But focusing on production cost is silly. The cost to consumers is what matters. Software is already free or dirt cheap because it can be served at zero marginal cost. There was only a market for cheap industrial clothes because tailor made clothes were expensive. This is not the case in software and that's why this whole industrialization analogy falls apart upon inspection
One thing that has become clearer to me over the years is that reasoning by analogy (like this article does) sounds a lot smarter than it is. If you look from first principles, it's clear that physical goods and software don't share the same properties and thus the analogy falls apart.
Physical goods like clothes or cars have variable costs. The marginal unit always costs > 0, and thus the price to the consumer is always greater than zero. Industrialization lowered this variable cost, while simultaneously increasing production capacity, and thus enabled a new segment of "low cost, high volume" products, but it does not eliminate the variable cost. This variable cost (eg. the cost of a hand made suit) is the "umbrella" under which a low cost variant (factory made clothes) has space to enter the market.
Digital goods have zero marginal cost. Many digital goods do not cost anything at all to the consumer! Or they are as cheap as possible to actively maximize users because their costs are effectively fixed. What is the "low value / low cost" version of Google? or Netflix for that matter? This is non-sensical because there's no space for a low cost entrant to play in when the price is already free.
In digital goods, consumers tend to choose on quality because price is just not that relevant of a dimension. You see this in the market structure of digital goods. They tend to be winner (or few) take all because the best good can serve everyone. That is a direct result of zero marginal cost.
Even if you accept the premise that AI will make software "industrialized" and thus cheaper to produce, it doesn't change the fact that most software is already free or dirt cheap.
The version of this that might make sense is software that is too expensive to make at all because the market size (eg. number of consumers * price they would pay) is less than the cost of the software developer / entrpreneurs time. But by definition those are small markets, and not anything like the huge markets that were enabled by physical good industrialization.
Digital goods do have a marginal cost. It's a lot lower than with physical goods, but there is a cost: at the very minimum, a digital good takes up storage space. A streamed digital good requires bandwidth and electricity (and in most of the world, both are metered resources).
Also, most consumers don't choose on quality; they choose on price. This is why free mobile games became huge and paid mobile games are a dying breed. In the physical world, it's why shein and alibaba nearly became trillion-dollar companies.
Sure there is some minimal marginal cost, but it's so close to zero that it's usually negligible, and the incentive is to basically give it away and "monetize" something else. Your point about games actually just makes my original point. Software is already usually free or dirt cheap, which is why reducing the cost to make the software can't create some "low cost / low value" quadrant. Unless your talking about bespoke software that has such a small market size it isn't worth making today. I could maybe see that area opening up, but even that software would not fit the OP's description of software that "has no owner and is not meant to be maintained"
I feel like we can round down fractions of a cent to zero. In practice, it's basically zero.
And, I think, consumers would like to balance both cost and quality. The problem is cost is obvious, quality is purposefully obfuscated. You really can't tell what is or is not quality software without spending an unreasonable amount of time and requiring an unreasonable amount of knowledge. Same with most modern physical goods.
Analogies are useful for adding new possibilities to the list of ideas you consider. They're not good for ruling anything out; you need other forms of reasoning for that.
This video was fascinating. I didn't know about "open endedness" as a concept but now that I see it, of course it's an approach.
One thought... in the video, Ken makes the observation that it takes way more complexity and steps to find a given shape with SGD vs. open-endedness. Which is certainly fascinating. However...
Intuitively, this feels like a similar dynamic is at play with the "birthday paradox". That's where if you take a room of just 23 people, there is a greater than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. This is very surprising to most people. It seems like you should need way more people (365 in fact!). The paradox is resolved when you realize that your intuition is asking how many people it takes to have your birthday. But the situation with a room of 23 people is implicitly asking for just one connection among any two people. Thus you don't have 23 chances, you have 23 ^ 2 = 529 chances.
I think the same thing is at work here. With the open-ended approach, humans can find any pattern at any generation. With the SGD approach, you can only look for one pattern. So it's just not an apples to apples comparison and sort of misleading / unfair to say that open-endedness is way more "efficient", because you aren't asking it to do the same task.
Said another way, I think with the open-endedness, it seems like you are looking for thousands (or even millions) of shapes simultaneously. With SGD, you're kinda flipping that around, and looking for exactly 1 shape, but giving it thousands of generations to achieve it.
I did a chat with Gemini about the paper, and tldr is...
* They introduce a loop at the beginning between Q, K, and V vectors (theoretically representing "question", "clues" and "hypothesis" of thinking)
* This loop contains a non linearity (ReLU)
* The loop is used to "pre select" relevant info
* They then feed that into a light weight attention mechanism.
