Some folks (myself among them) view the idea that because someone started wealthy they should be able to get more wealthy simply because they can leverage their existing wealth to be a negative thing.
Sure, there are cases where small landlords are beneficial in providing liquidity. But the big corporate firms being able to leverage their existing assets to buy more units seems antithetical to the goal of "we should eliminate homelessness" to me.
Financial leveraging is risk. You can lose your principal. Investors pay for building new homes too.
Speculators do need to get burned periodically to correct bubbles though. Especially now. Making money because you bought sooner than someone else could (practically enshrined in the California constitution) is not really adding value so on average should not pay off any better than inflation.
As your second paragraph is saying, "risk" isn't inherently valuable. That's also what the GP is saying, you just might disagree on the situations it applies to.
Yes in that the situations they refer to account for all investment of any kind being "a bad thing", while I criticize certain govt policies. But other than that, same page yes.
With the exception of people who are landlords for the purposes of mutual aid. We rented a room out for a bit, but only charged "what you could pay" with a hard upper cap of "what it costs is to maintain the unit".
We have people live with us for free, for in kind services, or paying whatever they could afford and still be saving money.
It absolutely kills me that there are approximately 30 empty homes for every homeless person in the States. (Roughly 550k homeless and roughly 16M vacant homes.)
Investors are part of the problem, but by no means the only part. Anything that reduces investor speculation on housing and returns units to the rental or purchase markets is ok by me.
My neighbor's house is empty, as he just moved out. It's for sale, and it's far easier to prep a house for sale when empty. As soon as they finish the prep, a for sale sign will go up. Then it will sit empty till it is bought, and will then sit empty until closing and the new owner will move in.
It may sit for a month or 6 waiting for a buyer.
Now, multiply this by all the turnover in the housing market, and there will be many "empty" homes at any one time.
In my area, homes sell over a weekend and typically the owner lives in them until closing basically. The open houses are nearly always done with the owners’ stuff still in the house. The houses sit empty for maybe a week. Is it really that common for a seller to move out while it is trying to be sold? Such a person would need a lot of money to do so.
If you're moving, it's kinda hard to buy a new house the same day you sold the old house.
In the car dealer business, cars usually sit for a month on the dealer's lot before they sell. Car dealers hate that, because they borrow money to put the inventory on the lot, and pay interest on that money.
It's the same for house sellers. Leaving a house vacant cost thousands of dollars a month. Sellers aren't letting it sit vacant for fun. When I've sold a house, I was painfully aware of the vacancy costs, and always tried to price it to get it sold ASAP.
That was true in my neighbourhood as well, up until a few month ago. Now I know two or three people around me that have moved and have been trying to sell their houses for months and aren't even getting low ball bids.
But even if you manage to sell your house within 24 hours of putting it on the market without having to do any work on it, there can still be a few months lag between you actually moving out and the new owner moving in.
The wait just means there is low liquidity i.e. the spread is wide. They could sell it this minute if they offered it for 100$ but they are in "no rush" so they are willing to wait. Opendoor is trying to solve this by pretty much being a market maker for homes. This comment is independent of "should the housing market be more liquid" just a general "markets" comment
There are some percentage of those 550K homeless who just need a home, but it's much lower than 50%. If you've seen a homeless person screaming at their reflection in a car window and then punching it repeatedly until their hand seems broken you will realize that that particular person's problem is not the lack of a housing structure.
As anyone who's ever tried to study any complex phenomenon in a rigorous way knows, determining causality is fraught. But I think it's fair to say that most mental illnesses are exacerbated by living in stressful and uncertain conditions, and having shelter is a basic need no matter how crazy you are. Thus, this seems like a poor argument against providing housing
But basic shelter is frequently available but ask homeless individuals why they don't use it. It can be unsafe, even trying to learn about the shelter or queuing up for access is unsafe as these areas are frequently overrun by dangerous elements for vulnerable populations. Ask hotel owners how it worked being forced to house homeless during the pandemic and various other times.
This is a complex issue no doubt, but it is the height of nativity to think we can use existing underutilized housing stock to solve or even help the existing homeless crisis. We have frequently tried it with poor results and poor outcomes. It is very very very hard to meaningfully address the existing homeless epidemic, which is intimately tied up with the opioid, general drug, and mental health epidemics, none of which we have any reasonable answers for.
