> setting a daily target of 1.2–1.6 grammes per kilogramme of body weight, 50-100 per cent above the longstanding recommended dietary allowance of 0.8g
This is a good range for improving for maintaining your body composition; preserving or building muscle. Fitness coaches are recommending 2.2g/lb (1g per lb) or even more which doesn't have much scientific backing. 1.6g/kg seems to be the max that will benefit muscle gain.
On the other hand, there are some (Valter Longo, biologist at UCLA) who say that such high protein will reduce your overall longevity. He recommends 0.36g protein per lb body weight.
I don't know what to do with this info. Personally, I stay around 1.2g protein/lb (and exercise) as a middle ground.
I think land-value taxation, with a cap on properties based on income (and wealth) for your first home, is the way.
I do think there is something special about the idea of home, and that home ownership should be encouraged. It brings people stability. People shouldn't be pushed out just because others have more income than them.
At the same time, we do need property taxes. In California, rate increases are capped, so older owners often pay pennies compared to new homeowners. Harmonize the taxes, while capping it.
You don’t need to be rich to own. Some people are lucky to buy a home where/when it’s cheap. Imagine the value (and taxes) outpacing your income. Like an elderly person with fixed income.
Either it's really valuable, and they can borrow money to pay taxes, or it's not and taxes are low. But people shouldn't be allowed to freeload on the work others do to make the property valuable.
Borrow money needs to be paid back. It's entirely possible and it wouldn't be a surprise someone retired lives for 30 or 40 years, accruing all that back taxes have to be paid up until eventually the taxes are worth more than the house.
The boatman doesn't charge money, so what's the problem with that? They got to live somewhere other people invested to make nice without extra money out of their pocket.
If you're lucky. There are a lot of scams out there that are variations on the idea of well we'll pay various fees at your house or pay you this or that. Reverse mortgages...
Sometimes it works out and it's fine. It's not all the scam. But there are no scams out there that I would not have any confidence in working out. And as a government (which as a voter I'm part of), I certainly would refuse because there are too many ways that I can lose.
Well you might need to if the property taxes can spike like crazy, which is the point some people may be making. You could budget a mortgage but with taxes as a substantial wild card, it can blow up your budget.
Consider my neighborhood in Chicago. It has gentrified rapidly over the past couple decades. But it wasn't always so wealthy. My retireee neighbor probably bought her house for no more than about $100,000, but now the market rate for a house like hers is more like $500,000. With that comes about $20,000 per year in property taxes.
That might be reasonable for the wealthier families who are moving into the neighborhood and driving up the land values. But it's pushing her into poverty.
No, its pushing her into a cash flow problem. Its not poverty; she has substantial wealth, but its all in the house.
There are mechanisms, of course, to access that wealth without moving, including ones specifically geared toward income-limited house-rich retirees.
Now, those end up creating a debt that must be resolved before transferring the house, including via estate, so living on the value of the home reduces its utility as a vehicle for generational wealth, but...unless you want to reproduce California’s system which makes it much harder for people to become homeowners while rewarding those who already have, eapecially the wealthiest, making the rich richer and what would be the comfirtable middle class anywhere else in the country poor, that’s the way it works (and your exact scenario was the major sales pitch that was used to sell the California system; its maybe understadable how people without 50 years of California’s example fell for it then, but...)
There are ways other than California's for addressing this. Washington's system works quite well: a disposable income based property tax exemption for people over 61.
It exempts you from "excess levies" (basically levies that are voted on) and some statewide levies and freezes your taxable assessed value. If your disposable income is low enough it also starts excluding part of your assessed value from taxation.
So your solution is to take the house away via a second mortgage?
Why are we trying to take houses away from homeowners? Many who have lived in their homes for twenty years or more. What services that the city has could be so important to push residents out of the homes they've lived in all their lives? Most of it is inefficient pork on admin and roles the people living there didn't choose to hire for.
Build more. Encourage building multifamily. Pay to buy these homeowners out of their single family and convert the land to multifamily. If you can't pay, don't try to make it up with tax increases. That forces people out.
Deregulate and build.
Maybe a city failing to stretch services will send new residents seeking other cities, which would be healthier anyway.
Or maybe property taxes should be based on the services rendered. If they increased from $1,000/year to $20,000/year and you subtract away the inflation here is the city government delivering more value or less?
In my city and others our city council delivers large grants to non-profits and other entities under various auspices. “Defending gay rights” is one, or maybe helping the homeless or something. Of course I support both causes in general, but if the city gives a million dollars away maybe we just have to have some people kicked out of their homes to pay for these programs?
You can say well we will just raise taxes on the wealthy. Sure yea, whatever but that isn’t a viable long term strategy for places outside of California or New York which have an ability to capture wealth better due to intrisinic location value. There are only so many “rich” people. Could I afford another $10,000 in city taxes? Yea. I won’t be able to go out to eat or shop at local business as much though. So then what happens? Do those businesses go under? Raise prices? What about their property tax? Maybe instead I sell and take a loss on the house and the market value goes down so now that home pays less in taxes (depending on how this stuff is measured in a given jurisdiction).
> Maybe a city failing to stretch services will send new residents seeking other cities, which would be healthier anyway.
Yea. Tell Google and Meta and whoever to stop putting more jobs in the “cool” cities and come to Ohio where I live instead of these data centers.
This stuff is rather complicated, unfortunately. Even the case of a city let’s say “building affordable housing” is arguably a benefit to the local homeowners, but if you do that yea sorry Granny McPension has to pay for it too - she has a house, she’s wealthy!
Needs additional context and qualifiers. If you think just owning a house makes you wealthy maybe your view of the world and what money is and means is wrong. You can be a regular ole’ plumber in, idk, Indiana and own a house. I wouldn’t consider that wealthy.
> If you own a house on which it is possible to owe significant property tax you are the very wealthy.
> Pay to buy these homeowners out of their single family and convert the land to multifamily.
But that's what the market is already doing? In your example from above, you can take a $400,000 windfall and move somewhere else, or take out a mortgage against that $400,000 of new equity to pay your taxes and still come out waaaaay ahead. I don't understand your characterization of a second mortgage as "taking the house away" at all.
What poverty--she owns a house worth $500k.
