samlevine

If every house is overvalued by some metric, then maybe the metric is wrong.

We're seeing people moving, and supply limits are influencing both rental prices and purchase prices. It's a weird housing market.

The question of the rationality of the valuation is:

1. Do you expect these migration patterns to continue? 2. If so, when do you expect new construction to pick up the slack for demand? 3. How bad of a recession is the Fed going to cause to break inflation?

housing that should depreciate over time.

It does, amusingly. Housing stock ages and units you build now will generally be worth less in 10-20 years. Land is the thing that can appreciate in value.

Posting a contrarian take can get you fired.

There is little point in peaking out from whatever novel thing you're interested in and discussing it when there are people who get their fun out of ruining lives.

This selects for people who post boring but inflammatory takes, and encourages heterodox thinkers who are trying to gain followings to meld their views to their audience.

I don't want social media to censor me, people I want to communicate with or people I don't ever want to communicate with.

I want tools that help me communicate with other people. Learn things, get exposed to new ideas. And we can't have that with a huge system designed to prevent people from saying the wrong things.

Our ability to communicate and learn freely is dependent on the ability for people we disagree with to also have this ability. You will be censored if you want other people censored.

I do this in Twitter with lists. They don't make it obvious, but lists actually make it quite usable once you've set them up.

Facebook (or Instagram) don't seem to have good options for this so for the most part I don't use them.

Discord works chronologically, for now at least, and as long as it does I'll be happy to keep chatting with my friends there.

Facebook should focus on giving tools to individuals and communities to communicate with each other and speak freely with one another. Communities and individuals should determine their rules, not Facebook.

Platform wide content moderation is inevitable (illegal content exists), but mass censorship is bad. It will come for you, if it hasn't already.

You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2?

Microsoft Intune/Endpoint manager is actually pretty easy to setup/enroll laptops. Autopilot takes a bit of work, but it does get you to the point where IT doesn't have to do anything on a new laptop shipped to a user.

Ultimately if you don't want your users doing much on their laptops you can make it pretty simple to manage them.

Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it?

It really depends on the industry. Most folks aren't doing this because security isn't a priority.

Some firms may not survive a data breach, others might incur tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in costs (directly and indirectly) for one large breach. These folks do care and will spend whatever it takes because it's got a business justification.

I realized the truth of the Appleton model. Thirty years from now all the new homes she’s selling will slip into the “old” category and will gradually fester as taxes rise and the middle class migrates to new greenfield developments.

This is possible, but a lot of suburbs are old and quite successful.

Bellevue and Redmond come to mind just from where I live but there are lots of places in America where the periphery is long lived and maintained.

Microsoft doesn't break down sales figures, but overall their Surface business is a couple billion a year.

Surface Pros are about as good as you can get right now for a general purpose computer that is also a tablet and also are not incredibly expensive.

High level, there are basically four paths to getting revenue in journalism:

- ads

- subscribers

- donations from small patrons

- donations from large patrons

These cover a lot of different business models.

If you want to make money at journalism (or just keep the lights on), focusing on ads when they've been a declining source of revenue for decades is kind of crazy. And that's not due to ad blocking.

You are not immune to censorship.

The things that you say and write now are very likely going to be put under a microscope in the future and be found wanting.

And you will have to choose between lying, keeping your mouth shut, and having your entire life (digital and personal) torn apart for not agreeing with whomever is deciding what's true that day.

If you want to have freedom of speech you have to have the freedom to say things that some people think are lies. And let other people do the same.

There are laws to deal with edge cases that are seriously damaging, like libel. Which, unsurprisingly, is quite hard to prosecute in the US due to first amendment protections.

Google banning illegal content is entirely reasonable. Kicking out users who are disruptive to the platform itself is also justifiable. This is not that.

Dating isn't fun. At least it isn't for me as a middle aged divorce.

I get matches, I meet interesting people and go on dates and the process is just emotionally exhausting.

I would rather put in time into my job, or my friends, or my hobbies. If I can meet someone who wants to be part of my life, fantastic. If not, I will live until I don't.