On the contrary, we've found as you actually build housing, prices go down (or at least rise more slowly) and homelessness goes down.
This argument is a variant of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can improve the lot of many long before you need to solve all addictions.
This sounds a lot like what we're trying is solutions that put the people the state is helping under their power and observation and do not give them ownership, autonomy, or any sense of stability surrounding their living situation. I'm not surprised that this kind of intervention often leads to abuse, nor that it's not desired by most people affected
Having a roof + support is one of the fundamental parts of treating mental health however.
Can't just shove them in a house and all good, but its a fundamental part of treatment along with social programs. Without stability it's tough to change much in someone's life.
It sounds like what is needed is a holistic solution that provides both accommodation and other support services all in one.
Agree just because a property is vacant it doesn’t make that property suitable for anyone. Does it need ground maintenance. Does it need furniture. Is it in a very high cost of living area. Is it near where homeless people and their associated support groups and family are. Etc
Greater than 50% of your comment is given to an embellished anecdote that is not, in fact, representative of the majority of homeless people.
You'd do better to stick to facts, like most homeless people are recently homeless and locals, and homeless rates correlate well with housing availability/prices.
>If you've seen a homeless person screaming at their reflection in a car window and then punching it repeatedly until their hand seems broken you will realize that that particular person's problem is not the lack of a housing structure.
Spending a decade without a housing structure and self medicating away the depression that comes with it is precisely how you end up like that.
Every time I hear this statistic it drives me insane.
I really wish there was an exponential property tax based on the number of properties that someone or some entity owns. I don’t think it would actually be feasible to implement, but I wish something like it existed.
Owning one property? Reasonable/cheap property tax. Own two properties? Pretty expensive property taxes. Own three properties? Eye watering property taxes. Own more than three? Truly insane property taxes.
> it is a misrepresentation, as a lot of those "empty" homes are awaiting a buyer.
Which means as a society we've chosen to value the liquidity of the housing market (something that I think is really good!) over the basic dignity and needs of human beings (something that I think is even more important!).
That's a societal choice. In a society that absolutely has enough wealth to shelter and feed every person, the fact that we've chosen not to is simply a disgrace. That people die in the cold in America is a moral failing. If we were a poor nation, and couldn't afford otherwise that would be one thing. But we aren't, and it's simply a choice that we make to let people die in the cold.
I made a proposal above (though, you’ll also not that I said I thought my proposal was unlikely to be workable in practice).
But, if you review what I wrote, you’ll note I never proposed anything close to what you asked about.
My actual proposal would be this: we should invest heavily in a housing first approach to homelessness at both the federal and state level. We should invest in this as a priority, as if it will save lives because it will.
Along with that, we should invest in mental health and addiction treatment programs as a supplement.
We should tax the fuck out of the rich to do so in a revenue neutral way.
BTW, the government has built housing for the poor many times. They're called "The Projects". Usually they wound up being demolished after a few years.
Very few people ever paid 91%. The reason was there were all sorts of tax shelters available at the time. This resulted in a lot of misallocation of resources. A lot of personal expenses could also be written off as a business expense, the most infamous of those was the "three martini lunch".
Reagan, in his deal to reduce the top marginal tax rates, also eliminated a vast swath of tax shelters and tax deductions.
More generally, the government consumed much less of the GDP in the 50s than it does today.
Taxes aren’t really bad for the rich in California. Ya, they are higher than normal, but most people who think they are excessive just don’t understand how marginal tax rates work.
"I don’t think it would actually be feasible to implement, but I wish something like it existed."
It's feasible (in some contexts), and has been implemented in Wales in recent years [0] (though not exponential, there's nothing stopping it from progressing that way).
There used to be reduced taxes on second homes, recently changed to 100%, and now changing to max 300% (set by councils).
They've also closed a number of loopholes to stop owners passing these homes off as dysfunctional businesses (listed to let without taking any lettings).
There's a large disparity in wealth over a relatively short physical distance, resulting in a large number of homes in "idyllic" but poor areas being bought as second homes and spending the majority of the year empty.
They've also moved to a land transaction tax that makes the second home purchase more expensive [1].
I'm not saying they are pulling the ladder up, and good to see these initiatives being put in place, but they don't necessarily solve the issue with existing vacant second houses which most likely have benefited from the lax taxation over the years combined with increasing property values.
I Wonder if there are some simple legal solutions to this.
