I agree, I love zig but the things that make me program differently are features like excellent enum/union support, defer and comptime, which aren't readily available in the other languages I tend to use (C++, Fortran and Python).
Just wanted to say, thanks for doing this! Now the old rant...
I started my career when on-prem was the norm and remember so much trouble. When you have long-lived hardware, eventually, no matter how hard you try, you just start to treat it as a pet and state naturally accumulates. Then, as the hardware starts to be not good enough, you need to upgrade. There's an internal team that presents the "commodity" interface, so you have to pick out your new hardware from their list and get the cost approved (it's a lot harder to just spend a little more and get a little more). Then your projects are delayed by them racking the new hardware and you properly "un-petting" your pets so they can respawn on the new devices, etc.
Anyways, when cloud came along, I was like, yeah we're switching and never going back. Buuut, come to find out that's part of the master plan: it's a no-brainer good deal until you and everyone in your org/company/industry forgets HTF to rack their own hardware, and then it starts to go from no-brainer to brainer. And basically unless you start to pull back and rebuild that muscle, it will go from brainer to no-brainer bad deal. So thanks for building this muscle!
we're in a pretty unique situation in that very early on we fundamentally can't afford the hyperscaler clouds to cover operations, so we're forced to develop some expertise. turned out to be reasonably chill and we'll prob stick with it for the foreseeable future, but we have seen a little bit of the state-creep you mention so tbd.
Yeah from memory on-prem was always cheaper, it just removed a lot of logistic obstacles and made everything convenient under one bill.
IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked. But over time temporarily scaling up became permanent, and devs became reliant on instantly spawning new machines for things other than spikes in demand and now everyone defaults to cloud and treats it as the baseline. In the process we lost the grounding needed to assess the real cost of things and predictably the cost difference between cloud and on-prem has only widened.
> IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked.
I've heard that before but was never able to make sense of it. Overflowing into the cloud seems like a nightmare to manage, wouldn't overbuilding on-prem be cheaper than paying your infra team to straddle two environments?
I've setup on-prem environments that would automatically and transparently spill workload to the cloud when we ran out of on-prem capacity. The prerequisite is that your operations people need to have strong automation skills, there can't be any human button-pushers in the loop, but it really isn't that much work nor does it require unusual technical skill if you have a competent operations environment. Once everything is wired up, it mostly just works. Even the devs often don't know whether their workloads are running on-prem or in the cloud.
An under-rated aspect of this is that it provides detailed data for planning the expansion of the on-prem environment, including changes in how the hardware is being used.
My experience is that this is a good model. On-prem is about 1/3 the cost of the cloud, fully burdened, in my experience but being able to transparently spill to the cloud mitigates the capacity and supply chain risks that come with on-prem.
As someone with experience with a company that did hybrid, I’ll say: it only makes sense if your infra team deeply understands computers.
The end state is “just some IaC,” wherein it doesn’t really matter to anyone where the application lives, but all of the underlying difficulties in getting to that state necessitate that your team actually, no-shit knows how distributed systems work. They’re going to be doing a lot of networking configuration, for one, and that’s a whole speciality.
Docker is amazing for forcing the machines not to be pets, seriously, a racked sever is just another K3 or K8 node (or whatever) and doesn't get the choice or ability of being petted. It's so nice. You could maybe of said the same about vm's but not really, the VM just became the pet, OK you could at least image/snapshot it but it's not the same.
It’s interesting everyone having different experiences and those experiences drive what they do.
I would never dream of running Docker in production. It seems so overly complicated. Also, since day one, I could never understand using a public registry for mission critical stuff. When I was learning Docker, I would unplug the network cable so I wouldn’t accidentally push my container online somewhere with all my data.
I totally get the concept at scale. I also get the concept of just shipping an application in a container. I also get the concept of self-hosting of just give me the container so I don’t have to think about how it all works.
However, the complexity of building the container, cleanup, deleting entries, environment variables, no SSH availability, even on Railway in the beginning, ambiguous where your container needs to be to be to even get it somewhere. Public registry or private registry.
Certainly most of it is my lack of knowledge of not sticking with it.
Just give me a VM and some firewall rules. Cloning VMs can be automated in so many different ways.