Unfortunately, the people that I care about mostly want to talk about what they're outraged about.

Famously capitalist Sweden has a lower tax on corporate income than the US.

It's a good policy, and you should be for it even if you want to soak the rich.

What happens when nothing can be discussed?

At that point, not discussing anything clearly means that you're a witch.

Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?

We shouldn't. And indeed, if you look at a random legitimate review of something it's unlikely to be particularly helpful. More users does not make the data better beyond maybe "was it dead on arrival?".

Platforms should empower users to build rings of trust with users they do trust, while keeping it as private as they're comfortable being. People will build social capital because it's useful, it's fun and for the top 0.01% of users is something that can be a job.

We have a coming of age passage where 18 year olds already spend absurd amounts of money on consumption goods, frequently with loans they cannot discharge in the event the passage fails (university).

In principle, just giving new adults the money directly to light on fire as they see fit shouldn't be inflationary.

The virus doesn't care about our posts. It does not read them, does not try to influence them. It is mindless and it may not even be alive, depending on the definition of life.

The tools you use to counter a disinformation campaign are not the tools you use to stop a virus. And with authorities actually getting stuff wrong stopping heterodox views is a suicide pact.

China is doing this because they're worried about the stability of their political system. Ours will survive goldbug1989 posting about how much they hate the quarantine or karenlovesyoga writing that essential oils will protect us.

This is good advice, especially for folks who entered the workforce during the Great Recession.

You have to take risks and be uncomfortable to grow. But you also have to accept that your choices have opportunity costs and it takes time to make them come to fruition.

It's great advice, but if I'm not sometimes tempted to skip a day for a hobby (hello running) it doesn't feel as fulfilling to me.

I'm under no illusions that I will ever be a great runner, for example, but pushing my boundaries is really important to me.

This one is actually kind of complicated. Healthcare costs are weird.

In general marginal costs to make drugs you already know how to make are usually low, so you can and do see a lot of free riders on the expensive part (R&D). It would be surprising if Illinois can't just join them.

That said, ideally if you're trying to contain costs by fiat you want these to be negotiated by governments and healthcare providers.

I'm sure they're quite nice jackets, but they're a flex. You're telling the world you can drop a grand on a jacket.

Nothing wrong with that, or enjoying a great jacket in the process. But it's clearly a signal of wealth.

It was, but Active Directory wasn't. If you put your DCs on the Internet you're asking to get hacked.

Another point worth mentioning is that as we move towards zero trust by default, AD getting replaced by Azure AD is a logical step towards that goal.

Make everything illegal and selectively enforce against people the state doesn't like is a viable strategy for an authoritarian government.

This might be a problem for the HK government, but I'm not sure rule of law is as big of a selling point to global capital as it used to be.

This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market.

Amazon's model is to be better at ecommerce and logistics than everyone else, including Walmart, which itself gained market share through incredible skill at logistics. They reinvest what would be profits into getting better, and frequently succeed at it.

Most companies don't actually do that once they're mature.

To the best of my knowledge the corporate tax in question is a tax on income, rather than revenue.

Any would-be competitor to Google is going to want to plow most/all of their revenue back into growth for years, perhaps over a decade. VC funded companies normally lose money so they can grow faster.

Once you're making money, yeah that's kind of a big sucking hole you want to deal with. But that's a political issue that other EU members states have with Ireland (and Luxembourg, and the Netherlands).

It's basically a tariff.

There is no European tech company that's going to compete with Google. They could ban Google entirely and the result would be Baidu etc. coming in and doing the exact same things.

This will encourage landlords to tear down existing properties rather than renovate them, as well as to not maintain them well.

Rental housing quality will bifurcate further, with poor and lower middle class people living in worse housing.

This is bad policy. It's not replicating the absolutely insane policies of SF, but it's still bad.

I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.

I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world.

Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations.

One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.

Humans evolved to be really good at long distance running and given proper training, time and discipline you can run an absurd distance compared to most mammals.