> They’re investments, not really meant for living in. They cast these huge shadows and block views—really change the skyline—just so they can stand empty.
That is definitely one of the saddest parts for me. These billionaires (many of whom got their wealth in shady circumstances) are just using these condos to park their money. I may think NFTs are insane but at least when people with too much money park their wealth there they don't fuck up an entire city.
Well, if you want to ruin their investment then issue building permits for more of them.
> They cast these huge shadows and block views
Talk about first world problems. Expecting a city skyline to never change is ridiculous. The only problem is that so few people use these buildings. The best kind of density regulation requires _more_ density.
I live in Edinburgh, and we have "key views" (example of the centre ones here https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/download/13259/key-vi... - there's 5 or 6 pages but no link to them all) there's dozens of the views in the city, and no planning will be granted that materially changes the skyline in the views!
12 floors is huge. Nearly every building in Paris is 6 floors and it is already at near the maximum density humanly acceptable in my opinion. There will never be enough supply in some place, especially with speculation and foreign investors. The situation in NYC and these cities is nothing like SF.
China has done the same recently. They are moving away from skyscrapers. Strict regulation for buildings taller than 250m. No approval for buildings taller than 500m.
I would imagine that has more to do with curbing local officials’ habits of encouraging land speculation to plump up their budgets. The central government is trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to property that needs to rise in value to boost wealth but also not become totally unaffordable for first time buyers, and overheating the market doesn’t help with the latter.
London isn't exactly a model of urban planning. There is a massive shortage of housing. And you end up with all new developments concentrated in a handful of areas.
Not just towards St Paul's, but also to the Palace of Westminster. See the City of London's "Protected views and tall buildings" planning docs [1] and the section "Protected vistas in London" in the Wikipedia page Protected View [2].
Also, see the Wikipedia page on Greenwich Hospital, London [3]:
An early controversy arose when it emerged that the original plans for the hospital would have blocked the riverside view from the Queen's House. Queen Mary II therefore ordered that the buildings be split, providing an avenue leading from the river through the hospital grounds up to the Queen's House and Greenwich Hill beyond.
The resulting effect is displayed well in this contemporary pic:
Who says there's an expectation for the skyline to never change?
Maybe it's ok if it changes for good reasons that benefit a lot of people, and not for the whims of the few ultra rich.
It's nuts that huge buildings are built, and then stand empty almost year round. That obviously doesn't help with density.
Yeah, more density, because all that matters is the size of cities and their economy. 90% of children never waking up to the sounds of birds around their house? Who cares? 90% of grownups never plant even a tomatoes? What does it matter! Families of four or more confined to single-bathroom, two-bedroom apartments? The cosier, the better! The most important bit is that the cheap workforce reaches their dull jobs in time to make the city work for the elite and God forbid they don't behave "ecologically efficient" when doing so!
> God forbid they don't behave "ecologically efficient" when doing so
I like how you casually take a dump on being environmentally friendly. Yes, city dwellers do have less of an impact on the environment. Like all animals we like as much space as possible. But unlike other animals we don’t need it to survive.
If more of us fit in cities, there would be more space that could be left for wild animals. Maybe that equilibrium will help the planet flourish for longer. That’s actually a good thing, even if your condescending comment won’t acknowledge it.
Get these things right and we can lower our environmental footprint whilst maintaining - or even improving - quality of life for the average individual.
I recall my niece visiting my new house in the bundus. She saw the milky way for the first time at 11 years old. It has been raining and foggy on the way there but it cleared up a a bit before we got to the house. She had no idea the night sky isn't a dull shade of orange with the moon. All she might have seen was sparse clouds and a blanket of shining stars too numerous to count, almost like a diamond dress (her words not mine)
Consequently, it's not something we consciously think about. We just assume everyone has seen the night sky. I certainly never thought seeing the stars and the milky way would mean so much for an 11 year old. She wanted to stay outside so she could stare at them all night. But the mosquitoes, bless them, put a stop to those plans.
I had a similar relationship with the phrase "can't even boil an egg". I never liked eggs growing up, so I learnt to cook quite a few significantly more complicated dishes several years before I learnt how to boil an egg.
Notice the sleight of hand in this comment. Those who oppose development posture as if it’s urbanists who are interested in enforcing their way of life on everyone else, but it’s quite plainly the other way around.
Only one side in this debate wants to make laws that encode their particular housing preferences in law. It’s the side that wants to prevent new construction, not the side that wants to allow people to make free choices in an open market.
Bigger city density means less demand on outskirts and easier life for anyone who wants to live there, i.e. cheaper prices, less regulations, smaller commute.
That's not the alternative at all. The alternative is sensible city planning with mixed zoning neighborhoods that create comfortable centers all around the city. Add metros, bike lanes, and parks and you have a pleasant city instead of a concrete jungle or a suburban sprawl.
> 90% of children never waking up to the sounds of birds around their house?
As someone who grew up in such an environment, 90+% of my peers spent the entirety of our adolescence doing as much as possible to get away from suburban hells like that. And you know what's ironic? I have way more access to actual nature now that I live in a city close to some national parks than I did when I was younger and was trapped in endless suburbia.
>>Expecting a city skyline to never change is ridiculous. The only problem is that so few people use these buildings. The best kind of density regulation requires _more_ density.
You're right, yet there are many cities that still restrict building development in the name of protecting certain views.
One example is the City of Vancouver that has a page dedicated to explaining the views they are trying to protect for real estate zoning.[1]
Austin, TX has laws dictating certain views of the state capitol building are not to be blocked. Personally I don't have an issue with it, there's still plenty of other views to block so the real estate people should be happy, but probably not land owners who would earn a lot more for their land if the laws didn't exist.
Not even. plenty of first-world cities expect skyline changes. This attitude toward change (anti-change) comes from SF and has migrated elsewhere. NYC was the antithesis to this attitude but apparently it's not immune to this line of thinking.
It's like they think mountains do not move. Rivers always run the same course. It's comical and tragic.
> This attitude toward change (anti-change) comes from SF and has migrated elsewhere. NYC was the antithesis to this attitude but apparently it's not immune to this line of thinking.
This was back from an era where the main contributors to disease were thought to be lack of air and light.
The zoning described was actually quite generous by modern standards; you could technically build as much as you wanted as long as it fit the prescribed cake tier shape, and you could build theoretically unlimited height on a certain portion, I believe the center quarter of the lot. There is no city in the US today where you could build something as tall as the Empire State Building as of right; and yet the older regulations allowed that.
"Well, if you want to ruin their investment then issue building permits for more of them"
For the past 30 years this has not happened even once in a major city. Developer will not build so many building as to drip the price. Maybe its time to accept that you are perpetuating a myth.
Wealthy people minus a few eccentrics are most certainly not parking their money in NFTs. The crazy $69MM Beeple headline was actually a purchase by an NFT related company from what I understand.