They claim OOM faster learning, and robustness acro domains. There's enough detail to probably do your own PuTorch implementation, though they haven't released code. The paper has been accepted into AMLDS2025. So peer reviewed.
At first blush, this sounds really exciting and if results hold up and are replicated, it could be huge.
I think we're not factoring in that people will react. We're already all starting to realize that the free for all is getting quite hard to navigate. My hunch is that within 10 years, we will start to see an "information immune system" develop. This could take many forms. For example, self regulatory organizations for news, or actual regulations. Like we have with food products, the use of certain words is regulated. Or it could be trusted information filters becoming the norm, the way we trust our browsers to warn us of insecure websites. Or simply some changing cultural norms, like we saw happen with cigarettes. Like it's totally fine today for news outlets to just use Twitter as a source. And maybe the bar will get higher over time. I'm spit balling about solutions, but I don't think society can or will tolerate some dystopian world where truly no one knows what's real for very long.
It's already happening for me. I've switched to "closed" social networks like Telegram/WhatsApp group chats, and small to medium sized Discord servers to eliminate the spam, toxic content, and even just to crank down the rate of new content I'm consuming. I treat most "open" social networks as read-only (if I even check them).
Ok, echoing my top level comment... An alternative framing that I've come to find more helpful is to take your life expectancy, and cut it by 2/3. For example, if you're 20 years old and your life expectancy is 80 (ie. 60 more years), pretend that you only have 20 more, so you'll only live until you're 40. It's nice cause it naturally adjusts as you get older. You'll have smaller windows to work with.
This approach strikes a nice balance. It gives you enough time to be able to really do something and change directions if you want. But not so much time that you can really waste any. It forces you to ask the hard questions about whether your day to day is truly connecting with your dreams, and whether you're on a path to get there.
Of course, Seneca didn't have life expectancy tables to work with. But I think he would have approved. :)
I often see the opposite in practice: young people living as if they were going to die tomorrow and old people living as if they were going to live forever.
> You should organize each day as if it were your last, so that you neither need to long for nor fear the next day.
I've come to find this "live each day like it's your last" advice to be pretty unhelpful. My favorite quote about it is, "all that goes to show you is some people would spend their last day giving you stupid advice".
The problem is that if it actually was your last day, most people would give the finger to all of their responsibilities and go party, eat cake, see friends, familiy, lovers, etc. Which is simply not an actual way to live your life. It's a way to exit your life.
An alternative framing that I've come to find more helpful is to take your life expectancy, and cut it by 2/3. Now what do you do? For example, if you're 20 years old and your life expectancy is 80 (ie. 60 more years), pretend that you only have 20 more, so you'll only live until you're 40. It's nice cause it naturally adjusts as you get older. You'll have smaller windows to work with.
This approach strikes a nice balance. It gives you enough time to be able to really do something and change directions if you want. But not so much time that you can really waste any. It forces you to ask the hard questions about whether your day to day is truly connecting with your dreams, and whether you're on a path to get there.
Of course, Seneca didn't have life expectancy tables to work with. But I think he would have approved. :)
If you read Seneca that's not what he's saying. He says that you should live your life in such a way that if before sleeping someone told you that it had been your last day, you would feel content with what you did today.
He says that you have to remind yourself that you can die at any time. So before doing something ask yourself whether you'd be proud of you if what you were about to do would be the last thing you'd do.
He also says that you should strive for that life, to use this advice as a compass. Not to literally start each day and do what you'd do if you were going to die tonight.
Also a good life according to Seneca is not a life full of instant gratifications like drugs, party, food. It's a simple, ascetic life.
It's a bit contradictory to resist instant gratifications, because if you asked people if they would feel content with what they did that day, I guess more would say yes if the day was packed with instant gratification compared to more boring but good strategic activities.
I think it's good advice, when placed in the correct context.
Live every day as if it could be your last - to me it's about ensuring you always strive towards being your best self, in the context of the virtues (wisdom, temperance, courage and justice) and the Stoic duty towards society.
Giving the finger to the world and living a hedonistic lifestyle is decidedly not Stoic.
Putting aside the distraction of past and future and focusing on the present is a Stoic ideal though:
"I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived - and dying I will tend to later." ~ Epictetus
A friend and I did a "guided" psychedelic session earlier this year. We did it individually over one weekend. It was great. She did it for more therapeutic reasons. I did it more for philosophy/spiritual reasons. But the two main things I took away are 1.) Guided sessions are qualitatively different than recreational sessions, and 2.) It is such a crying shame that this isn't an accepted "tool in the toolbox" for therapists.
