pager86

Just because its binary doesn't mean it can't be studied. Even with something like compiled native machine code its still relatively easy to disassemble and look at how it works with the right tools. With WebAssembly, dissassembly should be even easier and be more clear than native x86 or something. Still not as easy as well written javascript, but I expect it will approach the difficulty of minified js.

In my eyes, the size and offline compilation aren't even the biggest benefits. Having a low level assembly language for web computation lets people write in any language and compile it for the web. There's already an LLVM backend for it - although still experimental. But this may even mean we can simply port existing codebases to WebAssembly with little performance loss.

You've been able to compile stuff for web for a while, by transpiling to javascript, but the result has been too slow for many applications, so it never really picked up.

Houses can basically last an arbitrarily long amount of time and still remain functional. With most things, like a car, there is some nebulous end of life where its value is effectively $0, and the value of that thing will steadily decrease over time until it reaches that point. Because houses hold their value, people can sell houses when they don't need them, which makes it an investment. Of course value of housing and land change over time - the fact that there's a market ensures that - and of course people want to sell something for more than they bought it for if they are planning on selling. Housing as an investment is so intrinsic to its nature I don't see how to avoid it.