Like only individuals and non-profits are allowed to own houses or you can only own a property if you are registered as a resident of the city.
I like the sliding scale tax idea but I think the firms would just find ways to continually invest in new properties and use that to dodge tax until a point where they offshore :(
> Like only individuals and non-profits are allowed to own houses or you can only own a property if you are registered as a resident of the city.
As a renter, I’m not a fan of this. The worst landlords I’ve had have been local and the best has been a corporation based in another city.
The problem of vacant apartments is that as long as there’s a shortage of housing in places people want, housing that has been built will increase in value. If we reduce the artificial constraints on building more housing, it will also remove the incentive to leave housing vacant.
People will just tear down the extra building rather than paying the tax.
This happened in Switzerland, where towns with more vacancies were assigned a higher number of refugees. In order to avoid this the towns demolished the empty buildings.
I don't think this is an issue that can be solved by authoritarian thinking. If politicians do something people don't like, people will vote them out next time around.
You don't need to overcomplicate things by draconianly taxing corporate entities if you implement the land value tax, which taxes land, but not property, and set the rate at a high appropriate level.
That's what the georgism advocate.
The problem of property as investment is not so new as a problem.
For my part, I am against the over ever evolving taxation schemes such as setting property tax sky high to deter speculators but not homeowners, without addressing the root cause of the current crisis.
First, homeowners are still incentivized to support housing supply restriction. Second, improvement on said properties are disincentivized. Which is why you want to tax land, but not property.
This is a systematic problem, not going to be solved by merely targeting a small part of the landowning population.
I could just leave a PC on mining some random coin to ensure there was always a bit of power going on. Likewise leave a tap slowly going. Cheaper than any tax most likely.
If it's not vacant, it's someone's primary residence which is recorded, but also the landlords will have receipts and be taxed. If there is a vacant unit, the landlord's income with be smaller than expected and can be used to ask the landlord to attest to the occupancy of their units.
You can go wherever you want. The house isn’t going anywhere, it’s still registered as yours and you still pay taxes for it, with a discount if you designate it as your primary residence.
Well you either tax them such that the owners can still afford them, so no material change in ownership ratios, or you make them unaffordably high and you punish people for being successful in life.
If you feel that taxes are punishments then we can't really have much of a discussion. Taxes are meant for wealth redistribution. They are what prevent kings and lords.
Second homes and vacation homes should be unaffordable. They are a luxury.
Disagree with all but your last sentence. Taxes are a necessary evil to pay for things we require as a society (e.g. police, schools). They are a burden on citizens, particularly the poor.
As for the comment about kings and lords, I suppose you're not familiar with the story of Robinhood...
That's the thing: taxes should NOT be about wealth redistribution - that's Marxist thinking. They should be about financing basic public services, like justice system, military, or possibly healthcare and education.
If you think taxes are a punishment for success in life, I assume you support toll roads, pay for your snow removal from city street and rent your police and fire protection? Or are you only concerned about the impact on your success not anybody else’s?
Taxes aren’t a binary thing! I think overly high taxes are a punishment for success, and a fair level of tax is necessary for a good and fair society.
I’m British, I think our society is better than the US due to things like social services, the NHS, etc. What is being discussed here is way outside the realm of British (and definitely American) way of taxation and public/social services.
You have to look
at the intention of the tax - as per this discussion - is not about wealth distribution but about enforcing a policy by trying to free up existing homes for the homeless.
In the advocates ideal position there would almost never be any money collected from this tax because it would make a second home or holiday home unaffordable. If people truly want the homeless to all be homed then why not use tax money to build more homes in better locations for those that need them? In the US, UK, and most other countries there is massive amounts of available real estate (could be via building up or building out). The issue here is more than finding a house. Who is going to pay the power, water, rates, insurance, furnishings, transport costs etc (those Martha Vineyard homes are not a great location for homeless trying to work).
Why not? Does anyone deserve such homes if there is people who could permanently live in them? Or maybe some reasonable cost involved let's say 20% a year.
Should I be able to get a free home if I refuse to pay rent? What if I can work, but refuse to, should I get a free home? Instead of taking my home, why not build them their own new home.
I have two houses: one in England, one in France. I live in one during the year and one in The summer. Neither one is an investment. They’re both our home. Combined, they would sell for less than a cheap house in Southern California.
Why do you want me to pay extra property tax because my home is split in two?