It's not about having crazy life altering, world-bending experiences (though that can happen). It's just about helping you get into a state of mind that allows for an effective therapy session. Sort of like... would you want to do your therapy session in a crowded bar, next to your mom? No, probably not. We all recognize that such a setting would not be conducive to good therapy. So similarly, we should be able to recognize that having the right setting, both mentally and physically can affect the quality of your session. Psychadelics can do exactly this.
It's also worth noting my friend has done "regular" therapy for 2 years, and she felt like there was a step change after the guided session. Her therapist noticed it as well.
When you consider that pain meds have ruined literally millions of lives through addiction, and that also virtually (maybe literally?) no one has ever died due to overdose of psilocybin, it's very confusing why one is prescribed all the time, and the other is considered incredibly dangerous. The U.S.'s perspective on drugs is so very backwards.
> The U.S.'s perspective on drugs is so very backwards.
The War on Drugs is a flaw that needs to end but at least with psilocybin US is moving slowly in the right direction. The only countries where psilocybin is legal are Brazil, Jamaica, Nepal, Samoa, Netherlands (truffle format), British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas [1].
Many places are illegal but unenforced though still illegal.
US psilocybin is decriminalized in many places now including all drugs in Oregon. More states need to get more like Oregon definitely.
However, in most states spores are legal and so are grow kits for other types of mycology.
Grow kits and spores legal in most states, full cultivation decriminalized in Seattle, Washington, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Denver, Colorado, Santa Cruz, California, Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington D.C. [1]
Legal in Oregon for mental health treatment in supervised settings since 1 February 2021 [1]
Full legalization needs to happen for marijuana and psychedelics. Decriminalization needs to happen for all drugs minimum as well.
As far as marijuana, psilocybin and LSD, they are the least toxic and less dependency forming of most drugs, even caffeine, aspirin and more. It is a tragedy and a drug dark age that they are in the Controlled Substances Act. I believe drugs should have to be toxic or cause death to actually be on that list. Marijuana, psilocybin and LSD are very safe when it comes to toxicity and drug overdoses are non-existent, all would be better as legal safer production products.
Legality makes everything safer, increases harm reduction and reduces black market unsafe production as well as reduces funding of cartels/mafias/bratvas. Their criminality truly makes no logical sense except to invite problems.
Yeah. The US pretty much exports its laws. It uses its vast economic leverage to impose US laws on everyone else via trade agreements, treaties.
It did the same thing with intellectual property. It will put sovereign countries in a literal naughty list when they don't accomodate US company interests.
Search the document for "interest". Plenty of talk about interested parties, rights holders. Euphemisms for US corporations using the might of the US government and its military to interfere in foreign countries. I've read some US documents discussing my country like it's a problem to be solved. Like it's a new planet they intend to terraform. It's surreal. Documents essentially saying things like "these places continue to be a problem, the local authorities aren't doing what we want them to do".
Essentially the US has "concerns" and it expects and "urges" other countries to address them by criminalizing anything that hurts the profits of US corporations, which they call "US economic interests". Yeah, because we totally have room in our prisons to lock up my country's entire population for copyright infringement. They must think we have nothing better to do.
They'll even put Canada, their neighbor and ally, in the watchlist. They write things like:
> Right holders also report that Canadian courts have established meaningful penalties against circumvention devices and services.
It's so incredibly surreal. "Yeah, our corporations have been saying you've been a good little country, Mr. Canada. Keep doing what they tell you and we might just take you off the naughty list next year." I don't even know what to say. Imagine being a politician who has to swallow language like this from world powers like the US all the time.
Ugh. The wording in this document is disgusting. It reads like it’s from the evil teacher from a movie: “The United States remains deeply troubled by the ambiguous education-related exception added to the copyright law”.
Deeply troubled? Like “We’re very concerned with your daughter’s inability to submit assignments as requested. We suspect there’s trouble at home and hope we don’t have to involve the authorities.” “You mean when you asked her to draw a cat and she drew a cat then coloured it purple?”
“Yes, exactly! She must be either developmentally delayed, or poorly parented. In either case it’s very concerning.”
>pain meds have ruined literally millions of lives through addiction
Unpopular opinion: opioids are massively under-prescribed for those that actually need them.
Addiction is a mental illness. That's whats killing so many, but why is to so few question what is actually causing such terrible emotional pain that must be self-medicated with incredibly potent medicaments?
Why is it that instead of acknowledging the rather uncomfortable root cause of those deaths, we just default to the so much simpler scapegoat, pills (the active ingredient in which has been with us in one form or another since 5000 BC), and pretend everything else is just rainbows and unicorns?
> opioids are massively under-prescribed for those that actually need them.
Absolutely.
