Lurker > willythemailboy

Flappers posted...

It is stupid. America has been rolling out a lot of censorship, requests for your personal information, and propaganda (I mean more than usual) lately. Take a guess as to why

No reason you're alluding to would reflect why other countries are doing the same thing at nearly the same time. See the UK "Online Safety Act" that while the Tories may have passed it Labour is fully on board with enforcing.

Although I do want to see the result of the UK government trying to enforce that against 4chan. The UK has filed an action against them and 4chan told them exactly where to stick it. As an American company with no business interests in the UK, 4chan is basically immure to that law.

Dikitain posted...

Looking at my most recent bill, I would save about $200 a year.

Not a ton, but not insignificant either. Especially since I would probably only get a few thousand in payout if my car was considered totaled.

I was going to look this up myself, but someone tried cracking my password this morning and my account is locked until it gets resolved. I'm currently paying about $380 a year for liability only, which I realize isn't an option everywhere. I tried to rent a car in Idaho last year and when I told them I didn't have comp and collision they looked at me like I'd grown a third eye.

teddy241 posted...

Did McDonalds always have different prices based on area? I just remember seeing fast food commercials as a kid and the price on tv was the same nationally. Ie arbys 5 for 5 or taco bell tacos for 69,79,89 99 cents.

Those ads might not play in other areas, and at any rate always had a disclaimer that prices may vary.

Raised bed or astroturf.

Revelation34 posted...

How do quitters win?

A gambler quitting while they're ahead fits that description. Or just quitting gambling in general.

green_dragon posted...

Buy a new drive?

Obviously, eventually. Hopefully the next few days.

faramir77 posted...

I upgraded my C drive a few months ago. It was only a 128GB SSD and Windows refused to do updates anymore because there wasn't enough space despite the C drive almost exclusively being used for operating system.

There's great tutorials on YouTube on how to clone your C drive to a new SSD. I cloned my old C drive to a new 1TB SSD. The whole thing took like 30 minutes and wasn't too expensive.

Mine's on a 256GB SSD with a few other things on it. Good news is for some reason I had D2R installed on it so I'm not entirely stuck. My other option would have been to revert to a console scrub with the newest console I have, a PS2.

I'm hoping I can get a 1TB SSD to replace my D drive and possibly rescue at least some of what's on the current drive. Maybe even 2TB, although I wasn't using that much space on the drive I had.

adjl posted...

I mean, viewing an ad-supported website while blocking the ads does constitute availing yourself of a service without paying the requested price for that service. In that sense, it's absolutely an example of piracy.

On the other hand, though, community websites profit from people actively using them whether they view ads or not (since that activity draws other viewers who won't necessarily block ads), social media platforms make most of their money selling your information anyway, and in many cases ads are so deliberately intrusive, obnoxious, and even outright dangerous that I'm convinced advertisers want people to block them. The actual harm is even more debatable than with formal piracy, and the fact that ads are so overtly hostile to users that the FBI officially recommends that everyone block them for security reasons means I'm not too concerned about that potential harm. If a physical store had a display of items out front that were for sale, but - by design - paying for them meant walking through a 20-foot hallway lined of clowns tickling you and honking their noses the entire time, I'd be inclined to steal a few things just to register a protest of their tickle-clown policy.

Is that basically the same philosophy as the "piracy is a customer service problem"? Adblock is a user experience problem?

Makes sense, really. Every once in a while I'll get ads that trigger my AV software until adblock updates to block those ads again.

kind9 posted...

use your C drive

Too small. My comp is ancient and the C drive is an SSD barely big enough for Windows.

No PC games for me for a while. What do?

Galvanized steel is a lot more corrosion resistant than regular steel. I don't know how common it is but there's nothing wrong with having it as long as it's in good condition.

josh posted...

Do we mean like a colony in space-space or on a moon or planet? I don't think humans could survive on a colony in space very long with no gravity or what their quality of life would be like.

An O'Neill cylinder (living on the inner surface of a rotating cylinder to simulate gravity) could answer a lot of that. Still, a colony on some sort of planetary surface is long-term more sustainable due to access to more types of resources and room to expand.

Muscles posted...

It makes sense we she's shoved down our throats 24/7, let her stay in her pop music niche, we don't need to hear about her in every facet of society

No one forces her music or anything else down your throat, you're just hyper sensitized like you have a bad allergy.

Salrite posted...

Isn't this just some straya shit? I haven't noticed anything about age requirements.

No, it's all of it because lots of countries seem to be doing "for the children" shit all at once.

adjl posted...

Fortunately, solar power is pretty readily available in space. Unfortunately, capturing that energy is relatively material-intensive and I don't actually know how viable it would be to synthesize those materials out of said energy.

Canonically, the replicators don't actually convert energy into matter. They create new items from individual atoms reclaimed from the waste stream generated on the ship, similar to ripping apart a Lego construction and reusing those same Legos to build something new. Just, you know, at the atomic scale.