It sounds like hold this view that anybody who owns anything is necessarily evil. But most of us are just people living their lives as best we can.
> Why do you want me to pay extra property tax because my home is split in two?
This is like asking why I want to make sure everyone gets a slice of cake before you go for a second slice.
I absolutely have nothing against you having two properties, but while homeless people exist in these societies, I absolutely think it should be expensive for you to do so. If we get to a place where homelessness doesn't exist, then I'd absolutely want you to be able to own a second property at no financial penalty.
> It sounds like hold this view that anybody who owns anything is necessarily evil.
I never said any such thing. I described adding taxes to a behavior that I think leads to a bad social outcome.
There are lots of things that I think we should tax as a means of changing behavior without saying someone who engages in those behaviors is evil.
Frankly, I don't know why you'd have this perception from my comment, but it's certainly not accurate. I own things! I don't think it's evil. There are lots of activities that I personally do that I think should be taxed at a higher rate.
I own a home, and think my property taxes should be higher. I own a business, and think my business taxes should be higher. Just because I advocate for higher taxes on things I personally do, doesn't lead me to believe I'm evil.
Land is finite, desirable land even more so. You can summer in France but you can pay more to do so than if you lived there year round. Call it an incentive, not a punishment, if you want.
But I do pay more. I had to purchase an entire house and pay taxes on it.
There is no shortage of houses here in farmland France or up in rural north England[1], which explains why houses are cheap enough that you can buy two of them. That’s the housing market working like it’s supposed to. Why does it need punishing or incentivising?
[1] there are towns within a few miles with hundreds of boarded up row houses that you could get for a few thousand pounds if you like. Our village in France is surrounded by fields as far as you can see in two directions. If you want to come live here, you can (and people often do) buy a small piece of that land and build a house.
More per house. There's no natural law saying taxes need to be equal per house, or that they need to be commensurate with services consumed by those living in them. Taxes (and tax breaks) are also used to incentivize behavior, which is the answer to your original question of "why".
Your home isn’t split in two. You have two homes, one of which stands empty at any given time. That’s what they’re arguing against, some people owning multiple houses while others are homeless. They’re not saying it should be impossible, just more expensive.
But anybody with a spare bedroom is doing the same thing by your logic. Nobody is in the kitchen right now. You monster.
The solution isn’t to stick homeless people in every available space. It’s to build places for them to live.
In your case, if your hypothetical homeless person wants to live on my street, he can buy one of the three homes currently for sale there, for the same price mine would sell for. How about we at least wait to see if he buys one of those before you go kicking me out of mine?
You jest about the kitchen and rooms, but the 80s saw a shift away from communal boarding options while reducing mental health treatment. There's a portion of the housing market that should have a communal kitchen, bathroom.
San Francisco has started building these again as startup incubators, but that's not the only target market
The slope isn’t that slippery. It’s not unreasonable to consider a home as an indivisible unit.
> if your hypothetical homeless person wants to live on my street, he can buy one of the three homes currently for sale there, for the same price mine would sell for.
Haha oh those silly homeless people, they should just buy houses, right?
Exactly, the effect of such a law would be to incentivize building mansions. And the savvy owners may even go the route of forming collectives of mansion owners.
Therefore each owner only owns one massive house that friends can use part of and spends most of the time at other friends massive houses.
I've seen some calculations suggesting that the speculators will buy up anything at this point. It's impossible to build enough. Partly because buying up new houses protects the investment into the already owned.
Also, what makes you think the market is not working and new houses are not being built at the highest possible pace? Given the prices, that would be a sensible assumption, no?
I haven’t seen those calculations but I’m very skeptical. The reason people are profitably able to invest in housing is that it is scarce. If the supply increased, housing would no longer be a desirable investment.
> what makes you think the market is not working and new houses are not being built at the highest possible pace
There’s a lot of political pressure by existing homeowners not to green light additional housing in their neighborhoods, because it would bring the price of the homes they already own down. There are a number of high-density projects in NYC and SF that have been blocked by these efforts.
Abandoned homes aren't the same as vacant homes. Most cities have low double digit vacancy rates. Whatever city you live in, odds are good there are units sitting vacant while people are homeless.
Someone did an analysis and the true number of vacant homes someone can move into is like 10% of that figure.
You figure the houses vacant because they’re sold/rented and waiting for move in, those under renovation, those where people have died and waiting to settle estate, etc and it’s 80-90% of that figure.
