> And no, please spare us all your justifications for how caffeine is fine or micro-dosing has been amazing, because they are simply varying levels of rationalization, I do it too, I’m just not in it as deeply. And no, just because you were able to become rich with and on the back of drugs does not mean you did it without harm, you likely just scandalized a lot of harm to, e.g., get rich selling some service to some coke head investor who will only fuel the abuse of data mining and social media addiction.
I think you make some interesting points, and it's a very well thought-out post, but this is the definition of "poisoning the well". You're attempting to preemptively discredit the most obvious flaw in your argument.
There is a massive amount of evidence for the impact on both society, economy and neurology for each of the drugs listed in your last paragraph – and it's these impacts that often change personal and societal perception of risk and reward. Caffeine, at average doses, induces an effect that is comparable to a small cortisol spike – it is mildly addictive, but nowhere near that of an opioid, for example.
Drugs like meth and heroine (and one wonders why you left off fentanyl) are highly addictive and destructive, cause enormous loss of life an an inconceivable scale, and can permanently damage neurological pathways. From what I've read, the impact of hallucinogenics is less well understood... but probably not great.
If your argument is "we like to say caffeine and alcohol are fine, when they're really no different than opioids and meth", well there _is_ a staggeringly enormous difference in the potency and impact of caffeine vs the other drugs you've listed. I do agree with you that alcohol is far more harmful than society cares to admit, however, and that's both well-studied and often ignored.
I hate to write out these words, but you're strawmanning.
The point is caffeine etc. corrupt the mind and cause a person's mental faculties to run in a way they were not initially designed to.
The point is not that these drugs are all extremely harmful, only that they are all harmful. Caffeine and other things get a pass because the "hard drugs" are so uniquely and visibly harmful that they overshadow all other forms of harm.
One could even say that this has tricked us into thinking that lesser drugs like caffeine or canabinoids are "effectively harmless" because they're not causing us to OD or steal things to get another hit or causing visibly psychotic states. But that is not true. We've simply accepted that the harm they due is not worth thinking about (this is subjective, not objective).
The use of the term "corrupt" rather than "alter" or "affect" is assuming the conclusion here. The human mind is not something that always works in the same Platonic perfection in a state of nature. Biological and cultural differences are major factors in what is considered normal at any given place and time.
Some people have conditions that make the way their brains work different than what is considered normal. Western technological culture imposes differences in social interaction and pressures on thinking and required performance that are far different than existed in societies even mere hundreds of years before.
Drugs can be a way to compensate for these pressures and find a way to exist in the world with as much equanimity as possible. And I say all this as a person who avoids all caffeine and illegal drugs, and uses alcohol very infrequently. I'm lucky I can do this and thrive in today's Western culture. Not everyone is as fortunate.
A small percentage of people, like myself, have clearly autosomal genetic conditions that means being 'normal' is just not on the cards. I have to take psychopharmacological drugs just to get close to normal.
Not everyone is the same, there is a lot of variety, what you say could indeed be true for most people but can also not be true for a small minority of people.
hEDS, there is a very long list of comorbidities and I tick off most of them. Not guessing, runs in the family, did a WGS and found the TNXB SNPs responsible.
I tried the no-drugs and being super healthy approach for the vast majority of my life, I look like a pro-athlete, the only reason I started the meds was due to figuring out the statistical possibility of having X things wrong with me was next to impossible without a common cause, and the ME/CFS with brain fog was destroying my life.
I also tried to quit caffeine but that only resulted in very negative effects that persisted for more than 4 months after going cold turkey, that's 4 months being largely housebound and not able to work for that one experiment. I've been at this so long that if you can think of something I've probably tried it - including the healthiest of healthy lifestyles.
Just comparing within my own family most are anti-drugs and anti-medications and their health is an absolute mess. I wish living a healthy lifestyle would be sufficient, I wouldn't have to walk a tightrope of balancing meds, but I don't get that option.
I just played a full round of Geoguessr world with Gemini 2.5 and got a score of 22k / 25k (so a silver medal). This puts in the realm of a "pretty good" player.
