BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

Posts

0

Comments

1,142

Joined

2 yr. ago

Inflation is a natural phenomenon that will occur with or without any amount of central monetary planning. It's impossible to introduce new currency without it affecting the value of that currency. You either don't introduce currency, which causes the existing currency to become more and more valuable as economic developments create new value, or you print some new money which will cause some amount of inflation.

If your economy has $1000 dollars in it, and suddenly a new invention allows you to create 50% more widgets for the same cost, then the same amount of money is now more valuable since it can fund the creation of more stuff. You can instead add another $500 to the economy to represent this new wealth, but that will have an inflationary effect. You can try to balance it to keep it relatively low, which is what the Fed does with its 2% inflation target, but there's no real way to completely get rid of it. Additionally, some amount of inflation encourages people to put money into more productive assets like investments rather than simply hording all their money, allowing the existence of things like credit, which are pretty helpful for anyone looking to start a business or buy a house. But, credit requires you to either have a lot of money sitting around in order to make that loan, or you need to be able to print money. The latter offers a lot more flexibility, but again, thus inflation.

Per the article:

about 8.5%

In this case, there's also the fact that no Democrat is going to be winning a statewide race in Missouri any time remotely soon.

Say hi to Neville Chamberlain to me when you next see him.

get foreigner national out

Actively working on it.

negotiation for hostage release

Actively working on it.

initiate peace talk

Being discussed

send peace keeping troop via UN to West Bank

I'm pretty sure you would call this more western imperialism.

Keep emphasize [...] “condemn hamas”

If you don't think that Hamas should be condemned, that says more about you than it does about Joe Biden.

It's 'ceasefire', by the way.

I'm genuinely curious, what course of action here could the US do that you wouldn't criticize? If the US helps citizens evacuate a war zone, you call it ethnic cleansing. If the US instead didn't do this and supported keeping them in Gaza, you'd say America is forcing them to be bombed to death.

I can't help but think that you're fundamentally always going to criticize the US and then find a justification for it afterwards.

It's been a very eye-opening experience over the past month to see just how little the left cares about victims of violence if they happen to be Jewish.

That law is about naturalization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who are not Israeli citizens.

I think we both agree that the West Bank is not the legal territory of Israel, right?

It should be noted that 'refugee camp' is a somewhat misleading term. These are functionally cities that are located where temporary camps were originally located. As refugee status is inherited by Palestinians, these are communities of legal refugees and thus, strictly speaking, refugee camps, but the image is very much not what the term brings to mind.

This is not to downplay the tragedy of civilian casualties; just providing some context that people may not know.

Exactly, and I also thought the Israeli government's response to that statement was ridiculous. I'm by no means a blind supporter of a single side here, and no one with a functioning brain should be. There's a lot of bad on all sides here.

I've been generally supportive of Israel's response to the attacks and do believe that the removal of Hamas is absolutely justified, however, that doesn't change the fact that West Bank settlers are an absolute blight on the country and do nothing but stand in the way of peace. My sympathies for them are extremely limited, and if this does turn out to be an unprovoked attack, this guy is no different than the terrorists from three weeks ago and deserves the same treatment.

I don't think it's wild to say that Hamas are not above selectively taking bits of religious texts and twisting them out of context in order to fit their own world view.

A non-trivial amount of evangelical Christians support Israel for the explicit purpose of fulfilling some end times prophecy in the Bible and triggering the return of Jesus (blissfully unaware that the Book of Revelations is a pretty thinly veiled analogy for the fall of Rome and not really an end times prophecy at all).

And when was the last time he made any anti LGBT actions?

Fun fact, for anyone who didn't know, Biden was the one who ultimately pushed Obama to come out in favor of gay marriage. He randomly stated that he supported it on some interview, which sent the White House into a scramble as they suddenly had to get Obama to make a statement. This apparently rather annoyed Obama for a while.

From some data I could find, the average one bedroom rent in January 2020 was $3050. From the same source, it's currently around $2900. That 2020 number adjusted for inflation is $3600. So, rents seem to have both nominally and truly fallen.

I'd assume it's largely due to lower demand because of remote work, since SF surely hasn't been building anything. Thanks for the good example that increased vacancy does indeed lead to lower rents.

There are, in fact, multiple hospitals in Gaza. This logic is not particularly challenging.

just some people that did a kidnapping.

You know, as one does.

I know you don't care about evidence, but for anyone reading who does, here's a study from Helsinki.

https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html

We study the city-wide effects of new, centrally-located market-rate housing supply using geo-coded total population register data from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run. Market-rate supply is likely to improve affordability outside the sub-markets where new construction occurs and to benefit low-income people.

Turns out there may be a meaningful difference between randomly cutting taxes from businesses and building a bunch of new housing.

I assure you, no normal person can afford to buy an apartment in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise, even if everything was done solely at cost. Rental units aren't a bad thing.

Israel could turn Gaza into a lifeless parking lot in an hour if they actually wanted to. They don't.

I won't pretend that their demands have always been reasonable, but they have made peace proposals that do not demand Palestinians not existing. You're letting your emotions talk way ahead of anything remotely factual.

Houses in the middle of Nebraska do not meaningfully help the housing market of New York City or San Francisco. Sure, I could go and buy a house in my hometown in bumfuck rural Missouri, but I don't want to live in a homophobic conservative hellhole, so housing stock there isn't really relevant to me in any way.

And if you look at a city like Seattle, where there actually has been meaningful construction, the pressure on renters has been way lower. Straight from the horses mouth:

The rise in vacancies across Seattle is directly linked to the rate of newly constructed apartments, according to Capital Economics, and it’s increased from 5.2% at the end of 2019 to 7% by midyear 2023. Already, Seattle’s asking rent growth rate is at -2% and could fall further. With that, the city’s apartment values will fall, and average annual total returns could become negative by 2027, meaning those properties are losing value as an asset and investment.

https://fortune.com/2023/10/24/how-much-seattle-west-coast-apartment-worth-landlords-rents-capital-economics-forecast/amp/

Here's a London-based investment firm complaining about how housing in Seattle is becoming a bad investment due to increasing supply.

Not to mention, more rentals isn't a bad thing! More rental units means fewer competition for each individual unit and ultimately cheaper rents. If you have 1000 people wanting to move to a city but there are only 500 open apartments, only the richest 500 people get to move. If you have 1200 open apartments, those landlords have to find a price that'll get them a tenant or they'll completely miss out on rents.

I completely agree with the sentiment that housing shouldn't be treated as a productive investment asset, but the real question worth asking is why the market is so slanted towards landlords that housing can even serve as a productive asset in the first place. If you look at places like the Soviet Union or Communist China, they managed to house everyone easily because they build a metric fuckton of housing everywhere, so the questions of determining who gets housing and who gets to starve on the streets didn't even apply.

It's a supply issue. Essentially every economist agrees that it's a supply issue. Evidence has shown time and time again that increasing supply lowers rent pressures. This is not a controversial question.