bollorior

I don't know - the problem with complaints like 'Wal-mart are destroying small, local businesses' is that although many people agree that Wal-mart is bad, often no one is sure exactly what is bad about Wal-mart.

Employee conditions, monopolistic practices to squeeze suppliers and city layouts and zoning are all already regulated in principle. But what if it's something much more nebulous? Attempts to intervene for 'atmosphere', 'niceness', 'tradition' and so on seem doomed to be either useless or lead to unintended consequences.

But just trying to understand and be honest about what it is we want can be a huge step forward!

I am prepared to accept that 'almost all cases' does not include the insanity particular to the frothiest 60% of the Australian housing market ;)

There isn't a technical limitation here. If in 2001 you had said that web content would be paid for by multiple auctions for advertising space between data brokers who know innumerable different facts about the reader, such as their recent browsing history, purchases, demographic info, happening in real-time while the page loads, it would have seemed technically unfeasible. $100 billion in annual revenue makes lots of things possible.

I mean, you've just outlined the way that newspapers' business model is delusional and broken. Lots of people are prepared to pay them for something they make, but they have decided that they're only prepared to accept money in a specific way and on specific terms. In fact, most paywalls assume that that specific news outlet is the most important one in your life. None of them are prepared to offer you a plan based on the more realistic scenario that you occasionally want to read something of theirs of particular interest, but don't want their take on every story, nor their particular curation of what to read on a given day.

Like the music industry a decade or so ago, the news industry is now in a position where, rather than try and compete, they are going to blame their customers and their competitors for their own failings, and try and secure a special status whereby they get paid in perpetuity for doing nothing because of their supposed great importance to society.

Newspapers made a huge strategic error in how they approached advertising, which ultimately resulted in much of their value being essentially given away to Google.

It used to be the case that much of (for example) the New York Times' advertising value came not just from the number of eyeballs, but from the specific nature of those eyeballs. Being able to target a specific category of people who read the NYT (they can afford the paper, they are likely to live in New York, they know long words, they have a specific worldview, etc) is incredibly valuable to advertisers. Market segmentation by publication is very powerful - even knowing that a viewer doesn't have much money, or hates buying things, or is cynical about advertising is more valuable than not knowing anything. It's the reason that so many niche magazines exist. Advertising to someone who cares about a very specific hobby is worth a lot. It's also the reason that most printed publications aren't free. Many could be if you take a simplistic view of the economics. However they would dilute their audience to the point where it would become less valuable to advertisers. Vogue advertises to people who want to look at fashion photos enough to pay $9 or whatever to do so.

With the internet, two things changed. Firstly the fact that anyone in the world could read a given article for free, meant that the average eyeball on a NYT article was much less 'NYT-reader-ish' than an eyeball on a printed page of the paper. Secondly, tracking and analytics meant that there was much more valuable and monetizable information about that reader than the fact that they are a NYT reader. Information like all the other things they have looked at, what they've recently bought, what apps they have installed, the content of their emails. Only the big tech companies and data brokers have this info. The data that the NYT has on you is trivial in comparison.

It didn't have to be this way. Newspapers could have ringfenced their own data and sold ads in a way which kept them in control. As a side effect it would have been better for their readers' privacy. They failed to understand their own business as well as Google did.

Now consumers are being blamed for this, for 'making the wrong choices'. I resent this for several reasons. Firstly it is an argument which denies the nature of reality. It is analogous with telling people they shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart, because local businesses will close. The solution is to change the rules to optimize for the things that we care about. Not to rely on the unlikely event that lots of people with limited resources will all make altruistic decisions to protect the nebulous thing that you care about. Secondly these newspapers set themselves up as society's only defenders of liberty and truth against the forces of darkness. In fact, a lot of them are full of propaganda, gossip and clickbait. Some of the $5 newsletters are in a class above almost everything in these newspapers. The people writing them are (typically) experts on one topic, they love that topic passionately, they have no particular axe to grind and they have much incentives to make something high quality.

Your grandfather is surely much better off than if he had been renting that house all those years. He would also have paid a huge total amount (to a landlord) and wouldn't have any share in the appreciation of his house value. He also probably has better security of tenure (a landlord could have decided to evict him and sell the property when the price went up).