I think deferral schemes where certain individuals can pay taxes upon sale of the home (with fair interest) should be fine to avoid forcing anyone into a reverse mortgage.
Well she doesn't have the 500k. This is akin to saying we should force people out if market conditions make their house more expensive. That seems like a really strange consequence to all this, idk
>This is akin to saying we should force people out if market conditions make their house more expensive.
Firstly, if housing wasn't treated as this appreciating asset to invest in (and NIMBY around), this wouldn't be a problem to begin with. So you can argue a part of this is the consequence of a generation's actions.
But in the context of a "single family" home, it's a question worth asking. Should an old couple who's long since had their children move out (and likely have their on children) still be able to sit on the property of a 3-4 bedroom household? Or should there be incentives for them to want to size down their house and free it up for next generation's families?
The population decline will already answer this question for us sooner than expected, but it's an interesting question to ponder on.
Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
Especially not when you're getting older, have limited ability to manage a move for yourself, built a life and raised your kids in the building, and would have to consider unloading a lifetime's worth of objects and/or moving infeasibly far away from your friends and community to get into a living situation that's more financially tenable.
> Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
> Especially not when you're getting older
Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.
How can someone be so out of touch? A person buys a house, spend a whole life there, and through no action of her own happens to live in an area that drastically appreciates in value over the decades, all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
And where would she move to? All decent areas probably also increased in price, her property went up 10x in value but so did all other properties she would contemplate to buy. That’s the fallacy of thinking property is wealth when talking about your only residence.
The suggestion is that this person can get a mortgage to pay their property taxes over the next 20 or 30 years as part of their retirement - or they can sell their property and live well in a cheaper location.
Claiming that the retiree has a right to both the home value and the ability to live there is the friction point. It reads as hollow in the face of rising homelessness and the inability for young people and families to access housing.
All else equal, I can see why the ability to live in the same house until you die would be given a high moral value. But in practice, IMO, this culture causes a number of problems. For instance, where I live, there was a lot of growth in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of young families, so they built a bunch of schools. It's an attractive place to live, so a lot of those people who lived in those houses when they were new and raised those families and attended those schools have kept living in those houses. But those kids that they raised there can't live in those same neighborhoods as adults, because there's no turnover, so they can't raise their own kids there. So now the schools are all half (or less) full, because the neighborhoods they were built to serve no longer have a lot of families living in them. So then they have to close and consolidate schools and everybody hates that. I don't really have a strong view on the moral question of whether houses "should" be owned by older people who have lived there a long time or by young people families, but from a pragmatic standpoint, this situation seems quite bad to me.
I think if we had a totally different culture, with multigenerational families living in the same house, then this might work better. But this model where we build new family friendly neighborhoods with parks and schools, and then nearly everyone ages in place and all the family amenities become empty over time, and the families all end up in the next new neighborhood and then it repeats, this doesn't seem ideal to me.
Schools aren't forever. They're just buildings that get built, expanded, replaced, upgraded, mothballed, abandoned, sold and/or destroyed all the time as the needs of the community using them changes. Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines.
And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there.
There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon.
People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable.
People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
Anyway, Grandma is as dead as that Sunday dinner. She won't care that the new occupants are being complete heathens about smoking dope and makin' babies on the sofa.
Yes, ironic how in such a discussion over how we value land, we choose there to be intrinsic value in a private dwelling and little value in an institution that raised that person and an entire community. Grandma Sally gets to die with dignity while her grandchildren wonder thy they need to change schools all of a sudden and separate from their friends.
Perfectly encapsulates modern society's attitudes by generation.
I also weep for the children. I still remember being a kid.
And I feel a lot more reverence for the memories of the house that my grandma and grandpa always lived in for the entirety of the time that our lives overlapped than I do for the memories of the school buildings I attended that are now abandoned or demolished.
I spent more years with them around than I did attending school.
No? I don't really understand what "outside forces" you're talking about. Property taxes? I'm sorry but that's just an incredibly silly and entitled way to think about land ownership.
Entitlement isn't a sin, my good sir! It is instead a thing that is worthy of accomplishing!
If you have a degree in mathematics from 1984, then you're still entitled to that degree today in 2026.
And if you bought a house and the land that it sits on in 1984, and paid for it wholly and own the title for it, then you're literally-entitled as the owner of that house and the property upon which it rests.
Words have meaning. Please do not disenfranchise them.
Pretty please.
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Anyway: Everyone else loves what you and others have done with the neighborhood since you moved there in 1984, and they decide they love it so much that they want to move there too. It's a pretty great place to live.
Value goes up. You may not have changed anything more on your property, but they love what you've done with the place so far and want to be near it.
You had the place paid off and were entitled to it in 2014 after you completed the terms of the 30-year mortgage you took out in '84.
But now: Value goes up. Property taxes increase. And, fuckin' hell: You can't afford to stay there anymore.
You own the place, there's no question about that at all. It's completely your entitlement, and you absolutely paid for that entitlement, and everyone agrees that this is true: This entitlement is even recorded at the courthouse!
But you have to move, anyway, because you just can't afford to stay in the house that you fucking absolutely own and are entitled to anymore because the cool kids (nearby, and also on on the other side of the state, and nationally/globally because of inflation) are pushing you out.
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So I guess that you aim to suggest that we shall own and keep nothing, and be happy about it? Fuck that! We're already fucking temporary! We're already run-limited by virtue of being human! We should be able to pay for decades of risk and eventually own a place, and then live the rest of our short fucking life in that same place without being forced to move around!
We all die. The property we were once entitled to will get recycled into the churn soon-enough no matter what our intention may have once been, after we check out.
The comment you are responding to is saying the opposite. They are saying that the person can access the wealth of the house (eg via a reverse mortgage) in order to pay the taxes while staying in the house. That's what this meant:
> Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Simple example. I bought the house at $100k. It's now worth $500k. That means I owe $20k/yr in taxes, but it also means I have $400k of additional wealth. A bank will lend me money with that wealth as collateral. If you imagine that the interest on the loan is roughly equivalent to the rate of appreciation of the property going forward, that's 20 years of taxes paid for by the increase in home value. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone!
