It feels like we (and I specifically mean the left) has decided to nearly universally stop enforcing rules on a large basis as an alternative to legislative reform.
We’ve basically decided that actually reforming the bureaucratic machine is much too hard, so instead of reform let’s just not enforce anything.
One of Zohrans ads is such an on the nose example of this. He has an ad where he says he’s gonna help out small business by cutting down the fines that they face. Which on the surface sort of sounds nice, but now we basically just get shitty businesses selling shitty things and facing small slaps on the wrist instead of actually going through and removing the onerous laws and enforcing the important ones.
Same thing going on with immigration. The system is so fucked up, that instead of reform we simply won’t enforce immigration laws.
You see the same thing with housing that abundance basically called out. The system has gotten really good at writing more and more complicated laws at the cost of things basically falling apart in the real world
These copper thefts affect millions of people. It regularly happens to the MTA and shuts down the subway. A functional society would make an example of people committing these thefts so that the rest of us can continue to contribute and live their lives without being screwed by antisocial people
Seems to me there’s been a weird inversion on the left towards prioritizing individual rights over rights of society.
The right to use drugs in public, to camp in a park, to steal copper, to do sexually inappropriate stuff, to break laws, all seem to be more important than societal safety, comfort, and peace now.
It’s very hard for me to make a case for urban living, and more apartments, and less cars when the average experience in cities in America is rampant drug use, and tons of unenforced quality of life issues.
I live in a very very good area of Brooklyn and still regularly run into needles, human shit, and open fentanyl use.
LA is similar unless you never leave your little neighborhood.
DC was similar when I lived there about 4 years ago.
SF is cleaning up, but I’ve regularly walked on streets where it’s just bodies and needles
I was shocked by the Vietnamese area of Seattle. It felt like a zombie land.
I mean, if we’re talking city core yeah this it the average experience. I say this as someone who loves cities, American cities leave a lot to be desired and a lot of that comes from simply refusing to enforce basic laws that the rest of the world (including much more left countries) don’t hesitate to do.
In what "very very good area of Brooklyn" are you regularly encountering needles?!
I've lived in the NYC metro area for nearly two decades and have yet to see a single one. Definitely saw them when I lived in Baltimore, and have seen them in Philly, but even then not "regularly" in either case.
I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.
To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?
Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin. Chesa also had pedigree like Zohran does (in his case, both parents in prison for terrorism charges, raised by lefties).
Inevitably, people saw through the virtue signalling and ended up recalling him. I voted for him initially because he sounded good on paper ("a DA with a heart") but when it actually came to running the office, he was a disaster.
Case in point: SF is overrun with Honduran drug dealers. But Chesa was convinced that they are all victims of human trafficking and refused to enforce the laws against them! His office would either not file charges against them, or just let them walk with a slap on the wrist. Naturally, in the Hondo drug dealer circles it was a well known fact that if you ever get picked up in SF, claim that you were trafficked there and/or that you are underage.
After a couple of years people had had enough of this circue, and decided to recall him. I voted to recall him at the first chance I got.
> Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin
As a former New Yorker who grew up in the Bay Area, I disagree.
Chesa had zero public experience prior to his run, and he never moderated his position, not even after being ousted from office. In the end, he was elected by fewer than 90,000 people [1]. (Smaller than the population of Manhattan’s Chinatown [2].)
Mamdani has some experience as a city legislator. And he moderated between his primary and the general, the latter which he won with more than a million votes [3].
The police respond to upstream actions of the prosecutors and judiciary. If the people they are arresting aren't being punished they won't bother arresting them. If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place. This is broken windows theory in action.
> If the people they are arresting aren't being punished they won't bother arresting them.
That’s a weird excuse to be soft on crime.
> If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place.
Well right there is the reason they should still be doing their job. Because you’re right, if the police stop arresting people, why would anybody report crime to the police?
> It feels like we (and I specifically mean the left) has decided ...
I'm going to invoke Murc's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law ) here and call out that this is an example of ascribing all agency in government to the left (and considering the right to be a force of nature that can't do anything but what they're going to do).
> Murc’s Law is a term that describes a tendency in political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors, while treating Republican actions as inevitable or structurally determined. The term originated in the left-wing blogosphere and has since gained traction in commentary about press bias and political framing.
These sorts of things are not a "the left has stopped enforcing laws" (the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws), but rather there has been a concerted effort to remove the ability for government to operate and regulate people organizations.
That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.
Yes, reform is hard. It is made more difficult when there aren't resources to do the reforms. It is furthermore difficult to do reforms when the suggested alternatives are "privatize it, move it to the states (or to cities), let the market figure it out."
> the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws
Left DAs absolutely have the ability to enforce or not enforce laws.
> That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.
Who was saying "defund the police"? And yes, some of them were actually trying to do that, to do exactly what they said.
The ridiculousness of the US two party system is key. Eg Zohan allowing shitty business practices is him using a traditionally right wing policy (to deregulate, and be "business friendly") coming from a Democrat.
Where does ICE fit into your view that immigration policy is too soft?
I just don't see how you can view America's plight as being due to soft, left wing policy. It has a right wing populist government and a partisan judiciary.
I think immigration currently is fucked up and there needs to be clean, legal avenues for immigrating. I don’t think immigration policy is too soft. It’s much too hard if anything.
But immigration policy =/= immigration enforcement. I think ICE needs to exist and needs to enforce the laws. Do I think maskless thugs dragging people from their homes is good? No. Screw that. They need to be dressed in uniform and follow laws. But we DO need enforcement and if you’re illegal I think you’ve got to go while simultaneously we need to offer a straightforward avenue beyond the lefts idea of simply abdicating any sort of enforcement
It’s mostly a meme not backed up by any serious facts. Politically, both sides get kudos for pretending cities are more dangerous than they actually are.
Feels like non news. Or at least, a continuation of existing trends.
We don't build enough housing, so housing becomes a good investment, eventually pricing out everyone except existing investors or people with large assets. We' structured the system so that once you're in you're IN. Leverage, 30yr mortgages, tax deductions all continue to subsidize existing homeowners at the expense of everyone else (who are technically a minority).
If this continues, expect to see more and more radical policy proposals by young people.
If you understand the underlying reasons for why an investor would buy an actively depreciating asset, then you understand why OP suggests--correctly in my opinion--that this is a non-story.
We have a housing shortage. As long as it looks like the shortage will continue, investors--people--will buy depreciating assets in the hopes that population growth will cause them to be worth more tomorrow than they are today. If it's not Private Equity, it'll be rental companies. If it's not rental companies, it'll be mom & pop landlords. If it's not mom & pop landlords, it'll be people looking for a second home or pied-a-terre with upside potential. The problem is the perpetual shortage clearly indicating increasing economic rents, instead of a trend toward the cost of production.
This is a housing crisis but most Americans are treating it like a housing whoopsie. We treat it with kid gloves, where we fight about the "correct" way to build just enough housing, in just the right places, instead of pointing a firehouse of development incentives, to the point of literally subsidizing private development and public development.
It's basic economics, but our electorate will tie itself in knots to make the housing crisis fit their niche political narrative.
Besides not enough new inventory in some areas, one major problem is allowing excessive housing hoarding and not taxing it enough to reduce gamification conditions leading to absurd exploitation. It needs much more regulation and increased progressive taxation for people/orgs who monopolize empty houses simply as speculative "investment" financial chicanery.
