing Prop 13...

Would put houses that the owner can't afford on the market thereby increasing supply. Adequate social security would mean they don't then get dumped on the streets.

>Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction...

Waiting changes the tax burden? No. But a capital gains tax would deincentivize flipping houses, a practice that serves little purpose other than inflating prices.

All the benefits of mortgage deduction are immediately swallowed by a commensurate increase in house price. People will always budget the same monthly payment, the only difference is whether the non-home owners (or future generation due to budget deficits) are unfairly burdened by having to make up for the missing tax revenue. The mortgage deduction is simply a funneling of money from the treasury to lending institution and provides zero long term benefit to the home owner. And Canada does not have it and their country has not fallen apart.

>Limiting realtors to hourly compensation?...

Hourly is good enough for lawyers, but salaried would also work. Seriously though, anything that does not incentive maximizing the sale price (such as pegging compensation to sale price) would reduce housing prices. Better would be tech simply replacing realtors entirely but unfortunately they have such clout in the assembly, their privileges are sacrosanct.

>I'm tempted to think you're trolling...

That is because you have never hear these ideas before exactly because they are not disseminated exactly because they would reduce housing prices which is political suicide and will cause TV views to turn the channel. I assure you not one of these ideas is my own and indeed they are well understood and discussed by very serious people eg[0], [1] and [2]

[0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-econo...

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/14/the-worst-ta...

[2]http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/15/heres-a-way-...

Very little impact on the present that I can think of (beyond Greenland's relationship to Denmark)

But the Greenland colony was inhabited by a few thousand people and lasted a few hundred years. Further more, the events around it are recorded in sagas that have survived to this day. Likewise the impact on the presumably hundreds of lives that we involved in the North American landings.

Anything that affects thousands of lives for hundreds of years is a big deal.

Zoning changes may be a fine short term solution for a finite number of units. With rezoning, this plan, non-profit, government housing or any number of options become viable.

But medium term, BART is already at maximum capacity and long term quality of life continues to drop and the economy chokes as housing cost per foot rises.

The real solution is removing the policies that drive up housing prices. Repeal prop 13, eliminate the mortgage deduction, tax capital gains on house sales aggressively, limit realtors to hourly compensation, end collusion among apartment management firms, improve social security so the middle class is no longer dependent on equity to survive old age, don't use tax funds to bail defaulters on mortgage payments while there are other people living on the street.

Somewhat off topic but about the section describing the viking arrival in Greenland and North America, it's astounding the impact on history that a tiny number of people taking big risks can have.

>We don't just let people put up houses on random pieces of land they don't own and live there.

The current lack of any serious action or even any real interest in solving the now generation old homeless problem makes shanty towns eventually inevitable. I know it will be embarrassing to have them scattered outside the richest cities in the country but for some unfathomable reason that is the economic path we chose.

I suggest Mt San Bruno will make a fine favela for what is already the world's richest 3rd world city in all but name.

rather than just that sentence, here's a tldr; for the problem the article describes.

There is a difference between a loan taken to build a fishing boat and a loan to buy an existing apartment building.

A fishing boat loan is paid off by producing real objects with real value (food) some of which wealth repays the loan.

The apartment building loan is paid of by raising rents and, rather than producing anything of value, actually takes wealth out of a productive part of the economy (consumer's pockets).

By considering both kinds of loans the same we have made a financial mess of things.

It does, however, allow those wealthy enough to hire a stream of expert witness to cast doubt on the technique in front of a jury and thereby win at trial while still convicting those who can't afford that.

The naive part of me still hopes this is just an unintended side effect.

To convince yourself that you live in a perfect meritocracy where anyone who fails does so solely because of moral deficiency or laziness is the most dangerous delusion you could inflict upon yourself. The story of millennials playing video games in mom's basement conveniently fits that narrative of moral outrage.

In fact there is a growing group of people who, being force to work in sectors where they compete with overseas workers who are brutal exploited by ruthless dictatorships or, to a much lesser degree, have their work obsoleted by technology, realize they have no hope of a 'normal' life. No hope of home ownership, of giving their kids a better life via college and who look at an old age of likely homeless or at best extreme poverty.

If we continue to disregard the problem of lack of mobility and the inequalities the current economy is producing, it will be forcibly fixed for us in catastrophic ways and we will end up with political extremism that dwarfs the current election cycle.

I agree entirely. And, looking at a small but easier part, I believe that there is a particular piece that Zuckerberg can work on very effectively.