GP is not forcing the retiree to move. GP is instead advocating retaining the use of property while reducing the cash flow burden. Asking someone to get a cash out refinance is not morally bankrupt; it is a pragmatic and fair solution. Some states also have deferred property tax schemes; these are even better. It is only fair for someone who, by luck, paid $100k to get a house that is now worth $500k and lives in a neighborhood that is now far better than when she bought the house.
>all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
Change that older lady to a 30 year old woman and the sentiment quickly shifts to "big deal, live in a house you can afford in. people need to move, get jobs, and work. Get hustling". And that is likely the story for a generation of renters.
Yes, it is morally bankrupt. But sympathy is a two way street and can quickly be lost when one side suffers pain.
Defered property tax for elderly can be (and usually is) implemented as a lien on the estate, to be settled upon the owners death. Do you heve any problem with that? Or should we now also think of (inheritance of) the children?
"And where would she move to?" -- Either the graveyard or the incinerator? She's dead... the bill doesn't come due until after her death and is settled from the value of the house.
It's classic neoliberalism think which for some reason the tech crowd is unreasonably susceptible to. "Oh you're poor? Can't afford your bills? Must be your fault." It's utterly disgusting.
You're not wrong, but that's an entirely different discussion from whether or not someone should be forced out of their house simply because gentrification and inflation causes their taxes to go up year after year likely long after they're done working. Oftentimes people buy homes in low-cost areas because that's what they can afford. It's not their fault when the area gentrifies and their taxes skyrocket past their means through no fault of their own. We can advocate both for homes to be more affordable for people that need one and for people to not lose their homes due to constantly rising taxes.
So your solution is to force her to sell her home and move? Move where? I've seen this in so many areas of the country where property taxes on your property are tied to market value rather than purchase price. It drives retired and lower income people out of neighborhoods that they have lived in for decades, forcing them to move down the scale of home ownership.
Perhaps the retired person is living on a fixed income of $40k/year. Over time their proterty taxes on the home that they have lived in for decades can now be more than half of their total income? How is this fair at any level?
How is it fair that working people have to pay 10x for housing than she did when she was young? How is it fair that the money goes to her inheritance while she made her working neighbors pay her share of taxes?
Of course, let's let yet another corporate land grab take even more residential property off the market for profit-based motives. This can't possibly do any more harm than locking property taxes at the time of sale.
Where I live, we are looking at locking property taxes once you hit a specified age (65) and have under a specified income ($40k+/-). The current debates revolve around exactly what those numbers are and at what level the taxes get locked. The goal is to protect the elderly who have already contributed to the economy and society for 40+ years and not force them into a financial situation forcing them to sell their home just to pay even more property taxes that they have paid for the entire ownership.
Meeting the basic needs of the population, by having enough housing and preventing hoarding of housing by wealthy individuals, is not a "coporare land grab."
We are clearly talking about different things. I'm talking about protecting single home homeowners on a fixed income from being forced out of their homes. Staying in the only home she owns is not hoarding.
Telling people that the solution is to sell their home to an insurance company as a solution is most certainly a corporate land grab.
You seem to be arguing about people/corporations that own multiple homes or even entire portfolios of property. These are not the same argument.
The solution is not necessarily to sell, they should only do that if they want.
If their asset is gaining in price so much that the tax burden is getting high, then tax deferement until a liquidity event both keeps them in their home, but also keeps them honest about how much they are taking away from the rest of society by taking that piece of land.
A number of states have this. Basically if you are low income, where that may be calculcaed differently depending on cost of living of the county you live in, you can defer or freeze property taxes.
"All Washington counties offer senior citizens and disabled households property tax exemptions. Eligibility is based on your age or disability status, home ownership, residency in Washington, and income level. Seniors who are at least age 61, or retired from regular gainful employment by reason of a disability, with an income of $64,000 or less are eligible."
The idea is to help people stay in their houses. This is really really important. And if you can afford it, you should be paying property taxes. I'm lucky I can afford mine, but I highly support this strategy.
In my state I occasionally see people in online discussions saying they can't afford their property taxes - I think a lot of people aren't aware of these programs, people are amazed when I post a few pointers and tell them about it.
Why should this person take up a family home in a desirable area? It is inefficient. The pressure she is feeling to leave is the system working as intended.
We shouldn’t prioritize efficiency when it comes to moral matters. That’s a bad idea for the government.
People’s primary residences are more than just an economic asset. If you don’t understand that, it’s difficult to have a conversation as we have very different starting points about morality.
There is no inalienable right to live in a place because you were there first.
Housing is a fungible good. I have friends and family living in squalor because people have decided sentiment is a valid reason to keep people in these four walls instead of those four walls.
I think people’s primary residence should not be seen as assets in the way they are today at all. The only reason they are is substantial government intervention.
Bullshit. Your comment is wholly nonsensical. Housing is distinctly non-fungible. You can't move a housing unit around from its intrinsic location! Housing exists in a neighborhood and in particular jurisdictions. That is fundamentally unchangeable (I mean unless you've got a mobile home or a historic house that actually can move: that's the exception to the rule.)
Housing is also set up in a particular way. A McMansion is nothing like a 1BR apartment. A condo is nothing like a ranch-style SFH. The aforementioned mobile homes could never serve a family of 12 or be attached to a swimming pool. These are not interchangeable things! They are unlike a barrel of oil or a $100 bill, my dude! Not to mention, illiquid. You tie up some money in real estate, and you can't simply trade one house for another. You want to sell houses, that's a chore. That's not a diamond in your pocket; that's the definition of non-fungible.
"Housing" as property is additionally two separate things in one package: the structures on the land, and the land itself. You can't usually sell one without the other, you see. So how is that fungible, when these two intrinsically linked commodities are clearly not.
It's true that nobody cares "who was there first", but property ownership confers real rights. The right to stay put, and the right to expel unwelcome people from your property. The right to defend it, or at least have the authorities defend your life and property within. Even renting tenants have rights, as long as their bills are current. It's not a matter of "who is here first" but God-given and gov-granted rights of occupation. In a less civilized place, your property rights would be defended with guns and violence, as against invasions.
Housing is, like, one of the least fungible commodities possible. I don't even know how you say that. How do you define fungible so that it includes housing? Pray tell! Inquiring minds want to know!
Would you define two apartment units next to each other, with the same floor plan as fungible?
What about the house next door?