Still absurdly energy intensive but many orders of magnitude less so than doing it the E=MC^2 route.

Why not Specter Gadget, which is a show about Gadget haunting Dr. Claw after one of Claw's schemes finally succeeds in killing Gadget.

adjl posted...

The full idea includes alternatives for driving (wage must cover CoL within a 30-minute drive, plus an allowance for car expenses) or transit (wage must cover CoL within a 30-minute transit trip, plus transit costs), but as it stands, there are two reasons people commute as far as they do: car-centric development patterns that put all the housing in one place and all the commerce in another (development patterns which have contributed to current housing shortages because they force lower density to accommodate all the cars), and the cost of living being unaffordably high near most workplaces. A measure like this would address both issues, encouraging businesses to open near places where people are currently living affordably (this would, of course, require substantial zoning redesign due to the aforementioned car-centric development patterns that have been encouraged by American governments for the last 6-7 decades), and ensuring that businesses in high CoL areas would pay enough for people to live nearby (which, in many cases, will result in those businesses moving elsewhere and drive the CoL in that area down because it no longer has the same attractions).

Depending on what which issues you're looking at this is either a sorta-okay idea or an absurdly bad idea, with very little falling between those extremes. In general, having a single central business district is far preferable by every conceivable metric than having minor business districts scattered all over the place. Light commercial areas mixed in with residential? Perfectly fine. Manufacturing or even moderately sized office structures? Complete shit show. Car centric culture has nothing to do with that, as the same phenomenon occurs as bad or worse with mass transit.

Ideally you want people moving radially into the CBD and back out as efficiently as the available transit allows. Multicentric city models means far too many people have to commute into, through, or around the CBD to get to the satellite district they need to get to; for multiple reasons few people will relocate for a different job so commuting is a fact of life. The alternative to commuting in a multicentric city model is people being locked into their particular node when it comes to job opportunities.

Snoregasm posted...

Bet you own a red hat

willythemailboy posted...

There's something all these names seem to have in common (ignoring the obviously political #11).

Called it.

Flappers posted...

Don't ever compare me to Alex Jones again. I'm one of the frogs that the chemicals turned gay and it offends me.

Then don't make it necessary.

adjl posted...

To be clear, I'm not concerned that they'd get in trouble for having too much of a monopoly (as you said, having a monopoly because everybody else chose to pull out of the market entirely of their own volition is their fault and not yours). I'm concerned that the PC market would suffer for them having even more of a monopoly than they already have. As it stands, they have that monopoly because they offer the better service, but if they can maintain the monopoly position because nobody can process payments without their blessing, that incentive to compete goes away.

But, as I also said, nothing is stopping their competitors from trying to get in on that action, so I guess the concern would be less that Valve put themselves into a monopoly position and more that nobody else did anything to compete.

Regulators don't step in unless the company with the monopoly take steps to enforce or increase that monopoly. Steam right now does not have a monopoly despite their commanding market share; if they tried to buy or stifle a competitor that would put them under regulatory scrutiny because that is an action to maintain a monopoly.

A Valve-run payment processor that "increased its monopoly" by processing payments for other game storefronts would actually be less of a monopoly than if they refused to process payments for other game storefronts, because for regulatory purposes that would be an attempt to leverage their payment processor business to increase their storefront's market share.

Flappers posted...

ngl felt kind of embarrassing to post a political cartoon but I was only like half-serious

Most of us would be absolutely mortified to channel Alex Jones this badly. Not you, though. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

I went on a 17 hour Drachinifel binge.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Naked and afraid?

Full of flaming baked goods what I took away from it.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The Chinese mostly used bronze tokens, Lydia was the first known region to start using gold and/or electrum for coins. They also had a FAR greater influence on the adoption of the concept by other regions - China was mostly self-contained and rarely spread ideas outside of their own sphere of influence (at least until much later). Being a self-sufficient and somewhat insular culture tends to have that effect.

Lydia might (or might not) have been the first to have enough electrum to use for the purpose, but gold by itself is hardly necessary for something to qualify as a coin. India used copper and silver long before Lydia even existed as a kingdom, and there's evidence that the Indus Valley civilization used gold tokens as early as 1000 BC.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Calling a kingdom that is literally part of "Asia Minor" European is pretty dishonest.

It's also literally and objectively wrong.

Considering there is no actual border between "Europe" and "Asia", lol no. It's all one big ass continent; while it makes sense in some regards to separate the two, in other ways it doesn't. Certainly not to draw a line at the Bosporus, anyway.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Russia has almost always leaned more towards being part of the European cultural sphere, but that doesn't really change the fact that 3/4ths of the country is part of Asia.

That would be because the vast majority of the population is on the European end of the country.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Nor does it mean that a Russian born in Vladivostok is a "European" (or would ever think of himself that way).

Do you think someone born in Istanbul would say they have more in common with a person in Cambodia or Greece?