I agree but there's only a single factor that matters: special treatment of mortgage loans. In tax. Government guarantees, both for owners and for banks. Special interest rates. Repo with government support. The list goes on.
And now you can say "yes, but ending those will cause a crash in house prices, which will hurt a lot of people, a lot of owners", which is true, but anything you do to change house prices will cause that hurt.
In a way you can look at it as the usual problem: governments effectively sold houses, handing out cash to constituents for votes and power, and now they want, maybe even need, them back. They can't pay to get them back. That's what the argument is about. If the government wanted to buy back houses the way everyone else has to play, by paying market price, nobody would be arguing much. Because of how property taxes work, even if governments crash the housing market, say by ending mortgage guarantees, governments will lose a lot of money they have already spent.
And the fundamental problem is not the division of houses, but how many there are. Crashing house prices is only part of the problem. They need to be torn down and rebuilt denser if you want to make any difference. That also needs to be paid for.
>We have a housing shortage. As long as it looks like the shortage will continue, investors--people--will buy depreciating assets in the hopes that population growth will cause them to be worth more tomorrow than they are today
This is the most interesting point. With the current birthrate, what will these homes be worth in 30, 40 years, when depopulation is ongoing? Prices will drop, and so will supply. Look to Japan, deaths of all towns that are not major cities, I expect that to occur in the US
Yes, in 50 years, I hope we as a society respond to the struggles of people then too, instead of nit picking our way to destroying an entire two generations ability to build wealth like we have done here.
This is a very important thing to point out. So often, issues that affect normal people negatively are only afforded a little bit of coverage once in a while. If the trend persists and it is still negatively affecting the citizenship, it deserves to be in the news.
> Of those, mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85% of all investor-owned residential properties, while those with between 6 and 10 properties account for another 5%.
They don’t provide any concrete evidence for how they classify “mom and pop” (to be fair i haven't had the time to read the original paper). It’s standard operating procedure to split investment properties between many subsidiaries to limit the financial splash damage. It’s mostly a legal fiction because the property managers are directors of multiple corporations managing dozens of properties, but the courts haven't cracked down on it yet. I’m suspicious of whatever statistics they use to classify investors.
(I’m speaking only of the investors that buy to rent extract, I have no insight into the flippers)
Not when they’re funneled through states like Wyoming and Nevada which an enormous amount of them are… both have very good privacy laws protecting the owners identity. Often times there will be a local LLC which is owned by (at least one) separate out of state LLC in Nevada or Wyoming obfuscating who the true owners are. There’s a whole industry behind this.
It's actually not, because it's a non-issue. The privacy of a Wyoming LLC doesn't mean protection. Your name isn't on any of the public records documents, but a court order can still force the disclosure of the interested parties.
It’s only a non-issue only if you have legal standing and the wherewithal/funding to push through to discovery, which in this case is a really (in)convenient catch-22 if you’re a constituent who wants to institute reform.
The fourth estate, the one that we ostensibly trust to hold power to account, again very conveniently, does not generally have that standing, FOIA excepted.
Not everyone has to be rich to want/need privacy. Maybe you had threats against your life and dont want your house and vehicle to be traceable to your name. Maybe you disagree with the automated license plate reader/tracker and this is one of the only legal ways around that.
Shit even if not something like that, 5 homes in the middle quintile in my city would be around 2.4 million dollars. That's the entire net worth of a middle class family at the end of their earning years, including their house. The only people whose mom and pop have that kind of money to invest are rich folks. It's just as much a problem as the other thing in practical terms.
>You’re not a mom and pop landlord if you’re just buying a second home to move into with intent to sell your current one.
That's my point. The person I'm replying to is being obtuse and sarcastically arguing that the investor criteria requires owning 3+ as an attempt to use absurdity to force people to admit that 2+ makes you an "investor" thereby classifying the people who are simply swapping homes like you stated as "investors".
blindriver: "you must own two homes and then buying a third makes you an investor"
me: "no, that would mean people who own one home to live in and one home to rent out are not investors. Owning one and investing in a second makes you an investor."
You: "you are sarcastically and obtusely arguing that being an investor requires owning 3+ homes!"
No, I'm not arguing that.
> "thereby classifying the people who are simply swapping homes like you stated as "investors""
Nobody was talking about people who own two homes while moving houses. But if we were then the choice is (people who own a second house to rent are not classed as investors just in case they get confused with people moving house) which is wrong permanently and silly, vs (people who own two homes while selling their old home are classed as investors for a while) which is wrong temporarily but not too unreasonable, then I will pick the latter.
That was my mom and pop in the 80s they bought about one house a year. Empty derelict houses purchased from the city for between $1000 and $15,000. The city provided matching grants to fix them up. Also the city paid the rent for the Cambodian and Vietnamese migrants that came here to live. My parents invested the organization and literal sweat equity to fix up these homes.
Intent doesn't matter; you can justify about any horrible behavior imaginable by saying you're looking after your family. I resent the commodification of housing and the destabilizing effects it has across society. Where's the upside?
In my area owning a trailer park home requires being in like the top 1% internationally. Owning 1 home in Oakland may be worse than owning 4 in Detroit, in terms of being an under-hated under-taxed elite.
Who needs more than two? You can only live in one at a time.
Why let the rentier class grow any larger than they already are?
It's not like there is an oversupply of desirable housing. And even if there were an oversupply, the answer isn't to incentivize the rich to get richer.
Yeah, we definitely still need homes to be available for rent.
If you move a lot, or want to be able to move easily and explore different cities or even neighborhoods within a city, renting is way easier than if you'd have to go through the hassle of buying.
What sucks is when private companies start owning too many houses and they have unfair advantages over regular folks. For example, they have teams of lawyers.
I was suggesting that as a way to prevent purchasing homes to resell for more money. I actually meant it as a tax on the profits from a sale of a house.
I completely agree, we need homes for rent at reasonable rates.
But I forgot that a lot of the homes that were purchased for investing were purchased to rent out. A 75% tax on the profits from sale wouldn’t help. If it’s 75% on all profits, including rental income, it’ll destroy the rental market.
I can’t think of a decent answer off the top of my head. My suggestion was glib, but it was meant for the pretty easy case of just flipping.
Trying to control how many houses are purchased versus rented, and how you determine a reasonable rent or prevent that from being abused, is a lot harder.
I think there are a few solutions. Having a property tax that goes higher the more properties you have would be a good one (it could be exempt for bigger apartment blocs if that was an issue)
A few or dozens, but not a large fraction of a city by one entity. The tax should be progressive and aggregate with ultimate holding companies/investors so they can't just gamify limits by creating a bunch of shell and holding companies.
There’s lots wrong with buying up homes for investing so that prices of homes go up and people can’t afford homes. It’s some kind of flawed myopic morality that says there’s nothing wrong with it.
They buy homes for investing with the expectation that prices soon rise, owing to demand and low interest rates, and inelastic supply. If you fix the supply issue then it would be moot.
30% of homes are not sitting empty, cities have a low vacancy rate. Often they rent out and we want low rents too.
He solution is building more or having fewer people on the market for a home through low immigration, and only the former seems politically viable.
A lot of people over the last few decades have invested in electronics and computer manufacturing, and today electronics and computers are cheaper than they have ever been. If we’re going to have a theory about why housing is expensive it’s going to have to be deeper than just the idea that investing in something makes the price go up.