It was shockingly accurate with its guesses of Essen, Germany and Sheffield, UK, but faltered a bit in Italy (it thought Genoa was Siena) and Russia (it guessed Samara but it was actually a small town about 400 miles to the west). It also guessed Orlando when it was Tampa.
Still this was only giving it a single image to work off of, where any player would be able to move around for a few minutes.
Right, but this is the same company, so the cost of marketing, auditing, R&D, etc. shouldn't be different for these products. That's a fixed cost for the company.
This is a guess, but the argument is probably that it took way more R&D effort for them to figure out how to produce it efficiently in the US, and they've chosen to increase the cost of the US phone variant to offset this particular R&D expenditure that the Chinese variant didn't have.
> So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
So I guess the answer is that they're selling to the "government security market" so they can charge whatever the hell they want.
I don't have a great sense as to how this works across the world, but where I'm at (Seattle) your property tax is a factor of both the improved and unimproved aspects of your parcel. The improved ones being the value of the buildings and the unimproved being the value of the land itself.
If you had a massive plot in an urban area, undeveloped, presumably the unimproved portion of your property tax would be quite high! But, the issue is that restrictive zoning means that typically the unimproved value of your tax assessment are pretty low.
For example, if you live on 2 acres, but zoning says that you can only put 1 dwelling unit per 5 acres, then you can't really do much with the remaining acres. As a result, the remaining land has little value, and the tax on it is low. This is especially true in areas of little industry, where the same zoning regulations might also prohibit industrial or agriculture uses on that same plot of land!
This is all to say that the structure you're looking for may already exist, but the issue is still in zoning.
I don't think you disagree here... Zoning changes and land value tax are both beneficial. In some cases like the example you gave where you can only build one dwelling per 5 acres, zoning would be a more significant problem. That's an extreme hypothetical though. In other cases, taxation incentives are more significant.
We absolutely need to push for BOTH zoning reform and taxation reform. They will work really well together :)
People value family differently. For some, their dream life is to have sick cars and a sweet loft, for others, it's to raise other humans to be good. You should probably understand that there are some that read your perspective on life as equally puzzling.
I agree that childcare and college is mad expensive. It's why people complain about these things as much as they do!
What I've always thought, as a parent: those without kids don't know what they're missing, and those with them know what they have.
I'm not saying this to try to brag about how I have some special thing in my life that you'll never understand. I'm saying it because it feels like a perfect system in a way - you simply don't miss what you don't have.
And lastly, those some sort of information bias at play. Non-parents hear all the time about how parents don't have time for this or that, or they hear them talk about how annoying their child is being. But most people have the self-awareness to not just sit and gush over how great their kid is to their non-parents friends, and even when they do, it's just obnoxious.
Oh I love parents and I don't have any problems with kids. Still consider them sometimes.
I was just bothered by the "I'm baffled by.." part of this specific post.
And you're 100% on the "don't know what we're missing," part. I haven't been married either, so no wedding, no births, no kids, it's an entire other lifestyle I basically won't have any interaction with if it doesn't happen, and it's a weird/scary thing because who knows which is better? Or what we're happier with in the end if we couldn't try both?
I'm straight but I kind of tell myself nowadays that all my gay friends are living that lifestyle and they're very happy from what I can tell so .. maybe it's not bad. But there are gay couples with kids, I don't know any. I haven't had the nerve to ask my good friend if he wanted/wants kids. Never know if thats a tough subject or not.
My only major parent pet peeve... is the word kiddos. And doggos. You can bring your screaming kids over to my pool to destroy my backyard and let all the bugs in cause they dont close doors while you get high and drunk but don't call them kiddos to me. I cannot deal with the mom forum abbreviations like DH (dear husband) and all that.. stuff. When it bleeds over to reddit etc, thankfully rarely, it hurts me to read.
I don't even care that parent coworkers leave to deal with parent stuff, at all. It actually makes ME feel less bad about leaving to do my personal stuff. I'm REALLY bad about being too anxious to leave. A lot better later in my career but early on I would never leave.
These are some interesting points around its value, but it can absolutely be inflated, no? Given that most of our standards of value are tied to fiats, and that Bitcoin's exchange with said fiats is highly variable, the value of your crypto wealth can totally be out of your control.