Edit: Greece may not be the best country to link Turkish people to. Replace Greece with Bulgaria or maybe Croatia, countries nearby that Turkey doesn't have quite the historical beef with.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But even beyond all of that, Mansa Musa is probably way more well known to the average Westerner these days than Croesus is, if only because Civilization has sort of made him a bit of a meme. So it's not even as if the "European" is the more famous one anyway.

Not really. Despite their perceived popularity, it's only a tiny fraction of people who have ever played any of the Civilization games. Out of the billion plus people that might be considered "westerners" only 10 million or so have played any of the Civilization games. Compare that to the people in "Asia Minor", the Middle East, or otherwise Mediterranean general area who may have learned about Croesus in history classes and it's not even close. Maybe if you limit it strictly to the Anglophone world but even then I doubt it's as close as you think.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

One is Asian, the other African.

Calling a kingdom on the Mediterranean coast "Asian" is pretty dishonest, especially when that kingdom is an integral part of Greek culture.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Also, Croesus supposedly invented the entire concept of coins.

He didn't; at best he made the standardization of coins widespread. The concept of "use this chunk of metal as a means of trade" predated him, possibly by up to 300-500 years in China and even more in India. Basically he was around when metalworking technology was first making coins feasible and multiple cultures adopted the practice in roughly the same few hundred years. It's entirely possible that all of them did so entirely independently, so coinage doesn't have a single origin point.

While not exactly "coins", even Mesoamerican cultures had some metal-based currency systems centuries prior to contact with the outside world.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

I have heard of the one, but not of the other.

One is European, the other is not. Go figure.

There's something all these names seem to have in common (ignoring the obviously political #11).

adjl posted...

Couple minimum wage to rents, and they regulate each other.

The problem with this idea is that the VAST majority of people don't live within a half hour walk of their job. The rent and minimum wage in any given area won't be at all related because even for the lowest income brackets the average commute is 18 miles.

adjl posted...

the former being the most basic requirement of doing business

You'd be shocked at the number of people who either don't understand this or actively disagree with this. And I don't limit that to just being a landlord, either. Certain notorious people on 261 and possibly still on CE unironically believed that all businesses should be forced to operate as nonprofits that pay everyone equally regardless of role or hours worked.

adjl posted...

My idea for minimum wage (algorithmically determining the minimum wage for a given business based on median rent within a 30-minute walk) might actually be the better way to achieve this, in that it would both directly attack the market forces (higher minimum wages for businesses mean fewer businesses will remain in the area and those that do will have to be more expensive, which drives down demand to live in that area) and lock income growth to rent growth such that rent control isn't needed to keep rents from outpacing incomes.

That's just another form of locked-in stagnation trap.

adjl posted...

And that doesn't surprise me, I'm just wary of multi-year amortization of any unit in a building that's already got enough problems to need that kind of investment. It's less the time scale in isolation and more the sense that the building is a ticking time bomb that creates a greater-than-usual risk that I won't actually see all of those years of returns.

Don't worry, because any building old enough for that to be a problem is also on the historic register and you're not allowed to tear it down regardless of how dilapidated it becomes. You have to carefully not maintain it until it literally falls down on its own before you can replace it rather than do a full-gut "renovation" that preserves the exterior of the building at 5x the cost.

Salrite posted...

When you do start thinking about the consequences of whatever decisions you'd have, you realize how it can spiral out of control. First instinct for me is to eliminate all moderation. No more censorship. Let people hornypost all they want, hell, post porn for all I care. After all, if the site gets lawsuits and fined over it, we can just pay it off with our infinite money.

But then you realize people are horrible and zero moderation would turn this place into a shithole overnight. So what is the optimal threshold of moderation? It's something I don't want to think about.

Bring back metamod, where users of sufficient level get to review moderator actions for fairness. Moderators whose actions are consistently judged to be too harsh or too lenient can be replaced.

Revelation34 posted...

Definitely doing it now. Can't make America any worse.

That's what you thought, right up until the radioactive fleas created hyper-territorial rats the size of wolves.

adjl posted...

Maybe I'm just not thinking long-term enough, but my inclination is that going into the hole for four years in a building that was able to rack up $50k in exceptional repairs in the first place (as you say, it's not impossible, especially if parts of the whole building have to be redone to bring it up to code, but things like fire or water damage usually aren't contained entirely to the uninhabitable unit and will likely rear their heads in other units in the not-too-distant future) isn't overly appealing. Yes, it's more appealing than not making the money back at all, but it'd probably be better invested in a building with a more certain future.

Current NYC rules require amortizing renovation costs over 96 months in rent-controlled units, when doing so is allowed at all. You have to think of at least years when planning real estate.

adjl posted...

It crossed my mind that such an idea could be used as a loophole to circumvent rent control, but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to do something like specify that if the condo-ified unit were rented out within some reasonable time frame after being purchased (like 2-3 years), it would face the same rent cap as pre-purchase (especially if universal rent control is standardized). The intent with the condo-ification idea would primarily be to get people into homes they can own, rather than just to create new rental opportunities.

