* landlords not wanting as much money (unlikely, although it happens at small scales)
* rent control-type policies
* competition
And as far as I know competition is the only thing that works at scale. Although, people tend to emphasize intralocal competition as where this gets fixed. But I tend to think that the even larger issue is that so many places suck to live in (due to schools, jobs, culture, lack of prosocial governance...) that everyone with options congregates in the good ones.
There's an effect every larger than all of those, though, which is wealth disparity. If incomes differ by fewer orders of magnitude then prices can't vary as much across markets. At the end of the day when rich people can and do buy 2-5 homes and everyone else can barely buy one of course you're going to have problems.
We had two types of competition in the past that are much less common now:
- competition from new builds
- competition from different locations
The first was killed by restrictive zoning. The second still exists but is no longer useful. You can move to West Virginia for cheap rent, but you'll have to move to a location without jobs.
The combination of far less people moving across states and of jobs concentrating in expensive places to live is what killed that second type of competition.
This is an easy problem to solve, regulate the amount of profit you're legally allowed to make from renting land you did not create.
We do this in other industries all the time.
Health insurance is heavily regulated to ensure that there are profit caps (think 80/20 rule) this means that the company is legally compelled to actually spend a certain amount on customers of said product.
Imagine if landlords were compelled to spend 80% of their rent dollars in improving the space or helping the renters.
How does this help young people who want to move to a new city, but can't because all apartments are already rented because rents are far below market rate? This is reality in cities like Berlin and Stockholm.
You need more housing. Rents in Austin have collapsed because the city made it legal to build a lot more housing.
You should look at Vienna public housing then, rents there are typically less than 20% of the median monthly salary. Socialized housing works for the people that want to live and make a community with the limited time on this Earth they have.
It doesn't work for landlords that just want to extract wealth from others.
Relying on private developers that only want to build luxury housing is kinda how we're in this current mess. Expecting them to solve the problem we know, build more housing, is just silly. They didn't do it when money was the cheapest it ever was the last 15 years, they aren't going to start building it now.
This is why the government needs to step in and build more/better public housing.
It works for Vienna, this young chap even speaks about it at great length:
I sure hope he goes into politics, we need people with this type of imagination to better our society and give us hope for a better future which we can create now, not later.
> Health insurance is heavily regulated to ensure that there are profit caps (think 80/20 rule) this means that the company is legally compelled to actually spend a certain amount on customers of said product.
This notoriously does not work at all.
Look up pay-vider structure and the type of manipulation of medical loss ratio it enables.
Can definitely see how that'd warm someone up to a politician who is crippling drug enforcement capabilities, addiction treatment programs, and addiction research... errr wait.
I was not aware HN is now an investment discussion board. Even if you were to argue that point, what’s his incremental value comped to but-for world? I mean one where Steve Jobs is still alive and running Apple. I am sure Jobs would’ve sat on his behind milking iPhones and just let Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia take the entire AI TAM. I am sure that’s the Steve Jobs we all knew.
There are many dimensions one could assess a management team, but it is obviously ridiculous to call them “a joke” when they achieve their principal goal at such astonishing scale.
I am certain Apple will do just fine in the AI revolution, in large part because such a massive distribution and brand advantage is extremely hard to overcome.
"Political hobbyism" is things like commenting on the internet, as distinct from going out and convincing people to vote differently or running for offfice.
Sure, there are more and less effective ways to engage in politics. But given that people spend nearly every waking moment now staring at information-on-screen-piped-through-internet, it's frankly ridiculous to keep up this "Internet isn't real life" charade.
Perhaps things were different in 2020, but today the United States government considers online commentary a key input to its decisions. The President of the United States, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had Twitter on a big screen in their war room for the Venezuela operation.
Young men put Trump in power? Afraid not. The demographic data shows that if it was narrowed down to one group, it was poorly educated white Christians over the age of 50.
I mean election victories are typically both multicausal and overdetermined. Poorly educated white Christians over the age of 50 form the GOP base, but especially a GOP win in the popular vote requires far more than that.
Parties focus so much on swing voters for a reason, and a lot of these swing voters are in fact swung by what they see online.
And extremely severe punishment as a deterrent against future efforts. Instead of a bunch of slow-rolled court cases and deferral back to the political process.
"Infrastructure investment" is not fungible. There's either demand for this power where they're adding it, or there's not. If there is demand, then it's created by AI. If there's not (i.e. AI bubble pops), then there's excess capacity where we don't need it.
If both partners typically work: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.
If AI makes everyone 20% more productive: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.
If minimum wages lift the bottom earners from $7.50/hr to $18.50/hr: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.
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