Fortunately for most bitcoiners who got in early, it's been variable in a positive direction... But not for everyone.
Value fluctuation is not the same as asset inflation. The first relates to how much confidence people have on using BTC to represent their wealth in a given moment. The second is a decreasing of the asset's value keeping overall confidence constant.
It's a very interesting time indeed for the housing market! These next 6-12 months are going to tell us something very big about the economy, crash or no crash. If anything, however, the Fed has built up an ability to drop rates if things go awry, so there's padding in the cushion if a fall does happen.
An interesting stat: We're almost back to our 2022 quantity of _new_ listings in October [1]. That's substantial because we've hovered around 20% below last year's number for just about every other month this year. One of the big stories of real estate is that sellers don't want to sell because they all locked in killer rates on their current homes, and buyers can't afford to buy with home prices AND mortgage rates what they are.
So, seeing even a slight increase in new listings (or the lack of a seasonal dropoff) is maybe an early indication of an easing of that stalemate. At the same time, time on market is still really low, which means that sellers are tapping into the high levels of demand that still exist. As a result, overall inventory isn't increasing.
All told though, even with those slight indicators, it's still a really tough time to be a buyer, and for the real estate market overall. The best hope that most have is that the dam leaks more, or even breaks on listings, and of course, if prices start to fall meaningfully, folks will want to cash out high, and you might get a proper "crash".
I personally don't really see it, but anything can happen, and we'll know soon enough!
I doubt low interest rates help buyers all that much. If there are 3 properties on the market and 4 buyers, it doesn't matter what interest rates are, the 3 highest-earning buyers are going to get the houses and one will miss out. The amount of money borrowed might go up and down, but there is a physical balance equation that must be satisfied which doesn't care about the financial situation.
In theory, low interest rates will reallocate resources from other sectors of the economy to housing, causing more to be built. In practice I don't know how big a factor this is though - I'm used to there being regulatory restrictions that prevent new housing being built in high-demand areas. But that might be an Australia thing. Regardless it'd lag interest rate changes by a few years because it takes time to organise new construction.
Yeah people are constrained by how much they can pay off each month. Either that’s higher prices with lower interest or lower prices with higher interest.
The drove up prices, making the down payment side harder. Higher interest rates should bring down the sales price, making down payments go further, but we're only halfway seeing that. My thinking is because the shortage masks that, but people married to their underwater 3% fixed-rate mortgages also does (for now). Ironically, this seems to be driving homebuilders to build more.
> sellers don't want to sell because they all locked in killer rates on their current homes
What happens is that house prices drop way below what they paid, and ends up equalizing their monthly payments with what someone who buys at the higher-rate-but-lower-price is paying. Except these people are locked into their current arrangement, since they cannot sell at a price that would cover the debt.
Some can ride this out over a number of years, some will end up taking a big hit because, for one reason or another (divorce, child birth, etc.) they have to sell and move. If you're old enough you will have seen this play out before.
I believe that many people are starting to fear that their lower rate mortgage exceeds the value of their house. While, in the long run, they’ll likely be fine but the near term may be 10-15 years of stagnant or declining home values. It’s also looking like the Fed is very intent on keeping rates higher for longer, and/or possibly hiking them again, further increasing the burden on buyers. It’s not looking good for sellers or buyers for at least the next 18 months. I suspect a crash in the housing market will occur but we haven’t had enough time to see foreclosures pick up to start the cascade downward.
Looking at how homes are insanely overpriced (worse here than in the US) that is not a bad thing. The only sane market at this point is +1M houses which is simply rediculous.
You're being overly optimistic because you work in real estate and people are blowing rainbows up your ass. If there's a crash, JPow lowering the rate would prevent the housing value correction from taking effect and nothing good would come of it.
There MUST be a crash. Look at all the people who are sitting in homes worth many times more than they bought it. Significantly higher value than a few years ago. Do you think these people are doing well as a result? No! They can barely afford their insurance!
People want the house values high and their insurance dirt cheap, but it's not possible. The housing values have to drop a good 80% for people to be able to afford their homes long term again and for the insurance companies to stop pulling out.