Not withstanding unoccupied real estate investments are a problem in every major city. It's usually wealthy foreign investors living far away in particular...e.g. Russia -> London, China -> Singapore/Vancouver, etc. really seems like non-occupied real estate purchases by foreign capital ought to be restricted a bit legally
While not good for the local housing market for sure, the country does gain from a ton of foreign illicit income being converted to its own currency and an easily seizable asset conveniently parked within its borders.
Cities and counties can also implement vacancy taxes and such to somewhat lessen this problem.
That's only true of the property actually is siezed (or taxed) and put to good use, which it isn't, because it's not nation vs nation so much as it's global ultra wealthy vs global everyone else.
But I do want to discourage vacant lots and encourage tall buildings, that’s seems the feature. We have only so much land and a large amount of people who want to live on it, increased density is the solution.
LVT turns an asset into a liability. The fact that they can afford it isn't the point. They won't want to afford it if it's a liability unless they live in it or can rent it out.
Meanwhile city coffers fill up with cash that can be used to build social housing.
The only downside to LVT on non primary residences is the epic political fight it would require against the super rich.
If they can afford the tax that's fine. At least then the inhabitants of the city get value out of the empty apartment buildings. Hell, it can be used to build other apartment buildings that aren't empty.
Yes these owners 'can afford' more but it will definitely discourage what OP was talking about that it's just land banking for future asset appreciation. The land value on this kind of property is extremely high so tax is not low even if it's a tall building
I think it’s fine to discourage vacant lots, but the skyscrapers we are talking about are the opposite of a vacant lot.
Whatever the tax on these buildings is under LVT, it will be more unaffordable by their neighbors that are shorter and use more land. There is a higher incentive for neighboring buildings to get torn down and get replaced by taller skyscrapers like these.
It’s just odd to point to the buildings least affected by the tax as the sort of development that would be discouraged.
I don't get the "billionaires buy property and leave it vacant, because it's more valuable as an investment" trope. Billionaires like to make money with their money. Sure, property prices increase, but rents are significant. If you can make 5% a year from your real estate appreciating, you can make 10% by renting it out. That's the difference between a mediocre yearly return and a fantastic one.
Maybe at the absolute top end, there isn't enough rental demand, eg the $90m apartment mentioned may not fetch $400k/month in rent. But I hear the same argument for middle-class apartments in moderately expensive cities: rich people buy $600k apartments in Dublin, Vancouver, Sydney, but turn down $2500/month in rental income even in red hot rental markets.
I don't buy it, though I don't have a clear alternative explanation.
Because many of these billionaires come from countries where their political systems are rife with corruption or otherwise unstable, and oftentimes they received their wealth through dubious means. This has been well documented for many residences on Billionaires Row in Manhattan, so much that laws have been passed preventing hiding identities through shell corps.
Buying real assets is seen as a way to protect their wealth when it is at risk of being confiscated or devalued by their home governments.
Another way to think about these apartments is similar to art. Billionaires spend obscene money on art, and they aren't renting out those paintings or really even looking at them very much.
Here's how I've had this explained before. You see the same thing in California with their real estate market. Buying property in these markets is a foolproof investment. Even if it sits empty for 2-5 years, you will still make money.
Therefore, renting it out is a secondary concern. You could rent it out, but that comes with all sorts of liabilities - what if tenants damage your property, stop paying, claim squatter's rights, infest the property with bedbugs, etc. There's a number of things that could go wrong with renting, and many landlords rarely make much profit on rental units.
So for these millionaires and billionaires it's easier to simply not rent them out at all.
Why don't you rent out your car on Turo when you're not using it, or resell your items when you're done with them rather than throw them away? I suspect, for the car example at least, it's for similar reasons. The liability of damage and hassle of managing a tenant is greater than the potential upside of rent for them.
When you have billions of money, do you have really have that much drive to optimize your properties which might be nice to keep as occasional holiday homes? Sure you'd think that "ooh, 5% more income on my properties" would motivate them to rent their properties out but they might be perfectly happy just living off their other investments and not giving a damn about such tedious optimizations.
When you're a billionaire, you can employ dozens, if not hundreds of people, to do tedious optimizations for you all day. And if that's the difference between 5% and 10% RoI, those people even pay for themselves (and then some).
That is all well and good, but did you consider that it would mean that your house would become tainted with the poority of someone who cannot even afford to not live in it? Who knows if it's infectious? It would become a cheap second-hand house. And there's like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer. Better to just stay away from that.
I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm or not so I’ll just remind everyone of Adam Smith: "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural."
In this country there was a time yes where inheriting it is shady and it’s something I fear our conservative brothers have forgotten. The problems of multi-generational wealth were clearly visible to our founders looking at Europe. It should be patently offensive to all Americans
If you have the same 200 families holding all the wealth for 500 years, you have a problem (like several countries in europe).
There is nothing wrong with a hardworking person to reach wealth, and for heirs to keep it, if its properly managed. The issue is they should be able to lose it thru squander. Bail outs, lobbying, regulatory capture, prevent that natural ineptitude from taking place (securing thru connections what heirs couldn't do like their predecessors....that is, satisfying customers or creating shrewd innovation).
Wealth is finite, despite how much some like to claim it's not zero-sum. Not everyone can be wealthy, so by definition there will be those who aren't. Inherited wealth allows the inheritors to start further along in wealth accumulation and widens the gap between the wealthy and those who aren't. That then locks up wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
It's quite to me natural to me, and I think Adam Smith is off base here.
If the parents earned that wealth through voluntary exchange, and they didn't do so by exploiting negative externalities, then it's theirs to do with as they wish. If they want to pay 1000 people to fan them, start a charity, or give it all to their kids, that's their prerogative.
It follows from the concept of private property. The parents earned that wealth at one point, in that someone voluntarily gave it to them in exchange for subjective utility of equal or greater value.
What right is it of yours to take it away from them just because you don't approve of the way they're spending it? They can buy 500 Ferraris but can't give it to their kids?
In my view it's plain theft dressed up in layers of abstraction and indirection just to hide that fact. (No, not all taxation is theft, as some level is necessary, but swiping half or all of someone's property is).
I don’t care what they spend it on, I never claimed to care. I agree ideologically with Adam’s premise though. It is in the best interest of the nation and the individuals living at that time that the assets and wealth of that nation be accessible to anyone living in it.
The accumulation of wealth across multiple generations has an extremely long history spanning back centuries of corruption, self dealing, preferentially treatment, and the hoarding of the more desirable assets (land for example) that the heirs did not earn or work for and cannot be enjoyed by a new entrant in the market. Being entitled to something because of your blood is fundamentally unamerican. We fought for our independence from such a system.
This country.. at least as how I was raised was one of grit, hard work, and innovation which determined who you’d be in life. A country where anyone with a novel idea or ruthless cunning can carve out a slice for themselves. The idea of inheritance undermines that, heirs did not earn anything by being born to the right parent, own things they did not work for.