While reports of ODs are endlessly bullhorned, millions in pain get demonized by algorithmic opioid blacklists, get ignored by news orgs/legislators addicted to opioid hysteria and get gaslighted by a public who only hears the bullhorning.
I have a lifelong friend with visibly crippling arthritis. He lost access to effective pain meds after the state passed a 3-day-max on opioids (passed >10 years after the pill-mill problem abated). Over the year that followed the law's passage, every Dr in his network (along with most Drs in the state) ~stopped Rx opioids. The (now fewer) pain mgt clinics are overloaded and not accepting patients.
His remaining avenues for pain relief no longer involve Dr's.
I had emergency abdominal surgery this year and had to convince the discharging Dr to prescribe Tramadol. Our new normal is for ERs/Hospitals to undermedicate patients in pain with OTC analgesics.
So yeah. Shout out to folks who are hand-waving away millions in pain - because pharma is greedy or because folks can't differentiate responsible Rx opioids from street fentanyl (that many in chronic pain turned to in desperation after they were cut off from safer pain relief).
> why is to so few question what is actually causing such terrible emotional pain that must be self-medicated with incredibly potent medicaments?
> Why is it that instead of acknowledging the rather uncomfortable root cause of those deaths, we just default to the so much simpler scapegoat, pills
Missing from these arguments is the role of criminalizing addiction versus treating it as the mental health issue you accurately described. And ignoring the pharmicuitical and lobbying industries behind the same pills.
I don't think it's a valid argument to reassign blame from the potency and availability of pills, to unmet mental health needs. They are related and intertwined, sure, but correlation != causation.
Case in point, the Purdue Pharma Sacklers settled for $billions (which also bought their immunity from future prosecution) precisely because they were pushing hard drugs and preying on those same people mental health issues [0]. Predatory, sociopathic behavior. But pill are a scapegoat? Sorry, that's a hot load of b.s.
I don't disagree there are bad actors. Dissolving Purdue (I thought they were dissolved, not just fined?) is great. Bad actors should be punished. And yes, criminalizing medical issue such as addiction is terrible. All of these are fairly obvious, which is why I didn't spell them out.
As I'm sure you know, many cases of mental illness are triggered by some sort of precipitating event.
I don't believe for a minute the fact that someone gave those addicts an opioid pill was the actual trigger. Instead it was something that happened way before that: some emotional trauma, PTSD, disadvantaged background, chronic illness, no life/career prospects, war, despair, etc, etc, so many stressors this life can bless you with. The Big Bad Pill is just what the addicts came across and realized it helped them feel okay for a moment, that's all it is.
E.g. a war veteran ends up getting PTSD and becomes an addict(let's assume he has no chronic pain). Aren't the circumstances around his life that led him to enlist and then develop PTSD are the much more relevant trigger? Barring that event, would they even begin using in the first place?
Who gave them that precipitating event? Other humans did.
The ugly truth is that the cause of this all is simply us, humans stressing other humans. Like other primates, we are intelligent enough to the point it takes very little effort to provide for our basic needs, and so we spend the rest of our time engaging in social status games at the expense of others.
Most people who use opioids do not actually become addicted. Those who used heroin in Vietnam, most of them stopped after they returned and circumstances changed from war to normality: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12873239/
"After their return, most of the men who had used heroin in Vietnam used it very occasionally or not at all."
"Possible post-Vietnam correlates of heroin injection were no job or school enrolment, alcohol problems, depression, absent or transient marriage, association with illicit drug users and other Vietnam veterans."
The real root cause is that humans are nothing but selfish machiavellian apes. We all are about me-me-me-me-me, and dig just a bit deeper, most are just as predatory and sociopathic as Purdue/Sacklers/whatever, just not as capable at getting their way.
We just look away and walk past the addicts in meatspace. We are no saints, and the real cause of most human suffering is not some processed alkaloid - it's other humans.
Not some pharma company or some evil billionaire clan that capitalized on this, I'm sure they contributed. There would be nothing to capitalize on or sell, if it weren't for humans psychologically injuring other humans for fun and profit.
Personally, it seems to me that we can recognize and accept a physical disability/injury much more readily than emotional/psychological one. Same goes for inflicting injuries: attempts to fracture someone's limb, a grave physical injury, seem too repulsive to even think about, and hopefully bystanders will attempt to rescue the victim should anyone ever try to do this to anyone. Harassment, bullying, hazing, belittling someone "just for laughs" on the other hand? All too often, others are more than happy to join in on the "fun" and even will gleefully laugh at the actual victim.
Of course, nobody likes to think of themselves in that way, much too unpleasant, and so we point our collective fingers elsewhere. It's always "them", and never "us".