I agree with you, but I also don’t do webdev. Docker seems neat, I’ve dabbled just to understand the stack and how it works. Not much of a container person I realized. Closest I get is spinning out yocto images and flashing them to hardware. Same image every time with updated versions of software. So maybe kind of like docker in the abstract sense, I suppose.
I’m mid-way through my career at this point and I’m hoping to skip the web/cloud bit, I just don’t enjoy it as much as I do hw/sw integrations.
Docker is a monster that you have to treat as a pet. You've still got to pet it through stages of updating, monitoring, snapshots and networking. When the internal system breaks it's no different to a server collapsing.
Snapshots are a haircut for the monster, useful but can make things worse.
I'm not op, but thanks for this. Like I mentioned in another comment, the wholesale move to the cloud has caused so many skills to become atrophied. And it's good that someone is starting to exercise that skill again, like you said. The hyperscalers are mostly to blame for this, the marketing FUD being that you can't possibly do it yourself, there are too many things to keep track of, let us do it (while conveniently leaving out how eye-wateringly expensive they are in comparison).
it means that even after negotiating much better terms than baseline we run into the fact that cloud providers just have a higher cost basis for the more premium/general product.
It is just as "vibe-ish" as vector search and notably does require chunking (document chunks are fed to the indexer to build the table of contents). That said, I don't find vector search any less "vibey". While "mathematical similarity" is a structured operation, the "conversion to high-dimensional vectors" part is predicated on the encoder, which can be trained towards any objective.
> scaling will become problematic as the doc structure approaches the context limit of the LLM doing the retrieval
IIUC, retrieval is based on traversing a tree structure, so only the root nodes have to fit in the context window. I find that kinda cool about this approach.
It doesn't look like it's just root nodes from the structure, it appears to be the entire structure including a summary and excluding the text content itself:
{json.dumps(tree_without_text, indent=2)}
The end result is that a pre-summarized digest is input in each prompt, the LLM selects whatever it decides on.
The pageIndex value add here is ostensibly the creation of that summary structure, but this too is done with LLM assistance. I've been through the code now, and what I see is essentially JSON creation and parsing during the index process that has LLM prompts as the creation engine for all of that as well.
Yes, it is technically vectorless-RAG, but it gets there completely and totally with iterative and recursive calls to an LLM on all sides.
Looking through the rest of their code & API, the API exists to do these things:
1: Create your ToC using unsupervised[1] LLM calls.
2: Serve your ToC to an LLM when searching or querying your doc base
3: Be your document store to return hits from #2
[1] Unsupervised in the ML sense, not as a value/quality judgement.
That’s because every business is “scaled” to the point that the edge employees —- ie the people who interact with paying customers —- don’t own anything, and are 12 levels of management away from anyone who does.
My grandparents owned a grocery store. Their name was on the sign. If you brought home spoiled meat, that was their name and you as a member of their community that were put out.
When my mom brings home spoiled meat from Stop & Shop, she goes back there not just to exchange it, but to complain to someone about how it messed up her barbecue plans, etc. And I’m like seriously, why would anyone working at Stop & Shop give a rat’s ass about your family gathering? Stop & Shop is owned by a Dutch multinational “food retail” company.
But that’s not the capitalism she grew up with. She actually thinks capitalism is great because it allowed her parents to come over on a boat as teenagers and make lives for themselves, and have extra to send back home. But she hates it when she calls her cable company and ends up chatting with a girl in Singapore. Go figure.
> the edge employees —- ie the people who interact with paying customers —- don’t own anything, and are 12 levels of management away from anyone who does.
Bingo. I found the breakdown in terms of the owner/renter/maintainer classes [0] very useful.
When the owner/renter/maintainer of a business/service/etc are the same person/community, incentives are aligned and quality tends to ensue.
When those 3 roles are clearly delineated and separated, no one gives a shit and owners care about maximizing their profit, maintainers care about getting the job done asap regardless of whether the maintenance will hold in the long term or not, and renters are left out to dry.
[0]: I first encountered it here, not sure if he got it from somewhere else.
The worst hardware store in town is a little locally owned one where the owner is often not only in the store but working the checkout. They really push the locally owned angle, the place is neatly kept and folksey, but just try to return anything and they'll give you the third degree. And if you've lost the receipt absolutely forget it.