Housing is expensive in large part because of how illiquid supply is. This is in large part because the fixed compliance costs of doing work upon "land near cities" is high. I'm not talking the $50 permit. I'm talking the $50-500k worth of engineering and lawyers and whatnot you need to bulldoze a 1-family and put in an N-family even in a place zoned for it. You typically wind up going rounds with the city at every step just because while you're nominally allowed to do whatever it is you have to bicker over everything like parking and setbacks and whatnot that are nebulously defined for the purpose of allowing the .gov to extract concessions. This is why only big money 5-over N apartments get built. When you have a ton of fixed costs nothing less makes sense.
In every North American city facing rising housing costs, there is a literal ocean of usable, desirable land for housing, already serviced by municipal infrastructure.
And every month, a percentage of that useable and desirable land comes up for sale, meaning it’s previous owner occupiers are voluntarily moving, and a new owner, if they chose, could redeploy the land in a way that provides homes to many more people, while not evicting anyone.
Unfortunately, each of these cities has also made it illegal for this transition to happen, mandating that the only way you’re allowed to build larger buildings, (if at all) is by demolishing another large (and occupied) building first.
In New Zealand the central government tried to weaken the building height restrictions, but some of the local governments have blatantly and illegally stuck to the old rules.
the key word is manufacturing. the article is talking about buying homes, not building them. if all those people would invest into building new homes as opposed to buying existing ones then the comparison would make sense and maybe the price of homes would indeed go down.
Absolutely. I think one of the biggest problems in discourse around housing is this idea that housing “investment” can only ever about buying existing assets.
People aren’t “buying up homes for investing so that prices of homes go up and people can’t afford homes.”
That may be an aggregate and long term effect, but i’ve never seen anyone actually motivated by something like that.
At least not statistically.
People with excess money (often dentists, doctors, middle managers, small business owners, etc), who don’t trust stocks or the banks, are buying houses because they think they can rent them to people for cashflow in the future (aka not have to eat dogfood!), or rent them out now to other people for money. People that otherwise couldn’t be in these houses, or those people would be buying them instead.
Aka put their money to work.
IMO, people doing that right now are going to lose their shirts, but that is risk/reward. I could be wildly wrong.
I am not saying it’s their motivation, but it is the end result. And since that is the end result, it is immoral.
I’m sure every person and corporation has some reason for buying homes in excess, but it’s still wrong because homes and land are limited resources that people need to live.
When everyone gets sick of it and votes for punitive taxes on residential property that is not owner occupied.
I would prefer they deregulate the living shit out of constructing additional housing so all the small money can get into that (i.e. something productive instead of literal rent seeking) instead but I am not hopeful.
This has happened in places like Scotland but I doubt it'll happen in the US. And if it did, courts would strike the law on the grounds "can't take property".
First, states like RI are already making incremental steps toward it (they have started taxing non owner occupied non rented properties above a threshold, mainly to get the billionares with fancy waterfront vacation real estate to either live in the places or rent them out). It's only a matter of moving that stuff down the economic ladder.
Second, all the "people oughta hang for this" quality legal precedent that enables. If you own a parcel and the government passes a bunch of laws saying you can't do things to the parcel going forward without jumping through economic non-starter sized hoops is that not a taking? They're basically forcing you to sell out to a developer big enough to jump through the hoops like in that supreme court case, only instead of a named developer it's basically a class of developers. And that's considered "not a taking". Straight up taxation is even less of a taking by comparison.
I'd be much more in favor of the taxation if it weren't for all the laws preventing small time land owners and speculators from developing on a scale and budget that befits them but if new punitive taxes get passed without rolling back all sorts of other regulation it's probably very bad for them.
At some point the number of vacancies (for renting) causes enough cash flow issues people go bankrupt, or the number of non-investor buyers drops enough that it’s clear it’s just an investor bubble and investment value tanks.
You're completely missing the point of the comment you're replying to, though.
The parent comment suggests that the cost of investing is not high enough. Moreover, they suggest that it should not only be a higher cost, but that this cost should be redistributive.
The proposed cost isn't redistributive, though. The investors aren't running a charity, and there's an inelastic supply, so they'll be passing the cost of all of those taxes on to the renters until they have a comfortable margin again.
You are completely missing the point of my comment though. I am saying it’s immoral to buy property in excess in the first place. So it should be discouraged, disincentivized, or made illegal, yes, and there are plenty of ways to do it, and sure, that is one of them.
As I said in another comment, there may be situations I’m not thinking of where this would be beneficial. For example buying up extremely dilapidated properties and flipping them for much more money after fixing them up.
So I guess I’m a little cautious about just making it flat out illegal. I don’t know enough about the market to know if that would really be a problem.
So I suggested a tax high enough to make it extremely undesirable to do. I figure the net effect will be to stop it.
I don't think you understand who the tax hurts in that case. If investors can pass that tax off to a renter, than this type of policy just hurts renters. It seems similar to rent to control its great if you own a house but you ultimually create a shortage that has a lot more slient unknown victims. The real solution is to just build more housing in places people want it so that renting it becomes insanely cheap because there is a glut of supply. It also drives the cost of houses down but I think that might be for the better despite hurting my bottom line as a single family house owner
The nuance needed is in taxing progressively in relation to how many other properties are owned in aggregate by ultimate shareholders/holding companies and forbidding gamification tricks like putting every house into its own trust.
This is a classic fallacy trotted out every time someone suggests taxing the rich/corporations/landlords more.
"Oh, you can't do that, they'll just pass on the costs to consumers and keep their margins the same! Really, when you raise taxes on the wealthy, the only people you're hurting are the little people!!"
But evidence doesn't bear that out. Real economics are more complex than that, and especially given how things are right now, people can't afford more expensive homes, so trying to pass on additional costs is going to sharply reduce your available market.
I disagree that consider the effects on supply and demand that taxes have is simplification or ignoring real economics is fallacy?
My only point was that its a supply issue not really a tax issue. Houses already have tax on them called property tax its small yes but the reason investors are buying houses is not because the tax is small but because the demand for them is extremely high and the supply is very low. Adding a tax does not in any way fix the demand imbalance. This is why things like price controls only create shortages the problem is that its impossible to build houses because of nimbism.
A Tax doesn't make more houses exist even without investors there isn't enough houses because of local zoning and protesting prevents cheap housing from entering the market. A Tax that does not solve this problem still means that there are to many people buying / renting chasing to few houses.
I agree with you. But let’s just say the comment you’re replying to is correct. They’ll pass it on to their renters.
Ok. Good.
That’s why we have to make it high enough. If you put a 10% tax on them they’ll just raise rents 10% (or more). I agree.
If you put a 75% tax on them, they’ll have to charge so much money that they’ll have a very hard time getting renters at all. Pretty soon that property is useless to an investor, but can be sold to a normal person and work just fine.
—
My suggestion was actually designed for just buying houses in hopes of reselling them. Buying them for rentals had not occurred to me, but I do know that’s a very common thing. It should have.
If the tax is high enough that you can’t make the business case work out, they won’t do it. And since it doesn’t apply to home owners on a primary residence that house is still perfectly good for anyone who would like to live there.
But that's the intended outcome, isn't it? The proposal is to increase supply of housing for sale by decreasing of supply of housing to rent.