This country is too young to have the problems of some European nations past but I think it’s starting to go that way. I think the founders saw the problems caused by bloodline rule and heirs and didn’t want that here.
There should be no inheritance. The heirs didn’t work for it, they’re no more entitled to it then I am. If a parent is wealthy then the kids will enjoy a life of potential high society, connections, and Ivy League educations, but they have to make it for themselves. I stand firmly behind that American ideal
Then the transaction will be taxed as income for those 1000 people. Gifts to children, particularly adult children, should be similarly taxed as income whether they are passed while the parents are alive or when they die.
Counterpoint: these buildings are gorgeous and only enhance the city. Whenever I’m on 57th St I crane my neck to stare at them as I walk. Often, I’ll just stop for a while to look up in awe.
They haven’t ruined anything.
Moreover, even if you disagree about their beauty, so what? People should be free to build things — even things you don’t personally like!
As someone who has lived on 57th street for most of their life, it's not all roses. 57th street used to be a vibrant street full of a variety of businesses. Back in the 70s & 80s when the 40s and 50s of Manhattan were filled with street prostitution (on the west side) and brothels (on the east side, and they're still there), 57th street used to be where you started to get respectable looking buildings and shops to fill them.
Now from end to end across Manhattan, most of 57th Street is becoming vacant in preparation for construction. The process is likely to take 20 or 30 years to complete, similar to what happened on 10th Avenue. There is more money to be made by letting buildings sit empty for years. 250 West 55th, at the cross street of 55th & 8th avenue, was an empty corner lot for 28 years while they waited for the rest of the buildings on the block to become vacant for teardown.
Some areas are especially derelict -- between 5th and 6th Avenue in particular. It's an absolute eyesore and source of daily construction noise and will likely be so for the rest of my natural life.
If you think that the buildings are ugly and damage the city, you'd be opposed to them. You like them so are not.
As for "people should be free to build things", we decided over 100 years ago that wasn't the case. Not unrestrained by zoning laws and concern for the community.
> we decided over 100 years ago that wasn't the case.
That was an enormous mistake. It's the source of our housing shortage in high-demand areas and it's probably costing us literally trillions of dollars. [0]
> If you think that the buildings are ugly and damage the city, you'd be opposed to them. You like them so are not.
This is what you believe, not what I believe. In fact, I think people should be free to build buildings I think are ugly.
Interesting take, considering the article we are talking about discusses how billionaires are hiding assets overseas (well, from overseas relative to us) in our housing. Don't you think that's driving up pricing.
Anyway, I disagree with your article's point of view. I don't think letting more people live in San Jose or NYC would unlock huge 10% improvements to GDP, and, even if it were, there's a value to being able to live in single family homes. If WFH is here to stay, then my suspicion is that NYC is going to continue suffering from its 2020 housing glut.
> there's a value to being able to live in single family homes
Of course that's true. Again, my view is that people should be free to build whatever they want. Single-family zoning makes the alternatives illegal, not the other way around! Proponents of single-family zoning get a lot of mileage out of the implication that urbanists want to impose their way of living on everybody else, but the opposite is quite plainly the case. Only one side in this debate wants to encode their preferences in law.
While I can't say about these specific buildings, I do agree that complaining about skyscrapers in New York seems weird. In general given enough time every eyesore becomes an iconic part of the city.
Attempts to equate 1) zoning that prevents buildings one doesn't like; and 2) zoning that prevents sources of pollution is a fairly tired false equivocation.
I’d be fine with $50 million dollar apartments if the owners paid 1% per year in real estate taxes, but in NYC the law is ridiculous and based on equivalent rent and there are no equivalent rentals. Taxes on a $50 million dollar condo are about $50k per year rather than $500k.
With any luck, NFTs and crypto in general might reduce this kind of investment in property. They might turn out to be a better place to park excess cash.
I really doubt that. The value of premium real estate is that it's limited and it takes a lot of wealth and time to build - it's the real proof of work so to speak. NFTs are infinite, similar to grains of sand, where each one is unique.
> I think NFTs are great because they move money from the hands of the stupid&rich to the hands of artists.
There are 15 million items offered for sale on OpenSea, for example, and each one of those will have cost the artist $50-100 in fees to list. Almost all of those will either fail to sell, or will sell at a loss to the artist. So, although the crypto-rich want you to believe you're democratising finance or sticking up for the little people against "the elite" or however they phrase it, the reality is the exact opposite of what you describe, i.e. NFTs are moving money from the hands of the artists to the crypto-rich.
Most artists do not sell their NFTs, and are instead stuck with the fees they paid to mint them.
"These numbers do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated." [0]
Most artists aren't going to sell, in no small part because there are a LOT of artists out there in the world and because selling art is Hard. I've met plenty of folks that spend more time selling art and being social enough to sell art than they spend actually making that art. And this is just the average seller: Few can actually make it a career.
Money, connections, luck, and a lot of social labor are pretty well required to get your art selling at higher prices, and might get rich folks to buy your stuff.
Skyscrapers fuck up a city how???? Do you expect Manhattan to consist entirely of 2 story suburban homes? It's attitudes like yours that are the reason the streets are full of so many homeless.
TBH they are not very big, in fact rather tiny for luxury homes, so let them have it at the highest price possible. If your idea of high life is a 3 meters greenhouse without even a garden, fine.
> Only 1000 editions of Private Views were published
For context this is towards the higher end of a standard print run in the photobook world. Most niche art/photo books will be printed in runs of only 50, 100, perhaps a few hundred, or at most 1,000 so "Only 1000 editions" is actually at the upper end and this is in no way "limited-edition". Unless the project goes viral it's unlikely the book itself will ever be sold out, such is the nature of the [lack of] demand for printed photobooks.
So getting the project featured on various sites helps sell a few dozen here and there and works towards clawing back the initial investment. Clearly this was an expensive book to produce as single copies are in the range of €70, which is almost double what most niche photobooks sell for. I'm sure some of the subjects included in the project will be interested in copies, so there's a meta aspect there.
If the book does sell out then the price of [secondhand] copies will increase above the original price, and you can find the value can double, or even increase by an order of magnitude. So a project about views you can't see unless you can afford them, becomes a book about views you can't see unless you can afford them which itself you can't afford. Another meta aspect.
Veering off topic but: there is a photography vlogger named Jared Polin who is producing a crowdfunded photo book and vlogging the process. It’s pretty fascinating if you’re casually interested in niche photo books.
That video gives a good general idea of the costs involved in creating high quality niche photobooks. TL;DW way more expensive than most people realise. Very few photographers make any profit from books however, unless they are very well established. So the emphasis on profit in this video is rather misleading.
There's also a big error/assumption from Jared when he covers why he is self-publishing rather than going to dedicated publisher in that he talks about the publisher giving "an $X thousand dollar advance" - this simply does not happen with photobook publishers, they usually just give you a certain number of copies of the print run to sell yourself.