I can only hope that one day we will evolve to finally dish out just as harsh punishment for psychological harm as we do for bodily harm, and hold each other accountable for it.
A bunch of things are conflated here that need to be untangled. Not all trauma is going to lead to an addiction. Not all addiction is to pills or drugs. Not everyone who takes opioids is going to form an addiction. Not all trauma is intentional and deserves punishment.
The expert in this area is Dr. Gabor Maté. He is highly respected in this field. If anyone is interested learning about the role of trauma in addiction, he literally wrote the book on it, "The Realm of Hungry Ghosts" [0]
From Maté [0]:
> Turning to the neurobiological roots of addiction, Dr. Maté presents an astonishing array of scientific evidence showing conclusively that:
> 1. addictive tendencies arise in the parts of our brains governing some of our most basic and life-sustaining needs and functions: incentive and motivation, physical and emotional pain relief, the regulation of stress, and the capacity to feel and receive love;
> 2. these brain circuits develop, or don’t develop, largely under the influence of the nurturing environment in early life, and that therefore addiction represents a failure of these crucial systems to mature in the way nature intended; and
> 3. the human brain continues to develop new circuitry throughout the lifespan, including well into adulthood, giving new hope for people mired in addictive patterns. Dr. Maté then examines the current mainstream.
Having both witnessed the whole opioid debacle first hand, first the sleezy over-prescription, then the reactionary under-prescription, which has caused, in my opinion, at least, as much, if not more, suffering and death than the over-prescription. Reading these comments is the first really sensible debate over the issue I've encountered and very encouraging.
For quite a while I've thought that the via media on the Rxs and an honest, more intensive treatment of the causes of 'deaths of despair' (which would certainly only partly be medical in nature) is by far the most humane (and medically ethical) way toward treating the problem. I know MDs who feel the same way but whose agency is very limited by this opioid Thermidor -- both in acting and speaking on the issue. I hope this is a sign of a changing trend in the public and political debate on the issue.
> Why is it that instead of acknowledging the rather uncomfortable root cause of those deaths, we just default to the so much simpler scapegoat, pills (the active ingredient in which has been with us in one form or another since 5000 BC), and pretend everything else is just rainbows and unicorns?
Okay, I'll take mushrooms, which have actually been with us since then, and you take synthetic intravenous opioids and we'll see who fares better.
What does fentanyl have to do with people who were cut off, people who - for years/decades - responsibly used Rx opiods to manage chronic debilitating pain?
Unless you're talking about people in pain who were forced to the street, after Dr's were (en masse) hazed into stopping pain treatment. In that case, I get your point.
I'm glad you asked! I've invoked it as a rhetorical device to highlight how different each opiate is from the next.
I'd like to less misery caused by heavy-handed drug policy — and it seems to me that decriminalization (and perhaps even legalization) is the way forward.
My comment was specifically about people that need them prescribed. For pain relief, injuries, chronic pain, and so on. Opioids are very effective and are vilified for no good reason, along with a few other classes of substances.
Not as in substitution therapy, like methadone. I do hope that mushrooms help people come off of long-term substitution.
>it's very confusing why one is prescribed all the time, and the other is considered incredibly dangerous. The U.S.'s perspective on drugs is so very backwards.
How are you going to sustain the largest economy on earth if your populace isn't hypnotized? Most of the work that needs to be done is not intrinsically or spiritually fufilling.
So there must be an alternative synthetic rewards system- which inevitably requires some form of mass hypnosis to remain dominant in the aggregate psyche.
It's no coincidence that all the research in this space was shut down in a hurry right around when the CIA figured out that LSD and the pikhal family weren't going to help with this at all.
Not only has no one ever died of psilocybin but it just doesn't get abused the way that pain killers do. You can't get the full effect by taking it often. If it's a deep session, you don't even want to!
One session meaning one time. Both of us think it would be valuable to do, but on the timescale of like... once/year or once every few years. But there are people who do it once/month for several months if they have a lot of specific things to work through. Our guide actually works with a number of 'regular' therapists, and they pass clients on to him if they think a guided session is the right move. He says therapists will sometimes say, "please take this person on a journey once / month for the next 3 months" (or something along those lines)
Medical tourism? Elsewhere upthread there are specific places called out where psilocybin is legal or decriminalized. Poking around on the web for therapeutic providers in those areas might be an effective strategy.
I'm located in San Francisco. I asked around a bunch of friends, got intros, and talked to a few potential guides. Eventually got linked up with someone who's been doing it for a number of years, and we vibed. We had a few phone calls through Signal, and then decided on a date/time/place.