I want the market to crash and correct as much as the next guy but thinking house prices are going to drop 80% is pure fantasy land. What's more likely to happen:
- Big corporations and billionaires hoover up the properties forcing more and more people to rent in the long term (you will own nothing and be happy)
- Companies are finally forced to raise worker wages which, through a variety of means, they have managed to suppress for decades.
The latter is what should happen but the former is what is more likely to happen, with all the evil that entails.
I lost my house to foreclosure in 2008. I track the price according to Zillow and if memory serves, it dropped from roughly 600K to 520K. If we do have a correction will probably be on that order of magnitude. If the correction is much greater, a lot of people will thrown into poverty and onto the street. I suspect however there would be enough political will to make the banks take a haircut instead of everyone else.
> If the correction is much greater, a lot of people will thrown into poverty and onto the street. I suspect however there would be enough political will to make the banks take a haircut instead of everyone else.
Both are gonna happen. Yes, a lot of people will be thrown onto the street. A lot of banks will go under.
Institutional investors have largely gotten out of residential properties in the last year. Homes aren't good investments unless expanding supply is illegal, which it has been, but they could change.
This hotel in SF just dropped 50% since 2016. Billionaires are over their heads on real estate; how are they gonna hoover it up when they can't afford their existing loan payments? It can and will happen.
A 50% reduction for one luxury apartment tower in the city most affected by remote work in the entire world and one that also has a notorious crime problem. What is your reasoning that this can be extrapolated to an 80% housing market crash on the national or global level?
Exactly. They've been getting away with it for close to 50 years at this point so the pain of getting them to where they should be if the profits had been shared fairly and not routed to investors and the C-Suite is absolutely massive. It would take a good few years (probably a decade) to get there, and a lot of companies that only exist because of that worker exploitation would go under, but overall it would end up being a good thing. If wage growth had kept pace like it should all these years, I'd wager the current property prices would actually make sense.
I can tell you honestly that I am personally hoping for a crash, and that's in part because I work on real estate. Home prices are unsustainably high by such a margin that it's absolutely killed transaction volume. Sure, earnings per transaction will go down, but we desperately need an increase in volume.
Plus, I want housing to be affordable despite my economic incentives.
When I say that I don't see it happening, I just don't quite see all of the indicators just yet. If we start seeing a sharper increase in new listings coming on market, or new construction prices significantly dropping, then I'd certainly change my outlook.
The problem is the Fed is using the only tool they have, the federal funds rate, to control the housing market. Yes, it has the effect of cooling the market but it doesn't solve the actual problem, actually it exacerbates it: there aren't enough housing units where they're needed. That's a supply problem. It's the insufficient supply that's the root cause of housing prices rising. The irony is raising the federal funds rate makes it more expensive to build housing so it tends to cool down construction and thus further constraining supply.
What have we actually accomplished? Locking people out of home ownership. But the Fed only has one tool and they're using it to the best of their ability.
> The problem is the Fed is using the only tool they have, the federal funds rate, to control the housing market.
No, they aren't, they are using it to control aggregate consumer prices and employment, their actual mission.
There are institutions with finer grained powers whose job is to manage the economy on a more fine-grained level (Congress at the federal level, plus states generally more locally), and the problem, insofar as there is one, with the management of the housing market is their (in)action, not the Fed.
This is why we the millennials and more importantly gen z must vote and actively and loudly participate in the political process.
Right now, the government is preventing wages from going up in a (futile) attempt to keep prices low for retirees and soon to be retirees who are on fixed income.
This is NOT what we want.
We want wages to go up as corporate profits go up.
I want prices to come down, I want affordability to go up . Who cares if wages go up and prices go up even faster.
The question is not what is the price of a house, but how many hours does a median wage worker need to work to afford their house, their car, their utilities, education, healthcare e.t.c
US is slowly becoming a zero sum game as the growth shrinks to ~1%. We need to increase the pie.
I'm guessing we'll see a weird mix of the following with the fed adjusting policy to keep everything together.
