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Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

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Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#511

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In a rising rates environment, house sale prices tend to fall (or rise much more slowly at best).

Really? Can you share more about this mechanism? I actually noticed someone opposite (are maybe it's the same mechanism) in the area I live in: House sale prices are rising like everywhere else, but rents stay mostly flat. I'd love to learn more about it.

sokoloff was talking about rising rates, not rising rents. And I agree completely, when interest rates rise money is more expensive, thus credit/mortgage has more interest, thus people can’t afford that much of a property price for the same monthly installment, thus property prices are going down.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#512
post #279

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Zoning. You link the "zones which employ people" and "zones which house people" to balance so you don't have significantly more jobs than homes. Next you zone for type of housing, where you only allow a certain percentage of the most profitable 1BR apartments to be built, and require those to be above certain size thresholds so that a variety of life situations can actually live in your city. You don't need to "incen…

From what I’ve seen in and outside America, my gut feeling (I don’t claim expertise) is that zoning can make things worse. The apartment directly under mine is used as an office. Down and to one side is a psychiatrist. Ground floor is a cafe and a pizza takeaway. The apartment opposite me has a grocery store on the ground floor, an office on the second, a dentist on the third, and it looks like the rest of the units…

Spot on. What zoning proponents miss is that people living and people working and people doing sports etc. are the same people. Zoning is equivalent of a spherical cow in a vacuum and would work only if there are people that work 24/7, then those that live 24/7 etc.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think one of the greatest mistakes of capitalism is to make property an investment asset.

Nobody made it an investment asset, it just happened as certain pieces of land grew more valuable for practical reasons. This is unavoidable unless you make it so you can't sell property, which would also mean you can't buy property - the government would need to manage peoples' needs based on family size and do the maintenance of maintaining property to the same level as landlords.

This is not true. We did make it an investment asset around the advent of agriculture. And there is a way to avoid it without freezing the market, which is called the Land Value Tax. As far as I know, no serious economist (from any ideological perspective) seems to actually dispute the functional fitness of this tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax?wprov=sfti1

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think one of the greatest mistakes of capitalism is to make property an investment asset.

I think we really need to limit how many one can own. Start taxing very very very heavily for anything beyond a second home for individuals and and anything beyond another number based on statistics for a company. Also add attitional tax for every two months a property is owned but no one is living in it or using it for business. This should cut down on hording and incentivize companies and people to get rid of any p…

Just institute high Land Value Tax and you kill these birds and their tax evasion schemes, with one very simple stone.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#515
post #392

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1) UBI is not UBI unless everyone gets it. 2) Any income surplus generated by UBI is rapidly consumed by middle people and rent-seekers. That’s how we get inflation.

I agree with #1, although also with the person who mentioned taxes can be changed to effectively control who gets how much net benefit. On #2 I think your claim needs evidence or support, I doubt that would be true for the most part (maybe to some extent).

The evidence for 2) is literally all around you. Why is an empty shack-sized lot in Palo Alto worth $1MM+? Simply and only because the people there earn enough money to buy it.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't rent just increase to capture this new income for most people? If UBI is high enough to afford mortgage payments on an owned house, housing prices will skyrocket (even more than now) until those receiving the UBI are priced out of the market once again. Because once the mortgage is paid off, the value of the property is expected to grow, and that's a bet lots of people are taking, even now in this crazy…

We could do what they do in Japan and deprecate housing as it ages. Very few people buy second hand properties, so a house is a liability that needs to be demolished vs land without one. It also helps if no one believes in property speculation because of a huge property bubble that burst in the 80s.

You could institute a high LVT and get all the same mechanics without any of the enforcement overhead.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#517
post #240

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An hour? Why is it acceptable or reasonable to spend 2 hours of your unpaid time wasted on commuting?

Because the only way to guarantee that people have less than an hour of commute to their job is to create extremely dense population center which means extremely small living spaces which are almost universally hated. And most jobs cannot be done remotely, so to guarantee that each individual has space, he must accept to be some distance ways from the hub where people concentrate to perform their daily tasks. Think o…

> The only way is to build huge tower hosting tons of small appartements, kill all green areas to gain as much space as possible.

This is precisely backwards! Dense housing creates green areas, sprawl devours them. This should be obvious if you think for even a moment—-dense housing requires less land per person housed, which leaves more for nature.

I live in a cluster of small towns with a major regional hospital, almost exactly the situation you describe. After decades of sprawl, we’re finally starting to do an OK job of building dense housing right next to the hospital, and it’s saving a huge amount of wild space.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#518
post #73

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>It will also force employees to look for higher-paying jobs ...implying they weren't already doing so? I'm not sure about you, but I don't think applebees is the type of place you stick around for "the good work culture" or whatever.

People working at these places are highly dependent on transportation and hours. When I worked retail, we were in sales and were top of the food chain. The restaurant people were a notch over regular mall workers in pay, but had to deal with different hours. Many people work multiple jobs… one line cook I remember did prep work starting at 6am at one place, painted, and closed the mall restaurant. He couldnt flip job…

People don't realize how expensive it is to be working poor if they've never been working poor. It's a difficult trap to escape. For some it may be their own doing getting there, for others it may be environmental factors that lead them there or some combination of the two.

The fact is, it's difficult to find resources to escape and you're trapped in a difficult space where gathering momentum to make even small transitions could take years of time while barely staying afloat. This is the life of the precariat class.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we really need to limit how many one can own. Start taxing very very very heavily for anything beyond a second home for individuals and and anything beyond another number based on statistics for a company. Also add attitional tax for every two months a property is owned but no one is living in it or using it for business. This should cut down on hording and incentivize companies and people to get rid of any p…

Just institute high Land Value Tax and you kill these birds and their tax evasion schemes, with one very simple stone.

Land tax is horrid. A person should be able to live off the land if they choose, self sufficiently. This is impossible when the government demands yearly cash payment just for having your own place to farm.

Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet theory is cities are malthusian. Contrary to popular belief, Malthus didn't predict runaway population growth. What he actually predicted (and was right for most of human history), is that any gains in productivity would be eaten up by population growth until the average wealth per person diluted down to it's previous level. So back to cities. Here's my pet theory. You build more apartments, or faster trains o…

There is also the Georgian explanation that rent seeking landlords will always increase rent to match any gains in production. Assuming that a landlord will always charge the maximum they can that market will sustain, any increase in production will mean an increase in what the market can pay for housing, and with time, what the landlord can extract from tenants. It neatly explains how cost of living correlates to jo…

That’s only possible if there’s is never enough housing for everyone. ITV does sort of work out because western building cannot be built for lower income folks as they cost too much. So low cost housing is essentialy all old end of life building
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