Guided aspects... he sent over a questionairre ahead of time with a lot of broad questions. We then did a one hour zoom call going over the questions and getting to know him. It's all designed to help you figure out what you want the session to be about for you personally at that moment in time in your life. And then the session itself lasts 4-6 hours, and he will ask you many questions, but also will follow the journey wherever it takes you, and there's ups and downs and everything in between. It's all very specific to you and the guide and where you want to go with it. And lastly there's an "integration session" the following week where you talk with him for an hour to go over how it went, and what it means. Can discuss more if you want. Email me at bwest87 at gmail.com if you'd like to discuss further.
Oakland relaxed a lot of zoning, and permitting regulations about 5 years ago, and so now you're starting to really see production sky rocket. This article [0] mentions 2019 was had 15x more units completed than 2018. And 3x the total units from 2013-2018 combined. Anecdotally, I have several friends who've all moved to Oakland in the last year or so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and maybe, hopefully, SF will take the hint.
CT went this way as well, eventually the businesses look to follow residents - particularly younger residents who can't afford the inflated rent or down payments.
CT has a different problem, they kicked the labor expenses 30 to 50 years into the future via underfunded defined benefit pension benefit, retiree healthcare, and other deferred compensation.
They don’t have a tier 1 city which people are willing to pay a premium to live in, and the taxpayers today are balking at paying for labor performed decades ago.
I’d be wary of starting a business subject to a relatively deeply indebted government if I had other options.
Did CT follow Oakland, where SF is NYC? Or if CT is SF, where is the corresponding Oakland?
I live in NYC, and my view of CT is that its modern identity is dominated by being a suburb to NYC, with a handful of big and old businesses in the big cities to keep domestic economy afloat.
The places in my mind that don't fit this model are all east of New Haven, at which point CT starts to be "Coastal New England", a region that, excepting Boston, continues up to Bar Harbor, ME.
But my view is obviously biased by my limited experience, I'm curious to hear more of your perspective.
During the suburban expansion of the last century many southern CT towns allowed in businesses but declined to expand housing and transit availability. This combined with strong NIMBYism drove up housing prices in southern CT.
A good modern analogue of southern CT from the 70s-90s would be the valley in the bay area e.g. Palo Alto, Mountain View etc.
Not disagreeing with you but some additional points:
I don't think CT's housing issues are anywhere remotely as bad as the Bay area. Stamford is the tier 1 city in CT IMHO, which seemed kind of lame. i.e. we would have friends in places further east (almost as far as New Haven) who would come to Stamford for the "scene". I use quotes because the scene in Stamford was pretty muted. We (who lived in Stamford) would drive to Manhattan for our weekends and special weeknights. I thought it worked really well for us. For 2400 a month, we were living in Luxury apartments and life was car friendly. Housing didn't seem too overpriced (starter homes were 600K IIRC). IMO, Stamford was pretty neat a few years back .. not sure if it has changed.
Bay area housing just went stupid until the pandemic hit. I moved out and so did many people I know. It was just not "affordable" on a 200K salary if you have multiple kids and a stay at home spouse. The housing you could get for $2400 was terrible in most parts that were reasonable commuting distance. I also would take metro north over caltrain any day.
Taxes are bad in both places. Stamford seemed more affordable and a lot better culture to me. I love the Bay area but can't make the math work :(
I grew up in southeastern CT and visit there occasionally. It's hard to describe how dead it is for commercial software development, even compared to Boston.
Even if one was inclined to open a good software shop in CT, you'd have neither low property prices nor an existing pool of highly skilled labor.
Anecdotally, I definitely came across more startups being located in the East Bay during my last job search. The founders already lived there, so they located the company there too.
Prop 13 gives huge tax benefits to using land less than productively. Both selling land, and building on it will massively increase taxes.
Property values are rising at 5%-10% per year, but bulidings themselves only depreciate without dumping more money into the building. So that 5%-10% is all land value gain. As a property owner, why increase taxes by using the land more productively with new buildings, when you can continue to profit just as much without that? Also, attempting to build is hugely risky, because the permitting process is fraught, long, and likely to fail.
If we didn't have Prop 13, every single property owner would have a lot more incentive to actually try to build.
> As a property owner, why increase taxes by using the land more productively with new buildings, when you can continue to profit just as much without that?
Is it really a bubble if the overvaluation is created by law? The only way to pop the bubble would be to change the laws. And with Prop 13 being untouchable politically, and homeowners have an iron grip over city councils to keep cities underzoned, there's little chance of the systematic problem being eliminated any time soon.
> Residents strain the city budget via things like public schools. Businesses put money into the city budget via gross receipts taxes.
Prop 13 was meant to drastically cap property taxes. It was very successful in doing so. As a result, tax revenue from property taxes has also been capped dramatically, and cities adapted by relying more heavily on taxing businesses. Hence the current situation where residents cost more in services than they bring in in property taxes, incentivizing cities to attract businesses and wiggle out of their responsibility to build more housing units.