Somewhat ironically, converting a building to condos is also something NYC recently made much more difficult because landlords were using it to get out from under rent control. They also changed the rules that allowed up to a 20% increase in rent if the unit had been vacant for more than 2 years.

adjl posted...

To be clear, NYC's rent control is probably a little too strict. When I'm thinking of applying rent control universally, I'm thinking somewhere in the 5-10% range, which I don't expect should prevent anyone from making money from a build unless something happens to dramatically spike repair costs (especially if property tax increases on rental properties reflect the rent cap), but would prevent people from having their rents double overnight because something happened to spike demand.

While I think we'd disagree on how to define NYC's current rent control, a 10% cap on current market rates would probably be sufficient to allow for future growth. Ideally, the cap should be high enough that market forces prevent rate increases from actually hitting that cap rather than the cap being the default rate of change for every unit. Even with all the horror stories of rents doubling or tripling overnight, most are exactly that: one-off horror stories. The average Manhattan market rate rent went up 7.6% last year, which was a new record for rent increases there.

adjl posted...

a lot of NYC can't really get much denser

It absolutely can, if the infrastructure and zoning laws were fixed to allow it. While subsurface rock formations (or lack thereof) limit where skyscrapers can be built (there's a good reason Manhattan has so many while the rest of the city doesn't), there's still plenty of room for vertical expansion by replacing existing 3-4 floor structures with 6-8 floor structures, or by turning the roughly half million stand-alone houses into more dense forms of residential areas.

adjl posted...

Which really makes me question why that's the case. Not so much the miscalculation (as you say, messy politics), but the fact that costs inflate so much that keeping rent from ballooning past affordability means it can't keep up with that inflation. I expect a substantial part of that is because there are so many uncontrolled rents jacking up both what landlords are collectively able to pay and the costs of living for the people that need to be employed to maintain units. In theory, eliminating uncontrolled properties would help with that.

I don't doubt that enforcing rent control on every property at the current rate would be disastrous, but I do doubt that anyone actually needs to triple rents year-over-year. There's a middle ground in there that would help to moderate maintenance costs without making them unaffordable.

I'm not sure what you consider "so many uncontrolled rents" but roughly half of NYC's units are rent stabilized of some form or another and half are not. The problem may well be that the rent controlled units being so constrained means that the only possible profits must come from the uncontrolled units, which is where the huge differential between controlled and uncontrolled rates come from

Considering that rent controlled apartments are currently capped at about 3% increases, that middle is probably worth exploring.

adjl posted...

If that creates a tax shortfall because they rely on that unsustainable increase on rent-controlled properties, apply a larger increase to uncontrolled ones to compensate

That would be extraordinarily difficult, as the two often coexist in the same buildings. In fact, one recently-outlawed tactic to get apartments out from under rent control was to "Frankenstein" a stabilized and a market rate apartment into one larger apartment which would be market rate.

adjl posted...

In practice, unfortunately, what seems to actually happen is that the rents in the "luxury" places get treated as carte blanche for all the shitholes to jack up their rents to align with "the market"

That jacking up of prices is the real issue and could be addressed in multiple ways instead of or in addition to rent control. It's definitely worth exploring.

adjl posted...

Not so much in NYC, which is literally the home of Wall Street, but for smaller cities less famous for all the billionaires that live there it's more relevant. Significantly more people can afford two houses than 20, regardless of where you look, and that helps to avoid concentrating too much real estate in any one person/company's hands by promoting meaningful competition.

When it comes to real estate development, buying the land is not the cost-prohibitive part even if there are already houses on that land. Anyone who could afford to build a 200 unit development isn't going to struggle to buy the land, while anyone whose budget would limit them to tearing down 2 houses for an 8 unit building probably isn't going to lock up all their capital in one building anyway. In reality the development would likely be under the same corporate ownership in piecemeal rather than as a block but the end result is largely the same.

adjl posted...

NIMBYs do suck, but I'm afraid I can't really get behind "it's good to kick everyone out of a neighbourhood for a few years before building so you don't have to deal with NIMBYs." It's convenient, yes, but I'm generally more a proponent of "listen to the NIMBYs just in case they have valid concerns, but then ignore everything else they say and build it anyway so they can start getting used to it."

Here's where I do wander into truly unpopular opinions, but I am actually in favor of eminent domain for redevelopment purposes under certain clearly delineated circumstances. Something like Transit Oriented Development is a substantial benefit to the city as well as the developer, but it definitely needs to be constrained pretty heavily. One thing I'd insist on is anyone being bought out getting 3-4 times the market value of the property, so the developer has to really want that land rather than just wanting a cheap plot to build on.

adjl posted...

And in that regard, just going for a larger building may make more sense. Larger buildings also spike density faster and more predictably, which is helpful for planning transit and other transportation infrastructure adjustments. I'm not saying there's no place for larger developments, just that there's a real problem when they comprise the majority of the new housing being built (by area, not just by unit count) because they do so much to disrupt the existing supply and respond so relatively slowly.

