261–270 of 320 posts
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What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?
It's perfectly legal for you and like-minded people to set up a commune, and create the society you want. Or join an existing one.
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It's perfectly legal for you and like-minded people to set up a commune, and create the society you want. Or join an existing one.
BTW, the best I can figure is the average commune member quits after about 2 years, cured of the notion that communism is for them.
It’s a mix of the lifestyle not being exactly what people thought plus them getting culty. In many cases it’s more the latter than the former.
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Oh, but they already have that figured out. You can't become a licensed electrician without doing x hours of apprenticeship under licensed electrician. And each licensed electrician doesn't need more than one or two helpers at a time, so... Hollywood is the same. Want to join SAG? You need to get cast in 5 SAG productions. Oh, but SAG productions only cast SAG actors? Oh well... Meanwhile, all us nerds were trying to…
I think they meant what will trade jobs look like when there are half as many highly paid knowledge workers able to fork out for their services?
If AI really does come in and destroy all that no job is safe. Blue collar households don’t hire tradesman at anywhere near the rate that white collar households do.
In a major economic downturn like that new construction dries up. The commercial work will dry up to as all those white collar companies close their offices.
The end result is that existing tradesman will be fighting over a much smaller pie. Plus they’ll be dealing with competition from all the unemployed knowledge workers trying to change careers. In some states and some trades new entrants will be less of an issue, but most trades in most states aren’t supply restricted like the above poster’s electrician example.
My point is getting to the trades isn’t going to protect you from AI taking your job unless AI takes over a small percent of jobs and stops. I don’t actually think AI is going to take all that many jobs myself, but if I’m wrong we’re going to have to completely rework our economy.
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I know enough of trade business owners to know that a business worth $10 million is rare. Just using some back of the envelope math from numbers I found. On the high end a plumbing company is valued at 5x EBITA. A very very good plumbing company has a 20% net profit margin (and no debt, no corporate taxes or anything so that net income and EBITA are essentially the same), and a good plumbing company makes $350k in re…
I am not in the business of valuing small businesses, but one thing that seems off to me is that an EBITDA multiple is usually also dependent on the overall size of the business. That is, a business with only $1 million in EBITDA may only be worth 3-4x that, while a business with $10 million in EBITDA might be worth 8-10x EBITDA, on the theory that larger businesses will be more stable and less likely to have key per…
The thing to keep in mind though is we’re talking small business, once you get to $10 million EBITA, you’re probably talking $50-$200 million in revenue and 200-500 employees. Thats firmly into mid sized business territory and I think revenue growth would be the or primary driver of the multiple.
From your source a 10x multiple would require very high revenue growth. That makes sense because you can get 10% average return with index funds, so you need to significantly beat that ROI.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening. 1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimen…
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The mistake you're making here is in the assumption that voters have any meaningful input on policy. Given the overwhelming majority of policy at both the state and federal level is drafted by lobbyists this assumption seems questionable at best.
But that's a feature of oligarchies more than it is of democracies.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
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"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).
That may be true in a very local area, but if you build something really nice in an area that wasn't very nice, the units that used to be mid are now near the bottom and have to lower their prices.
Nah, what actually happens is the lower rung housing is either flipped to capture the increase in area pricing or the lot gets scraped, again to capture the increase in area pricing.
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> In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification). This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up. Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) so…
"This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up." Someone should tell the local housing market that then, because this pattern has consistently manifest over the last 20 years here. Without exception everyone I've seen make this claim isn't invested in residential real estate and hasn't closely watched how prices shift in response to new construction. In any event if you're trying to advance the claim tha…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44914153
It is rather fascinating that you would bring up a "gentrification is a myth claim," why would you try to insert that into my mouth?
Gentrification happens all throughout the US, but in the current era it's from the under discussed type from the original literature in the 1970s: through lack of construction. When there's not enough housing to go around, prices rise, wealthier people are the only ones who win the bidding war, etc etc. See Boyle Heights in LA for a classic example of this. No new buildings, massive gentrification because there's not enough housing to go around.
See also in LA for the neighborhoods where prices are not rising: the only places they are building lots of apartments.
Perhaps there was some era when the "rent gap" style of gentrification was actually prevalent, but it hasn't been that way for decades. It's all just shortage driven gentrification in every example I have been pointed to in recent times.
The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young). We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security fo…
> We stopped building new housing The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally). [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt.... [2…
But more importantly, the most economically vibrant areas, with the most ability to provide economic opportunity, have been stunted by lack of housing: NYC, SF Bay Area, Boston, San Diego, etc. This transfers wealth to current landowners in those regions, but let's only the highest income job professions move in, and overall slows the ability of those with less to access economic opportunity.
And those areas down zones half a century ago, capping out their housing ages ago. That's the true lack of housing, and it's all locational. The only thing you can't build more of is land, and it's not fungible. Best we can do is build up in those special areas where there's the magic combination of people to allow for more productivity and more jobs. (Which also happens to be far more ecologically friendly too, but I'm aware not everybody cares about the environment these days).