There is a solution to the housing problem besides home ownership and renting: Housing cooperatives. These are still relatively common in Germany, my parents live in a flat owned by a cooperative and are consistently paying less rent than I pay for my college dorms, despite living in the center of a major city.
The cooperative was founded by workers in the 19th century and has a single purpose: To provide affordable housing, satisfying the needs of their members. It isn't subsidized by the state, its business model is simply to distribute the expenses for building and maintaining the flats to their members.
Home ownership has the disadvantage of being too inelastic and imposing the risks of owning a house to individuals. Renting from a private company on the other hand means you constantly have to give up a significant portion of your income so someone else makes profit from basically doing nothing.
Cooperatives strike me as the best solution to this dilemma. It's of course not surprising that the Economist doesn't mention this at all, the flaws of their argument have been sufficiently demonstrated by other commenters. The basic recognition that home ownership is flawed is an important point though IMO.
I know people who live in cooperatives and I've explored it for myself as well.
You might pay less in a cooperative, but you're expected to be more involved in its internal politics and in keeping things running, so you're likely making up for the lower monetary price by paying with your time and energy.
There are also many opportunities for interpersonal conflicts.
> you constantly have to give up a significant portion of your income so someone else makes profit from basically doing nothing
When something goes wrong in the house I rent (which has happened multiple times), it's up to my landlord to fix it. The landlord also has to spend time and money on upkeep and maintaining the property.
It depends on the size of cooperative how much you have to be involved --- if it's only one house, you'll surely have to be involved. Other coops have thousands of members, in these you can choose to just be a renter (in fact most people do that in my parents coop, less than 10% go to the annual meetings etc.).
It's certainly true that individual landlords have some trouble with renting out their property. The majority of homes however is held by companies, whose administration deals with renters. Maintenance costs of a single home can be uncertain, but of a number of homes it's very predictable. So the risks of big companies holding properties is manageable, and in no proportion to the profits that big conglomerates such as Deutsche Wohnen make.
I've rented three different properties (2 flats and now a house) in Germany, in three different cities, and each time it was from an individual owner, not some faceless corporation.
I also own a property myself in a different country.
Big companies don't own the majority of homes in Germany[1]. This is just the left-wing version of right-wing people overestimating the number of immigrants in a country.
This is unfair. There is nothing wrong with passive income. Owning shares or bonds, or having a bank deposit is also "doing nothing" yet no one would blame anyone for it.
> There is nothing wrong with passive income. Owning shares or bonds, or having a bank deposit is also "doing nothing" yet no one would blame anyone for it.
The wrong part is that having passive income of that kind is a privilege that only few can reach, and it works by squeezing the rest. It isn't possible for everybody to have such passive income.
they are very comparable. Owning shares in a company that takes money to provide essential services? That has been the model of capitalism - fee for service - for a long time, and it has worked. The service gets provided, at the right price that the market can bear ,and still produce a profit for those providing the service. The alternative is to not have that service provided at all!
There's an entire political ideology which totally disagrees with you -- Georgism. Basically most of capitalism is fine, shares, bonds etc. but natural monopolies and value derived from land are not the same thing and must be treated specially. There's one very pithy way of expressing this which goes back to Adam Smith -- taxes on land do not cause economic inefficiencies in the same manner as other taxes.
My two cents on why his writings are popular:
- He uses anecdotal evidence which appears to be sound at first. Looking at the top 100 billionaires seems to give a good idea on how wealth is created and distributed, but really it is only a glimpse at a much bigger phenomenon (especially since the data only comes from two years).
- His style of writing is very accessible and natural. He wrote an article on his style (http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html), and it seems to strike a chord with technicians who prefer this over more complicated prose.
I feel these are the same reasons for why effective altruism is so popular among technicians. It offers clear cut answers, and avoids uncomfortable questions.
Also his conclusions are what some people want to hear, that confirms their worldview.
This is not at all unique to PG, you and I and everyone does the same thing, at least to some extent, in choosing what argument/opinion pieces (now the dominant form of textual media?) we are tickled by.
Same reason Malcolm Gladwell is popular — it's pop science/economics/whatever, made to be readable and digestible, but over simplifies (and sometimes falsifies) in the process.