I don't necessarily disagree, but see previous post about affordable housing being economically nonviable. Building small is also generally less viable than building big or building multiple smaller buildings at once in the same area. If you're building 8 unit buildings, building two at the same time right next to each other is not twice as expensive as building one and building two buildings some distance apart or building one after the other is more expensive that building two next to each other at the same time.

adjl posted...

I'm inclined to guess that if one unit is uninhabitable beyond economically viable repair, the rest of the building probably isn't far off and demolition/replacement may be on the horizon as the only route forward (let's be real: if a single unit needs 50k in repairs, it's probably not viable to repair that unit with or without rent control)

Not at all. Significant fire or water damage, or a single destructive tenant, combined with decades of code changes that stop being "grandfathered" in when major renovations are undertaken can pile up in a hurry, and NYC labor costs add even more. $50k in renovations isn't that much of a stretch. An example might be that renovating that one apartment would require replacing the entire building's plumbing system to remove lead pipes to bring that one unit up to code. The lead pipes are currently grandfathered in (and despite the Flint disaster, generally safe enough), but for a newly renovated apartment they'd have to be removed.

Admittedly, some of those should result in demolition and replacement, but lol NYC "historic character" and zoning laws generally mean even 100+ year old buildings built before insulated wiring was invented can't be knocked down. And people tend to get upset when all the rest of the tenants get evicted to do that, especially since new construction wouldn't fall under rent control.

In terms of viability, consider that the difference between rent control and market rate is going to be at minimum $1000 a month, meaning even a $50k renovation bill would pay for itself in four years for a market rate unit, and could not ever pay off at all for a rent controlled unit.

adjl posted...

As it stands, I don't think zoning laws typically allow for a building of apartments to have units sold individually as condos, but that's not that hard to change, and treating apartment buildings as a collection of individual properties is kind of a prerequisite for any sort of legislation that requires individual properties to be occupied. Other alternatives would be to instead set a minimum occupancy threshold that does treat buildings as a single entity and not a collection of individual properties (like 90%, which gets rounded up so that buildings under 10 units are expected to be fully occupied), or to exempt a unit from being counted by having it formally condemned.

Existing rent control is why none of this would work. The NYC implementation of rent control is so financially debilitating to landlords that every conceivable scheme has been used to get units out from under such controls. As a result, most of the loopholes allowing units to be changed from rent control to market rate have been eliminated.

I know using current policy to argue against changes to that policy seems pretty stupid, but the whole system is so fucked up you're stuck with a "can't get there from here" problem unless the entire legal code - and possibly the entire physical city - is nuked from orbit, bulldozed flat, and started over from scratch.

adjl posted...

Well, I did just make up numbers to illustrate the point of "making less money>making no money," so I'm not terribly surprised they aren't an accurate representation of actual figures. Obviously, the exact figures need to be analyzed in greater depth than anyone is going to do for a post on GameFAQs to figure out what limitations will be appropriate. I'm not specifically suggesting that profit margins be reduced by 50%.

It's not the "reduce profits by 50%" specifically that is the problem, it's that the return on investment is actually fairly low and it doesn't take much tinkering at all to make building anything at all economically nonviable. That's why I pointed out that "affordable" housing generally has to be build as a small fraction of higher income housing, as building "affordable" housing is already economically nonviable without some sort of subsidy or government support. It is literally better to build nothing than build "affordable" housing in most cases, as the return on investment is lower than alternative investments with far less risk.

adjl posted...

There's nothing intrinsic in the concept of rent control that means it can't keep up with the costs of renting out a place

But of course there is, as the politicians who set those rates can run on keeping them as low as possible. The more units that are rent controlled, the more votes that can be bought by keeping rent increases lower than they should be. NYC rent control does have "real bite", to the point where some units are priced 60% below market rates and are (supposedly) calculated to be set to just barely cover costs and minimal profit. In reality those costs are calculated too low and rent controlled units are break-even at best and generally losses in the long term.

adjl posted...

Off-hand, though, one easy provision is to restrict the amount property tax can go up annually on a rent-controlled property, reflective of the limits that rent control places on owners' ability to cover tax increases.

Another example of where politics interferes, as about a third of NYC's budget comes from property taxes. Such a policy would blow a massive hole in the budget that would need to be filled somehow, and alternative revenue sources are likely to be less politically viable.

Again, NYC is simply a case study since it's easier to find relevant numbers for one particular city than to generalize national numbers that treats major cities the same as Bumfuck Iowa.

adjl posted...

Data on speculation seems to be hard to find, though. I'm just seeing some things about the impact of vacancy taxes, which isn't tremendously useful for drawing definite conclusions.

The reason you can't find data is because defining what exactly counts as speculation is hard to do, and people have reasons to inflate how common it is specifically to push policies to tackle a problem that is actually much smaller than they would like you to believe.

adjl posted...