For the purposes that people use them for, there is an immense allocation problem in the US. People are sitting on a 5b/5ba and living alone. Bizarre sets of incentives have culminated to make this possible. We have collectively decided that for some reason, it’s completely sane to live in a house that you don’t need. We should look at it the same way as owning a stretch hummer.
We’ve collectively decided this because the West developed a strong sense of property rights of the individual versus that of the collective. Typically it’s taxation that nudges these behaviors, at least in theory. It’s nuanced complex and incoherent at times, so no need to come after me for just trying to answer your question. I am not advocating that it’s the right balance or mix.
$20k on $500k is 4% annually, which is really high. I'm not seeing any Chicago neighborhoods that are this high (looks like a max of maybe 2%) but perhaps I'm missing something about how Chicago works?
His neighbor is either lying or he's exaggerating.
Cook County has senior exemptions, senior freeze exemptions, and long-time homeowner freeze exemptions. They don't push any responsible homeowner into poverty. They also have a website so you can look up exactly what your neighbor's assessed value and annual tax is. There is no need to guess.
Why can’t she pay from her retirement accounts? 20K/yr isn’t all that much considering today’s cost of living. The stock market has skyrocketed in the last decade and change.
I also don’t buy 20K of property tax on a 500K home, that’s a 4% tax which seems unlikely in Chicago.
Because a cap or exclusion or credit for your primary home lets people who can just barely afford it to purchase their own home. And that's a good thing.
I'm not sure it is. If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession.
Now, apartments can suck too. Especially in places like the USA where we have a landlord cartel actively pushing up prices, and a professional landlord president who shut down an antitrust investigation into said cartel shortly after entering office.
I certainly can't say I have all the answers here; right now housing sucks every way you look at it. But I do believe quite firmly that this idea that going very deeply into debt and securing it with the actual roof over your head is somehow good for a person's financial security is an idea that mostly serves the interests of people who earn a commission on convincing people to get into that situation.
>"If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession."
Except you have to live somewhere, it's not like buying a boat. All of these dangers apply equally to owners and renters. Yet the protection you get from owning in that situation is massively advantaged over renting. Lose your job and can't afford your mortgage? Oh no, guess I'll have to take out a HELOC, or apply for forbearance, then wait years to be foreclosed on and declare bankruptcy. Lose your job and can't afford your rent? Sheriff's knocking on the door in 90 days to throw you on the street.
> I'm not sure it is. If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession.
'Tis better than to have owned and lost, than to have never owned at all.
> Now, apartments can suck too. Especially in places like the USA where we have a landlord cartel actively pushing up prices, and a professional landlord president who shut down an antitrust investigation into said cartel shortly after entering office.
So rather than ever own a home, just rent. It's about the same as taking a pile of money out into the middle of the street every month and setting it on fire, but what else can a person do?
You're just arguing what "barely afford a home" is. Ok, it has to include a maintenance budget. And maybe a financial buffer. But those are true regardless of taxes. That doesn't mean that there are lots of people who can afford the home and the maintenance and some taxes but not the full tax amount.
That's looking at the ability to buy ONLY as a numbers game, but it says nothing of the emotional effect it has on actual buyers. I bought a house. I can ask for a raise I'm worth it. I am doing well now... I'll get a better job next. Now I have a wife and kid and they want me to do better. etc...
While not all stories are like that, many are (in fact most are).
Even assuming things just increase at the rate of inflation, a house you can just barely afford today is a good investment because in 20 or 30 years that house is going to be worth far more while your payments have stayed the same and your income has increased.
Note that I'm very against cash out refinancing, which a lot of people are doing to get the cash that the house is worth. In my opinion the best reason to have a house is in 30 years it's paid off and now you can live there rent free for the rest of your life.
I just don't believe that that math works out so easily if you run real numbers.
I am a fairly recent homeowner. Before that I lived in an apartment in the same neighborhood. I like owning the house and having control over the space. I like having a bit more space. But, after I add up home loan interest, taxes, homeowner's insurance, higher utility bills, maintenance, etc., the amount of money that I will definitely never see again adds up to quite a bit more than I was paying to live in an apartment that, square footage aside, was aesthetically much nicer and better situated than the house.
And then, yeah, some additional amount goes to equity in an "investment" that is less liquid and historically earns a lower rate than a decent index fund.
When a person buys a home with a mortgage (congrats, by the way!), they gain the possibility of getting some return on the money they spend to have a place to live. It might work out long-term or it might not, but there's a chance (and it's often a pretty favorable one) that it works out well-enough as the years tick by that the light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting actually-closer.
Every day, thousands of folks do emerge from that tunnel and gain the ability to make profound statements like "Well, at least the house is paid for."
This is in stark contrast to renting, wherein: There is absolute certainty that none of the money spent towards having a place to live will ever be returned. It doesn't matter how much is spent: Whether a little, a lot, or a lot more, that money is always just unilaterally gone. There's no chance at all of anything else happening. The odds of winning are nonexistent. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and there never can be -- it's just inescapable darkness in there.
In general, buying binds capital, more than renting.
If you include opportunity cost into the decision, then your contrast can and often will disappear (i.e. renting is financially superior or "winning" in your terminology).
Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
> Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
When I find these kinds of phrases to be directed my way, it is my most charitable interpretation that it is impossible for anything to be gained from the conversation.
> But, after I add up home loan interest, taxes, homeowner's insurance, higher utility bills, maintenance, etc., the amount of money that I will definitely never see again adds up
So your landlord was renting your apartment to you at a loss?
The landlord may have been. Sometimes investments lose money.
But it's also probable that the loan is fixed at a lower rate than you can get now, the maintenance costs less if you put a few people on salary vs hiring them for one off repairs, and the utility bills are lower because it's a smaller space.
That doesn't matter for this discussion, because rent is set by supply and demand, not the landlord's profit margin.
Losing money sets a floor on rent because the landlord loses money is going to be looking at selling the place, possibly even at a loss, just to get out from under the burden and so that place disappears from the market. If profit is high, they'll be looking to build a possible, maybe not your landlord, but someone will, and if there's no place to build for whatever reason, then rent is just going to go up.
You need to report back again in 30 years. As a recent homeowner, you are absolutely correct. I don't even need to ask for details. However, things will change over the next 30 years. Your tax and insurance will go up with inflation and so it will actually be free to live there. However, in 30 years your loan is paid off and you get to live there for the rest of your life with no house payment ever again.