His company is now a key part of the way people form their view of the world. The algorithm/process that selects what ideas they are exposed to chooses only the most outlandish and memorable ideas that also serve to reinforce the viewers already existing preconceptions. This, after all, makes facebook quite attractive: an echo chamber of stimulating impressions that always reconfirm your world view. Obviously accuracy is irrelevant in this model and evidence is unheard of.

This is a specific problem that is contributing to a completely credulous world view, worsening political gaps based on untruths and, worst of all, creating the belief that fact is just another word for opinion. And this problem is exactly in his area of expertise on a platform he has control of.

At any rate, if not worked on pretty quick, a re-established House Un-American Activities Committee will make it awfully hard later.

This is lovely and all.

But he is in a much better position to work on the curious problems of ever increasing political polarization in our new Post-Factual world.

If I were to guess, over the next century that problem is going to result is a vastly more misery than a slight speed up to medical technology could compensate for.

And vandalism btw. Particularly the preparation needed to remove a 'theft proof' sign is not done by an idle souvenir collector on a road with essential no tourists that no one form outside the area has ever heard of. Those things are just as likely done by the few who have a moral objection to the number. Ironically, the road could have been turned into a minor tourist attraction for Gallup if not Shiprock. Likewise, copies of the sign could have been pedaled in Gallup to feed any souvenir collectors as is done with rte 66 signs.

But most interesting to me is the way the attitudes of evangelicals concerning the spiritual status of the valley (albeit newly acquired and negative) spilled over into the Navajo beliefs as the area become known on the reservation to have a high number of Skinwalkers.

Except where the numbering is magical such as the renaming of hwy666 when some groups suddenly decided the number was satanic[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_491

It will be an interesting experiment since the vast majority of Americans have none of these stereotypes. The word Gypsy conjures solely the image of a palm reader and the word Roma means nothing to the vast majority.

Their speech will sound like Russian to the American ear and their appearance will match that impression.

So, if the trend somehow continues or expands, we have a chance to see whether the exact same stereotypes re-emerge or whether they too end up following an unremarkable integration trajectory.

If consciousness is purely a result of the arrangement of the brain, why would you not see B and the copy see A since the bodies are identical? This paradox is the problem with a simple emergent property explanation.

To say somehow the different history of the atoms in the original brain vs the atoms in duplicate is somehow relevant to the emergent property would be a very odd claim: we don't take into account the prior history of the atoms in turbulent flow for example, just what the are doing right now.

Or for clarity, if I gradually replaced every molecule in your brain with another identical one, the emergent "you" would not be affected. So, if it weren't already obvious, it clearly can not be dependent on the particular atoms that make you up.

And by the way, if your brain at 10 years old and 90 years old, in spite of being very different structurally, still give rise to your same "you", the copy would not even have to be very good.

It is a fun problem I must say.

a fantastic article and wonderful to have a calm conversation on the topic.

I can not fault anything in the article but I would add that immigrants also bring dynamism and new ideas to the country. Not necessarily of economic value but certainly of value. For example the relative greater openness and tolerance levels of the cities with larger immigrant populations might have become that way because of their arrival.

Obviously I may have confused cause and effect, obviously this may or may not be worth the economic consequences but I think it is worth thinking about.

Consider the story from your own personal point of view not as an observer.

I put you in a duplication chamber. In front of you is a card with the letter "A"

In a neighboring identical empty chamber is card with a "B" on it.

You close your eyes and I pull a big steam-punk lever and an exact copy of you is made in chamber B

When you open your eyes, what letter do you see and why?

If every bodily action is caused ultimately by things explained by physics, as is clearly the case, then there is no room for a non-phiscal mind.

Put another way, using our current knowledge of physics and chemistry, we can, on a high level anyway, account for every item in the cause and effect chain from the photons hitting the retina to the arm that a person raises to shade his eyes. There is no room to insert anything into that causal chain let alone something so massively influential that it causes all the body actions that we consider driven by conscious choice. Thus whatever is going on must be made from very ordinary matter.

It's this very fact that makes it such a fun puzzle to look at, very ordinary mater maybe doing something (causing consciousness) that is wildly unexpected.

Yes this is my favorite explanation: that consciousness is incredibly brief and delicate. That only one very precise organization of the brain could give rise to the epiphenomenon that is me. So precise in fact that "I" only exist for a very brief moment.