Imputed rent tax and mortgage tax deduction make sense together but not separately in my opinion.

Mortgage tax deduction without tax on imputed rent (as in Norway, Sweden and the US) is a subsidy to those who are rich enough to own their own homes. It is also a perverse incentive in that if you pay off your mortgage, you lose the tax benefit. So people take larger mortgages than makes sense, and invest their spare cash in risky assets rather than paying their mortgages down.

An imputed rent tax without a deduction for mortgage interest would be grossly unfair to borrowers, but does not exist anywhere as far as I know.

An imputed rent tax with a deduction lightly taxes mortgage borrowers against the benefits they receive from owning not renting. It has a bigger effect on owner occupiers without mortgages - they pay the full tax without any deduction. So it is progressive. It also levels the playing field between landlords and owner-occupiers - both are taxed on the rental value of their property and receive (roughly similar) deductions. So neither form of ownership has a built-in advantage.

(Probably the right wing parties want to remove the tax deduction because they also want to get rid of the tax on imputed rent?) As pointed out in the reply, this was a misunderstanding.

I think you have misunderstood how taxation works. If you rent out a house, the rent is income, which you are taxed on. The deduction means that you don't have to pay taxes on the gross amount, but only on the net income after you've paid the mortgage on the property. In almost all cases the rental income will be higher than the mortgage payment, so you will still pay some tax, more than the person who lives in a property they own with a mortgage.

As a probability theorist (who knows very little about physics) I understand this machine as relying on the well-studied and widely debunked martingale fallacy - that you can play until you are slightly ahead, and then stop. Then repeat from the start. Perhaps I am missing something.

If I'm right, there are lots of ways of tweaking this system to make it appear more effective on different time scales and with different constraints. This is exactly what the folklore of 'gambling systems' looks like - although none can violate the laws of probability, they can be optimized to give a better appearance of doing so.

Suppose I told you to go to Vegas, bet $1 on black at roulette. If you lose, bet $1 million on red. If you lose a second time, bet $1 trillion on black. You would probably recognize this as an unworkable strategy quite quickly. Now try another strategy: write the numbers 1, 2, 4, 4, 3, 7 on a piece of paper. Bet the sum of the first amount and the last amount in the list (on an even chance such as red or black). If you win, cross out both numbers. If you lose, write down sum of the two numbers (the amount you lost) at the end of the list. Repeat until all the numbers are crossed out. You're $21 up. Repeat as many times as the number of dollars you want, divided by 21. The second strategy has been highly optimized, not to beat casinos, but to give gamblers the strong sense that they are either guaranteed to win, or that they are coming very close to winning, except for some outlying bad luck.

However, the two strategies are equally constrained by mathematical laws from making you infinitely rich with certainty.

Yes, this invention appears to resolve a fallacy simply by replacing with another fallacy, perhaps less well known to physicists.

Interesting, thank you.

If you asked me to write a JSON parser in 6502 assembly, I would put the fairly short and unambiguous JSON grammar into lex and yacc to get a parser in C, then compile that to 6502 assembly. Then maybe glance through the assembly code, although I doubt very much that I know anything about assembly that the compiler doesn't.

Of course the author is a highly skilled person who also did this for his enjoyment. But am I missing some way in which what he did would be more than incrementally better than what I would do? Aren't these tools pretty much as good as the best humans at solving this problem?

My city is unusual, fair. But 5x ratio would be far from unusual. One could easily find an apartment in Staten Island (not even a suburb, not very far from the city center) for less than 1/5 Manhattan office rent per sq ft.

I'm not sure of your point about sq ft per employee. 10 times 150 sq ft seems like quite a nice three bed.

5 times the office space per employee is going to be huge, especially given that most people already have kitchens and bathrooms.

Rent per square foot in the city center where my company's office is located is at least ten times rent per square foot on a house like mine in the suburb I live in. The rent per square foot for a desk in a serviced office near where I live is about halfway between the two.

In fact the rent on a small three bedroom house in my neighbourhood and the rent per employee for office space where I work are comparable.