Sometimes, they're fully vacant, other times they abuse weak lease protections to be able to kick people out on short notice

Long-term, that large building will provide a bunch of new housing, but it's usually priced well outside of what existing residents of the neighbourhood can afford, and it'll be several years before that's realized even after all of the properties have been bought/demolished (which can itself take several years).

Somewhat ironically, those properties being held for later development would be ideal for use in the STR market. Sometimes when you have two problems you can make progress on one by solving the other.

It's an unpopular position, but new construction being unaffordable to the existing residents isn't really a bad thing. Overall the city benefits from higher tax revenues and higher economic output from that neighborhood, and the neighborhood doesn't become a multigenerational poverty zone. The issue is the rate at which such turnover occurs, not that it occurs at all. Too high is bad, but so is stagnation.

adjl posted...

That, really, is the issue I have with current development strategies: They're all aiming big and not for the "missing middle" sort of housing that cities generally need more of. More housing is needed *now*, not in the 5-10 years it takes to buy up a block and build an apartment tower. By pushing for smaller, quicker developments, you get that response faster, plus you end up with more local investors instead of large corporations that will be siphoning their revenue out of the community (since you don't need as much capital to buy two houses for a 2-year plan as you do to buy 20 for a 10-year plan).

For even local investors, the capital issue isn't that big a deal. Faster response can be a bonus, but existing residents also means you have bigger NIMBY problems with any development that changes the nature of the neighborhood, regardless of whether that change is a single 8 unit building, multiple 8 unit buildings, or one 200 unit block.

With that level of occupancy difference, it's likely large-scale utility issues come into play, requiring a bigger overall investment to justify the expense. For example, while zoning laws are an issue in NYC the bigger barrier to higher density is that 100+ year old water and sewer systems are at capacity with the current density, and replacing even a few 4 story buildings with 10 story buildings would require $100 million worth of utility upgrades. Sometimes those upgrades wouldn't even be near the construction site, depending on where the service bottlenecks are located. And of course the city doesn't have the money or really the motive to make those upgrades, so the developer would have to pay for it as part of the development cost.

Vicaris posted...

listen I'm not gonna make a 1 gorilla vs 100 men out of this but an elephant would score 9/10 times after snap.

A team with two elephants, unbeatable.

I want to see any number of football players try to tackle a hippo.

There were no survivors.

adjl posted...

If a developer's got a choice between an expected profit of $10 million and an expected profit of $20 million, obviously they're going to choose the latter. If a developer's got a choice between an expected profit of $10 million or just not doing anything at all, they're going to choose the $10 million. Developers aren't going to stop making any money at all just because they can't make all the money.

This is why I question your contact with reality. A more realistic profit margin would be $1 million for the high end and essentially zero for the low end. And that's after putting $12 million into the project. So risking $12 million to maybe sell for $13 million is the ridiculously high profit margin you think they can shave in half (and that's only if everything goes perfectly). If you cut that in half, you're dropping 8.7% net profits down to 4.35%, which is basically what Treasury bonds are paying right now. The developer would be about as well off buying treasury bonds and building nothing because the returns are the same and there's basically no risk and no work.

adjl posted...

It is if the rent control reflects the actual year-over-year increases in the costs of providing housing

It won't and you damn well know it won't. Certainly it never has in any currently existing rent control scheme.

adjl posted...

4% is massive when the typical target for a healthy vacancy rate is 3-5% and so many cities are struggling to break 1%.

The institutional investors owning 4% does not in any way imply that those properties are empty. Institutional investors are generally in the market for returns, not speculation. That means keeping those units occupied as much as possible.

adjl posted...

My inclination is to go nuclear: Every residentially-zoned property must have a long-term resident registered as living in it within six months of purchase, and cannot go more than six months without a registered long-term resident unless a clear explanation is provided for the vacancy (such as ongoing construction for which there is a definite plan and concrete timetable). If this condition is not met, the property is expropriated, sold for current market value, and the proceeds of that sale go to the previous owner. The numbers obviously need some tweaks (possibly scaling based on local vacancy rate), but the bottom line is to force residential properties to be used for residing.

I know the NYC market the best since it's a world class manual on what not to do, so I'll use that. In many cases that "current market value" is zero. The value of an apartment that needs $50k worth of renovations to bring up to code but due to rent control cannot possibly charge rent high enough to recoup that cost is nothing but a net drain on whoever owns it. The most cost effective way an owner has to deal with it is to turn off all the utilities and take the property tax loss in perpetuity.

How does your utopian plan deal with one totally uninhabitable, economically nonviable apartment in a building full of otherwise rented apartments - knowing that whoever is dumb enough to buy the building is going to be in exactly the same position in six months because your solution doesn't in any way address the issue?

adjl posted...