As a general rule of thumb, the break-even comes out to be about seven years. It can be as bad as 15 years if you get unlucky and when you buy it what the economy does, but by 30 years it is almost guaranteed you are overall money head buying a house.
Although I do have to point out that I did not consider other investment options. If you take an apartment for cheap rent and then invest the difference between what a house payment would be including all that insurance and taxes versus your apartment and apartment insurance (less buy important) - and invest the difference in stocks, that is going to change your financial situation. All those equal that expect to be equal over in the long run. Since by investing, you are investing less money. However, just to make things tricky, in the U.S., we can invest up to a certain maximum in a 401k or IRA, both of which are going to be much better because of taxes, but it doesn't matter if you have an apartment or you have a house, you're at the same maximum. And so someone with a house can get that advantage of that and their future rent is paid for while someone with an apartment is still going to be pay for that apartment all their life.
There's a few other assumptions above. I'm assuming you're relatively young and you're going to live a relatively long life in the same area. Moving houses that's going to change things, apartments are much easier to move. Be the umlucky person who dies young: you won't get to take advantage of either investment.
Overall apartments and houses can both be good things and you need to examine the situation for your own life. Life includes your future, which is of course unknown. Good luck.
Anyone who claims there is a universal answer for everyone is categorically, utterly wrong.
When supply is so constrained that the first home is unaffordable, measures like this generally just push the price up without actually increasing the number of people that can afford a house. You can see this in the UK where multiple 'making houses affordable' tax breaks for first-time buyers have mainly just lined the pockets of existing property owners (except when the existing owner is the local government, in which case they should obviously take the loss despite having all the obligations to provide services and none of the authority to raise tax income, with the all the predictable holes in their budgets that result).
Maybe you’re referring to someone who owns multiple properties… But I think if someone owns the house they live in, there should be a cap once they reach a certain age. My Mom is retired and owns her home, but she still effectively pays rent on the property. She has a fixed income and the property tax comes in around 16% of her monthly income.
That doesn’t seem too bad, until you see all of her other costs have gone up dramatically because inflation has been high post pandemic. She only has so much money to spend every month, and if her property taxes kept going up too, she’d eventually be unable to afford to live in her house. She only owns her home because she was worried about being secure later in life and prioritized it above things like vacations or cars.
For a lot of folks as they age, even if they’re frugal, it’s not easy to survive. If you live for 20-30 years after retirement you’re likely to have your buying power cut by half if not more.
With that said, if someone’s home is worth more than say 10x the average price in your area, or your assets are $10+ million[1], I think there’s room for increased taxation. My primary point was simply being a property isn’t necessarily the right measure to determine a reasonable tax rate.
[1] The number obviously depends on where someone lives. Living in New York or SF, $10 million dollars of assets would be an extremely comfortable life but most likely not a lavish lifestyle. But… $10 million dollars in rural Mississippi is going to have you living an extremely lavish lifestyle.
Raise capital gains taxes then on those who inherit the property. It’s not extremely unfair to reward folks with a home to live the rest of their life in… I’m also not sure at all how it’s excess wealth to own a home. Most people in retirement now bought their homes at reasonable prices, that well exceed what they paid for or perhaps even made in life. If they sell they can’t buy something else.
By your logic anyone who is retired and has an asset appreciate should immediately sell it, and be forced to move somewhere else.
I cannot afford a home in Portland where I live. I could probably make the mortgage but it’s too risky in my opinion to have a 30 year debt obligation. None of my friends own their own home, not a single one. We’ve all just entered our 40s. The lack of somewhere to live won’t be fixed by a lien, nor will liens on an individuals actual home due at death fix it. It will absolutely incentivize investors who can exploit that, who will pay the liens and add to their portfolio.
If we want more housing at better prices we need to encourage development of more housing. That means making cities more dense and removing NIMBY policies which prevent it. Sure some of these homeowners may be voting for those policies, but they are the minority in larger cities.
Likely because of legacy homeowners who bought their $2m home 50 years ago for $25k and are now retired. They don’t have the income to pay those taxes even though their non-liquid net worth is way high
Land-value taxation is an idea that only works because we restrict building homes. If we said, look starting tomorrow anyone who wants a permit to build housing can get it in 30 days and if the local control won't permit it we have a state-wide (I live in CA) office that will review your building permit (and zoning), issue you a building permit, and do the inspections, specifically for housing, there wouldn't be a housing shortage in 15 years.
Basically land-value scarcity is not because we lack the homebuilding capacity, its because we severely restrict building in places that have high demand
Get rid of the fixed mortgage rate. Owners will sell when they can't afford the mortgage rate; the new owner will pay property taxes at the current rate.
Apart from the US, there aren't may other countries that allow fixed rate mortgages, and not a 30-year fixed.
Land value taxation is the worst idea ever. I already don’t like the idea of property taxes, where you have to pay for a piece of land you own. The ideal should be that unless you’re making use of public services you can live a free life. You should not have to pay just to exist. I’d much rather that income is taxed for the higher tax brackets more.
I think they've legitimately been fumbling the frontier race, but fortunately with not too much impact to their profits.
See for example the exodus of talent this year, triggered by mismanagement and politics. They still have a lot of talent but they've lost a lot.
Also, competition with Google Cloud for compute resources, less urgency and focus than the competitors, and (strange to say) not as much user LLM behavior data to feed to RL for coding, work, etc.
But I think they will keep catching up and stay relevant for a good class of LLM use cases.
I don't know exactly why the talent left. But this talent couldn't produce a serious frontier model over the past 6 months. Several months after high profile departures, Google appears to have a high quality model again. Maybe the high profile folks were overrated at best, or a hindrance at worst.
In this very specific case I don’t think this is what is happening. Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive, the moment this stops the real situation of the economy will become visible to everyone and they don’t want that.
The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
I doubt it even matters when. The message regardless is that bad things are because of Democrats, good things are because of Donald.
This is the magic. Historically many Americans voted for Leopards Eating Faces out of either a misplaced belief that their face wouldn't be eaten or a rational but still awful choice that OK, I don't want my face eaten but at least the people I don't like get their faces eaten and that's important to me. Today the idea is you vote for the Leopards Eating Faces and then when your face gets eaten that's explicitly not because of the Leopards Eating Faces. "Facts aren't true" becomes Dogma.