Even with 1.3million followers Jared probably wouldn't sell the 2,500 copies he is talking about printing here - this is why people go the Kickstarter route as you're pre-selling and can print to demand (plus a few copies on top). People don't really buy art, very few people are willing to drop $50+ on a photobook.
A reason people do go to publishers is that they have the marketing clout to get your book into independent photobook shops, visible at photobook festivals, into award listings, featured in newspapers, online, etc. That's the hard part in self-publishing, and even established publishers go the Kickstarter route if they're unsure about the potential demand for a book.
I agree Polin seems to undervalue (or just not understand?) what a publisher brings to the table, but I did get the impression he is trying to do this as an offshoot of his vlogging business more than "as a photographer" and for that, flying solo might have advantages outside the actual sales and publicity of the book.
Funny that you say people don't really buy art: the primary complaint from artists about the art world is that there's too much money in it. Lots of people buy art, and lots of people make art, and lots of people sell art: for at least these three measures, more people than ever have at any previous time in recorded history. But sure, more people don't than do.
Interesting, my first thought uppon reading this was "huh guess I can't buy this limited edition book" weird to see hoe wrong that was.
I wonder how many lost sales thoughts like mine cause in the end
> But despite the breathtaking views, Schmied says the multi-million-dollar condos were dishearteningly dull
How many new apartments aren't dull? If you're spending $90 million on an apartment, the last thing you would want is for it to be in the style of some architect's avant-garde idea of beauty. If you want to add personality, you hire your own interior designers to find your own aesthetic.
Exactly. Staged apartments are supposed to be dull. Prospective buyers should see a blank canvas, something as neutral and inoffensive as possible. And this applies to all sales, not just new apartments. There's a reason your realtor wants you to move all your stuff out before starting showings, no matter how much you think looking "homely" will help.
I can’t speak for the artist but I find these places quite drab because of the material choice and color. Grey/white marble, satin paint, light flooring, etc all make it dull to me. The problem I see though is to sell a unit at that those asking prices it’s not Home Depot marble or $2/f flooring it’s the crap Davis was sculpted from or whatever. That’s cool and all but yawn…
You’d think right?! So why the hell is the same marble used to craft David already in the unit? Why spend so much on finishings if it’s just gonna be redone. That’s part of the 70 million. Feels like rentseeking and waste to me
A counterpoint - if having style increases the variance of liking the property, then with increased variance, there will be more people who really like the property (and thus be willing to pay more).
in such a niche market, you're better off creating competition among a few bidders, rather than putting off a significant % of the demand and relying on a person really liking the property to bid up the price.
Put another way, 4 people moderately interested in the property will probably yield a higher price than 2 people that are very interested in the property.
This is especially true in luxury real estate, where buyers go in looking to substantially change the property. They expect to bring in their own architects and designers. The staging is just a canvas.
Put another way: Compare a newish construction to equally staged houses from yesteryear. Something built in 1918 will probably have wood paned windows and wide trim - and keep these sorts of details around the house. Art nouveau and art deco have their details, even when you stage them to as much of a blank slate as possible. Something from the 70's has some details from them in the construction. Folks still apply their own aesthetic to these places.
These "luxury" apartments do not seem to have things like this. They are missing built-in character, that realistically has nothing to do with the color of the walls or the furniture in the place.
And honestly, even a plain place shows the architect's sense of beauty (or lack thereof).
If it's an investment anyways, then there's no harm in giving it some artistic flair to give investors something additional to speculate about. I find it far more likely that foreign CEOs are just using it for their the couple weeks a year they spend in NYC when they visit their NYC office.
The room my wife and I booked in 2019 offered a panoramic, bird's eye view of Bangkok's skyline from one of the higher floors in the building. Not bad at ~$90 / night at the time.
Bangkok is absolutely full of view likes this, in no small part due to lax planning regulations. Also there are many tall buildings with bars on the top.
My wife and I once visited a friend of a friend who was “living like a king” in northern Thailand. He had a walled compound with a Mets baseball theme, a half dozen Burmese slaves, and had recently downsized from multiple wives to 1. He explained that there were three ways people make money in Thailand, drugs, money lending, and prostitution. And that he didn’t touch drugs...
It was one of the saddest and strangest experiences of my life.
But yes. People do this. It is weirder than you think.
Just to tamp down on the hyperbole a little, while Burmese legal refugees and illegal immigrants are mercilessly exploited, slavery (and polygamy for that matter) are illegal in Thailand, and many Western people who think that their money insulates them from the legal system find out the hard way that no, it does not.
This was 13 years ago, so the political situation may have changed. But this guy was very much operating in the open, and definitely breaking all kinds of laws. He’d been doing it for more than a decade, and no jail time yet.
He did also finance construction of an elementary school and some other community improvement stuff. He didn’t explicitly talk about bribes, but I’m sure he was paying people off. At least at the time he seemed to have figured out a way to avoid the law. But maybe corruption is down and it finally caught up with him - I’m definitely out of date here.
So do? Plenty of companies hiring remote, and you will be far (far far far) from the first tech worker to move to South East Asia. Bangkok in particular has world class (and affordable) health care, food, and night life, and you’re only ever a couple of hours from the beach
Thai police can be corrupt sometimes (not always - I've even been busted for pot twice, talked my way out of it both times even though they knew they could have gotten some western cash out of me), but Thai justice system is usually quite fair even for foreigners. There are exceptions of course, but usually you won't get into real trouble unless you are doing something that is obviously illegal (doing drugs, running prostitution ring, something something royal family). Even some my friends have sued and won against a big bank or people hustling money from them.
I haven't researched much about this but India seems like a better fit for tech workers? There I'll find folks who share my interest and the culture is good too.
> “They all talked about having a golf simulator room—I’ve never heard of this thing before, but they all had it,”
Why are wealthy people so much into golf? It seems like the dullest of activities. Is it just because other rich people say they like golf, and they're all such conformists?
"No, I won't play golf, it's playing marbles for people who don't want to bend down." - Youp van het Hek
Jokes aside, it's because it is a way to signal that you are part of the in-group by sharing in a particular activity. And what better way than to make that the kind of activity that implicitly shows off your privilege? Golf involves a large amount of grass fields set aside and maintained just for you and your friends that can't be used for anything else, and spending time on it means you can afford to not use your time on something more productive. It's gatekeeping by its very nature. It's showing off how rich you are by being wasteful with two of the most precious resources available (I think there's even a name for this in the context of evolutionary biology).
Having said that, I won't deny that it can be enjoyable in the same sense that going for a walk can be enjoyable. Going on (the equivalent of) a walk, together or alone, is a healthy thing to do. But as a social activity those other factors also play a role.
Agreed on the first part, that's where being a proxy for taking a walk comes into play. But regarding the second part: almost any lawn game would qualify for that, no? This could also be done over a game of horseshoes or Kubb. But that would miss all the other the gatekeeping, in-group signaling qualities mentioned.