A good illustration of this dynamic is “RHNA”
process for allocating housing unit quotas to each city in California. it is a very conflictual process where city councils typically fight tooth and nail to get their quotas reduced. A recent example in Palo Alto: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/11/18/palo-alto-ass...
I don't think every California home owner is some evil beast trying to keep others out. I support building more homes, and would love it if every single family detached home were automatically rezoned for two units on the parcel. But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me.
And "raising property values" only raises my property tax, while giving me no real benefit.
Prop 13 causers real estate values to rise much faster than they would have otherwise , by restricting the productive use of the land. It incentivizes land owners to not build and to not transfer land to someone who could make better use of it.
When it's a broad, general effect that covers an entire stateC that causes prices to rise much faster than they would have risen without Prop 13.
Prop 13 is one of the major causes of people "paying too much money," whatever that means. No purchaser wants to pay too much. The seller is the one setting the price when it is high, and Prop 13's incentives for speculation are what gives sellers so much market power to extort purchasers.
1) sell, reaping a huge windfall.
2) use a HELOC or reverse mortgage to pay for the higher property taxes.
But of course you'd prefer both to keep the windfall and not move, a privilege afforded to you by prop 13. That is only natural.
Meanwhile, homelessness in the state continues to rise as high land values make housing production and anti-growth activists on planning committees exacerbate our housing shortage.
I find it acceptable that people want to stay at home where their social networks and memories are. You all act like it is OK to push people out from their homes, just because you have money and want that place.
I agree it would not be OK for people to be forced to leave their home because they cannot afford to pay their property tax.
But there are simple solutions to this problem which do not create even worse problems, unlike prop 13. For example, Texas allows taxpayers 65 years of age or older to defer their property tax payments. In other words, the tax is still due, but not until the property is sold.
Why did California voters not implement this much simpler approach to preventing displacement? Because the goal was never to prevent displacement - it was to lock in massive tax subsidies for established homeowners, at the expense of everyone else.
> But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me.
Prop 13 does not solve this problem. It merely shields historical homeowners from it, while amplifying it for everyone else. Many people and businesses were forced out by speculation because of prop 13, but you and a small group of people were exempted so you don’t care.
People are forced out of their home all the time, without the gigantic windfall of money that a property sale entails.
Evictions happen all the time, and these poor folks do not get the windfall of a $1M investment paying out. They get the trouble of trying to find a place to rent with an eviction on their record, which means they will be paying higher rents with less ability to pay.
Nobody should be forced from their home, homeowner or renter. But in California we only privilege the already privileged with that sympathy.
Prop 13 has forced far more people out of their home than property taxes have forced people in NY State out of their home. And NY has high property taxes and lots of people. So does NJ.
The idea that Prop 13 protects people from being taxed out of their hugely inflating financial asset is somewhat preposterous on its face. It mostly protects large landholders, and gives a tiny tiny benefit to the people that we are concerned about.
Focusing on the ineffective application of protection to a tiny number of millionaire homeowners, while ignoring the wealth inequality that funnels money to the people with tens and hundreds of millions of property, is extremely short sighted. It's time to stop pretending that Prop 13 is about the minor side effect of protecting a homestead, and pay attention to its primary effects, which is to encourage financial speculation with land and to give away tons of tax subsidies to those with the most land wealth that are hoarding it the most from better uses.
> The idea that Prop 13 protects people from being taxed out of their hugely inflating financial asset is somewhat preposterous on its face. It mostly protects large landholders, and gives a tiny tiny benefit to the people that we are concerned about.
When you say "large landholders", are you talking about REITs and commercial property holders? If so, wouldn't Prop 15 have addressed these issues?
Anybody who owns more than a home, including "small" landlords.
If you look at land distribution in cities, you'll find lots of super wealthy families, hidden behind LLCs, and a few REITs, the smaller scale landlords, and then finally individual homeowners.
Those wealthy land hoarding families are often worse than REITs for cities, in that maintaining their own political power is more important than profits, and that can be worse for people on the lower end not the economic scale than even REITs' horrifying landlord behaviors.
Thanks. I had briefly thought "what if we just tax second homes at market rate?" But quickly realized the loophole of creating a company/trust per property.
Have you come across any good articles showing the breakdown of land ownership in SF?
"You should be thankful for having to move despite really not wanting to, because some other people have been completely screwed" is an abusive logic tho.
I think the point being made is that if you support Prop 13, you either a) are wildly misinformed about its effects, or b) don't care about its effects because you are in the privileged group that benefits from it at the expense of others.