Could you expand on the last sentence a bit more regarding effective altruism? Are the uncomfortable questions related to the utilitarian nature of how the movement racks and stacks the causes they choose to support or not?
I was more referring to the fact that EA promotes philanthropy instead of asking why we have inequalities in the first place. So it evades questions of redistribution or fairness in a similar fashion as PG.
I'm not quite sure how strong the analogy is though.
The author puts Gödel's Incompleteness and the Continuum hypothesis on the same level, which is misleading. The continuum hypothesis is unprovable in our current mathematical foundation ZFC, but there are extensions to ZFC that either make the continuum hypothesis true or false.
Incompleteness is a property of every sufficiently complex formal system and thus poses a general constraint in logic.
That a particular learning problem is not provable in ZFC is not that surprising. Connections between learning and Incompleteness are way more interesting (and there is a lot of pseudo-research going on, "proving" that humans are not simulatable by computer etc.)
Which is mostly due to safety concerns, the fire regulations are not met by BER due to a complete chaos in planning the construction.
Nowadays, big projects in the West are far more complex since have to meet more demands and more stakeholders are involved. In authoritarian countries, this is not so much a problem, the new airport in Istanbul is built very fast, but concerns from citizens are not respected etc.
I would hardly say it shows the effectiveness of philanthropy - this is just one college and has very limited effects on the healthcare system as a whole. In Germany for instance higher education is free everywhere, I don't see how this could work with private fundraising.
As an European I always find the dichotomy "government vs people" strange. If the state pays for something, it's solidarity, not communism.
>In Germany for instance higher education is free everywhere, I don't see how this could work with private fundraising.
Germany isn't a good example. Germany stands because it can exploit its weaker neighbors, the east block out of their resources and force the companies to book profit and get taxed in Germany.
Germans see each others as bothers. Show me a few German companies where a foreigner is in the executive role?
The whole point of Germany is Germans first. Ofcourse, they can make education free in this setting.
I didn't have high expectations for Solidity considering the recent vulnerabilities, but even these were disappointed. If some guy writes this kind of code at home, alright, but this as the alleged foundation for our future financial system? Frightening.
Just one example:
"Our function EndLottery() must be only accessible by the owner of the lottery." [0]
function EndLottery() public {
if (msg.sender == owner) {
...
}
}
What about code guards? Not to speak of decent typing, etc. etc.
I understand the eth VM is pretty limited and limiting, but Solidity is just sad, it's like somebody saw Javascript and thought "ok that's a pretty terrible basis for writing contracts, but surely we can make it even worse?"
Can't remember where I read it, but someone put it best during the DAO fiasco last year when they wrote "Imagine Javascript but your bank account accessible through the Document Object Model."
Even that's only scratching the surface of how awful Solidity is. An example of minor security detail straight from the documentation is this:
for(var i=0; i<arr.length; ++i) {
Solidity is a "statically typed language" with "type inference". In most of these, you'd expect i to be typed as whatever the type of arr.length is, but Solidity does not care, it sees `var i = 0`, 0 fits into a uint8 so a uint8 i is, it'll get promoted during the comparison and if arr has more than 255 elements it'll overflow and the loop is infinite.
You are right, they solved the particular problem I highlighted with Modifiers.
But the main question remains: Why don't they utilize the progess we made in decades of research for better programming languages?
The argument that Solidity should be useable by the average programmer doesn't hold, in fact, typing makes programming easier since it clarifies data structures that are implicit in languages like JS.
PL people often direct their "it should be functional and use strong typing" critique at the EVM rather than Solidity. Solidity is just one HLL (higher level language) that compiles to EVM bytecode.
A lot of the limitations of Solidity are due to constraints of the EVM, but the EVM is evolving. For instance, the next planned hard fork will enable the EVM to pass dynamically sized data (e.g. solidity arrays or strings) between call stacks. Previously arrays had to be fixed-size, so you'd have to define a fixed maximum size, then always return data of that size (usually a lot of empty elements). This feature, like many others, is somewhat challenging to design because every execution step of the EVM must be metered by a "gas fee"; the first version of the EVM kept it simple by only allowing return data to be a fixed size. See these issues for background https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/issues/164https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/211
Also, the longer-term proposal is to adopt WebAssembly for EVM 2.0: https://github.com/ewasm/design. Then users can write contract code using any language with an llvm compiler (rust, ocaml, etc.).