Which is why you rent control everything. You don't need to worry about rent control disincentivizing development in one area if every area is equally disincentivized. It's far from impossible to make money off of a development in a rent controlled area, developers just don't make as much. By taking away the opportunity to make extra money elsewhere, they can make do with making slightly less.

This is the most out-of-touch leftist take I've seen since BBT unironically suggested using Soviet style government owned, centrally assigned housing as a solution.

No, it is not possible to build new rent-controlled housing without massive subsidies. Usually, those subsidies come from building an 80-20 mix of market rate and "affordable" housing as part of a new development. An alternative might be the government funding new construction, until you realize that government housing managers are the worst slum lords on the planet. The typical example is the NYC Housing Authority, which is the largest landlord in the city and by far the worst slumlord in the city by every conceivable metric.

adjl posted...

For the sake of short-term stability, yeah, but long-term rent control doesn't solve the core problems of a lack of housing. That, as I alluded, is going to have to involve killing the residential real estate speculation that entails multibillion dollar corporations engineering housing crises for fun and profit, as well as killing the short-term rentals that have resulted in a substantial amount of residential-zoned property evaporating from the housing market. Building more is still necessary, but vacancy rates being as low as they are is not just a matter of a lack of development interest. They're a product of a substantial number of viable homes being held off of the market for the financial gain of the owner.

This is two different takes, the first one another out-of-touch leftist take and the other legitimate. The share of housing units owned by institutional investors is less than 4% of the total; significant but not nearly enough to engineer a housing shortage. That's the sort of take that sounds good to the uninformed but is essentially dishonest.

The short term rental issue is more significant - about four times as many units are used in STR than are owned by institutional investors (defined as those that own 100+ properties). Keep in mind that those numbers will be skewed toward apartments in the STR market rather than stand-alone houses, while the institutional investor number will be skewed toward stand-alone houses since apartment buildings count as 1 property regardless of the number of units.

But again, NYC effectively banned STRs about a year ago and there hasn't been noticeable change in the rental market as a result. Nearly all the talking points you see about STRs ruining the rental market are ultimately funded by hotel industry groups, for fairly obvious reasons. Can it have an effect? Sure. But that effect is not nearly as large as you might think.

Kallainanna posted...

If it's "inefficient" to make sure everyone has housing, then I am 1000% in favor of an inefficient housing market.

Every form of inefficiency has a cost, and someone is going to have to pay it. From your take I'm guessing your answer to that question is "not me, so I don't care".

I have a frozen Brewpub brand coming out of the oven now.

xGhostchantx posted...

Even a company with two employees has to comply it. Even a company with only one.

So three months out of the year it's a one employee company, or simply shuts down for six weeks a year. How else could they possibly comply?

xGhostchantx posted...

No one here is overstaffed. We do not "overstaff" with "10%" more "just in case" someone goes on leave.

At this point you're actively choosing to ignore the point, as you can't have possibly misunderstood me. Yes, you are overstaffed not because someone might go on leave but because people will be on leave more than 10% of the year. You have to cover that leave somehow, either by overstaffing or by operating below capacity - which is just another way of saying you're overstaffed for the workload you're actually handling.

The only "gaslighting" going on is you trying to convince me that you're not overstaffed by American standards.

xGhostchantx posted...

Literally no, lol. Who is feeding you this bullshit? I genuinely feel really, really bad for you dude. Even a company with 10 employees still has to comply and still manages to.

An equivalent American company would only have 8 or 9 employees because they don't have to comply with that. How are you failing at basic math?

xGhostchantx posted...

you have been gaslit so, so badly. we absolutely are not "over staffed". Not even remotely close. We wish so, so bad that were true. You probably don't even realise that leave can be blocked if it's busy.

You're staffed such that at minimum 10% of your employees are on leave at any given time. You don't "feel" overstaffed because the excess staff isn't on-hand at any given time, but to maintain that leave policy means that you have to keep at minimum 11% more people on payroll to maintain the same level of staffing an equivalent American company would. The math isn't perfect, as an American company would generally offer 2 weeks paid leave per year vs 6 weeks in most European countries but close enough.

And of course leave can be blocked. It can in the US as well. If your business has a predictable surge period, leave is generally blacked out for that time period, such as December for retail workers or March-April for tax accountants.

bachewychomp posted...

Why would someone with a thousand times the wealth be less/only as worth blaming as millionaires as you're insinuating?

It depends on whether we're blaming them individually or as a class, because there's sure as fuck more than a thousand times as many millionaires as billionaires.

bachewychomp posted...

where you'd rather not be advocated for at all than have someone richer advocate for you

I don't trust anyone with that much money to be advocating for anyone but themselves, and I've never seen an example to show that I should.

bachewychomp posted...

Although the whole thing about Bernie being a millionaire was so stupid and overblown anyway.

In other circumstances I'd have agreed, but Bernie in particular had been railing against the millionaires and billionaires exploiting everyone only to drop the millionaires part like it was radioactive the first time someone pointed out that he was part of the millionaire class. By calling you Bernie I'm saying I expect the same exact behavior from you. Your lifestyle is just as dependent on exploiting those poorer than you as anyone in a corporate boardroom.