> Roughly 550k homeless and roughly 16M vacant homes.
> Someone did an analysis and the true number of vacant homes someone can move into is like 10% of that figure.
If that 10% figure from the analysis of San Fransisco applies to the entire country (and I recognize it may not), then the 550k homeless would be compared to 1.6M homes, or still ~3x the number of houses we would need to house every homeless person in the country. That 3x gives us a fair amount of wiggle-room, for the analysis not being replicable across the country.
My main point is not that we should seize an arbitrary number of houses and house homeless people in them, but rather that homelessness is both a choice that we've made as a society and as government policy.
We absolutely have the wealth that we could choose not to have homelessness in the country. And it's a stain on our society that we choose to have homelessness.
Well, as you point out, assuming the SF stats apply to the entire US is a stretch.
But regardless, do you think the only reason why people are homeless is because they can't afford a home? They did a survey in SF and 60%+ were homeless due to mental health and/or drug and alcohol issues.
Housing First approaches have found much better outcomes for mental health treatment, and addiction treatment.
It’s so hard to address mental health issues with a population that’s homeless. Simple things like weekly visits with a therapist become much much more difficult. Keeping medication safe and secure is much more feasible when someone has stable housing.
You’re absolutely right that housing people won’t necessarily fix all their problems. But it makes those other problems much easier to address, and leads to better outcomes [1].
And it can drive down other costs (like healthcare costs specifically) to the point that it’s cheaper [2].
Reducing what you call investor speculation us very likely to also reduce investment in building houses. I want house builders to speculate on building homes. The profit incentive drives to create more homes. This is a good thing.
I have a hard time reconciling this comment. If you gave each homeless person a house/apartment, in what way wouldn't you have solved homelessness? Are you saying many/most of them would abandon, destroy or otherwise not use those houses?
Many people--perhaps the majority, even--are not homeless simply because they ran out of money to pay for housing; instead, they are homeless because they made life choices that led to them not being able to hold a job and pay for housing, or they have mental health issues that make it difficult for them to participate in a society where only those best able to adapt can afford good housing.
I like wording as in my opinion you managed to write it in a way where people are not to blame for their choices.
Yes they made choices in life that led them to not be able to hold a job and pay for housing - but to say it was "bad choices" one need context of their lives to judge that and in addition it might be the case that choice was made for them and they could not do much about it.
Maybe many would not destroy or abandon more like neglect or facilitate illicit activities. There is a lot of social work to be done but no one wants to pay for it.
There were (I think still are in many places) projects where municipality in Europe would create social housing and putting let's say "not that lucky people" in one place does not help but creates its own problems. Where just providing flats was not enough because later no one had time do social work or money to pay social workers.
I can say as a kid I was living in such a project, all of the "normal-city" people would refer to us as "special place" or "street of magic". Many people made their lives better or at least make it stable there. Some managed to burn down their flats creating problems for their neighbors. Then there was loads of shady stuff going on.
I don't see a problem with these real estate developers that are building and managing large apartments complexes themselves. Seems like they're doing a lot to add supply at the lower end. Even if they do maintain a certain vacancy rate.
Exactly. Imagine if the supply of new cars dropped through the floor and prices shot up, especially for used cars.
Oh wait, this actually happened during the pandemic and nobody was like, "oh this is good, people's car equity is going up!" because with things that aren't houses people have a saner view of finances.
Now imagine people start trying to ban car companies from making new cars, because they'll probably just be luxury cars for brogrammers anyway, plus more cars means less parking availability!
Hah, so this becomes the same trap as thinking that way about a primary home. Do they have a plan for selling to realize their gains? Do we get to look forward to car-equity lines of credit or reverse car loans where people try to have their cake and eat it?
I'd be interested to see more of what the likes of Singapore do, especially for larger metropolitan areas. As I understand it, and I could be way wrong here, but I think there's a government office that buys and sells properties, but with restrictions on price and who can buy through the schema. Anyone else is totally free to conduct private property transactions, but get slapped with an almost-unmanageable property tax, making it more economical to go through official channels. This then lets the government rather than the market set the fair rate for a particular house in a particular area.
Public housing in Singapore is affordable if you win the ballot for a new unit. Otherwise the secondary market is allowed to float and basically the only restriction is that they must be sold to Singaporeans (i.e. citizens or permanent residents). I don't think it's really done much to curb the exuberance, there's plenty of talk of flipping these units once the minimum occupancy period (5 years) is up.
