Viewing profile — harryh

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP. The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk. Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to …

You're welcome! The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking. https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them). It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. …

Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Brockman is off the board but not fired. Which is weird right? You'd think if he was involved in whatever the really bad thing is then he would be fired.

1) Note that I indicated that the 20% increase was a real increase and not a nominal one. That means that to the extent that household expenses have increased, it's because househo…

Median household income in America is roughly $70,000 per year. That is a roughly 20% real (not nominal!) increase over the past 40 years. $10/month would represent 0.17% of that i…

Someone should start a company to sell business machines internationally.

Worse demographic ratios though which I think is likely more important.

The WARN act only applies for "mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment." I'm honestly not sure how this would apply for a remote workforce. Consul…

Fair point about Canadian law being different than US law. For the - There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they are…

This post should be flagged off HN. Everything in the tweet is factually incorrect. - Companies aren't required to pay severance when doing layoffs. - There is no evidence that Str…

I suspect that whatever climate benefits generated by eliminating commutes will be counteracted by the urban sprawl fostered by your first point.

There is no "someone" who could do anything about this.

I think you're confusing availability zones with regions in this comment. AWS AZs don't even have consistent naming across AWS accounts.

Yup. Which goes back to the housing problem. Under building of housing country wide (and even more so in major cities) is IMHO one of the root causes of many many many of the probl…

You don't need eminent domain. There are plenty of landowners that want to build. The issue is that NIMBYs have largely captured the city government and zoning restrictions have ma…

It's mostly illegal to build new housing in Manhattan.

If NYC politics serves property developers first, then it probably wouldn't be illegal for property developers to develop new property in the vast majority of the city. I think you…

When considering this topic, it's worth noting that NYC recently made the construction of all new hotels illegal.

NYC is safer that virtually anywhere else in America when you look at both crime statistics and auto fatalities. Ignoring the 2nd is a major omission. I don't have stats for Amhers…

This isn't true at all. The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investm…

Steve Waldman has a great blog post on this topic that goes beyond big city rents (though I agree that's a huge issue): https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7263.html