Ferret7446
Born on July 02, 2022•2287 Karma
I have to take issue with the ".. out of wood and paper". Because that's not the cause. There are buildings here literally a thousand years old and built of wood, still standing, after centuries of sometimes unbelievably big earthquakes. And wooden homes built properly these days handle earthquakes as good as anything else. It's not the material, it's how it's done which matters.
Source: Researched a lot of house building companies the last couple of years. Some of them, building wooden houses, have been in business for a long time and haven't had a single house as a victim of earthquakes for half a century, with the occasional exception where the earth has literally flipped over. Nothing can handle that. But "ordinary" earthquakes? All still standing. There are photos around showing certain houses alone on a field of flattened buildings. These guys.
The difference is partly the attitude towards houses, but it also has to do with how difficult it is for foreign investors to speculate in the market, the ubiquity of public transit (which makes accessibility as a value-driving feature mostly moot), the way the building code precludes a "missing middle" (or "missing cheap place"), and other features of modern Japanese society that are alien to Americans (and Canadians, but weirdly not always to Britons).
The point is that there are lots of ways to chip away at the affordability issue. It's just that ALL of them necessarily attack RE investors' ability to exploit their property to the fullest extent possible.
One last anecdote: South Korea is similarly situated to Japan, but is also facing an extreme affordability crisis. So, there is the suggestion that NONE of the material aspects matter if the owner class is determined to wring every cent out of you. The changes disincentivize gouging, but in the end, you just have to have property owners willing to acknowledge housing as a an affordable necessity and not a profit center built on the backs of a captive audience...
I have no idea why people keep talking about raising pay as if they were in a video game where resources just spawn out of thin air
It puts varying pressures on other elements in a dynamic system in different ratios and with second order effects that can’t be fully predicted until you “run the experiment.”
At the margin, a wage floor will prevent some percent of transactions that would have taken place if a wage floor was not in place. It's not complicated. Some people will benefit, sure, but some commerce just won't take place.
Consider a price floor on selling a used car. Suppose you had a car to sell. Would it make you feel better if there were a law that prevents you from selling your car for less than some amount? Sure maybe without the floor, your car would have sold for less than the floor amount. But would you want a price floor as a seller of a car? How about as a buyer of a car?
Chances are if your car is worth less than the floor, no one will buy your car now. The price floor doesn't magically make your car more valuable, just makes it harder to sell.
There are more variables than the graphs you get in the first two weeks of Econ 101. If you make it to the end of the semester, or even to the midterm, you'll know that the simple predictions you got on the first quiz were false.
I would agree that modest minimum wage increases are far from the worst thing the government does, compared to other government interventions.
Wages don't make up all the costs so we can't say that increasing wages increases prices by the same percentage either.
>It puts varying pressures on other elements in a dynamic system in different ratios and with second order effects that can’t be fully predicted until you “run the experiment.”
Now replace "raising a wage floor" with "tariffs". Just over a year ago Trump administration cheerleaders were making similar arguments about "dynamic system" and "second order effects" to justify tariffs, predicting that prices might even drop due to [insert handwaving about fx rates].
Really? Which ones? For the ones predicting economic calamity, they get a pass because they were didn't take into account TACO, which might be bad if you're grading it as a forecast, but hardly is a mark against them when it comes to economic analysis on the effects of a policy.
And we in fact have tons of Epstein files showing exactly that in play, as a side benefit of those being released.
Uber saw adjusted EBITDA of $2.5 billion, up 35% year-over-year" in 4q25 (per them). Money poured in.
I have no idea why people keep talking about raising pay is a problem. Workers paid more spend more, stimulating growth at all levels. Economics 101.
But per the original study, they didn't get paid more?
It's a bit like California raising fast food minimum wages causing thousands of jobs to be lost[0].
[0] https://tfppwire.com/new-data-shows-california-lost-staggeri...
The whole idea of "taming technology" starts from a flawed premise. The problem is with people, not the technology.
Technology concentrates power. Yes, people may be the problem, but "taming technology" is obviously not a "flawed premise". There is a big difference between people having the power to bludgeon their neighbors with sticks and stones compared to blowing up entire continents with nukes.
> firearms accounted for 78% of all mechanisms used in homicides between 2018 and 2025.
Yes, but why?
If/when everything stabilizes, we will probably see more open source. Agents are still very new and people are still figuring out the best way to make a harness