What I perceive as a continuous consciousness is really just a memory of other "I"s who were caused by this brain in the past, left a memory of introspection and then dissipated to be replaced by an new one.

This view has many advantages: it solves the problem of time you elude to, it answers the problem of other minds and the problem of my childhood self. The only problem I can not see solved is the hypothetical molecular level duplicate I mentioned above.

Technically though describing consciousness as emergent property of neural functioning is a conjecture, though a very credible one.

Unlike turbulence, I only have one case where I have ever seen this consciousness which I am trying to explain as an epiphenomenon, namely my own. All others consciousness (if they even exist which I can't prove directly) are not remotely observed in the same way, they are self reported by other people.

So you have the question of why I can only directly perceive that emergent property in exactly one brain and not others.

Likewise you'd have to explain why the emergent property is apparently continuous through my whole lifetime over which my brain changes enormously.

Finally you'd have to deal with the hypothetical case where I am duplicated molecule for molecule and then ask which consciousness would I have direct access to, the duplicate or the original.

So while dualism is obviously patently absurd, the idea of consciousness as epiphenomenon, while promising, needs work too.

Actually I think the grandparent comment should be read "...proof [of the truth] of any phenomenon..."

I suggest the problem is with the concept "true".

The assumption that all phenomenon have a physical basis is exceedingly practical and produces fantastic predictive success. "True-ness" as it is intuitively defined is not interesting in this case, indeed it may be nonsense.

Stated another way, if we're going to describe "true" as some aspect of reality that we can never directly perceive but only get at through fallible senses and perceptions then we are not only flirting with something that is likely a-priori unprovable but also likely very uninteresting.

Reason will give you the math to build the pyramids.

Irrationality will make you think it is a good idea.

Very sensible point.

But I would emphasize that in order to justify the value of intuition in this case, you had to resort to reason as well as anthropology and evolutionary biology. That last one in particular most especially is the product of rational empiricism.

So again it appears we can only trust intuition if we can rationally prove that trust is justified.

How would you go about showing that emotions, feelings and intuition produce good results without proving that very idea rationally?

While intuition may be useful to get good results (perhaps it is the subconscious quickly applying some pattern that has worked in the past) there's no way to know a particular use of intuition worked unless you go back later and rationally analyze the results.

And more importantly, there's no reason to believe intuition works at all unless we either 1) understand it on something like a neurological psychological level (I would not hold my breath waiting for this) or 2) do some statistical modeling of it's reliably.

>...One is the climate...

71% of homeless people were living in SF just before becoming homeless. Only 10% come from outside of California (and its climate)[0]

This pretty clearly shows homeless has alot more to do with the cost of housing relative to wages jobs then good weather.

[0]pg 33 of http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...

I too lived overseas for several years and returned to the Bay Area recently to be astonished in the same ways.

Another surprise that the article does not reveal was that in speaking to long standing friends who remained in the Bay Area, I have commonly heard them say homeless people choose to be homeless. These are normal bay area professional class people who read the Atlantic and the NYT. But to hear repeatedly such notions form well education otherwise forward thing people is something I still can not remotely comprehend. And how they would develop such views is even more incomprehensible.

So Hong Kong, Georgia, Mauritius, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Lithuania are all more free than the US? A strange conclusion.

>Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force...

So we'll be giving north American back to the Indians? Or do we consider any slow-down of that North Dakota pipeline a gross violation of freedom of the innocent oil industry?

Yeah, homo-sapiens will undoubtedly survive but the economy sure as hell won't. And given the inevitable loss of every major city coastal city, the unutterable disruption of agriculture and water supplies with the attendant massive die off, I agree the word 'fine' may be a tad inaccurate.

I wish companies would post a spread of their developer ages on their careers page so we would know which ones not to waste time with. Because mere lip service about hiring solely on merit, even if the hirer somehow believes they are, really just wastes everyone's time.

In addition, history is long and tech grows fast. I imagine at some future point and well within our lifetimes it will be trivial to infer our political attitudes and assign semi-anonymous screen names to real persons just by scrapping the web of 2016. Especially since absolute certainty of guilt is not the highest priority in these cases.

And since there's very real possibility of having a lunatic at the helm of government at some point, yes, one had better speak up now.

Or we could eliminate the mortgage deduction, adopt Vancouver's foreign investment restrictions and abolish California's prop13 and its equivalent in other states.

But of course those acts actually would reduce housing prices.