You might also be interested in checking out Sweden’s public housing policies. They vary slightly from one municipality to the next, but an interesting concept overall.
Sweden Public housing is terrible. You get in the queue at 16/18 and maybe maybe when you're 30 you can get a nice 2 rooms apartment on the suburbs. Except if you managed to either buy someone's contract illegally, or use family connections to get in front of the queue. If you are a recent immigrant there is basically no point going in the queue and you will be forced to expensive second hand contract and move every year as they expire.
And then there's no logic to prices. You will get something cheaper in your 50s because you waited so long that you can finally get a nice spacious apartment for no money at all in the city center, while a student will have to pay more than that to get a shitty corridor room in the suburbs. Real life example: a friend paying 6000kr for a room in the suburbs as a student vs a 40yo lady with a good income paying the same for a 2 bedroom appartment in the center (market rent for second hand contracts for such a flat is about 19 000kr). And then you have newly built public housing in the suburbs that has prices 2-3 times more expensive than the old ones in the center for the same size, but those you can get without waiting whereas the old ones need more than 20 years of queue to get.
It is probably the most broken system in Sweden, but it kind of seems to be by design to be honest. I would actually have liked a well functioning and supplied public housing market, compared to the annoying parts of the private market in most countries, but swedish rules have just made it a nightmare instead
The reason why the price between the student apartment and the regular apartment differs so much has a lot more to do with when they were built. The 2 room bedroom apartment was likely built during a time when building was much cheaper. Student apartments on the other hand are usually much newer.
It is the same system in Denmark. It started out with good intentions but has now been skewed to create more inequality.
The property tax in some new areas even in the suburbs is more than or only slightly less than the total rent in the some social housing in the center of the city. Some of these areas do not even have public heating.
It has become reverse socialism, steal from the poor and subsidise the rich.
I'm not sure about Denmark or Sweden, but when I was living in England a few years back, the right-wing tabloid press used housing policy as basically a cudgel to drive voters into the arms of right-wing politicans. The basic story they seemed to run every few weeks was some immigrant (preferably Middle-Eastern) family who got a free house that was denied to locals. This kind of story was what drove a lot of voters into the mess of Brexit that they're still in.
No, I think the point being made is that it's bad to set wages this way. If every company is colluding, then wages are being kept artificially low. (Even in tech, where engineers are in demand.)
The salaries are high because of supply and demand. Big tech companies collude to "keep them low" because they are high.
Nobody here has a problem with their salary being high, they feel it's totally fine because it benefits them. It's only when they experience the other side that they're outraged and want regulation.
Which is totally natural and fine, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed or whatever. But we should still be aware that that's what it is.
Wages are lower than they should be. Wages would be higher if employers were not colluding. Collusion is hurting both high demand engineers and renters.
Good writing is clearly useful and quite often mentioned. But good reading is very rarely talked about. I think it is even more important.
Too many people cannot maintain attention for more than a few seconds while reading. Or they read "what they want to read" instead of the actual text. Like I write a "list of things" and they read it like "a set of things", loosing the meaningful ordering of a list.
I tend to write concise documentation, but people always loose some important details that way. So I am now purposefully adding more text than strictly required to be sure important points are really understood.
Like a good teacher repeats at least 3 times the same matter, with a slightly different angle
This reminds me of an old Spolsky blog post on writing specs: [0]
> Programmers often try to write specs which look like dense academic
> papers. They think that a "correct" spec needs to be "technically"
> correct and then they are off the hook.
>
> The mistake is that when you write a spec, in addition to being
> correct, it has to be understandable, which, in programming terms,
> means that it needs to be written so that the human brain can
> "compile" it.
> Like I write a "list of things" and they read it like "a set of things", loosing the meaningful ordering of a list.
That's on you. A lot of code use list instead of set purely because set is rarely a basic primitive language offers.
If I see method returning list of users I'm just gonna assume it is unordered, and it usually is unordered.
If you return list that's ordered and that matters for some reason, the docs should say it is ordered and by which key.
If the method is called RunTasks(list) and documentation is "runs a list of tasks" it is perfectly fine to assume it means "runs list of tasks in order" but it is also perfectly fine to assume "runs all of the tasks in parallel".