And this may be personal bias, but of the abusive employment situations I've been in none of them were caused by billionaires. The only small business I've worked for was operated by an asshole millionaire who in the end skipped town and left dozens of illegal immigrants protesting about not being paid for weeks (thankfully months after I quit); in corporate jobs it's not generally the CEO that's exploiting you, it's the largely millionaire middle management squeezing workers to increase their own "performance" based bonuses.

xGhostchantx posted...

A good start over there would be pushing for benefits since it varies state to state. In most western nations we get guaranteed paid sick leave and are actually encouraged (sometimes forced) to use our leave days (even months at a time). it would probably be a more palatable compromise for the red states.

One big difference between European and American employers is that by American standards you're massively overstaffed. An American company generally doesn't have the staff to have people gone a month or two out of the year, and hiring more people (or paying massive overtime) is actually more expensive than raising wages (within limits, of course).

OhhhJa posted...

Lol you dont know shit. Quit trying to pretend you're something you arent. Ive been in poverty and i can tell you haven't

OhhhJa posted...

Most people that claim 15 an hour is a livable wage are the kind of people that never had to live in poverty. But they want you to keep doing so

No one who had experience living on below $15 an hour would post that $15 an hour isn't a livable wage. Your own posts expose your lies, tough guy.

I'm guessing any experience you've had living on that level of income occurred in the 1990s.

bachewychomp posted...

Willy sounds a lot like the rural poor rhetoric that's common in America where they look down on city folk who are predominantly maybe one or two class strata above them, instead of directing that disdain towards the classes at or near the very top, who are the ones actually keeping people poor

Okay, uncle Bernie. We know it can't be the millionaires you were blaming, because you're one of them, so we'll have to blame the billionaires.

man101 posted...

A place where the life expectancy is the lowest in the country, the education is the worst, the infrastructure is the most outdated, and the likelihood of natural disaster is the highest. Don't call it a shit hole if that offends your sensibilities but it's definitely not a place most people want to live, and the fact that some select places can get by on $15 an hour doesn't mean it's a livable wage for the rest of the country.

My post about the Bronx proves how bad this take is. The median family income for Mississippi and the Bronx are roughly similar.

OhhhJa posted...

Most people that claim 15 an hour is a livable wage are the kind of people that never had to live in poverty. But they want you to keep doing so

On the contrary, the people saying $15 an hour is a livable wage are often the people who have or are living on that wage and question your life experience when you call it poverty, since you clearly have not experienced poverty if you think $15 an hour represents poverty.

There's an insulting term for your point of view, and it's called privilege.

Cacciato posted...

Whats your point?

That well more than half of New York is low income, apparently.

Monopoman posted...

$15 an hour might be a livable wage in some areas, but it's never considered good. I guess also some places are so fucking rundown and barren that most there don't make shit for money so there it might be decent.

Any place worth living is likely going to push towards making at least $25-30 an hour to have a decent life.

willythemailboy posted...

I get your game, though. Any place I point out that people can and do live on under $40k you're just going to call a shithole. You can't be proven wrong because you've defined the terms such that even proof that you're wrong you can take as "proof" that you're right.

New low effort troll arrives, gets same answer.

bachewychomp posted...

You're saying this about people complaining about $15 an hour

Allowing for some minor hyperbole, yes. The post above yours is saying "any place worth living" needs to exceed the median income for the Bronx. Let that sink in. They're pushing for a wage that would put a minimum wage earner above the median family income of part of NYC. The median individual income there is actually about $15/hour.

Meanwhile I live in a rather nice 200k or so town in Illinois where median income is higher than that, and living on $15 an hour isn't the high life but neither is it poverty wages. I swear most of you seem to think anyone living outside of a city of a million people still have outhouses and haven't yet discovered running water.

Questionmarktarius posted...

The old lady on the 3rd floor who would watch everyone's kids in her apartment for $30 a week, now needs several mandatory online courses, a separate detached building built to very strict code, regular inspections, and a license that needs to be renewed every year. None of that is cheap, and thus childcare is no longer cheap.

You forgot the biggest factor: there's a legal cap on how many kids she can watch based on the age of the children being watched. If she can only watch 5 kids, she has to charge 20% or more of your total income in order to make enough to pay her own bills.

bachewychomp posted...

Ah man it seems like topics that devolve to "just move to a cheaper area, simple as" are becoming a weekly occurrence on this board now

Well it seems that "no one can possibly live on less than what someone needs to live in a Manhattan high rise" has become a weekly occurrence, so the counter argument is also going to come up with the same frequency.

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

"people that farm the food I eat don't deserve to make the same amount of money as me because I went to college, okay?"

how do people seriously believe this?

The same person who thinks like you will in the same breath complain that the cost of childcare is too high, completely incapable of comprehending that the two might be related.