But migration and the normal population growth are qualitatively different - normal population growth is an exponential phenomenon given a constant growth rate, migration is a linear phenomenon given a constant migration rate. And at least in developed countries I see now real issues controlling both forms of growth, limiting the number of immigrants as well as establishing a two children policy if required.
That was actually my point. The areas of SF that have gotten ridiculously expensive are areas where the housing is actually sub-standard to what you'd see in most of America.
The house that just sold for $2M wouldn't even be worth $200K in most US cities. The house is just beat up and old.
I could see paying $2M for a gorgeous house that is either new or recently upgraded. There are houses that are basically condemned going for >$1M!
I think the mistake you're making is thinking that the value of houses in SF is dominated by the value of their structure. Rather, it's dominated by the value of the land they occupy. In the case of the $2M sub-standard SF house in a desirable area you mentioned, if it burned down to the ground, the land would still be worth well north of a million dollars.
I see he's still as obnoxious like always. He makes points, though I'm not qualified to say whether they are valid. I wish he could be more restrained.
That said, if someone like David Deutsch publishes such theories with grand predictions, they deserve criticism.
I scanned the paper and I feel like most of the criticism by Motl is more or less justified. They introduce non-standard notation for things that would probably benefit from a treatment within well established mathematical language. For example their discussion of non clonability of "superinformation", whatever that is, could probably be resolved by working within a non-cartesian monoidal category (which is a standard tool in Quantum logic).
"it isn't easy to ignore Lubos, but it is always worth it" if he could just be a little more on the topic, instead of insulting everyone, his legitimate critiscm would a far greater value.
If you're just calculating the overall crime rate, yes. If you want to calculate the murder rate, the penny candy stealing rate, and other rates of individual crimes separately, of course you can do that too. (Though you might find it difficult to find numbers for penny candy stealing.)
GHK published their paper later in the year (although they apparently arrived at the result independently..), which might be why they were left out.
In 1962 P.W. Anderson worked out that Nambu–Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a massive vector field (e.g. the so-called "higgs-mechanism", but in a non-relativistic context). In 1964 E&B,H,GHK showed that this is also possible in a relativistically invariant theory.
Here's a twitter comment from John Preskill (caltech):
"The emphasis on finding a relativistic model may be misplaced, though. Anderson understood the mechanism well."
https://twitter.com/preskill/status/387580651664191488
So maybe Anderson is more deserving of the last spot than GHK.
Norway doesn't really have a permanent criminal class, and the main aim of the criminal justice system is to keep it that way. Whereas the US (and many others) have an enormous criminal social class, firmly-rooted criminal organizations seemingly in a prepetual state of war with law enforcement, and so on. That stuff isn't going away even if you did liberal prison reform. The circumstances are very different, maybe it's appropriate that the aims and methods of law enforcement are too?
They're not going away without doing liberal prison reform either.
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I honestly don't see how much good can come of the current setup. Maybe that say more about me than it does about the setup - but what good can come from brutalising these people?
When you try to use pain to make someone comply, the underlying message is that when they start complying the pain will stop. But ex-cons are effectively black-listed from most respectable jobs, they generally have very little by way of life skills, their social network is generally tied to criminals, there's no real welfare system to speak of to support them.
The pain doesn't sound like it really stops, changes intensity maybe. Meanwhile there's lots of relatively easy money to be made from drugs, slavery and the like.... I suspect you need a very strong character to work your way up decently from that sort of starting position - I just don't see how effectively torturing people would give them that.
