In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
Income isn't wealth. Someone making $62,000/yr in income without working at 55 (i.e. no Social Security) is likely comfortable. That's >$1m in invested assets plus whatever is owed to them as retirement income when they reach retirement age. It's especially unclear if everyone else's payroll taxes should be spent allowing this person to retire a few years earlier.
This is all before including the other large personal expense (housing) for this person is likely imputed rents from homeownership which aren't counted as income but function that way.
Surely you are capable of thinking there are tradeoffs here where one can set a level without dealing in absolutes. Put differently why not expand Medicaid to cover every American regardless of income? 400% is just as arbitrary as 1000000%.
I do actually think that universal healthcare is the best policy. But that will mean some wealthy people get coverage paid for by the state, which aggravates some people.
A substantial amount of discussion in early retirement communities is about how to stay below 400% AGI, which is why I found it odd to see a criticism of healthcare subsidies going to early retirees in the context of the expanded subsidies.
Great then you have even bigger problems to wrestle with regarding solvency. Americans won't choose cost effective treatments, and if you force them to pay out of pocket for experimental therapy you will be accused of running death panels. Good luck with that. On top of all that, they are also unhealthy due to a variety of lifestyle factors including that their primary mode of transportation likes maiming them.
Rent control absolutely causes a reduction in supply: there's a reason rent controlled buildings have apartments in poor condition that owners do not renovate (so a reduction in quality supplied) and many are held off market or converted to owner occupancy through condos and TICs (so a reduction in quantity supplied). Not to mention the units underused by long term tenants who maintain them as secondary residences.
Central to the challenge of UBI and housing costs is the law of rent. UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners. There are ways to make that possible.
Rent controlled apartments being held by tenants no longer using them as primary residences is pretty common. A famous case of this was Cleve Jones in San Francisco who tried to make it a huge political deal when his landlord raised his rent to market because he was 1. living in Guerneville full time and 2. subletting the apartment. The media environment is one where it's ok for a master tenant to be a de facto landlord and make money on real estate, as long as it's not the landowner themselves!
>> UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners.
Doesnt this happen now because we're all so tethered to HCOL cities? With UBI presumably people would be geographically free, and there is a lot of inexpensive land and housing around the country. Doesnt the capture problem only happen due to scarcity in HCOL cities and thus not an issue?
Yes but it builds into my argument - it does not counter it. Reduced supply... increases rent. I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build". And the person I'm replying to said rent control makes people not want to build.
> I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build"
This is false. People will want to build more on the margin, but that doesn't mean they want to build. If the profitability requirement (hurdle rate for getting investment from institutions) is greater than the the market rent, people will not build even if market rent is high. Indeed, that's what's happened in the last 5 years as costs have increased much faster than rents.
haha i misread casual as causal, but i guess, here are the "accurate conclusions" you are looking for, that is to say, what does rent control cause, as opposed to the vibes and correlations people are talking about?
it's the "credibility revolution" and someone has won a nobel prize for it.
rent control causes limited mobility (read: displacement out of town) by 20 percent; it causes reduced rental housing supply by 15 percent:
Did you write an entire comment by misreading "casual", the word I used, with "causal"? Otherwise, I have no idea how your reply relates to mine, as I didn't make any claims about the existence of such research.
Casual is a perfectly reasonable descriptor of economic conclusions based on vibes and anecdotes about apartment building in Montreal. I don't think it's reasonable to read it as an insult.
You don't need a study to tell you that if you make things more difficult and worse for landlords, the housing supply will decrease.
Courts actually need to do their jobs here for an optimal solution - e.g. it should be easy to punish shitty landlords AND easy to kick out shitty tenants.
It shouldn't take a 1+ year wait (as during COVID) to get a landlord-tenant court date to resolve issues.
The housing issue is multi-faceted however, so that's only 1 piece of the puzzle. But thanks to NIMBYs and building code overreach, it's literally impossible to build affordable housing that would rent at its own depreciation schedule.
> You don't need a study to tell you that if you make things more difficult and worse for landlords, the housing supply will decrease.
That doesn't need to be true. In post WW2 UK the government built lots of rental property. That increased the housing supply and hurt private landlords at the same time.
"Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law."
No, because rent control isn't portable and most people's housing needs change over time. The person who can hold onto a house for 20 years straight is the outlier.
People say this a lot, but it makes no sense to me. A recession comes with lower incomes and wealth for everyone, so affordability doesn't change for the average person. It only increases it for those who had a short position in their asset allocation, but that's just investment outperformance which you can have even without a recession.
You're generally right except it's not true for everyone. Every recession that hits a lot of folks just keep their jobs and their salaries. Maybe their stock portfolios (for the few who have those outside of 401k's) take a hit. But the key is that if there's a real estate downturn, almost every single home (house, condo and even land) takes a hit and so you end up with a situation where all the inventory drops in price, but not all the eligible buyers "drop in price" (i.e., not all eligible buyers suffer a downturn and so, net, you actually get more people into homes).
The key of course is that the downturn isn't so massive (hello 2008!), where the blood flows so freely that the layoffs/foreclosures/etc. overwhelm the eligible buyer pool in absolute numbers. That can for sure happen, but is atypical historically.
You've just listed a set of specific circumstances under which some number of people might find housing more affordable, but that's a lot more like "investment outperformance" driven affordability than "broad based housing price decrease" affordability. That can happen even without a recession. A small number of people could've found Bay Area houses more affordable in the last decade if they were HODLing some 10x stock.
FWIW I think I just listed a set of circumstances that happen every time there is a drop in housing prices historically, at least going back to the 90's savings and loan crisis. I'll tell you when people found Bay Area houses more affordable? 2009-2012. And during that time the unemployment rate was at roughly 10 or 12% (had to look it up just now but knew it was around there). Housing prices during that same time? Dropped as low as 40-50% in some parts of the Bay (best case they were down 20%+). 10x stock needed? No. A job? Yes. You can repeat the exercise for the start of Covid, but the timeline for the drop in prices, and the % drop, was muted in comparison to the housing crisis. Same for S&L crisis. Dotcom bust too, though, again, housing prices didn't crater like the housing crisis.
Chances are the UK government would require them to create that backdoor for them, and Apple would publicize that (implicitly, if the UK government would also forbid them to tell it explicitly)
It’s classic Apple commenter not know about Apple. They offered matte display upgrades to the MacBook Pro almost 20 years ago. The current glossy black display only became a product line wide choice with the retina displays in 2012, likely because they didn’t prioritize getting an appropriate matte glass finish on the retina screens due to low demand.
I can make the same argument about you. Matte display was the standard prior to Unibody MacBook Pros in 2008.
Glossy was an available option, but not the product line wide choice.
The top of the line Late 2008 MacBook Pro (not Unibody) included:
> An antiglare CCFL-backlit 17" widescreen 1680x1050 active-matrix display (a glossy display was offered via build-to-order at no extra cost, and a higher resolution LED-backlit 1920x1200 display also was offered for an extra US$100).
I wasn’t making claims that Apple was marketing one as better or implying some contradiction between glossy and matte upgrades, so this information isn’t relevant to my point. Matte has been sold as an upgrade in the lineup for a long time which is contradictory to the point I was replying to.
Your citation is doubly irrelevant because the primary benefit of the glossy upgrade in the year or so it was an upgrade (glossy has been standard for 18 years) was a wider color gamut and higher resolution, not the glossiness of the screen itself.