The cost of investment increases, so to keep the profits investors increase the rent, less people can afford it so the demand for rent decreases and investors sell houses. The supply of housing increases (I agree this is quite convoluted way to increase housing supply) and prices drop. Top cohort of renters can now afford to buy a house, and the bottom cohort is... fucked?
I was being sarcastic. taxes are rarely a good solution to our ills, because you are enabling tyranny from the gvt. And yes there are places/situations where taxes have exceed 100%.
I suggest that any tax on multiple home purchases should scale, and be different depending on whether or not an individual or a corporation is doing the buying.
If someone’s a billionaire and wants to play around by buying houses? Is that any better than an investment company doing it for the market?
How do you tell the difference between a rich person buying their third vacation home and buying a house they intend to sell for profit in a year or two through speculation?
Of course, on the other side, I’m aware of companies that own some company housing to let their employees use. How do you tell that from investing?
Maybe since they weren’t really doing it to make money they wouldn’t really care that the tax would be high when they sold it if they made a big profit.
It all gets really sticky. No special taxes gains on your primary residence, may be a lower tax (that 75% of what’s er) on a secondary residence.
But pretty quickly if you have that many houses personally you can probably afford to pay a high tax on gains. You’re not really what we want to optimize the market for anyway.
I just guessed at a big number. Maybe it should be 50%. Maybe it should be 90%. I have no idea. It seems like it should be legal, there have got to be cases where it might be useful. Buying and flipping houses from dilapidated neighborhood by turning it into something better.
I’m at the age where I wouldn’t mind a house. But they’re all gigantic, expensive, or both in my area. I have no idea how a normal family is ever supposed to afford one.
"Markets" exist because they are a thing people find useful. If people can't afford shelter and participate in the "market" of leveraging property because they are being pushed out by a soulless outgrowth of "line go up" thinking, then the "market" has failed and needs to be fixed until it is useful for people again.
Sure, but if the price of housing is too high then price controls won't fix it either. You'd end up with no availability, or a decades-long waitlist for rent-controlled apartments like Stockholm.
The issue with housing affordability is that the market is often prevented from responding to high demand and low supply by regulation. SF is very restrictive with permitting housing construction, despite the incredibly high rents. It's not that the market forces are failing to incentivize housing construction, it's that developers are prevented from responding to market demand.
>Sure, but if the price of housing is too high then price controls won't fix it either. You'd end up with no availability
You're assuming a baseline of a functional market system.
If you have widespread price-fixing between landlords (say, via everyone using the same algorithm service that gives everyone the same recommendation) then rent control isn't introducing a price fix, it's just changing the level of price fixing.
If you can only rent for $X000, but the rent price is fixed to at least $X500, then for you, there might as well be no availability - the landlord is leaving the place vacant due to the price-fixing.
The allegations of rent fixing don't look very credible. RealPage had a single-digit market share in SF when that story was making the rounds, nowhere near enough to effectively fix rates. Furthermore, these cities don't have high vacancy rates. And lastly, cities that banned the use of the software and did not see a subsequent drop in rental prices.
This is called a cartel. The trouble with cartels is enforcing it. Cartel members cheat all the time by selling for less than the cartel price in order to get a larger share of the market. The setup is unstable as the incentives are much like the Prisoner's Dilemma.
It's not the fault of private capital firms that local governments have essentially outlawed building new homes in many areas. The solution should be focused on restricting the ability of localities to do this, not restricting the ability of companies to buy real estate.
Yeah I agree with this here. Its simply to hard to build housing and the number permits and zoning restrictions have lead to localized housing shortages where people want to live. Its simply a difficult poltical issue to solve because most of the time zoning is handled at the local level and old people who have houses attend town hall meetings where zoning is discussed (if seldomly ever). Homeowners who have treated housing as a speculative centeralized asset have little to gain in allowing the market fixing itself.
Which doesn't really matter because they don't need to be "protected" in any capacity. Removing their ability to purchase those homes, and letting it get sorted between the people who are "outlawing building homes" and those who want to move there makes more sense.
Deciding who gets to buy what is known as central economic planning. It doesn't have a good track record.
In this case, by restricting who can buy, you're reducing the demand for housing. Less demand means lower prices. Lower prices mean fewer homes will be built, meaning less supply.
A better scheme would be to lower the costs of home construction by reducing regulations and taxes on them.
Markets are powerful tools--perhaps the most powerful tool we have to shape human interactions. But too many people believe in a sort of market gospel ("Supply Side Jesus"); that market forces are as inevitable and inflexible as the force of gravity. In reality, policy choices shape markets and careful market design can deliver politically-favorable outcomes.
Markets work for us, not the other way around. "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"
“Ground rents are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which best bear to have a particular tax imposed upon them.”
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
“A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground.”
“The sea in the neighbourhood of the islands of Shetland is more than commonly abundant in fish, which make a great part of the subsistence of the inhabitants. But in order to profit by the produce of the water, they must have a habitation upon the neighbouring land. The rent of the landlord is in proportion, not to what he can make by the land, but to what he can make both by the land and water. It is partly paid in sea-fish.”
Got anything more specific than cliches? For example, do you have any examples of this demonstrably making housing more affordable (ie lowering housing costs as a percentage of income) at scale?
I asked you for examples of market deregulation making housing more affordable at scale. I am not interested in your assertions about how the market works, but empirical data of your proposals leading to improved outcomes. Apparently you don't have any.
Those are the result of a free market. Zoning laws are the results of participants in a free market protecting their investments. Even in the absence of a government (if functioning markets could exist in such an environment) with which to create such laws, people would find other ways to do it. Rent control comes after rents in the free market have already increased to the point where people create political pressure to make these policies (if it's not the result of lobbying by investors).
You could temporarily make the situation better by getting rid of these laws and regulations, but over time they would just come back because in a free market the players that get such policies implemented get richer and win.
So basically remove all regulations and everything will fix itself automatically? This kind of wishful thinking is ludicrous, and it's insane how common it is. Markets have issues that need to be addressed through regulations, unless we want a return to the Gilded Age.
Wealth isn't "distributed" in a free market. People work and invest to get money in exchange.
Consider Jeff Bezos. He was roundly criticized for the profligacy of spending $80 million for his wedding. But look at it another way. He spread the wealth around by paying artisans, workers, craftsmen, photographers, travel agents, hotels, restaurateurs, etc.
Wealth has a distribution in any economy, and the actual distribution is a consequence of the economic system which itself is the aggregate of specific policy decisions.
Those people could have been doing something more useful with their time if Bezos hadn't bought them. Because Bezos has such an obscene amount of wealth, he can outpay any other cause that people would want to pay for. Those craftsmen and workers could have built a farm and a school, but because the people that need those don't have the kind of money Bezos does, they used their time to entertain Bezos and his friends for a couple of days instead.
This is comical. Do you fondle billionaires balls out of sheer loyalty or are you that ideologically captured? Trickle-down economics never worked, do you not know that? Nobody can work hard enough to deserve a billion dollars. This wealth was stolen from actual workers being way undercompensated.
Now, from a higher level of abstraction, would you rather $80M worth of work be done toward inflating balloons and setting tables for some megarich fuck's wedding? Or would you rather they be doing something that's actually improving society? (And maybe is more fulfilling to them).
