As a homeowner I see little benefit for me for the insane value of my home. Do I want to pay more in property taxes? No. If I sell it’s to just buy a different insanely priced home. I suppose I’m privileged in that I have other retirement plans so my kids will inherit my home - and that’s good I guess if they ever want to afford a home. Homes being an investment is the wrong mindset for a healthy society. Have cheap homes so you have enough money to invest in something else. I couldn’t care less if the value of my home plummets if all other desirable homes did too. Heck, I’d celebrate it. Seems to me the people who care are those who invest in real estate instead of just want a nice place to live.
Property taxes in many states are set according to budget, so your home’s value relative to other homes is important, but if all housing prices all fall or rise, the money collected is the same.
Homes are considered an investment because people want nice ones in locations that can only support so many (either via artificial or natural restriction). In turns out homes outside of those locations can get really cheap since finding buyers is hard.
Homes are and should always be an investment because they are. They dont have to beat the stock market, but a well maintained home should track inflation at least. They have real and huge replacement costs in materials and labor. If my house burnt down, it would cost $1M to rebuild.
Im all for cheap simple houses for those with less money. However, unless they are so cheap as to be disposable, they too will be investments.
This is incorrect. If they are an investment then they should go up and down in relation to the value of being able to live wherever the property is. The big issue now is all places (but some more than others) are artificially constraining supply with excessive regulation and restriction on what one can do with their property. We need to largely get rid of that excessive regulation (i.e. much less strict zoning allowing much higher density, with drastically restricted ability of neighbours to interfere with what is built and much quicker turn around time on permits to get building rolling as fast as possible). Doing that will destroy a lot of "value" of houses that are only constrained because of these rules. Other places will go up in value as much higher density is allowed more easily on land in higher demand areas.
What your house would cost to replace is only very tangentially relevant to what its resale value is.
I agree with the first part of what you said, but disagree with your closing comment. I think a lot of people underestimate how significant construction costs are. I planned was infinite and there were no zoning regulations, my home would only give up like a third of its value.
Materials and labor are a huge component of housing prices
if your house is currently a million dollars then dropping in value by a third is roughly the difference between needing 220k a year of income to buy it or 156k a year of income to buy it. it's a 96th percentile income house vs a 92nd percentile income house, which makes it an affordable house to many millions more people.
That being said. I agree that labor and materials are a huge part. However, a large part of the labor and materials cost is itself driven by regulation and should decrease in a less regulated environment (everything from elimination of wasted trades time caused by regulators to it being much easier for startups in 3d printing, factory line production, etc. should drive costs down), Further, elimination of mundane but expensive required details like minimum parking requirements, multiple fire escapes in low rise smaller developments limiting floor plan design (while being unnecessary due to improvements in fire suppression), minimum suite sizes,etc, etc. should drive more right sized development to areas that are currently overheated, pushing prices down.
>if your house is currently a million dollars then dropping in value by a third is roughly the difference between needing 220k a year of income to buy it or 156k a year of income to buy it. it's a 96th percentile income house vs a 92nd percentile income house, which makes it an affordable house to many millions more people.
Another way to put this is it would set house prices back by 3-4 years, which is where I was coming at it from.
I do think there is a lot that should be done on the regulatory front, so that more people can own, and more people in general can have roofs over their head.
I think it is despicable that we as a society have enacted things like minimum unit size while there are homeless people struggling to find housing. I think there should be basically no regulations for owner occupied homes, and the bare minimum safety standards for rentals. IF someone wants to rent a 10x10ft cinderblock cell to live in, they must really be struggling, so why the hell would we want to make things harder for them.
Why did you compare home size in a city to home size in a country? Average Japan home size is about 1000 square feet, smaller but not that much smaller.
Because the meme/myth about disposable Japanese housing comes from dense urban environments like Tokyo.
It is largely a result of tax policy and construction methods between 1960-1990 where it made sense to gut apartments after they depreciated for tax purposes.
In Japan, property tax decreases to zero over time, but resets if you upgrade it. There for people gut and remodel before selling their units so they get the benefit of a higher price, but the buyer pays the taxes.
I think it would be the best if everyone was forced to live in a flat, which size is determined by the number of people living in that Appartement. It is cool for you that your house is valued at 1 million; that proves my point even more. A house shouldn‘t be an Investment, but your education.
There are huge transaction costs to buying and selling a home, renting could also be seen as a way to avoid those costs if you aren’t going to stay somewhere. But I rented for cheap in Beijing when housing to buy costs were super high, who wouldn’t rent a $1 million apartment for < $1000/month, buying in that market would have been dumb even without red tape to buy something.
Let's say you are an airline. You are selling tickets for the next year. Jet fuel is a major input cost, largely driven by the price of crude oil. If you sell a ticket today for 6 months from now, you are implicitly short the oil market.
You haven't actually shorted the market, but if prices increase over the next 6 months, you may end up losing money on the tickets you sold. This is why you see airlines hedging, because they are implicitly short.