Who doesn't hassle customers about returning stuff? Lowes.
This is amusingly the main argument at the cornerstone of most leftist theory.
Capitalism works great as an improvement from feudalism and mercantilism however it starts to majorly break down as a system once the capital owning class cements itself as only needing to invest their capital and manage assets to maintain perpetual dominance. From there they slowly accrue capital and the rift between the working classes and the capital owning classes spreads further and further until the two are effectively completely divorced with the working classes providing 100% of the labor and the capital owning classes consuming 100% of the profits.
And the sign that this decay has reached the point of no return without major social upheaval is the death of the petit bourgeois/petite bourgeoisie, i.e. the end of the self employed shop owners and family businesses. This is one thing people famously get wrong about Marx. His view was that under capitalism the petite bourgeoisie will always eventually be cannibalised by the haute and grande bourgeoisie despite generally siding with them politically (ergo acting against their long term interests). This of course contrasts with the view popular with the state socialists (who misguidedly view the petite bourgeoisie as a threat to and toxic element of capitalism).
And so now we stand at the precipice with the widespread death of the canary in the coal mine that is the small business owner and the question that remains is where do we go from here?
But this divide is farcical. People like Musk/Bezos/etc don't make their money from literal profits, but from the stock price going up, which is driven by speculation. In particular the total valuation of the stock market is worth more than literally all money in existence. And neither Amazon nor Tesla pay dividends, so you can't even go that route. And the owners rarely just sit around letting the money come in, but quite often are obsessive work-a-holics.
I'm very antagonistic towards people like the Waltons who, themselves, have mostly contributed absolutely nothing whatsoever to society and are just coasting off daddy's success - being born to tens of billions of dollars and then dying with your biggest accomplishment being born to tens of billions of dollars is just so many degrees of pathetic. They fit quite closely to what you're describing (and WalMart does pay dividends), but they're a vanishingly small percent of the ultra-wealthy.
Musk had a video game system installed in his DOGE office. I've had that kind of 'workaholic' boss. It's that they have no life, so make work their life, not that they are so good at 'working'.
Here's a steelman for some brand of leftism (I don't ascribe to any label, though I'm an alleged market socialist)
You can buy votes, even if it's banned, by buying up and controlling the media.
Therefore money and political power can be exchanged.
The existence of billionaires - People who have as much money (and therefore, as much political power) as ten hundred millionaires - Therefore represents a dangerous accumulation of power.
When we look at the market and capitalism, we aren't seeing a fun little game where some speedrunner gets a high score and there are no consequences. We are seeing an incentive landscape trying to reform the aristocracy. We are seeing kings arise from first principles.
This should be stopped.
One nonviolent way to stop this is to fund just massive welfare programs, close all tax loopholes, all offshore tax havens, and give poor people money, which is the most American franchisement you can have.
Implementation is left as a simple exercise for the reader
This is true is all systems. People will never be equal in society, because the things that need to be done vary radically in difficulty and the number of people realistically capable of doing them - and those close to the top will always be 'more equal' than those who are doing basic labor. I'm also sidestepping the issue that's probably inescapable in practice - hierarchy. And historically social economic systems have created systems where it's even more difficult to transition between top and bottom, than it is in capitalist systems.
I do not think your solutions are viable. Giving people money is going to simply drive mass inflation, because you end up massively increasing the amount of money in circulation, but keep the same amount of products. Okay, so then the typical response is well then we just add price controls. And now you end up in a scenario where you have empty shelves because supply no longer meets demand, but also you likely have declining production because the things producers are producing become worth less in real terms, often to the point of them being unable to continue profitably producing them.
I offered some solutions that I think are more viable here. [1]
> This is true is all systems. People will never be equal in society, because the things that need to be done vary radically in difficulty and the number of people realistically capable of doing them - and those close to the top will always be 'more equal' than those who are doing basic labor. I'm also sidestepping the issue that's probably inescapable in practice - hierarchy. And historically social economic systems have created systems where it's even more difficult to transition between top and bottom, than it is in capitalist systems.
This is called "capitalist realism".
The problem of capitalism isn't that "some people are better at doing things". The problem of capitalism is that anything that exists or can be imagined can be designated as private property and any claim to this property is enforced with the full monopoly of violence of the state.