This almost works. Except for the most important thing. Mother Nature. Ma doesn't give a shit that you don't believe her facts are true.
Here's my attempt[0] (5 months ago) on trying to keep track of all the things that AI had negatively done yet we were forgetting back then. Looking back, I definitely need to update it as so much has happened since then but that is my point, I wish if you could go back and see all the negative things that we most likely forgot AI companies have done. They are just continuously overdoing things and constantly tiring us and having us not keep track of all the things of our past and the process repeats.
GDP is a particularly poor proxy to measure all of this. AI/Datacenters can increase the GDP while the costs (energy,infra, labor,disruption,capital concentration) are distributed elsewhere
It reminds me of the old joke where two economies each eat a dead rat for 10k$ and conclude they just added 20k$ to the GDP/Economy.
I wish to ask if its that AI is increasing our actual economic output but also who really captures the gains and who bears the costs if the boom eventually reverses.
That's the ridiculous part, because there is a huge range of positive, profit generating areas to invest in, and it's a tulip madness of concentrated and narcissistic wealth does things like pour trillions in to AI, but an insufficient amount of money into an electrical generation and grid infrastructure and housing. We basically have a centrally mismanaged economy under a banner of "capitalism" as the magical mythology of the era.
It's called capitalism. Whether that is sane, or individual self-interest without empathy is a trait of sociopaths, i'll leave up to psychologists and historians to debate.
I think everyone is downplaying the sober part of your critique. We’ve seen these leaders visibly high while talking to the public about our future paths.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
The intent of your comment is unclear to me, so I will ask you to clarify. And I will avoid any attempt at sarcasm from now on.
Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).
Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)
Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?
Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?
I did read your comment correctly as a sarcastic way to make the point that, "no, potentially wiping out the human race is not a way to attract investors". I disagree.
I referenced the meme in order to show that yes, the zeitgeist does believe that the investor-class will destroy civilization for short-term profit.
And yes, I believe at least a subset of investors are short-sighted and willing to inflict immense harm for profit, and that claiming the ability to cause incalculable damage is a deliberate attempt to appeal to such people.
I believe the LLM-mania is in no small part driven by an ultimately fraudulent implicit pitch to investors that OpenAI etc will eventually Install Planetary Overlords, and that claiming "we could wipe out the human race" serves as marketing in furtherance of that implication.
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
First we should ask why "all the other people who are not CEOs" are talking about this?
Maybe it's because said CEOs put it on the agenda for everyone to talk about.
This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.
Oh like who the media that loves scary things? The “effective altruists” (fucking lol) that are one degree away at most from working for big tech?
My in laws don’t have a microwave because they think it nukes food… one of them mentioned rouge AIs attacking a site called huggingface by name to me… this shit is not organic.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
I dunno, we share an earth with North Korea who has nukes... which perfectly fits your "same train car playing with a grenade" analogy, but we don't do anything about it.
Are you gonna continue to tolerate it? Or are you gonna stop them from playing with grenades in this train car we call earth?
In my opinion, no; but they are now getting in bed (Metaphorically) with people who see their software as potential means to "beat China" or "beat Iran" and together they are weaving a very tangled Pandora's box of worms
The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).
We saw during Covid that many jobs are not needed. And we may be heading to energy lockdowns. Companies could lose a lot of valuation or just use the "AI is doing everything" excuse.
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
The point is that what we think is valuable (and I agree, most corporate busywork is IMO a waste of everyone's precious time on this planet) doesn't matter under a system where labor and resources are ordered about by the people with the most money. Those jobs exist because our rulers (the ones in charge of the money) want them to, and that is the only definition of "valuable" that matters. Likewise, all the low-paid and unpleasant labor like digging up minerals with no safety equipment, sewing shoes for 17 hours a day, wiping asses in nursing homes, etc. is low-paid and unpleasant because our rulers want it that way.
> Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.
That’s a very engineer type of take.
Both middle management and HR serve roles that are believed to be useful to someone (maybe not you).
Often it is some form of protection by serving as a fall guy or complying with regulations, but it can be other things (e.g., increasing headcount/budget to gain power, etc.).
Yes, many sales people or even whole sales teams are effectively dead weight, but a highly-skilled sales team is a godsend both to the company and the economy.
We should all be wishing for more effective sales teams — the world would be a better place.
Most people have never experienced a good sales team, so I’m guessing this sounds like total fiction.
how are they required at all? why can't a company publish its products and services on its website and customers can take it or leave it? why do we need commission-paid schmoozers in-between, who make multiples of what rank-and-file workers earn? The workers create value, and are paid the least. That's the definition of perversion.
I’m going to take your comments at face value. I encourage you to find a good salesperson and shadow them for a day or two.
> why can't a company publish its products and services on its website and customers can take it or leave it?
Do you assume most people actually read product info? If they do, so you assume they understand it? The answer to both of those is a resounding “no” (especially in areas that change rapidly like tech and medicine), even if it doesn’t apply to you. For some potential customers this is due to lack of time, and for others it’s simply lack of ability.
A good sales person is finding and connecting their product or service with customers who will find value with their product or service. “Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door” has largely been shown to be untrue.
> why do we need commission-paid schmoozers in-between, who make multiples of what rank-and-file workers earn?
There is a lot to unpack here.
Commission-based pay can be debated, but I assure you that any system that yielded better results consistently would become the new standard fairly quickly. It is what it is.
The amount sales people earn is generally based on two things — their relative value to the company and the market for sales people. Losing one key salesperson to a competitor can mean the end of a lot of small businesses.
The “schmoozer” comment can simply be addressed by saying that some people are more likely to pay for a product or service from someone they know or like. This might be a rational criterion in some cases, irrational in others, but it’s very real.
> The workers create value, and are paid the least.
Workers do create some value for sure. Matchmaking the customer to the product or service also has value. You may not personally believe that, but the market seems to.
The relative amounts of pay are largely market driven, imho.
A lot of that money is printed and handed to some players that recirculate it where they see fit. It's as "needed" as the government paying you to dig and fill curves.
The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.
> When the CEOs of these companies are saying that we will risk extinction and jobs will be decimated, why do you even need a "foreign agent"?