> Wealth isn't "distributed" in a free market. People work and invest to get money in exchange.
It's trickled up by regulatory capture, cheating the political system, gerrymandering, and grants to ensure the property class pay little or no taxes and get socialism for the rich while suppressing wages, expanding undocumented workers and 13a exception prison slave labor, encouraging austerity, and neoliberalism.
> The Gilded Age was a time of great prosperity in the US.
Oh ok, so you have a totally wrong understanding of history. Neoliberalism's strongest solider, I see.
You do realize that the average American back then was working insanely long hours -when there was work at all- for meager wages, in horrendous conditions? Perhaps that's what you want to do with your life? Not me.
> remove all regulations on rent.
How would removing all regulations on rent improve this situation? You'd just make landlords even more powerful than they already are. What would prevent them from charging as much as they can get away with, ensuring their tenants remain poor forever? They are knowns to collectively price gouge.
If you want cash poor people to compete with cash rich private equity in the housing market without banning PE completely, you need to make it cheaper for cash poor people to borrow money. That too isn’t a particularly radical policy proposal. A lot of countries across the world do it with positive outcomes.
You could go the other direction -increasing the borrowing cost of purchasing a home for investment to ensure that borrowers with less capital can still afford homes in the same market.
As a hypothetical, you could tax their purchase at the same rate at which they're borrowing and use the funds to back loan guarantees for new/lower income purchasers.
The point is to impair the ROI for multi-home purchasers without limiting upside in the market.
NINJA loans were loans for people with no income and no jobs. What I’m proposing is cheaper access to cash for first time homebuyers. You’d still have to be credit worthy.
Yep, pass that, free up a few percentage points of inventory, good wealth transfer to the rest of existing entrenched investor base. They might even come leased!
How about we start with no home-based deductions for corporations. The means depreciation, vacancy, any sort of loss is not tax deductible for a corporation. If a corporation owns 100 homes, it may cost them nothing (or close to nothing) to keep 10 (or more) of those homes vacant, because they can simply deduct the costs from those vacant homes from the massive profits they are reaping on the other 90 and lower their tax burden.
The average person who owns a second home for rental purposes is highly motivated to get that home rented out, even if it means lowering the rent to attract a renter, because it can be financially ruinous to pay for the taxes and an upkeep if it stays empty.
Private equity shouldn't be able to own housing. It should be like new highways and tolls, you get to charge until you make up for your investment, but then people who live there or the government should own it.
Want to keep your toll business? Build more housing.
I have a different take. I feel housing is important enough that the government (i.e., the voters) shouldn't be able to interfere in the market for it, e.g., shouldn't be able to restrict who can buy and who can sell a house or apartment building.
If it's so important, then my take is that the government should step in and make sure it happens and in some orderly way.
Cost cutting in my town for profits that go away just drains the local's pockets. If you want free market rules to apply, then profits going out of the town/city should be taxed harder to promote local businesses and community.
If there are people that cannot afford housing, I would prefer for the government to give those people money rather than interfering with the resource-allocation system on which everyone relies. Prohibiting certain kinds of investors from investing in housing would be an example of interfering.
> Prohibiting certain kinds of investors from investing in housing would be an example of interfering.
Note that I did not propose forbidding investment, just having rules to help make sure final ownership ends in people (who ideally live there and don't own other 10+ homes).
I'm just making sure that investments don't fuel a system where regular people can't own, but only rent forever, paying past the investment and a healthy interest for their lending, planning and doing service.
Why do road and other infrastructure investments can get these limited profit kind of terms for governments, but housing can't get similar ones for the people?
I do a lot of "focus group" style conversations and one theme is "why do people think the economy is so bad for them right now?" A perception that the housing market is unfair comes up a lot, particularly complaints that investors are buying up all the houses.
Ithaca recently got an ordinance to encourage alternative dwelling units (ADU, aka "granny flats") but boy was it a knock-down drag-out because so many people were up in arms about AirBNB conversions and Private Equity getting involved in buying and building properties. As I'm seeing it Ezra Klein's "Abundance" theme is closely linked to Matt Stoller's "antitrust" theme both in the sense that monopolies are one reason "why nothing works" and that anger at them is dominating the public imagination.
the govs of the left shifting countries in EU (Norway, Denmark, Iceland) played an active role in nipping private energy monopolies in the bud. (Where did Spain err in comparison?) Their policies probably would be regarded as communist in the US though. I tend to call it "communitarian" rather than "communist", but I might be too lazy to argue that distinction :(
Abstract
>Traditional corporatist mechanisms in the Nordic countries are increasingly challenged by professionals such as lobbyists, a development that has consequences for the processes and forms of political communication. Populist political parties have increased their media presence and political influence, whereas the news media have lost readers, viewers, listeners, and advertisers.
YC used to be about investing in potential millennialist monopolies like AirBnB/Stripe/Coinbase/sama, though these days they lobby for the small businesses & the small cities (SF) :)
The economist Alan Kohler on Australia's ABC News has a great quote: "For housing to no longer outstrip incomes, it has to become a bad investment."
The "how" of it doesn't matter. Could be changes to taxation, investment rules, foreign buyers, whatever. The point is that no matter what, for housing to stop getting more expensive faster than people's incomes, it has to be a bad investment.
Right now, in Australia, housing is a fantastically good investment, earning ludicrous incomes for people basically doing nothing but sitting on some property. It has created a new social class of the "landed gentry" that can earn income without usefully contributing to the economy.
>The new nobility will not give this up willingly.
It's not just the nobility, it's also the Australian economic system itself. Australia's GDP is built on asset inflation and the housing market - I find numbers between 10% to 25% of Australia's GDP being based on housing.
If the Australian government stops the boomer money train they might crash the GDP, which in turn will negatively affect Australia's borrowing capacity, which will negatively impact (crash?) the economy.
Edit: the obvious solution is to diversify Australia's economy, away from digging holes and building houses. Economists have been shouting this from the roof-tops for years now and I have seen little political will to actually make this happen, the easy-money-train is just too good.
In Australia, I'm a software engineer and don't own property so I'm a peasant but my parents are in the noble class. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find things to talk about with them because almost everything that happens to me is bad and they can't relate.
So every topic we talk about seems to dissolve into some detailed complaint about how the system is screwing over people and it makes my parents uncomfortable. But then I can't talk about my work since it's too technical (and mind-numbing) for them so I literally have nothing else to talk about since I work all the time. I can't discuss politics because they think everything is fine politically. I picked up some outdoor hobbies so thankfully I have that to talk about; at least until my workload increases and salary drops to the point that I don't have time for hobbies anymore and can't afford to go on holidays.
The class divide is so strong, my life's goal shifted from "become a tech millionaire" to "try to save a deposit for an apartment" to now "just survive 30 years". If I can survive 30 years, I will become noble and I will finally understand what it feels like to be happy.
But because I'm a peasant and constantly stressed with a horrible workaholic lifestyle doing unfulfilling work, I think there's a possibility I'll die before my parents. I try to teach my toddler son about the importance of money. I had my son quite late because I couldn't afford to have a child sooner. Also, because I'm poor, my wife is quite a bit older than me (only noble men can afford younger wife these days). I worry my son won't understand the importance of money so I wrote letters for him in case he ends up inheriting at a young age to explain how money works and how horrible my life has been without money and how corrupt the system is and that real friends cannot exist in this system because people are always trying to get your money or securing their own money and that money is the most important thing. I explain to everyone around me how the government has made it illegal to be homeless and to exist without money, even if you perfect your wilderness survival skills, rangers will literally find you in the forest and arrest you if you refuse to vacate. I already started planning with my wife how we're going to get him married into money when he is older.