Although maybe croquet qualifies as posh enough... Now you're having me wonder if we can categorize lawn games by the classes that play them?
What other sport can old people play? If they want to stay semi-active they can't really play badminton or basketball or anything else. Some of it can about about privilege or whatever, but there are other ways to show that like have boats and what not. I play golf and all the people I know genuinely enjoy it
First, you appear to be reacting to something I did not actually say or mean to imply. I was answering a specific question about the connection between "rich" people and golf. So the question was implicitly focused on class, and therefore my answer was looking at golf from that perspective too. Please note that this is not the same as casting judgement on the qualities of golf as a sport in and of itself.
I'm not trying to tell anyone that golf is inherently bad and that they should feel bad for enjoying it (although I do stand by my earlier comment on it being a display of having excess land to waste, at least if we're talking about golf courses in areas where it does not fit into the natural landscape and where available land is scarce).
Similarly, whether or not the class comments apply to you specifically is not up to me to decide. I don't know you or your context.
Now, to answer your question: I would say that the entire category of Lawn Games would be available here. I already linked the wiki page before but I'll do so again in case that comment gets lost:
There's also Tai Chi, or yoga, or just going for a walk, and we can keep going. Also, looking at my own parents, badminton and tennis are perfectly fine sports to play for retired people if your opponents are of the same age and you both take it easy. My mom plays badminton and tennis with her friends, and my father still likes to shoot hoops in his backyard. So basically, there are plenty of ways to get mild exercise out there, that is not an argument favoring golf over anything else.
* You walk in "nature", which almost everyone likes
* You can talk with your rich buddies while doing it
* You don't get sweaty or tired from doing it
* However you can still claim that you exercised
* You don't meet filthy poor people
* At the end you can replenish the 250 kilocalories you burned playing 9 holes by eating a big 400 kcal tenderloin steak and washing it away with 5 glasses of wine (also 400 kcal)
I think people in this thread are exaggerating the cost of golf - you can get a used club set for a few hundred and if you already live in a cheap area an executive tee time is maybe $20-$40. If you're struggling to pay your bills and work 16/7 then sure that's inaccessible, but then so would be most hobbies.
Just wanted to provide a bit of an international perspective on golf as I think it might be interesting. Golf isn't considered a stereotypical wealthy persona activity everywhere. Many towns and villages in Scotland have a local golf course that's inexpensive to play on with a scruffy clubhouse basically becomes the village pub. There are places which are for the wealthier among us, as you can imagine you can't just show up unannounced to Old Course at St Andrews and pay a few quid for a round.
Probably not, so you’d either be renting them or (if you’re into golf) you’d have a set already. I just looked up my old local course (which is in a reasonably well-to-do town) and it’s about £20 for a round for one person. So a little more than “a few quid” as I’d originally said, but in Scotland at least, it’s definitely quite accessible. Now whether you’re actually into golf and would want to, is another thing entirely :D
As a person who has played one full game of golf and a handful of mini-golf games I highly recommend Top Golf. It's basically a driving range plus restaurant. Relaxed, comfortable, fun. It's satisfying to just whack a few golf balls as hard as you can and see where they go. It's also not a problem if people have different skill levels.
In Copenhagen most apartments require people to live there. "Bopælspligt", residency requirement. As the owner of an apartment you are required to make sure someone lives there at least 180 days a year.
The best places to live in a city should have people living there. It's really that simple.
Serious question: what do you do if you simply cannot find anyone who wants to live there? For example if you inherited a flat when the owners died, and you already have a place to live in?
In the extreme case the municipality will rent it out for you.
This almost never happens. It's really not hard to find people in the city who want to rent apartments.
It is actually a pretty smart way to ensure that there is some occupancy in all building blocks (which could reduce crime) and also it brings down the overall rental costs.
Condos like this aren't really marketed in public. The exclusivity is part of the draw. It took some effort for her to look the part, they won't show them to just any rando who shows up.
I thought the same thing, but I found it hard to find views of inside of the apartments I sampled from the article. A lot of the apartment websites just talked about the amenities. Some had a floor plan, but no pictures of what the inside actually looked like. For a $7mil+ condo I was expecting a little more, but I'm also not really the target audience of those condos either
this is a huge argument for a real estate tax on non-primary residential property. Then, triple the tax its not rented during the year.
do we want to allow wealthy princes to have a pied a terre on park ave ? OK.
Let them pay in blood for the privilege.
Of course, neither "progressives" or "conservatives" will be willing to threaten upper classes, real estate lobby, and political donors, with such a tax.. despite that the people that stand most to gain from this would be lower income AND first time owners ...who are voters in their own district!
There is investment of capital with positive value, like in startups.
There is investment with (mostly( neutral value like gold
There is investment with negative value where you buy a resource that everyone needs (like land) and then you hog it and prevent others from using it. For economy to work properly, the latter must be discouraged.
I think the parent comment's argument is that expensive apartments exist _and_ the vast majority of them are not used for living, but rather a place for the uber rich to park their money.
From the article
> “But these apartments are turnkey—the kind of person they’re trying to appeal to would never live there.”
By your definition, I could say about Newton's Principa Mathematica "He put some words on paper, groundbreaking" Or Linus "He put some bits on disk, groundbreaking"
If you don't think her book is interesting, that's fine. But treating the methodology of how she got access to take the pictures as her sole output is lazy.
> To pass as a convincing buyer, Schmied enlisted an antiquarian friend in Budapest to serve as her “husband,” and invented a 21-month-old baby, a personal chef, and a personal assistant named "Coco." She also blew the entire allowance from her residency at Dumbo’s Triangle Arts Association on manicures, makeup and clothes.
Oh, but right...literally none of that was necessary:
>...Surprisingly, none of the brokers asked for a credit check or proof of net worth. “I think at that level, they don’t bother with financial information,” she explains.
It is necessary, brokers are not going to do a credit check or proof of net worth because their clients would not like that but they will judge how you dress and how expensive you look so makeup and clothes are necessary for the impression needed.
Source: I've been dismissed before based on how I presented myself in such situation and learned to play the game when needed.
They didn't formally initiate a credit check or validate net worth, but I guarantee none of those brokers would give me the time of day if I called in right now. The theater is there to avoid the credit checks; the fact that they didn't check just means her plan worked.
Slightly reminded of the story about the guy who went into his local VW dealer and asked to test-drive a Golf GTI (which he could afford to buy). They did whatever (formal or informal) checks they normally do, and gave him the keys.
He drove it across town to the BMW dealer, and told them that his new GTI wasn't fast enough for him and he was interested in trading it in for an M3.
Repeat at higher- and higher-end car dealers until he's in a Lamborghini by lunchtime, which he then had a few hours to drive around in before he went back returning all of the cars...