Three claims of propagandists with agendas.
While I do think AI will be disruptive like other tech advances, I think the manner and extent to which it could cause trouble is rarely discussed in a way that will be looked back on as resembling what actually ends up happening.
This isn't likely even about AI. It's about making large groups of people the targets of terrorist investigations, and holding the possibility of incarceration over their heads. AI is the latest convenient excuse. Just like when they designated "Anonymous" a terrorist "organization" (when there is no actual organization) - so now anyone in possession of a Guy Fawkes mask could plausibly be arrested for being a terrorist. I wish I were joking. It's only funny when people who voted for this administration end up being a target. This is going to keep happening, unfortunately.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
So the first amendment is suspended for individuals whose opinion/public activity - according to the administration - "furthers the goals of a foreign power".
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
Would this not mean that if you oppose the Iran war because it's bad to kill civilians or you want gas prices to go down, that's OK - but if you oppose the Iran war because you're trying to help the Iranian government's foreign policy goals, that's acting as a foreign agent?
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
So I can read the DOJ sentence two ways, I first interpreted it as #1, but it sounds like you took it as #2?
1. "We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we said "acting as" because it indicates a temporary employment status rather than an innate human characteristic."
2. "We are weasel-wording to target all people with similar acts to how agents would act, but who would not qualify under the law we want you to think we'd be drawing authority from."
I empathize with your concern, but as bad as things are we shouldn't assume infinite malice from all federal entities in all circumstances. Not out of kindness or charity, but because it would be a maladaptive strategy for handling problems.
If they try charging Joe-Shmoe under FARA, there's still some chance of loss in federal courts.
No need to assume infinite malice, but given the track record, it would be naïve to assume anything other than a default of malice unless proven otherwise
The evidence in front of us (the malicious words of the person in question) strongly favors malice anyways.
My guess is that they're drawing a distinction between reporting that says:
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)
There's not any question about it: the president already said in no uncertain terms (and probably all caps) that anybody opposing datacenters is a foreign agent working against the usa.
Only a truly naïve person would not have seen this next logical step (prosecutory threats) coming when the preceding step received virtually no opposition.
TBH we should support any channel by which America is forced to share money with the rest of the world. Imagine if they had a billion abortion protestors - maybe they couldn't afford data centers.
> There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
As I have watched places like x.com and Reddit it’s pretty clear to me there is some sort of weird propaganda thing going on promoting the Chinese models and casting shade on the big American models
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.
The Chinese models are cheaper and probably soon are going to be better, too. They're also open weight, which is the most important thing in the future. US companies are no longer considered safe enough against industrial espionage outside the US and do not meet mandatory data protection standards elsewhere. There have also been known incidents of direct interference with US models for propaganda/political purposes (e.g. Elon Musk admitted to doing that), making US models a fairly direct threat to EU sovereignty.
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
> To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
> Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Wow, you're really triggered by the idea that people should get a say about what happens in their lives.
You'll note I didn't oppose the datacenters - I offered a solution to getting the datacenters built. If you trade houses with the people who don't want a data center in the neighborhood you're getting the datacenter! It's just that you're so upset about someone else having the ability to affect their own lives that you aren't seeing that you have the same power, and can work towards your own perfect world with power plants and datacenters and sewage treatment plants and subway stops just down the street!
I think the problem with that plan is what I pointed out - you want other people to have all the downsides of those things in their neighborhood while you get the benefit. It's pretty sick to think that them not wanting the downsides is a problem, but you not wanting the downsides also means they have a problem. Fortunately there's a solution! Go form a YIMBY community that allows all the projects that have representatives promising benefits, and prove that the NIMBYs are all wrong. I'm 100% certain it will make you way happier.
> What's your plan to solve income inequality?
Well part of it starts by not giving giant companies with lots of money even more money in the form of tax breaks, extra access to government, and the ability to use eminent domain for their profit. All these thing grow income inequality.
You wouldn’t want to live next to a data center because of income inequality? Or you would want to live by one because you think data centers cut checks to townspeople?
If they make the communities enough money the community will be happier to let them be built. Try increasing that amount and offering it up front, maybe.
I would support that. Companies should do that. Sometimes communities disagree, obviously. Communities that really don't want them often succeed. That's why the administration is throwing such a fit.
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
Sure? I would be completely fine with a data center next door assuming it's a normal one and not something like xAI's. There are several not too far from me already.
In general, you're right. They are just buildings that sit there emitting hot air.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
If you don't like it there, trade with someone who is in a town with a datacenter and is unhappy that the datacenter is there! Or maybe convince more YIMBY types to move into your city and get the datacenter back.
I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted. You can still do plenty to get the datacenters right across the street from you - sometimes in this world you have to work for the outcomes you want. IDK if it's fair or not, but it is how it seems to work out.
Nobody is building datacenters directly across a house. This kind of ridiculous exaggeration doesn't help. And I'd happily live in a town or place near one.
You linked to a data center that was a bitcoin mining operation and is explicitly having noise abatement being applied before being brought back online as an AI one?
That doesn’t support any argument against new builds nor does it support the notion that they are inherently noisy.
Also, in reply to your further up NIMBY nonsense suggesting I move.
I don’t think you understand how people operate. I like my small city and am upset idiots spread fear and harmed its prospects that we will pay for with continued anemic local employment, poorly budgeted infrastructure, etc.
I want to see good things here. I’m not just going to give up on it and go to some city that has its shit together on the business side.
Datacenters have been around for decades and the Dulles Tech Corridor, the ones around Portland, the SIX in Seattle, etc all have shown they can operate just fine.
> I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted
No, I’m disappointed they did it based on ignorance and propaganda. There was no informed decision making going on. This is no different than people who voted against gay marriage because they thought their god would seek retribution through calamities.
> You linked to a data center that was a bitcoin mining operation
This is a good point. Was it a data center across the street from somebody’s house when it was mining Bitcoin? Yes. Will it still be a data center across the street from somebody’s house when it reopens as an ai data center? Also yes
> Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
As much as I hate appeal-to-authority based arguments, it's basically the only way I can see how to answer this without just totally rehashing the things he says in the video. He was an AI forecaster at OpenAI for several years. (I think 2019? to 2024). He quit on the grounds that OpenAI (as well as the rest of the industry) were / are throttling towards RSI irresponsibly, and even refused to sign an anti disparagement clause on exit at the risk of losing 2 million dollars (80% of his family's net worth) so he could talk freely about OpenAI. Now he runs a non-profit that does AI forecasting and advocacy.