(Whether or not the assumptions behind this assumption are true is of course up for debate, though I personally tend to believe Prop 13 is a bad deal, even for those who think they benefit from it.)
Perhaps you simply were not aware of the fact that prop 13 contributes to the displacement of people and businesses you claim to care about. I that case, it is now up to you to act on this newly acquired information and revisit your support of prop 13. The choice is yours.
Actually no, land is the one thing you can't make more of, which is why economists say a land value tax is one of the most efficient taxes (since supply is fixed, taxes can't reduce supply).
It's true you can make more housing by building up, but only if city zoning allows, which NIMBYs don't want.
Wealth taxes in general are challenging to execute. Property taxes are much easier, as well as deal with the extra issues brought on by land ownership that cash-equivalent wealth does not.
You're absolutely right - a property tax is a type of wealth tax. I completely agree, which is why I attempted to differentiate between a general-purpose tax on all wealth in any form and a tax on real property. Please accept my humble apologies for my failures to be less clear than I could have been - my communication skills are a work in progress.
With that said, I have been under the impression that countries that have attempted to levy general-purposes taxes on all forms of wealth have in many cases run into practical difficulties. This requires things like finding a fair way to value and re-value an art collection or shares in a company not traded or liquid. In several cases - like France - these difficulties and others have led to dropping general-purpose wealth taxes.
Have I been laboring under a misapprehension? Can you help me understand what I've missed?
I don't think you're wrong. There's easy parts (ie. publicly traded equities) and hard parts (eg. art collections).
I've been skeptical of skepticism (lol) of the wealth tax mostly because the easy parts dominate the hard parts. Most wealth is in the easily identifiable areas (ie. equities and property) not the hard areas. Even with private companies like some startup, surely the shares have some known valuation right?
My point is though that we've already built a bureaucratic apparatus to evaluate wealth in our property assessment system so surely it's possible to extend this.
A possible implementation would be to mostly ignore the "hard" sectors of wealth (eg. car collections/art collections) or do random audits of the tricky parts just to keep people honest.
My -- perhaps overly cynical -- expectation is that a "focus on the easy stuff" wealth tax would just cause wealthy people to move their assets into the "hard stuff" as much as possible.
I think the hope would be that there'd be would be some limit to the willingness for someone to shift money into relatively illiquid assets (ie. cars) that aren't really that good of investments instead of keeping their money in equities and simply pay the tax. There's a balance to find there in the policy.
Do you think it's perhaps worth looking at places that have tried wealth taxes? I think it possible that there might be some lessons to be learned from the well-intentioned and sincerely tried efforts of others. Perhaps our basic assumption that what works for real property will surely work for everything might not be trivially true, for example.
Yeah sure, but we should also be aware that the wealthy do not want these taxes, and will use every means to ensure they are not enacted. This includes spreading FUD about their implementation and results.
I, personally, hesitate to characterize the lived experiences with policy choices of other polities as FUD. I understand that this is a deeply personal choice, and as such some might differ.
I'm speaking mostly to the media (owned by whom?), politicians and the surrogates of wealth that appear as a talking head to speak about the wealth tax.
The "Taxes were repealed in Europe so case closed" message that wealth is all too happy to push is a deflection from a thorough examination of the policy. Why were these policies "failures" in Europe? Some of the flaws of the European taxes have been already directly addressed by more recent Bernie and Warren proposals. For another example the issue some European countries had of their wealthy fleeing the country to avoid the tax isn't even possible US's tax system which will tax you regardless of where you live.
I'm not sure it's so rosy in Oakland. For commercial real-estate in oakland, we were hit with the reverse -- rent kept going up as folks like Uber were eyeing it. Community housing groups were rightfully concerned for the relatively poor community as well. It reached the point that we moved to a spot in SF (union square) because prices reached a similar level. We went fully-remote right before covid as we had a remote culture, so not sure how it is now.
If true, good to hear Oakland is fixing the path it was on..
SF gets a lot of flak for housing - quite deservedly so - but we give a free pass to cities like Mountain View and Palo Alto. They have much much more restrictive zoning. Palo Alto outright bans a second storey. That’s where people go to work as well. They want to keep the offices there but not let the people live. What would be good is a tax system that’s distributed based on where people live nullifying the advantage of the lopsided advantage for favoring businesses over residents.
I agree with Palo Alto, but how is Mountain View restrictive by Bay Area standards? It's added a higher percent of people than Oakland on the past decade.
Prefab won't be a solution for housing shortages in California because of trade union opposition. The fact that there is more than enough work to go around doesn't stop them from opposing efficiency improvements and extracting rents in the form of union labour requirements in housing bills.