The problem of modern capitalism is that we've expanded the concept of private property to the point where the vast majority of profits generated are not tied to actual sales of products any more but come from the finance industry - essentially a system of speculative gambling multiple layers of abstraction removed from even the notion of actually "running a business".
And it's not just the "evil bankers" or investors. Even retirement is nowadays based on the finance market. We gradually replaced relying on the community to take care of its elders with relying on your own family to take care of you as an elder to having the government set some of your wages aside to pay for taking care of you as elder to having your company set some of your wages aside to having you invest money in the finance market.
And with everyone having to participate in the finance market despite only receiving a minute fraction of its profits, the interests of the finance industry also shape the nature of the real industry of service and production, driving up deregulation, encouraging short-term growth over long-term sustainability, pump and dump schemes, lobbying against labor protections, etc.
And as any of the Georgists here on HN will tell you: of course this also means that sales (i.e. transfer of property) have been displaced by rent-seeking because rent-seeking is more scalable.
None of this had to necessarily follow from "some people are better at doing some things than others". Of course a lot of this logically follows from the existence of a class of people who hold power over others continuously wanting to maintain and extend that power out of a persistent fear of losing it and ending up on the other side of the equation. But in order for this to work we had to have a culture that would enable this. And the myth of those at the top having gotten there (implying they all started wherever you did as a recipient of this myth) simply by being better at doing something rather than by having literally an entire society provide them a stepladder and handing them the reins, this myth has been reinforcing this culture of enablement for tens of centuries.
I mostly agree, but I'd argue that this is largely because of funny money. Check out this great site. [1] The event it's alluding to is the end of Bretton Woods, which is the point that the government completely unrestricted in their ability to 'print money'. In an economy it may or may not be true that money trickles down, but it's indisputable that it gushes upward. And so each time the government dumps trillions of dollars into the economy, that money makes its way straight to the top in very rapid fashion.
Next thing you know you have people and companies that literally have more money than they know what to do with. And then government and industry become increasingly incestuous as politicians filter money to various companies while in office, and then those companies not only stuff their election coffers full of money, but then have cushy 7+ figure 'advisory' roles for these politicians, or their inner circle, once they leave office - sometimes not even waiting for that. And then the government ends up printing endless amounts of money to keep this businesses afloat after they come crashing down to their own incompetence, completely wrecking the natural process of progression over time. All the while the stock market continues to reach record highs even in the midst of an economy destroying epidemic simply because it's all fake and driven on endless speculation, backed by endless injections of funny money.
And then on top of all of this you have various meta-effects. For instance when you live in an economy without much inflation or deflation, it's practically impossible to lower wages simply because people won't accept that. But in an inflationary economy? Somebody might even be happy about earning 25% more than they were in 2020, when in reality that means they've actually taken a pay cut thanks to inflation. And inflation is driven by the excesses of funny money.
And an inflationary society also strongly incentivizes the hoarding of things which, in turn, drives rent seeking behavior. Your things become worth more over time, but money becomes worth less over time. So you want to accumulate as many things as you can and rent access to them. Whereas in a stable or deflationary economy, things remain a comparable cost or even become worth less over time - so there's less motivation to hoard things and more motivation to hoard money.
He started from relatively little in spite of claims from his estranged and strange father, and has built up literally species-changing industries in both rocketry and electrical vehicles. The world is a million times different, and better, because of him. And he will certainly go down in history as the Thomas Edison of this era.
I’m the farthest thing from a Marxist but the reason they see the petty bourgeoisie as a threat is that they and the comfortable middle class in general are the main bulk of the opposition to revolution and very threatened by it (understandably, and if we’re being honest, rightly so) and thus are natural anti-communists.
Of course. The issue with the common leftist stance is that it takes the wrong thing away from that. That the petite bourgeoisie are toxic is not at the root of the issue, rather it is a symptom of capitalist rot.
Petite bourgeoisie are an important component of any non-state leftist economy as they are workers who directly own the results of their labor. The focus should not be in punishing or excising these petite bourgeoisie but rather in educating them, "converting them", and folding them into the cause. They are a key component of the struggle and any movement which wholly excludes them devolves into authoritarianism and in the process throws fuel into the fire for the rise of fascism.