[Of course, this only works in countries which don't have special easily-recognizable license plates for cars owned by a dealer.]
Why do you guarantee that? Have you ever tried? If she mortgaged her house and rented a $1M pearl necklace as part of her scheme, wouldn't you also be saying that that part of her plan worked? How do you determine what was necessary and what was just a waste of effort?
Why do I care about her methodology? The article is about the apartments she viewed. It includes details about how she viewed them, but you quoted the entirety of the article about that bit of backstory.
That is definitely one of the saddest parts for me. These billionaires (many of whom got their wealth in shady circumstances) are just using these condos to park their money. I may think NFTs are insane but at least when people with too much money park their wealth there they don't fuck up an entire city.
> They cast these huge shadows and block views
Talk about first world problems. Expecting a city skyline to never change is ridiculous. The only problem is that so few people use these buildings. The best kind of density regulation requires _more_ density.
"In Athens, buildings are not allowed to surpass 12 floors so as not to block the view toward the Parthenon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_A...
I'd say this isn't typical of most of the world, but it's not unprecedented.
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3115225/...
250m is the limit for strict regulation. Newer buildings tend to be around 100m.
I would imagine that has more to do with curbing local officials’ habits of encouraging land speculation to plump up their budgets. The central government is trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to property that needs to rise in value to boost wealth but also not become totally unaffordable for first time buyers, and overheating the market doesn’t help with the latter.
Also, see the Wikipedia page on Greenwich Hospital, London [3]:
An early controversy arose when it emerged that the original plans for the hospital would have blocked the riverside view from the Queen's House. Queen Mary II therefore ordered that the buildings be split, providing an avenue leading from the river through the hospital grounds up to the Queen's House and Greenwich Hill beyond.
The resulting effect is displayed well in this contemporary pic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naval_College.JPG
[1] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/planning/planning-p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Hospital,_London
It's nuts that huge buildings are built, and then stand empty almost year round. That obviously doesn't help with density.
I like how you casually take a dump on being environmentally friendly. Yes, city dwellers do have less of an impact on the environment. Like all animals we like as much space as possible. But unlike other animals we don’t need it to survive.
If more of us fit in cities, there would be more space that could be left for wild animals. Maybe that equilibrium will help the planet flourish for longer. That’s actually a good thing, even if your condescending comment won’t acknowledge it.
- rewilding
- fast and expansive rail network
- right to roam
Get these things right and we can lower our environmental footprint whilst maintaining - or even improving - quality of life for the average individual.
(I have planted potatoes though)
Consequently, it's not something we consciously think about. We just assume everyone has seen the night sky. I certainly never thought seeing the stars and the milky way would mean so much for an 11 year old. She wanted to stay outside so she could stare at them all night. But the mosquitoes, bless them, put a stop to those plans.
Only one side in this debate wants to make laws that encode their particular housing preferences in law. It’s the side that wants to prevent new construction, not the side that wants to allow people to make free choices in an open market.
So we optimize to put people close to their jobs so they get lots of leisure time with their family.
If they don't want that they can always live farther out. That way everyone is happy.
As someone who grew up in such an environment, 90+% of my peers spent the entirety of our adolescence doing as much as possible to get away from suburban hells like that. And you know what's ironic? I have way more access to actual nature now that I live in a city close to some national parks than I did when I was younger and was trapped in endless suburbia.
https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2011/londons-protected-vistas/
You're right, yet there are many cities that still restrict building development in the name of protecting certain views.
One example is the City of Vancouver that has a page dedicated to explaining the views they are trying to protect for real estate zoning.[1]
[1] https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va...
That will just expand the market for such investments and make even larger areas unlivable.
It's like they think mountains do not move. Rivers always run the same course. It's comical and tragic.
NYC created the world's first zoning laws in response to a building casting shadows: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/background.page
The zoning described was actually quite generous by modern standards; you could technically build as much as you wanted as long as it fit the prescribed cake tier shape, and you could build theoretically unlimited height on a certain portion, I believe the center quarter of the lot. There is no city in the US today where you could build something as tall as the Empire State Building as of right; and yet the older regulations allowed that.
For the past 30 years this has not happened even once in a major city. Developer will not build so many building as to drip the price. Maybe its time to accept that you are perpetuating a myth.
Not withstanding unoccupied real estate investments are a problem in every major city. It's usually wealthy foreign investors living far away in particular...e.g. Russia -> London, China -> Singapore/Vancouver, etc. really seems like non-occupied real estate purchases by foreign capital ought to be restricted a bit legally
Cities and counties can also implement vacancy taxes and such to somewhat lessen this problem.
It has also the benefit that owning a home doesn't get preferential tax treatment than renting.
Income from wealth should be treated as normal income, it shouldn't matter if you consume the income yourself or receive cash for it.
Meanwhile city coffers fill up with cash that can be used to build social housing.
The only downside to LVT on non primary residences is the epic political fight it would require against the super rich.
Yes these owners 'can afford' more but it will definitely discourage what OP was talking about that it's just land banking for future asset appreciation. The land value on this kind of property is extremely high so tax is not low even if it's a tall building
Whatever the tax on these buildings is under LVT, it will be more unaffordable by their neighbors that are shorter and use more land. There is a higher incentive for neighboring buildings to get torn down and get replaced by taller skyscrapers like these.
It’s just odd to point to the buildings least affected by the tax as the sort of development that would be discouraged.
The comment you're replying to didn't say they were.
Maybe at the absolute top end, there isn't enough rental demand, eg the $90m apartment mentioned may not fetch $400k/month in rent. But I hear the same argument for middle-class apartments in moderately expensive cities: rich people buy $600k apartments in Dublin, Vancouver, Sydney, but turn down $2500/month in rental income even in red hot rental markets.
I don't buy it, though I don't have a clear alternative explanation.
Buying real assets is seen as a way to protect their wealth when it is at risk of being confiscated or devalued by their home governments.
Another way to think about these apartments is similar to art. Billionaires spend obscene money on art, and they aren't renting out those paintings or really even looking at them very much.
Therefore, renting it out is a secondary concern. You could rent it out, but that comes with all sorts of liabilities - what if tenants damage your property, stop paying, claim squatter's rights, infest the property with bedbugs, etc. There's a number of things that could go wrong with renting, and many landlords rarely make much profit on rental units.
So for these millionaires and billionaires it's easier to simply not rent them out at all.
A tenant in a single unit/house will easily drop the price by 10% or more from my experience trying to buy a single family home in SoCal in 2016.
As well, who can afford to rent these units? The mortgage/break-even point for for a $8mil value would be $37,825 a month.
... is how imagine their thought process.
Like inheriting it, which is the shadiest of shady ways to make money
In this country there was a time yes where inheriting it is shady and it’s something I fear our conservative brothers have forgotten. The problems of multi-generational wealth were clearly visible to our founders looking at Europe. It should be patently offensive to all Americans
What matters is the turnover of inheritance.