I can obtain an image of you online, while I need to be on-site to spot you typing your pin. So if I have your phone, I can do research at home to break in.
Additionally, you cannot change your iris once it's compromised. This is an absolute no-no for secure systems! Changing your pin is easy.
This is definitely not a huge step forward. And, as already mentioned, the average user gets misguided by exaggerated marketing promises.
For me it was the finding that mathematics is quite arbitrary. There is no deeper meaning in using functions, sets or logic, it just seems to work. These still are just models of the world for us.
We have such an application running on DO, 100k visitors users a month. We have a big application server running and other servers for DB (postgres and redis) and static files (which is basically a nginx mirror).
So far, we are satisfied. Over the last year, there were 4 out times which lasted 30min to 1h caused by DO, which is alright I guess.
Since we experience more traffic peaks in the last time, we may use their load balancers in the future. The application servers are not the problem though, more the DB server. This is more a pain, since setting up and maintaining a DB cluster is quite a lot of work. We might go to AWS for this.
TL;DR DO works for larger projects, databases are bit of a pain though
Yeah the load balancer was just intended for the application servers. Running a hot DB secondary with just read accesses is possible by setting up manually, but tends to require a lot of maintenance work during updates in our experience.
To be honest, we have not figured out how to connect the DO servers to AWS yet. Do you have experience with that?
Having a cross-datacenter VPN is one way. But I am not sure about how bad your latencies will end up. Most likely they won't be performant especially in the case of an ACID compliant DB.
We outsourced our database to Google Cloud after having pains with percona on DO with clustering. Might be worth looking at that. No regrets for us so far, except that restoring backups is painful if you want 1 out of many databases restored.
I don't think that's a problem that is solvable with technology. It's a social problem. Less social inequality and better education, taxes on unhealthy food, less working hours. That would be necessary to tackle the problem. Obesity is just a symptom.
I love the SV mindset: Let's not get to the reasons of something, let's just build an app and everything will be good.
While I agree that there are some underlying social and economic issues that contribute to obesity, that doesn't mean technology can't help. There are plenty of ways even simple apps can be used to improve people's awareness of what they're eating, help them make better choices, and provide incentives to eat better and get more exercise.
To address a couple of the things you mentioned:
Better education: It's true -- when it comes to health and nutrition, there's a lot of misinformation out there and a general lack of knowledge of even the basics. Most people are not great at determining how many calories are in a meal, whether something is good for them, or even just remembering what they've eaten on a given day. There's a huge opportunity for technology to help people figure this stuff out and learn to make better choices (full disclosure: I work on an app in this space [1]).
Taxing unhealthy food: While we can't levy taxes, there are ways to provide similar incentives, for example by automatically giving people cash rebates when they purchase healthy food [2].
Can the tech industry solve obesity on its own? Maybe not. But I'd argue that trying to address what we can is a better option than throwing up our hands and saying it's a social problem.
> trying to address what we can is a better option than throwing up our hands and saying it's a social problem
I totally agree that we shouldn't throw our hands up. However, the consequence is not to do just some stuff just because you know web development, but to think on a larger scale.
It seems like a big trend of our time that no one wants to do politics. With politics I don't mean being a bureaucrat, but to express your opinions and trying to change something on a normative level. Effective Altruism, tackling injustice by consuming "fair" products, social entrepreneurship: All these things seem to be just for soothing our consciences.
What we miss is to actually change something. The current political situation is the product of this individual politicising.
My gears are turning.. an app that tells you the viability of solving a given problem using an app. It would be powered by AWS array on the back end using google's latest AI, TensorFlow, and it would also be community driven like Yelp. We'd make our profits by taking advantage of platform network advantage to connect cofounders, investors, and customers for the startups who use us and move forwards.