To borrow a quote from Trotsky[1]:
> The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie. The latter has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other. Its dissatisfaction, indignation, and despair are diverted by the fascists away from big capital and against the workers. It may be said that fascism is the act of placing the petty bourgeoisie at the disposal of its most bitter enemies. In this way, big capital ruins the middle classes and then, with the help of hired fascist demagogues, incites the despairing petty bourgeoisie against the worker.
The petite bourgeoisie at the end of their ropes inevitably turn to fascism in an attempt to survive with their status in tact. In doing so they tie the noose that the haute and grande bourgeoisie use to hang them with as they seize control of the state as a tool to reign in the worker and limit the capacity for upstarts to challenge their authority.
The alternative of course is to integrate the petite bourgeoisie and encourage them to embrace their place among the worker class rather than ostracise them for their adjacency to and overlap with the managerial class.
I don't think they can be "converted" for so the same reasons they regularly decide to side against their own long term interests. They don't want to see themselves as workers. They've been raised in a society that tells them "worker" is the lowest rung and no small part of them started a business in large part for the status of being an "owner"
> But she hates it when she calls her cable company and ends up chatting with a girl in Singapore.
Singapore? What cable company? I am curious. Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world. I cannot believe they have a foreign call center in Singapore, except for wealth management. Did you mean the Philippines?
Costco and Chick-fil-A are scaled but they pay and train their employees to give good service and the scale also provides lower prices. We don't need to retvrn to 1950s local small business.
Most developing countries are capitalistic and still have a system where when you go into a shop and talk to somebody, it's often the person who owns that shop. It's part of the many reasons I'm a huge fan of decentralization in basically everything. It's absolutely wonderful.
I don't think capitalism inherently trends towards corporatism. Very few companies can grow massively on their own merit. It's often a mixture of anti-competitive behavior and mergers/acquisitions. So one obvious thing is to actually prevent mergers/acquisitions unless there is a provable and immediate benefit to customers, and split up companies if that benefit can be shown, to a civil law standard, to have not played out at any point over the next let's say 20 years. And obviously crack down hard on anti-competitive behavior with criminal consequences for executives and board members.
Boom, corporatism solved. But you need to solve it before it happens because otherwise you end up in a scenario where corporations will eventually also come to own politicians.
This also varies significantly, but I think supports the idea that the farther you are from ownership, the more service is equated to demeaning one's self for a salary that remains unchanged if you help someone or not.
If the shop isn't ran and staffed by the owner and family, it quickly devolves to the point that it's a challenge to throw money at anyone, because the money doesn't go to the person you're talking to. Any store with more than 5 employees is a jobs program for friends and family and you're inconveniencing someone's chit-chat or doomscrolling to bother them to ask a question.
Capital buys political power thus it leads to corporatism. The state doesn't exist to regulate capital, it exists to facilitate it. So a state that acts how you describe will just be bought and killed by capital.
> why would anyone working at Stop & Shop give a rat’s ass about your family gathering?
That's pretty much the split between the generations. Boomers want the appearance of giving a rat’s ass, but Millennials and younger have been the apathetic employee and don't expect otherwise.
Well, millenials and younger saw their parents kill themselves at the job when giving a rat's ass, and still saw them get laid off/their bodies destroyed by the toll of a lifetime of manual work/a whole life of hustle leading to a meager retirement, and they realized none of it was worth it.
Genuinely this. Every time an older employee gives me a "And thank you for shopping at <business>" I just feel sad for
them. The company neither pays them enough nor gives even a single fuck to warrant that kind of behavior.
I approach customer service as the total opposite from the OP. I treat anyone I interact with like they're doing me a favor by providing me service—and honestly, they are. I mean they're working this absolutely thankless job that I think I would choose the mines before considering, and they owe their employer nothing other than the bare fucking minimum. We're all just trying to get by and they're in the trenches.
The company with the lowest median pay, Aptiv, I had to look up, and what a darling of a company this is:
- guilty of systemic accounting fraud from 1999-2004
- manufactured a (allegedly known-to-be) faulty ignition switch that led to the deaths of 124 people and injured 275 others
- currently forcing 20,000 former employees to fight a decades-long legal battle for their earned pension benefits
- gleefully dumps massive quantities of carcinogens and poisons into the environment, including: lead compounds, chromium compounds, sulfuric and hydrochloride acid (lol), and glycol ethers
Simply a masterclass in corporate irresponsibility, exactly why their CEO is so well comped.