If you have the same 200 families holding all the wealth for 500 years, you have a problem (like several countries in europe).
There is nothing wrong with a hardworking person to reach wealth, and for heirs to keep it, if its properly managed. The issue is they should be able to lose it thru squander. Bail outs, lobbying, regulatory capture, prevent that natural ineptitude from taking place (securing thru connections what heirs couldn't do like their predecessors....that is, satisfying customers or creating shrewd innovation).
If the parents earned that wealth through voluntary exchange, and they didn't do so by exploiting negative externalities, then it's theirs to do with as they wish. If they want to pay 1000 people to fan them, start a charity, or give it all to their kids, that's their prerogative.
It follows from the concept of private property. The parents earned that wealth at one point, in that someone voluntarily gave it to them in exchange for subjective utility of equal or greater value.
What right is it of yours to take it away from them just because you don't approve of the way they're spending it? They can buy 500 Ferraris but can't give it to their kids?
In my view it's plain theft dressed up in layers of abstraction and indirection just to hide that fact. (No, not all taxation is theft, as some level is necessary, but swiping half or all of someone's property is).
The accumulation of wealth across multiple generations has an extremely long history spanning back centuries of corruption, self dealing, preferentially treatment, and the hoarding of the more desirable assets (land for example) that the heirs did not earn or work for and cannot be enjoyed by a new entrant in the market. Being entitled to something because of your blood is fundamentally unamerican. We fought for our independence from such a system.
This country.. at least as how I was raised was one of grit, hard work, and innovation which determined who you’d be in life. A country where anyone with a novel idea or ruthless cunning can carve out a slice for themselves. The idea of inheritance undermines that, heirs did not earn anything by being born to the right parent, own things they did not work for.
This country is too young to have the problems of some European nations past but I think it’s starting to go that way. I think the founders saw the problems caused by bloodline rule and heirs and didn’t want that here.
There should be no inheritance. The heirs didn’t work for it, they’re no more entitled to it then I am. If a parent is wealthy then the kids will enjoy a life of potential high society, connections, and Ivy League educations, but they have to make it for themselves. I stand firmly behind that American ideal
Then the transaction will be taxed as income for those 1000 people. Gifts to children, particularly adult children, should be similarly taxed as income whether they are passed while the parents are alive or when they die.
They haven’t ruined anything.
Moreover, even if you disagree about their beauty, so what? People should be free to build things — even things you don’t personally like!
Now from end to end across Manhattan, most of 57th Street is becoming vacant in preparation for construction. The process is likely to take 20 or 30 years to complete, similar to what happened on 10th Avenue. There is more money to be made by letting buildings sit empty for years. 250 West 55th, at the cross street of 55th & 8th avenue, was an empty corner lot for 28 years while they waited for the rest of the buildings on the block to become vacant for teardown.
Some areas are especially derelict -- between 5th and 6th Avenue in particular. It's an absolute eyesore and source of daily construction noise and will likely be so for the rest of my natural life.
This has ruined my neighborhood.
As for "people should be free to build things", we decided over 100 years ago that wasn't the case. Not unrestrained by zoning laws and concern for the community.
That was an enormous mistake. It's the source of our housing shortage in high-demand areas and it's probably costing us literally trillions of dollars. [0]
> If you think that the buildings are ugly and damage the city, you'd be opposed to them. You like them so are not.
This is what you believe, not what I believe. In fact, I think people should be free to build buildings I think are ugly.
[0] https://ggwash.org/view/42946/zoning-the-hidden-trillion-dol...
Anyway, I disagree with your article's point of view. I don't think letting more people live in San Jose or NYC would unlock huge 10% improvements to GDP, and, even if it were, there's a value to being able to live in single family homes. If WFH is here to stay, then my suspicion is that NYC is going to continue suffering from its 2020 housing glut.
Of course that's true. Again, my view is that people should be free to build whatever they want. Single-family zoning makes the alternatives illegal, not the other way around! Proponents of single-family zoning get a lot of mileage out of the implication that urbanists want to impose their way of living on everybody else, but the opposite is quite plainly the case. Only one side in this debate wants to encode their preferences in law.
With any luck, NFTs and crypto in general might reduce this kind of investment in property. They might turn out to be a better place to park excess cash.
There are 15 million items offered for sale on OpenSea, for example, and each one of those will have cost the artist $50-100 in fees to list. Almost all of those will either fail to sell, or will sell at a loss to the artist. So, although the crypto-rich want you to believe you're democratising finance or sticking up for the little people against "the elite" or however they phrase it, the reality is the exact opposite of what you describe, i.e. NFTs are moving money from the hands of the artists to the crypto-rich.
"These numbers do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated." [0]
[0]: https://thatkimparker.medium.com/most-artists-are-not-making...
Most artists aren't going to sell, in no small part because there are a LOT of artists out there in the world and because selling art is Hard. I've met plenty of folks that spend more time selling art and being social enough to sell art than they spend actually making that art. And this is just the average seller: Few can actually make it a career.
Money, connections, luck, and a lot of social labor are pretty well required to get your art selling at higher prices, and might get rich folks to buy your stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM
It has a great explanation of the difference between complex and complicated, and the fragility of our systems compared to nature's ones.
Skyscrapers fuck up a city how???? Do you expect Manhattan to consist entirely of 2 story suburban homes? It's attitudes like yours that are the reason the streets are full of so many homeless.
For context this is towards the higher end of a standard print run in the photobook world. Most niche art/photo books will be printed in runs of only 50, 100, perhaps a few hundred, or at most 1,000 so "Only 1000 editions" is actually at the upper end and this is in no way "limited-edition". Unless the project goes viral it's unlikely the book itself will ever be sold out, such is the nature of the [lack of] demand for printed photobooks.
So getting the project featured on various sites helps sell a few dozen here and there and works towards clawing back the initial investment. Clearly this was an expensive book to produce as single copies are in the range of €70, which is almost double what most niche photobooks sell for. I'm sure some of the subjects included in the project will be interested in copies, so there's a meta aspect there.
If the book does sell out then the price of [secondhand] copies will increase above the original price, and you can find the value can double, or even increase by an order of magnitude. So a project about views you can't see unless you can afford them, becomes a book about views you can't see unless you can afford them which itself you can't afford. Another meta aspect.
https://youtu.be/NloBEbN7qo8
There's also a big error/assumption from Jared when he covers why he is self-publishing rather than going to dedicated publisher in that he talks about the publisher giving "an $X thousand dollar advance" - this simply does not happen with photobook publishers, they usually just give you a certain number of copies of the print run to sell yourself.
Even with 1.3million followers Jared probably wouldn't sell the 2,500 copies he is talking about printing here - this is why people go the Kickstarter route as you're pre-selling and can print to demand (plus a few copies on top). People don't really buy art, very few people are willing to drop $50+ on a photobook.