My parents always said that it's bad to spoil a child; that you have to be firm with a child; "when you say no, it means no" kind of thing. I couldn't disagree more nowadays. I started teaching my son that if he throws a tantrum bad enough, for long enough, I will give him what he wanted. Because he needs to know what being a jerk pays off and he needs to demand what he wants. Also, I prioritize his confidence above everything else.
You need people who care about you even more than money. I wish I had understood this when I was still young enough to seriously entertain having children.
My experience is; if you get lucky, you might meet someone who will stay with you even without money, but you basically have to live through trauma together, to create that kind of bond. I feel like only extreme traumatic hardship can keep people together when they don't have money.
Some rich people feel jealous of poor people "This guy is dirt poor and yet his wife stayed with him." but they're missing the fact that these two people probably share so much trauma that it's very difficult to relate to anyone else after that. They stay together because they literally lack alternatives; nobody else can possibly understand their pain. Which is the core of their identity. It's not pleasant at all. Also, it's almost impossible to make new friends when you're poor for the same reason. You can't relate to anyone. People get rich for a small number of reasons (it's a unifying experience) but people get poor for a million different reasons which feels like falling through hundreds of different invisible cracks (it's a divisive experience).
Being poor, every time I do something unnecessary like small talk or making a joke, I feel unnatural and fake. At a profound level, I don't understand how it's possible to have friends 'just for fun'. Everything I do must have a path towards money. I feel guilty otherwise. I could have spent this time practicing my coding or writing skills or earning money.
I also believed I needed money and status to make friends. I hated myself, and behaved in ways others found difficult to appreciate or understand. As a result, I often failed and now have far less of these things than people who seem to believe in their own intrinsic value.
It has taken me nearly 20 years to understand why I feel this way. It is painful and unnecessary.
It’s an almost YoY doubling of the Q1 2024 rate (14.8%, 13.1% and 13.8% for 2024, 2023 and 2022) [0], which seems pretty significant. Though, what’s interesting is that the share bought by institutional investor is shrinking per the article.
> If this continues, expect to see more and more radical policy proposals by young people.
The inability of people (specifically ex-soldiers) to acquire land and make a living provided a platform for Julius Caesar to take control of Rome and effectively end the Republic.
Yes, more radical policy proposals are my expectation too.
When the status quo is already extreme (re: property ownership), the appropriate response will seem even MORE extreme because we've gotten used to that opposite one.
Journalists are, on average, shockingly innumerate. Here is Brian Williams (famous anchor) and Mara Gay (NYT Editorial Board member) thinking that $500 million is enough to give all 327 million people in America $1 million: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/msnbc-bloo....
Note that this was pre-planned. They had a little graphic overlay prepared for this and everything. Probably a dozen people laid eyes on this and they didn't catch it. If you're a functioning human, your gut-level understanding of the world should have caught this. It would be like reporting that the weather in phoenix this weekend will be 327 degrees F.
It reminds me of my dad's story of watching about the moon landing on TV from Bangladesh. The guy next to him said he didn't believe it, because "how did they break through the dome of the sky?" That's what American reporters are like with statistics and economics.
So what? You're just deflecting attention from this story to a poorly researched one written by someone else. That's like me saying people should ignore anything you say because some other lawyer used ChatGPT in court. Do better.
OP explained why this article displayed a bit of economic ignorance, insofar as the framing is confused about what’s the real story. I’m simply providing broader context.
That is, if I start hallucinating citations it’s fair to compare me to AI!
I think it's as much a social problem as a numbers one. The greatest generation and the silent generation were rich enough to buy up tons of property but mostly didn't. In contrast every thousandaire boomer and gen X is trying to get into the rental game.
So it's possible we get to a point where a minority of the people own enough housing that the rest just vote to say fuck 'em.
The rentier class has tools to prevent such coordinated voting. They divide us with scare tactics on fringe issues, religion, encourage over identifying with things/movements/celebrities, etc.
I'm afraid things would have to fundamentally and undeniably bad to rally enough people to change things. It's amazing how much folks with overlook or rationalize if given an effective distraction, like fear or hate.
>The rentier class has tools to prevent such coordinated voting. They divide us with scare tactics on fringe issues, religion, encourage over identifying with things/movements/celebrities, etc.
The "rentier class" in question here is a bunch of slumlords who own a few apartments as part of an LLC they have with their buddies and boomers who have retired to their vacation home and are AirBnBing their former primary residence, not Blackrock and friends, big money only owns a small fraction of property. The average landlord is some other middle or upper middle class schmuck.
There was already money in preventing it. In a link I posted elsewhere about a hearing, the same people raised nearly $8,000 to try and stop one apartment building from going up in their neighborhood.
Not private equity, not 'tHe ChINesE' (or whichever 'bad' foreigners are currently in vogue), but wealthy local NIMBYs.
The problem isn’t a lack of housing, it’s a lot of breeding. US population has doubled since 1950. It quadrupled since 1900.
As long as people keep having babies in excess of the replacement rate, housing will always be good investment. They don’t make any more land, and the earth is, frankly, full.
Problem is absolutely lack of housing and population growth has nothing to do with it.
Average house size was about 1000 sqft in the 1900 and average household size was 5. This remained relatively the same in 1950 where the average household size was 4. These days, the average size of a house is 2600sqft and household size is 3. We have created a system where we build fewer larger houses. This is because policy (often dictated by people who already own houses) makes it impossible to build small high density housing or even if it is possible to build it, it’s not profitable.
> The problem isn’t a lack of housing, it’s a lot of breeding.
> As long as people keep having babies in excess of the replacement rate
To reiterate, the thread was about "breeding". The birth rate has fallen behind.
You are referring to the overall population growth being due to immigration. This may be true, but is unrelated. Respond to the post about why overpop is driving the housing pricing, not to the factual corrections.
> So immigrants don’t count as people, or have babies?
Births for immigrants are not counted separately. Again, the birth rate is the topic (which includes immigrant births). Granted, all kinds of residents have births outside of hospitals, but that's a tiny minority that is not counted.
This focus on immigrant vs non-immigrant is more noise in the wrong thread.
The trend is clear. The outliers from 2024 onward (which are pretty big outliers) are likely due to data not being curated correctly. The administration would be to blame for that. The US is faring better than most other western nations specifically because of immigration, so the political environment will likely have a negative downward pressure on that benefit.
It may very well also be that the way we're organizing people means they can't live densely and that's why it's full. Regardless it's full enough that there's almost no place for young people in the US economy.
7e specifically said "land". He (?) said that "the earth is full", even though the issue was the US housing supply. Well, the US has plenty of land for houses - even if people can't or won't live densely.
And whether there's a place for young people in the economy is not what's under discussion here.
I'm surprised more people here don't pay for iCloud for at least the bottom tier storage (50GB). The free 5GB is almost worthless in 2025 for doing nightly backups. I don't back up with Apple Photos but even with "just" app data my nightly auto backups are like 10-15GB.