Yep, I think something like this is the correct response, though I would prefer to see vegetables that have super-desirable test profiles that trick the body into thinking its getting the high calorie foods it's evolved to crave rather than drugs that alter the humans to want to eat less in general.
Humans are driven by biology, and psychology is only a thin abstraction on top of that. The amount of self-discipline any single individual can deploy is very limited. If that discipline threshold gets used up on other things, it's not going to be available for food and diet.
Consider on top of this that most of us have been socialized and trained for decades to prefer unhealthy options, and the already-steep incline of resisting the body's physically preferred options becomes treacherous.
Most fat people aren't fat becomes they're snarfing down platters that are meant to feed six in every sitting. They're fat because the foods they eat provide low nutrition and high calories, and candy bars aren't the only food with such a profile. Most packaged foods that you can buy at a regular, non-niche grocer are that way, even the ones that are touted as healthy. Food companies do this because they know people like foods with more calories more than they like foods with fewer calories, and they want you to buy their foods more often.
Technology got us into this mess by creating an easily-accessible supply of hyper-caloric foods, an amount of plenty that our bodies, built for scarcity, are not at all equipped to handle. Technology should be employed to fix it. Whether it's human-side or food-side, something needs to be developed that can blackhole the excess calories with no noticeable impact on the eating experience, either in taste or chemical reward.
The other alternative is to revert to a food supply where artificial contrivances such as candy and foods injected with sugars and other unnatural taste-improving formulations are very rare. This is not possible while we live in a society of abundance. It will only be possible if there is famine, hardship, war, etc. So it's not a good option.
"Just try harder" is never going to be a real answer to this problem, and the stats clearly bear that out. People hate being fat. They spend billions of dollars every year desperately trying to find someone who can fix it for them. We should try to address that in a reasonable way.
This requires that you actually want to lose weight and do something about it.
Obese people often have a low socio-economic status [1]. If you are marginalized, eating may be an outlet for frustration. You won't buy special stuff to lose weight.
Everyone here was surprised when Trump got elected (except Peter Thiel). "Nerd nation" [2] is a huge bubble -- the majority of our society is different. The won't buy any drugs or apps.
Totally incorrect. People spend billions of dollars every year trying not to be fat anymore. [0] I also contend that while more liberal places often have less obesity, it's not like the problem is non-existent there; they still have ~20-25% obesity, which is 1 in 4, which is A LOT of obese people everywhere. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard there.
It's not that obese people don't care or don't know, or that they enjoy living an unhealthy lifestyle. There's a lot of complex factors that are involved, but the basic factor is this: humans are evolved to strongly prefer high calorie foods, and we've made high-calorie foods available in unprecedented quantities while also requiring less physical energy expenditure than ever before. Our bodies don't know how to deal with that.
It's been thoroughly proven over the last 30 years that self-control can't be relied upon to prevent this. When you throw someone into a situation where all of their biological functions are pushing them toward acquiring a biological reward that is so abundant they have to actively avoid it, the options are very limited. That person is going to have a lot of difficulty refraining from acquiring the reward. That's true for everyone, and the issue is generally only avoided if your body has never learned the reward in the first place or if you've trained your body to forget the reward (and in both of these situations, as soon as your body learns to desire that reward, you're back at risk).
We need a solution that a) constrains the supply of hyper-caloric foods, which is not practical, because again, if it's available, good luck keeping it out of peoples' hands; or b) modifies either the foods or the consumers of said food so that the excessive calories are neutralized and the same neurological rewards are obtained.
The cooperative was founded by workers in the 19th century and has a single purpose: To provide affordable housing, satisfying the needs of their members. It isn't subsidized by the state, its business model is simply to distribute the expenses for building and maintaining the flats to their members.
Home ownership has the disadvantage of being too inelastic and imposing the risks of owning a house to individuals. Renting from a private company on the other hand means you constantly have to give up a significant portion of your income so someone else makes profit from basically doing nothing.
Cooperatives strike me as the best solution to this dilemma. It's of course not surprising that the Economist doesn't mention this at all, the flaws of their argument have been sufficiently demonstrated by other commenters. The basic recognition that home ownership is flawed is an important point though IMO.