A reason people do go to publishers is that they have the marketing clout to get your book into independent photobook shops, visible at photobook festivals, into award listings, featured in newspapers, online, etc. That's the hard part in self-publishing, and even established publishers go the Kickstarter route if they're unsure about the potential demand for a book.
I agree Polin seems to undervalue (or just not understand?) what a publisher brings to the table, but I did get the impression he is trying to do this as an offshoot of his vlogging business more than "as a photographer" and for that, flying solo might have advantages outside the actual sales and publicity of the book.
Funny that you say people don't really buy art: the primary complaint from artists about the art world is that there's too much money in it. Lots of people buy art, and lots of people make art, and lots of people sell art: for at least these three measures, more people than ever have at any previous time in recorded history. But sure, more people don't than do.
How many new apartments aren't dull? If you're spending $90 million on an apartment, the last thing you would want is for it to be in the style of some architect's avant-garde idea of beauty. If you want to add personality, you hire your own interior designers to find your own aesthetic.
If you’re buying a $70mm apartment and living in it, you’re renovating it before moving in.
Sales.
> Feels like rentseeking and waste to me
It’s wasteful. But it’s not rent seeking [1]. If it makes you feel better, there is a healthy secondary market in New York for these materials.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Put another way, 4 people moderately interested in the property will probably yield a higher price than 2 people that are very interested in the property.
This is especially true in luxury real estate, where buyers go in looking to substantially change the property. They expect to bring in their own architects and designers. The staging is just a canvas.
These "luxury" apartments do not seem to have things like this. They are missing built-in character, that realistically has nothing to do with the color of the walls or the furniture in the place.
And honestly, even a plain place shows the architect's sense of beauty (or lack thereof).
https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/thirty-nine-boulevard-execu...
The room my wife and I booked in 2019 offered a panoramic, bird's eye view of Bangkok's skyline from one of the higher floors in the building. Not bad at ~$90 / night at the time.
It was one of the saddest and strangest experiences of my life.
But yes. People do this. It is weirder than you think.
He did also finance construction of an elementary school and some other community improvement stuff. He didn’t explicitly talk about bribes, but I’m sure he was paying people off. At least at the time he seemed to have figured out a way to avoid the law. But maybe corruption is down and it finally caught up with him - I’m definitely out of date here.
http://hdr.undp.org/en/dashboard-human-development-anthropoc...
Highlight Thailand and US and you'll find both in the same section above or below the median.
Why are wealthy people so much into golf? It seems like the dullest of activities. Is it just because other rich people say they like golf, and they're all such conformists?
Jokes aside, it's because it is a way to signal that you are part of the in-group by sharing in a particular activity. And what better way than to make that the kind of activity that implicitly shows off your privilege? Golf involves a large amount of grass fields set aside and maintained just for you and your friends that can't be used for anything else, and spending time on it means you can afford to not use your time on something more productive. It's gatekeeping by its very nature. It's showing off how rich you are by being wasteful with two of the most precious resources available (I think there's even a name for this in the context of evolutionary biology).
Having said that, I won't deny that it can be enjoyable in the same sense that going for a walk can be enjoyable. Going on (the equivalent of) a walk, together or alone, is a healthy thing to do. But as a social activity those other factors also play a role.
Although maybe croquet qualifies as posh enough... Now you're having me wonder if we can categorize lawn games by the classes that play them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_game
I'm not trying to tell anyone that golf is inherently bad and that they should feel bad for enjoying it (although I do stand by my earlier comment on it being a display of having excess land to waste, at least if we're talking about golf courses in areas where it does not fit into the natural landscape and where available land is scarce).
Similarly, whether or not the class comments apply to you specifically is not up to me to decide. I don't know you or your context.
Now, to answer your question: I would say that the entire category of Lawn Games would be available here. I already linked the wiki page before but I'll do so again in case that comment gets lost:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_game
There's also Tai Chi, or yoga, or just going for a walk, and we can keep going. Also, looking at my own parents, badminton and tennis are perfectly fine sports to play for retired people if your opponents are of the same age and you both take it easy. My mom plays badminton and tennis with her friends, and my father still likes to shoot hoops in his backyard. So basically, there are plenty of ways to get mild exercise out there, that is not an argument favoring golf over anything else.
I think you're thinking of the handicap principle.
See also: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-11-01
* You can talk with your rich buddies while doing it
* You don't get sweaty or tired from doing it
* However you can still claim that you exercised
* You don't meet filthy poor people
* At the end you can replenish the 250 kilocalories you burned playing 9 holes by eating a big 400 kcal tenderloin steak and washing it away with 5 glasses of wine (also 400 kcal)
It's not really my cup of tea, though.
https://montrosegolflinks.com/broomfield-course/
What are your hobbies? Whatever they are, they probably seem deathly dull to someone out there.
The best places to live in a city should have people living there. It's really that simple.
I find it deliciously ironic that she would restrict access to her work like this - though perhaps there are other avenues not mentioned.
do we want to allow wealthy princes to have a pied a terre on park ave ? OK. Let them pay in blood for the privilege.
Of course, neither "progressives" or "conservatives" will be willing to threaten upper classes, real estate lobby, and political donors, with such a tax.. despite that the people that stand most to gain from this would be lower income AND first time owners ...who are voters in their own district!
What was the argument. I didn’t see an argument. That fact that expensive apartments exist?
> let them pay in blood for the privilege
Why? Follow this thread of envy and it ends at a guillotine for anyone with wealth.
There is investment with (mostly( neutral value like gold
There is investment with negative value where you buy a resource that everyone needs (like land) and then you hog it and prevent others from using it. For economy to work properly, the latter must be discouraged.
From the article > “But these apartments are turnkey—the kind of person they’re trying to appeal to would never live there.”
I cannot understand this line of thinking. I wonder if I can get a set of keys to the author's flat, so I can "share in it".
Groundbreaking.
If you don't think her book is interesting, that's fine. But treating the methodology of how she got access to take the pictures as her sole output is lazy.
> To pass as a convincing buyer, Schmied enlisted an antiquarian friend in Budapest to serve as her “husband,” and invented a 21-month-old baby, a personal chef, and a personal assistant named "Coco." She also blew the entire allowance from her residency at Dumbo’s Triangle Arts Association on manicures, makeup and clothes.
Oh, but right...literally none of that was necessary:
>...Surprisingly, none of the brokers asked for a credit check or proof of net worth. “I think at that level, they don’t bother with financial information,” she explains.
Source: I've been dismissed before based on how I presented myself in such situation and learned to play the game when needed.
He drove it across town to the BMW dealer, and told them that his new GTI wasn't fast enough for him and he was interested in trading it in for an M3.
Repeat at higher- and higher-end car dealers until he's in a Lamborghini by lunchtime, which he then had a few hours to drive around in before he went back returning all of the cars...
[Of course, this only works in countries which don't have special easily-recognizable license plates for cars owned by a dealer.]