- BirdieNZ parentJevon's Paradox: more software will be produced, rather than fewer software engineers being employed.
- > Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them.
Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).
NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.
- Dell/HP/Lenovo all have huge amounts of ex-corporate mini PCs constantly coming onto the second hand market as they reach the end of Windows 10 licensing, or are depreciated out, or mass upgraded. Some popular models to get due to having a full size PCIe slot are the Lenovo M920q, M720q, or P330. They idle at maybe 10-15W with no optimisation attempts, and you can put a 10G network card in for example, or a bunch of M2/nvme SSDs. RAM can be upgraded to at least 64Gb. CPUs can be swapped out, there are 3D printable rack mounts, backplates and so on in abundance.
- I'm trialing a NAS with Immich, and then backing up the media and Immich DB dump daily to AWS S3 Deep Archive. It has Android and iOS apps, and enough of the feature set of Google Photos to keep me happy.
You can also store photos/scans on desktops in the same NAS and make sure Immich is picking them up (and then the backup script will catch them if they get imported to Immich). For an HN user it's pretty straight-forward to set up.
- Maybe formal spoken Cantonese/Mandarin, but colloquial spoken Cantonese for example is very different from formal written Cantonese. It would sound odd to speak the way things are formally written, if that makes sense.
Perhaps you could say there's a subset of the languages which can be mostly written in a mutually intelligible way. That sounds more like the similarities between, say, Portuguese and Spanish, though, where you can probably write a subset of the languages that is pretty comprehensible by both language speakers, yet the languages are distinct.
- The sale value won't stay flat unless you tax land (or use leasehold like Singapore), because typically incomes rise, and in most places the rate of building new housing has an equilibrium lower than the rate of demand, because profit is needed for private developments to go ahead.
This results in a) higher incomes, and b) higher rents, because landlords can extract some of the increase in income, because tenants don't have enough alternatives to keep the rents low.
Capital value of property is a function of rents, so increases in rents result in increases in sale value of the property.
- It's good practice to separate out your control plane and data plane, so in this kind of scenario you can use the control plane freely to manage and scale up the data plane without worrying about the data plane underresourcing affecting your control plane operations.
The reverse also applies; by separating them you can have issues with your control plane but not have the database go down.
- > Cultures that value kids will have more. My parents did the same for us
Last I checked, cultures that have access to contraception and female education have fewer kids, independent of religion or tradition or practice of valuing kids.
Indian culture is no exception; total fertility rate has declined in the last ~50 years from ~6 children per woman to ~2, and continues to decline.
- Wikipedia says in 2022 there were 4.4 million software developers in the USA. H1bs are ~85,000 added per year. Say over the last 20 years, every h1b slot was filled (by software developers), they never left the USA, and remained on h1b without becoming permanent residents or citizens. That would be 1.7 million H1b software developers currently working.
In reality a large amount become permanent residents or leave. However, FAANG and FAANG-adjacent are probably only around 1 million employees (not including Amazon's non-AWS workforce, but including non-USA employees). Still, FAANG+ are unlikely to be typically anywhere near 80%+ active H1b visa employees. Maybe AWS is a standout exception.
Now, how many software developers in FAANG+ are not born in the USA might be a very different story.
- The same problem exists in other games, like Ultima Online and FFXIV. There's a solution for this, which was used in EVE Online: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a...
It works in real life too: https://gameofrent.com/
- I can't speak for everywhere in the world, but in New Zealand it has usually been possible to cover total costs with rent. It's not possible right now due to higher interest rates. I believe this is common in many other countries (e.g. Australia, Canada, UK etc.).
This suggests it's common in the USA too: https://www.moneypenny.com/us/resources/blog/how-much-renter...
- I lean towards renting out housing at market rent in my city to be unethical, so I refuse on ethical grounds to become a landlord. In the long term if the opportunity (e.g. money) arises I would like to build housing charging at-cost rent, but that'd be a charitable activity rather than a profit-seeking one.
I live in New Zealand, which is quite addicted as a country to profiting from real estate. The ability to leverage your money into an asset that provides both enough cashflow to cover costs and interest servicing as well as appreciates in value ~7% annually means that for most people, becoming a landlord is the most reliable path to easy wealth.
Yes, you can become a margin trader, but the cashflow management is much harder, the margin interest rate is higher (here at least), and it is much more difficult compared to buying an existing house and renting it out.
- If you think of it in share market terms, it's a 4.2% dividend from a stock with a long-term price growth rate of ~7%. Not only that but you can use leverage (e.g. like a margin trader) in the form of a mortgage. In the USA, you can even lock your interest rate for 30 years, and only re-fix the rate when it drops!
It's very profitable!
- No, even in 2024. I'm in New Zealand; there are a handful of big tech companies here, and they all offer compensation approximately the same (maybe on the upper end) as other New Zealand tech companies. There aren't that many remote jobs for US companies, and often they're also trying to save money by offshoring.
Why don't the local NZ tech companies offer more, though? Mostly because they don't have the same scale, so the revenue per employee is much lower.
FAANG (as in, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) make something like $1.5-$3 million USD per (white collar) employee (excluding Amazon warehouse workers).
Compare this to some well-known NZ tech companies (some of which even operate internationally!) Xero has revenue per employee of ~$150k USD. Pushpay maybe $200k USD revenue per employee. Datacom has revenue per employee of ~$130k USD.
It would bankrupt these companies to offer anything like what FAANG can offer, because they simply don't have the scale and revenue per employee to do so. Tech companies specifically have the rare ability to hugely leverage relatively few employees into huge revenue due to scaling, but only if you actually manage to scale. Most tech companies (probably even ones in the USA) don't have the kind of global scale and presence of the big tech companies.
- You can't make more of unique locations. Dirt isn't the issue, it's location. Times Square doesn't use that much "land", but it's a unique, non-commodity location.
Sprawl in NYC wouldn't create more Times Squares, so in this sense, "they aren't making more land".
There's plenty of land in Siberia. There are very few locations that are in the middle of dense cities.
- It's hard to think of many businesses that require lower capital investment and maintenance than a car wash. The ones I see in my city that look like land banking are a big plot with asphalt covering it (don't even need to mow lawns), a few awnings with some plumbing for hoses and soap and other gear, and nothing else. Even a laundromat would cost more to set up.