-80s inflation (higher interest rates hurting real property value, especially in higher value coastal metros)
-90s stagflation (a significant decline in national real property values masked by some inflation)
-50s postwar economic expansion (economics/warfare in EMEA keeping demand for US energy, agriculture, and products high even with higher inflation hurting asset valuations)
I don't it will crash. Democratic party tends to go socialism...in this case they are bailout-ish them Rep. In this case they will quietly bail large properties and banks to ensure it wont crash...just drag and stagnant like Evergrande and others in China. It seems to work over there. As long as people willing to go thru a wasted decade like Japanese did, it won't crash.
Oxford English dictionary follows the trends of language rather than setting them definitionally. They offer the "extremely" definition because the word gets misused so often, not because of any original meaning. One can argue the merits of whether a dictionary should include such misuses that have become commonplace but that's the direction they have opted to go.
In the same vein as this debate, OED considers irregardless to be a proper synonym for regardless.
Very tangentially related -- I keep hearing "disorientated" in the audio edition of The Economist (which is British).
It drives me bonkers. I'm cool with neologisms if they add value -- but a 400-year old[1] neologism that's merely a longer way to say something we already have a word for is still too young for me to consider valid.
That is the requirement. The law applies standards to ensure that domestic workers aren't adversely impacted by the hiring of foreign workers. This includes putting essentially bogus ads in newspaper classifieds, and requires that they're paying the same to H1-B workers in the same role as a domestic worker, among other comical things.
The program has defacto evolved to one in which the US can tap into a skilled global labor market to increase competition for roles, without paying too much attention to the actual legal requirements.
Sources:
(Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa)
> This includes putting essentially bogus ads in newspaper classifieds
> Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa
Both of these things have absolutely nothing to do with H1B visa requirements. You're just proving my point in the comment you're replying to. Please read it again.
Also read your own references to see where they require ads in newspapers or needing to tailor H1B "requisition documents". Spoiler, there's none.
It would be better to spend less of your comments expressing frustration with people who don't understand, and more explaining what the difference actually is. I read both of your comments and while I have no reason to disagree with you, I can't tell what you're actually saying.
If you respond to incorrect information with correct information and show us how it is correct, your comments will be more persuasive as well as more in the intended spirit of the site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It can be easy to take this for granted when you already have the correct information mapped out in your head many times over—but the rest of us don't have access to that!
Fair, I will do that. I had just become jaded over the years(almost 15 years now) spending time explaining the same point in tech forums and then later it's just even more and more comments from others confidently stating the same wrong things again on every tech immigration related story(a bunch on this story including the couple of parent comments in this thread I was replying to). This creates a feedback loop with others assuming the same.
For a while I did not engage with such stories because it feels like a losing battle swimming against the current even though tech forums are generally filled with smart folks.
As another sibling comment said, the requirements for placing ads etc. are for the first step of the green card process, aka PERM, and are not required for a H1B visa.
Maybe I should write a blog post or something explaining it and link it every time :)
Having posted over 60k comments largely repeating the same explanations over and over, I definitely sympathize with the frustrations of internet statelessness!
Writing one definitive explanation and then linking to it sounds like a good solution in this case. Even if just you wrote it up as an HN comment and then linked to that in the future.
Are you sure you are not conflating this with PERM? H-1B only requires a prevailing wage determination. There is no “ludicrously specific” job description, nor a requirement to post ads (just a notice at the workplace).
I think you make some interesting points, and it's a very well thought-out post, but this is the definition of "poisoning the well". You're attempting to preemptively discredit the most obvious flaw in your argument.
There is a massive amount of evidence for the impact on both society, economy and neurology for each of the drugs listed in your last paragraph – and it's these impacts that often change personal and societal perception of risk and reward. Caffeine, at average doses, induces an effect that is comparable to a small cortisol spike – it is mildly addictive, but nowhere near that of an opioid, for example.
Drugs like meth and heroine (and one wonders why you left off fentanyl) are highly addictive and destructive, cause enormous loss of life an an inconceivable scale, and can permanently damage neurological pathways. From what I've read, the impact of hallucinogenics is less well understood... but probably not great.
If your argument is "we like to say caffeine and alcohol are fine, when they're really no different than opioids and meth", well there _is_ a staggeringly enormous difference in the potency and impact of caffeine vs the other drugs you've listed. I do agree with you that alcohol is far more harmful than society cares to admit, however, and that's both well-studied and often ignored.