Even on iPhone there are much better and much cheaper solutions out there (not to mention cross platform) and those have everything a couple of times better than Photos.app and then a bit more. Maybe except Apple's troupe of privacy claims.
Like what? I use Backblaze B2 to backup all my non-Apple stuff and that's $6/TB/mo. iCloud's 2TB plan is $10/mo, so actually cheaper per TB, but with Backblaze you only pay for what you use so it may be cheaper. But pricing is pretty comparable, and I can't even imagine what a PITA it would be to use B2 for Apple stuff, so certainly seems like a good value. Are you saying there are even cheaper solutions that also have good Apple integration?
Status symbol? Here's my take on it - iPhone is dozen a dime here in my country now (3rd world) but iCloud, iMessage are not. iCloud+ is definitely not. People are used to WhatsApp here (just to take an example of messaging apps) and even if they ever stumble upon iMessage they immediately see what a decidedly inferior and opaque oddity that thing is.
I don't see how this competes with partiful. Feels like it'll be another half baked never updated app from apple. I wish they'd open their apis and integrations more. Feels silly that these apps get first class access to apple apis, meanwhile better made apps are forced to do weird workarounds, or simply have no integrations.
I see this app as more like the Notes, iMessage or Freeform apps. There are tons of apps out there that do XYZ better, but Apple wants to ship a polished version that does 90% of everything the average user needs. It accomplishes three things (in my eyes):
1. It helps grow Apple's ecosystem by covering just enough ground to make third-party alternatives less necessary for most users.
2. It reduces one of the major "sticky" points that keep people in Facebook's own moat. Events and Marketplace are the two reasons I still use Facebook.
3. It encourages competition from the people who want to do that last 10% better than Apple's apps, raising the baseline and hopefully forcing innovation as well. Those apps lead to more App Store revenue, so, cynically, it's a win-win for Apple.
It’s based on the new GroupKit API, which sounds like something that would be available to other apps in the future. Otherwise it would just use some private API.
I agree. I tried to get it to work recently with datadog, but there was so many hiccups. I ended up having to use datadogs solution mostly. The documentation across everything is also kind of confusing
It's a nice dream. At Google Cloud Next last year, the vendors kinda of came in two buckets. Datadog, and everyone trying to replace Datadog's outrageous bills.
FWIW the "datadog doesn't like otel" thing is kind of old hat, and the story was a little more complicated at the time too.
Nowadays they're contributing more to the project directly and have built some support to embed the collector into their DD agent. Other vendors (splunk, dynatrace, new relic, grafana, honeycomb, sumo logic, etc.) contribute to the project a bunch and typically recommend using OTel to start instead of some custom stuff from before.
They support ingesting via otel (ie competing with other vendors for their customers) but won't support ingesting via their SDKs (they still try very hard to lock you in to their tooling).
Yeah their agent will accept traces from the standard Otel SDK but there is no way to change their SDK to send the traces to anyone other than Datadog when I last checked a couple(?) of years ago.
I mean I understand why they did that but it really removes one of the most compelling parts about Otel. We ended doing the hard work of using the standard Otel libraries. I had to contribute a PR or two to get it all to work with our services but am glad that's the route we went because now we can switch vendors if needed (which is likely in the not too distant future in our case.
part of the reason for that experience is also because DataDog is not open telemetry native and all their docs and instructions encourage use of their own agents. Using DataDog with Otel is like trying to hold your nose round over your head
You should try Otel native observability platforms like SigNoz, Honeycomb, etc. your life will be much simpler
Disclaimer : i am one of the maintainers at SigNoz
The biggest barrier to setting up oTel for me is the development experience. Having a single open specification is fantastic, especially for portability, but the SDKs are almost overwhelmingly abstract and therefore difficult to intuit.
I used to really like Datadog for being a one-stop observability shop and even though the experience of integrating with it is still quite simple, I think product and pricing wise they've jumped the shark.
I'm much happier these days using a collection of small time services and self-hosting other things, and the only part of that which isn't joyful is the boilerplate and not really understanding when and why you should, say, use gRPC over HTTP, and stuff like that.
You are generally correct but I've used https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve for several projects for dev-only complete OTel stack (dashboards included) and I liked it. There are better dashboards out there for sure, but for what I needed locally it did the job fantastically well. Zero complaints.
It's extremely easy to self-host, either on a dev machine, a VPS, or in any Docker-based PaaS.
I’ve thought of something like this for a while, I’m very interested in where this goes.
A highly async actor model is something I’ve wanted to explore, and combined with a highly multi core architecture but clocked very very low, it seems like it could be power efficient too.
I think the problem isn't that it's a "bad idea" in some intrinsic sense, but that you really have to have a problem that it fits like a glove. By the nature of the math, if you can only use 4 of your 128 cores 50% of the time, your performance just tanks no matter how fast you're going the other 50% of the time.
Contra the occasional "Everyone Else Is Stupid And We Just Need To Get Off Of von Neumann Architectures To Reach Nirvana" post, CPUs are shaped the way they are for a reason; being able to bring very highly concentrated power to bear on a specific problem is very flexible, especially when you can move the focus around very quickly as a CPU can. (Not instantaneously, but quickly, and this switching penalty is something that can be engineered around.) A lot of the rest of the problem space has been eaten by GPUs. This sort of "lots of low powered computers networked together" still fits in between them somewhat, but there's not a lot of space left anymore. They can communicate better in some ways than GPU cores can communicate with each other, but that is also a problem that can be engineered around.
If you squint really hard, it's possible that computers are sort of wandering in this direction, though. Being low power means it's also low-heat. Putting "efficiency cores" on to CPU dies is sort of, kind of starting down a road that could end up at the greenarray idea. Still, it's hard to imagine what even all of the Windows OS would do with 128 efficiency cores. Maybe if someone comes up with a brilliant innovation on current AI architectures that requires some sort of additional cross-talk between the neural layers that simply requires this sort of architecture to work you could see this pop up... which I suppose brings us back around to the original idea. But it's hard to imagine what that architecture could be, where the communication is vital on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond level and can't just be a separate phase of processing a neural net.
> By the nature of the math, if you can only use 4 of your 128 cores 50% of the time, your performance just tanks no matter how fast you're going the other 50% of the time.
I'm not sure I understand this point. If you're using a work-stealing threadpool servicing tasks in your actor model there's no reason you shouldn't get ~100% CPU utilisation provided you are driving the input hard enough (i.e. sampling often from your inputs).
To work steal, you must have work to steal. If you always have work to steal, you have a CPU problem, not a CPU fabric problem. CPU fabrics are good for when you have some sort of task that is sort of parallel, but also somehow requires a lot of cross-talk between the tasks, preferably of a very regular and predictable nature, e.g., not randomly blasting messages of very irregular sizes like one might see in a web-based system, but a very regular "I'm going to need exactly 16KB per frame from each of my surrounding 4 CPUs every 25ms". You would think of using a GPU on a modern computer because you can use all the little CPUs in a GPU, but the GPU won't do well because those GPU CPUs can't communicate like that. GPUs obtain their power by forbidding communication within cells except through very stereotyped patterns.
If you have all that, and you have it all the time, you can win on these fabrics.