The same holds true for housing for most people as I explained above. People rarely downsize their homes. Their forward consumption of housing is almost always greater than their current exposure to the housing market. This leaves them implicitly net short.
Thanks for explaining. your are talking about exposure to cost increases relative to your intended purpose.
I hold that still depends on what your alternative investment opportunities are. If you buy the $1M house when you actually want the $2M house, you are still locking in 50% of the cost. Thats a good thing if the alternative investments perform poorly, and a bad thing if the alternatives are better.
There are negative benefits to high housing prices. It's the most illiquid asset type. If you sell it where are you going to live? At the same time high rents drive up the price of goods and services you need to pay for.
Jews are only 0.2% of the World’s population, but 17.46% of the World’s billionaires. Thus their representation is 8,730% of their population share.
Of course any non-idiot would see this as simply an interesting fact worthy of researching out how being a jew correlates with success in a merit-based competency hierarchy... and not a reason to hate jews for conspiring to take over the world. While we're at it, we should probably also chill out on white men in general too.
As somebody who's just incapable of acknowledging group-identity diversity is a thing worth respecting (though, I find individual diversity beautiful and fascinating) This was something of a rollercoaster:
Oh wow, a woman headed react? That's cool.
Oh wait, a trans-woman... so that's socio-cultural diversity though not biological diversity - still born a white male.
Unless transgenderism isn't a choice but part of somebody's biological nature, then it is biological diversity, right?
erm, is being biologically predisposed to not liking chocolate also biological diversity? Wow, how much biological diversity goes unnoticed by diversity advocates? Maybe fb is biologically diverse after all!?
Isn't it cool we're all unique individuals with unique interests, although fb has mostly people who all share an interest in tech. True diversity would be to get people not interested in tech at fb.
It’s irrelevant where it is said so long as it is said publicly.
Edit: This is the same reason Elon is now being sued for "Twibel". You cannot say state lies publicly without legal repercussions. "Funding secured" is classified as material non-public information.
I used to work in finance and regulatory compliance.
There’s no requirement that he lie that way in a regulatory filing, previous posters are trying to explain to you that it’s enough to make the claim publically. Lying in a filing would be a different crime.
Either the Twitter account is a financial venue covered by the regulations at issue, or making the announcement there was illegal independent of its truth.
The Prop 13 problem is easy to solve technically, if you see the problem as described in this piece... but that's not the problem that needs to be solved. The real problem is California's referendum system that allows such populist lunacy to pass at all.
I'm not sure what you're proposing, but my own preference (as a California voter) would be for initiative constitutional amendments to require a 60% supermajority. Initiative statutes, which can be modified after passage by the legislature, I'm still fine with passing on a bare majority.
Sorry I can't answer your question, but I'd bet money it's not a coincidence.. Scheduled births (whether induced or c-section) are prevalent enough that people will just avoid "yucky" dates even if they're not superstitious.
Anecdotally, I went in with my wife for an ultrasound on a Friday the 13th and it was definitely less crowded that day. Rest assured, no Rosemary's Baby detected, nor any heart defects, etc. I just benefited from not having to take a seat in the waiting room :).
Soc sec. number is used as an immutable unique identifier for Americans since that's really the only piece of information that can be used in such a way. I'm not aware of anybody relying on it as a sole means of authentication... if it's used for authentication it's always combined with additional information such as "you had a revolving credit account with: a, b, c, or d".
Even when there isn't a data breech I don't understand how all big 3 credit agencies survive doing their business as they currently do... which is to expose people to the injury of identify theft by default, and then tell them to pay up if they want a product that protects them from that threat.. How is that not seen as akin to a gangster protection racket?
I'll try and keep it simple. It helps make code more readable.
When I see a bunch of Maybe monads, for example, I can instantly know that the programmer's intent was maybe to not just have a type safe null and avoid null pointer exceptions, but also to possibly make use of Maybe's toxicity.
What I mean by toxicity is you know how in some languages you have "not a number" aka NaN? A NaN times / divided by / added to / subtracted from anything is a NaN, that means that if you have a complex formula, if you throw a NaN in there anyway you get back a NaN. Maybe works the exact same way but with all functions not just arithmetic operators. That's what I mean by its toxicity.
Without Maybe you'd have to explicitly apply that logic everywhere you'd otherwise apply a monadic "join." The reader would then have to study your code much more carefully to understand that intent, and probably look at it with some skepticism that the toxicity works perfectly every time or is in every place you might expect. And of course not everyone values brevity and expressiveness, but when done right it makes code more readable not less, and Monads done right facilitate that.
Maybe's toxicity is just an example of pretty much any "magic" you can build into a Monad. You could for example have a Future Monad that will handle asynchronous control flow for you.
As a side matter, it's not just working around Haskell's strict type system that make Monads a good fit for IO, but also Haskell's non-strict execution.. monads help things happen in the right order which is crucial for IO. That's kind of neat when you think about - the bridge between the mathematical rigor of pure functional code and real world devices that make computing useful. Functional purity makes code easier to reason about and less error-prone.