Sometimes the most interesting people are people with ideas outside of the same groupthink circle. Everyone who has changed society has been called a quack by a square.
Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times and declined to answer questions during a heated July 29, 2026, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.
He was wrong about so many things and now refuses to talk. Also got the first pre pardon for crimes undiscovered against him.
Debates can be better than CNN gotcha questions, you know that right?
At the end of the day a debate is only as good as the interlocutors. I wouldn't advocate spectating two people screaming at each other either.
It's just sad that I can't even point to an instructive example here. This is part of my frustration. I don't think I've seen a good contemporary debate in a long time.
I think the reason covid became politicized is the same individualistic vs communitarian tension in all other american politics.
Individualistic: vaccines don't help the young
Communitarian: vaccinating everybody creates herd immunity that protects the community
Individualistic: Masks don't protect the wearer
Communitarian: Masks reduce the virus the wearer breathes out reducing the harm to others
On ivermectin Rogan was just wrong.
On lab-leak, Rogan pushed it hard based only on circumstantial evidence while Fauci thought natural spillover was more likely but didn't rule out lab leak. I don't think we'll ever know for certain.
Who should I trust, the extremely political Trump white house that never misses a chance to create division and attack perceived enemies. Or the scientists and even US intelligence agencies that disagree with each other and continue to debate the topic?
From my understanding this intel came from US intelligence agencies. I don't think scientists are against this viewpoint. In fact many spoke out against the pengina / wwt market theory.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
One real existential risk of AI is when psychopaths use it as a cover for their agendas and actions, and move the Overton window where there's nobody to be held liable for anything since the AI ostensibly did it.
Another twist is getting rid of any remaining truth in the already post-truth world.
For example, the head of the totally corrupt Centerizberkom in Russia, the organization behind all those rigged "elections" of the past 20 years, showed an AI video depicting a casually looking man mass-dropping ballot papers into a box, followed by several outright fantasy AI characters doing the same.
Can you guess what the bottom line of that demonstration was?
Exactly - no video is a proof of anything anymore, and if some vigilant citizens try to film egregious violations of the "democratic elections" and share that, then it must be fake, because it's trivial to create any video these days with AI.
It is misleading, even if it's true. The headline states "A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals". Given that Hugging Face was the most prominent hacking scandal, it would be reasonable to think that that's one of the scandals they're talking about.
But more to the point, the article is trying to paint this as some sort of coordinated plan just because there was a sandbox misconfiguration by Irregular. The fact that the most well known hacking scandal was due to a completely unrelated escape (zero day in Artifactory) makes the entire thesis of the article invalid.
It is strongly misleading because it says "behind hacking scandals" (which suggests behind all of them in general) not "behind some of the hacking scandals". Considering that by far the most important one, the Hugging Face hack, has no Irregular involvement, the headline is deceptive.
I wouldn't say they are falling. The pricing is just being distributed differently to make it look like you can beat the system.
For my specific plan, the daily rate (supply charge) has gone up from $1.13 to $1.80. That is a price regardless of any usage. This varies depending on what you select for your usage rates. So if you happen to get a lower per kWh rate, then your supply rate goes up.
Time of use also is manipulative. If you have a variable rate (time of use) then your peak time is much higher than your off peak which is higher still if you were on a fixed rate plan. If you select a plan that has 3 "free" hours then the peak time is rediculous priced.
So to sum up.. You have to have a very good understanding of how you use your power.
Home battery systems, and solar to some extent, are essentially 'pre-pay' schemes. A shift of where your money goes. At least for the next 7 to 10 years which is a rough payback period for solar/battery.
I would also like to mention, when Australia introduced the solar panel schemes, the retailers were paying 60c/kWh for infeed, now they are paying 1 to 2c. The high infeed allowed a home owner to offset their bills by infeeding while at work, sometimes even generate a credit just from solar. Certainly not these days. So what would be the next shift after they get everyone on home battery systems.
Personally I went to https://console.cloud.google.com since I already had some GCP projects. Then I searched for Gemini API Key. It brought me to https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/setti.... Then, there was a banner saying "Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities." Then, I did that, which took quite a while (minutes). Finally, I was able to see the way to create an API key.
The fact that there's two ways to get keys is also very confusing.
Even if you have GCP projects, I'd still recommend the AI studio UI - easier to figure out. Also, you can easily see the free tier in AI studio and just use your API key from there.
Yes I will look into it now but there’s no cross reference from GCP, and why are there two ways? And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t?
> Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities
Isn’t this the insecure thing that gives all your Google API keys access to Gemini, even those that were intended to be semi public (eg maps API keys embedded in websites or apps)
How much does OpenAI actually control the way the data centers are built and deployed?
I don’t know much about the impact of their data centers compared to others, but there weren’t many (if any) concrete commitments in this letter. The promises all seem like areas that even an evil corporation could pay lip service to.
Major tenants like OAI have near total control. These GW-class datacenters are built to spec for the tenant. Construction doesn't start until all the details are signed off.
If you are just paying the bills and leasing the space, is it really your fault a datacenter some other entity built is sucking the water table of Levelland dry?
If I just use and don't own the data center, then how can I be held accountable for it's impact others?
With the amount of cash OpenAI is splashing around they could easily write it into the contracts, but the current incentive structure prioritizes time between ground breaking and powered GPUs in racks. OpenAI has shown complete disinterest in the impact of AI writ large and will only reduce their community/infra impact to optimize that time to racked GPU along the Pareto frontier.
This is a good range for improving for maintaining your body composition; preserving or building muscle. Fitness coaches are recommending 2.2g/lb (1g per lb) or even more which doesn't have much scientific backing. 1.6g/kg seems to be the max that will benefit muscle gain.
On the other hand, there are some (Valter Longo, biologist at UCLA) who say that such high protein will reduce your overall longevity. He recommends 0.36g protein per lb body weight.
I don't know what to do with this info. Personally, I stay around 1.2g protein/lb (and exercise) as a middle ground.