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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • This is good logic but I think what you are missing is that the factor behind investment demand driving up price is volume of capital rather than number of landlords. One company can buy any number of living spaces if it has a way to profit on them, cancelling out the effects of any number of principled refusals by individuals to buy property in pursuit of that profit.

    That said, one thing that is weighted to individuals is lobbying local government to protect their investments, so more people becoming landlords isn’t necessarily good, because your finances being tied to something is a powerful source of bias, for instance towards opposing new housing developments that could increase housing supply and reduce price of your properties, or opposing higher property taxes for non-primary-residences. But if someone supports effective policies towards affordable housing, even knowing it will harm their investments, I think they get credit for that.



  • This will probably be an unpopular opinion but I think the reality is that the choice whether to be a landlord has no effect on the supply of housing and so is almost totally irrelevant to this essentially systemic issue. The only kind of stuff that matters here:

    • Supply of housing influencing its cost
    • Relative wealth of the poorest influencing their ability to pay for housing
    • Other factors (the credit system etc) limiting people’s access to housing
    • Legal ability to use housing as a speculative investment and store of wealth (ie. low property taxes even if you own multiple properties)

    The idea that people would buy property and then provide housing on a charitable basis in defiance of the market isn’t realistic and isn’t a viable solution to the problem. The only solution is to build the right incentives into the system. Someone can support the latter without trying to do the former.




  • How can you know the success is zero? Encryption is more widely used and much more resistant to political attack. Open source software is more powerful and accessible. A large portion of people loathe corporate tech platforms at a level they didn’t years ago. Granted a lot of that is just down to how functional or trustworthy the software is, and what guarantees about it can be plausibly provided, and it isn’t all wins. Maybe you can’t exactly get everyone caring about this stuff in the same way or for the same reasons you do. But that doesn’t mean there are no possible avenues to success, or that the tech habits of other groups can be written off as useless here, because it’s probably the most important thing.









  • In those cases it seems like the law does prevent state level regulation of those things, because the state is only allowed to regulate commerce happening within its borders, not what its residents do elsewhere (although they can still also regulate the use of fireworks and airguns, but enforcement is more difficult, for instance where I am they sometimes send out notices in the mail warning that it’s against the law for individuals to be setting off fireworks but there’s always a massive decentralized fireworks show every 4th of July anyway).

    Somehow with the internet, the location of the server isn’t the thing that matters, it’s whose computer is accessing it and where that person and computer is located, and the liability is on the server not the user. IMO it should not work that way, because then every state with regressive politics has a stranglehold on the whole internet.