I think everyone is capable of reading well-written text or code. The problem comes when it’s not well written, in which case you’re in the real of reverse engineering. And most people are bad at RE.
The whole musk shebang has been an eye opener for me. I usually consider HN to be top of the line as far as internet forums go, but the amount of mental gymnastics I'm seeing these past days... Unbelievable.
HN definitely has a range of ideological bents, and in my experience you'll run into a huge variety of ideologies. But among them all, pro-worker anti-capitalist is pretty rare.
Yeah I was going to say. I don’t get many upvotes for my pro-labor and anti-capitalist posts. Which end up being most of my comments these days. Though I’m not usually as upfront.
It's easy. It's easier to buy there than elsewhere because it's habit.
I stopped prime a couple years ago, I buy from other stores when I can, but sometimes you just need protein powder, spray bottles, stove gaskets, a 300 piece puzzle, and a cello stand. Amazon makes it possible to just buy one spot.
If Twitter had unionized they could have protected themselves from the whims of Musk. It's still likely Musk would have massacred the company, but maybe people wouldn't be getting fired the day before Thanksgiving.
How any engineer looks at Twitter and doesn't say, "We should consider a union..." is beyond me.
To be clear, in the EU, the workers have been blocked from access, but they have not been fired, because he legally cannot fire them in that manner.
Before access was blocked, from what I've heard, many of the EU Twitter employees read the "you're fired" email, said "hah, not from that I'm not" and went right back into work the next day.
If Twitter employees were unionized here in the US, it would be a similar story: Musk could say "you're all fired", but unless he went through the processes outlined in the union contract to fire the people, they would not be fired. At most, if he could get the payroll employees to do his bidding, he could stop them from getting paid, but that would absolutely not hold up in court, and he would have to pay them with back pay once the legal system got done with it—and that kind of legal dispute probably wouldn't take 2 years, since it would be an extremely straightforward case of breach of contract.
In this case, what would strike achieve from people who Musk wants to not work anyway? Twitter literally closed EU facilities. I don't know any union law in any country that prevents company from closing facilities and eliminating all jobs.
Twitter workers could strike and shut down the site, they could strike and not make changes like the $8 verification badge, they could strike until Musk agreed to reasonable work hours.
They could afford to pay a lawyer a whole lot to fight layoffs and firings.
Not a perfect set of options, but better options than they have today.
Not legally they haven't been. Facebook discovered this recently, when they attempted to lay off people in NL. They discovered that because it's a mass layoff, they need to consult a workers council. But they don't have a workers council, so they need to elect one, which will take three months. Then another three months of consultation.
Even in Ireland/UK which have pretty employer friendly labour laws, none of the FB employees have actually been laid off yet, they're still in a consultation period (till December I believe).
Unfortunately for US CEO's, the US labour law does not apply globally.
Musk wants 20-25% of the workforce remaining to run Twitter. He’s not closing all facilities since he is promoting RTO.
In theory that’s a bargaining chip that organized labor could have used (this would involve labor solidarity between the laid-off/fired workers and the ones he wanted to keep). Bringing in “scabs” with zero institutional knowledge to run the site effectively without torching his $30 billion equity investment could have been very difficult, especially since RTO in San Francisco is apparently valuable to him.
> Musk wants 20-25% of the workforce remaining to run Twitter.
Engineering is cut down to about ~10% or less in many areas. A friend of mine told me their group is down to ~10 from 155 after 2/3 being laid off and about 90% of the remainder rejecting the "hardcore" ultimatum.
I'm expecting a lot of the non-SF facilities to close and those people to be fired as well. They should have considered geography more in the layoff, but because he had a bunch of Tesla goons deciding who to cut instead of people who know the business or HR professionals who know how to plan workforce reduction it doesn't seem like geographic distribution was considered. But it's certainly not economical to operate many office locations designed for hundreds with only a small fraction of that number still employed.
> How any engineer looks at Twitter and doesn't say, "We should consider a union..." is beyond me.
"You know, those $500k a year are nice and all, but what I really want is $125k, job security and someone who makes sure only union members are allowed to plug in network cables."
Engineers are making large amounts of money, that's why they don't care about unions.
Sure, there are cases where small landlords are beneficial in providing liquidity. But the big corporate firms being able to leverage their existing assets to buy more units seems antithetical to the goal of "we should eliminate homelessness" to me.