The problem is, this doesn't describe very many problems. There's a lot of problems that may sort of look like this, but have steps where the problem has to be unpacked and dispatched, or the information has to be rejoined, or just in general there's other parts of the process that are limited to a single CPU somehow, and then Amdahl's Law murders your performance advantage over conventional CPUs. If you can't keep these things firing on all cylinders basically all the time, you very quickly end up back in a regime where conventional CPUs are more appropriate. It's really hard to feed a hundred threads of anything in a rigidly consistent way, whereas "tasks more or less randomly pile up and we dispatch our CPUs to those tasks with a scheduler" is fairly easy, and very useful.
I've implemented something similar to this using Golang Channels during Covid lockdowns. You don't get an emergence of intelligence from throwing random spaghetti at a wall.
I think at some point Go is just going to have to either be a very flawed language, or make some very big breaking changes. Between union types being difficult to do properly, and sum types being subject to infinite arguments on GitHub. I get the feeling that it’s just going to stay a flawed language that I grow annoyed with.
Literally the only two features I’ve ever wanted in go is a way to express optional return values without pointers, and a way to be able to write a set of enumerable values in a sane way. The inability to express both in Go is quite frankly ridiculous.
I use go extensively. I’ve written numerous tools and deployed lots of things to production with it. Both of these problems are such a sore point for me. So many go libraries have either ridiculous workarounds with foot guns due to these two missing features that it hurts to use most of them.
Because it wasn't designed by PL researchers. It was designed by systems programmers who are used to C and just wanted a "better C". It was made popular because that happened within Google and they publicly gave it their backing so they wouldn't have to train new hirees on their new language.
Also its creator pulled a Molyneux and basically promissed journalists everything they asked about it. Not only would it be the perfect C++ replacement for all projects at Google, it would do systems and embedded programming and dozens of other things as well.
My first Go project (i think this was ~2014), i created a supervisorD clone as a school project (the coroutine/channel part of the languages were pretty much perfect for that).
After one week, i started calling Go: C+-. It felt like a superset of C with a lot of helpful tools, that kneecaped you each time you want to do something it's not meant to, like using memcpy. Why feel so much like C and not give you its most powerfull tool? (i was becoming pretty good with C memory management, pointer algorithms, and gcc at the time too, and not having those tools available to code/debug probably gave me a bad first impression).
The public backing by Google absolutely propelled Go into the spotlight, but Dart, also released by Google, hasn’t achieved anywhere near the same success. Considering how long ago Go was released, if the language didn't have its own merit, it would have fizzled out by now and failed to sustain its momentum or foster such a strong community.
Dart was never marketed (to my knowledge) as a general-purpose programming language. Go was marketed as the best thing since sliced bread, and especially as a "systems language", which it definitely isn't. It was also gaining popularity on HN at the same time Rust was gaining its initial wave of popularity (~2016-2017, around when I started reading HN), so the two were compared and written about a lot in a way that Dart never had the chance to since it never had a narrative foil.
In reality it turned out to be a worse C in many ways, because it has a GC and fat runtime (ruling it out for a huge chunk of what you might use C for) and lacks any kind of metaprogramming capability (yes, C macros are bad, but they're useful/necessary a lot of the time).
Regardless of their intention, it turned out to be a competitor to Java, not C.
I don't understand, why did you think Go "ignored" them?
I think a really important insight from ~50 years of PLs is that recent language features (say: lifetimes, or dependent types) do not always correlate with practical adoption, security guarantees, low cognitive overhead, teachability, readability, fast compilation, mechanical sympathy, and other such goals.
You can totally argue that Go should have been designed differently, but it's much harsher and untrue to say the designers ignored the ideas you have in mind.
Go the language is simple at the expense of code written in Go being complex. That’s why it sucks. Every problem it doesn’t solve or solves poorly to eschew complexity is a problem every Go codebase now has its own bespoke pattern or hack or library to solve. Its low cognitive overhead is false economy.
You can't have "low cognitive overhead" and Go's "let's pollute every single line of code with error handling". Same for "let's have multiple versions of the same type everywhere because we don't have generics" (thankfully, fixed). And so on.
Sum types and product types are fundamental to a type system, the same way that addition and multiplication are fundamental to arithmetic.
You wouldn't design a language with only multiplication and not addition. You wouldn't design boolean operations with only `&&` and not `||`. You wouldn't design bitwise operations with only `&` and not `^`. You wouldn't design set operations with only `∩` and not `∪`.
The alternative to "ignore" here is "ignorant", so it seems a nicer intention that they were aware of the fundamentals and chose not to use them.
Thanks for your input! All the design proposal RFCs have shown they cause an issue with the Go Compatibility Promise whereby adding any enum value can cause a semver-MAJOR breaking change. This causes a greater rate of ecosystem churn which, in every design proposal so far, has been deemed a net negative outweighing the modelling benefits.
Yep, I'm aware. The question you asked was about the Go language designers ignoring the fundamentals, which is the root cause of this situation today where fundamentals can't be bolted on to the language later
Yes, generics. Have all the people complaining about the lack of generics in Go adopted it now that it supports generics? No, they found other things to complain about. So this should probably be a lesson to stop looking for the "next big thing" to implement (non-nullability? Union types?).
Yes, people will complain about other things. Why is it surprising to you?
Generics was a big thing because it impacted how a lot of code was written. It doesn't mean people don't want other things in the language that is hell bent on ignoring any practical advances in languages of the past 50 years.
What you propose is to basically stop improving the language because people complain.
I see these kinds of hateful comments repeated on HN all the time, and these comments disgust me. Why phrase the criticism in such an incendiary way? What’s the goal here?
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt
> They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt
How would you phrase this? Thinking programmers are too stupid to understand languages with modern features is just the plain literal meaning of the quote, no?
He spent decades at Bell Labs. He was also, IIRC, in his seventies.
So a more charitable interpretation would be that most of his colleagues are in their 20s and just out of school with a CS degree. He doesn't think they can (productively) use the languages the cutting-edge PL researchers generate.
Sure they could. Sum types aren't in go, not because fresh grads can't learn how to use sum types, but because they couldn't see a clean way to add it to go and have it fit with the other stuff they were putting in go, which they thought was more important.
But trying to get new grads to use Haskell on the scale of a 10 million line code base, and have them not make a mess of it? That's the kind of thing he didn't trust the new grads with.
> They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school
these same lowly colleagues were also incapable of wiping their asses at one point in their life but over the years and skidmarks, they all mastered that beautiful language and now make heated bidet money.
I think Rob Pike didn't mean brilliant as a complete compliment here. It was more an indictment on astronaut engineering of languages rather then engineers. He is literally the designer of Go and likes to program in it.
We’ve basically decided that actually reforming the bureaucratic machine is much too hard, so instead of reform let’s just not enforce anything.
One of Zohrans ads is such an on the nose example of this. He has an ad where he says he’s gonna help out small business by cutting down the fines that they face. Which on the surface sort of sounds nice, but now we basically just get shitty businesses selling shitty things and facing small slaps on the wrist instead of actually going through and removing the onerous laws and enforcing the important ones.
Same thing going on with immigration. The system is so fucked up, that instead of reform we simply won’t enforce immigration laws.
You see the same thing with housing that abundance basically called out. The system has gotten really good at writing more and more complicated laws at the cost of things basically falling apart in the real world
These copper thefts affect millions of people. It regularly happens to the MTA and shuts down the subway. A functional society would make an example of people committing these thefts so that the rest of us can continue to contribute and live their lives without being screwed by antisocial people
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