So if I understand this correctly, this works on a single large document whose size exceeds what you can or want to put into a single context frame for answering a question? It first "indexes" the document by feeding successive "proto-chunks" to an LLM, along with an accumulator, which is like a running table of contents into the document with "sections" that the indexer LLM decides on and summarizes, until the table of contents is complete. (What we're calling "sections" here - these are still "chunks", they're just not a fixed size and are decided on by the indexer at build time?)
Then for the retrieval stage, it presents the table of contents to a "retriever" LLM, which decides which sections are relevant to the question based on the summaries the indexer LLM created. Then for the answer generation stage, it just presents those relevant sections along with the question.
That's pretty clever - does it work with a corpus of documents as well, or just a single large document? Does the "indexer" know the question ahead of time, or is the creation of sections and section summarization supposed to be question-agnostic? What if your table of contents gets too big? Seems like then it just becomes normal RAG, where you have to store the summaries and document-chunk pointers in some vector or lexical database?
Exactly — thanks for the insightful comments! The goal is to generate an “LLM-friendly table of contents” for retrieval, rather than relying on vector-based semantic search. We think it’s closer to how humans approach information retrieval. The table of contents also naturally produces semantically coherent sections instead of arbitrary fixed-size chunks.
- Corpus of documents: Yes, this approach can generalize. For multiple documents, you can first filter by metadata or document-level summaries, and then build indexes per document. The key is that the metadata (or doc-level summaries) helps distinguish and route queries across documents. We have some examples here: https://docs.pageindex.ai/doc-search
- Question-agnostic indexing: The indexer does not know the question in advance. It builds the tree index once, and that structure can then be stored in a standard SQL database and reused at query time. In practice, we store the tree structure in JSON, and also keep (node_id, node_text) in a separate table. When we get the node_id from the LLM, we look up the corresponding node_text to form the context. There is no need for Vector DBs.
- Handling large tables of contents: If the TOC gets too large, you can traverse the tree hierarchically — starting from the top level and drilling down only into relevant branches. That’s why we use a tree structure rather than just a flat list of sections. This is what makes it different from traditional RAG with flat chunking. In spirit, it’s closer to a search-over-tree approach, somewhat like how AlphaGo handled large search spaces.
Really appreciate the thoughtful questions again! We’re actually preparing some upcoming notebooks that will address them in more detail— stay tuned!
> Most of California’s single-family house investors are “mom and pop” types, according to BatchData.
> Small-fry owners, with up to five properties nationwide, control 91% of California investment houses.
> The rest is divvied up this way: Owners of six to 10 houses control 4% of California investment houses. Investors with 11 to 50 houses own 3% of this Golden State housing group. And 51 or more? Only 2% of investment houses.
I’m one of those mom and pop owners. The decent ROI on renting out my starter home financed me adding an ADU to the lot, which I also rent out.
I’ve owned the house long enough that I’ve had several tenants churn out when they buy their own houses.
This doesn’t feel like a policy failure, IMO. Renters have the option to live in a free standing home while they save for a down payment, and “investors” have an incentive to increase density/add to the housing stock.
Not everyone is at a point in their life where it makes sense to own a home. It feels weird making a judgement that these people should be required to live in apartments.
I don’t have a problem with it. I pointed it out because it seems to show Blackstone hasn’t bought up all the houses like people think.
People should rent what they can afford and need. Some people need the house with all its space, some only need an apartment.
The big thing is people shouldn’t be spending 50% of their monthly income on rent. It doesn’t help them, their family, or you. Likely, eventually, they’ll have trouble paying, you’ll have to evict them, their lives will be disrupted, their families lives will be disrupted, and you’ll have to spend time evicting them and
finding a new tenant else you’re not making money.
Agreed. I look for tenants that aren’t spending more than a third on rent. At $1300/month, that puts it right on median household income of $48k for the area (this is in rural northern CA).
I have no interest in ever evicting anyone, it sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved. I like my tenants, and my rents go up rarely and below market rate/inflation.
You're completely off the mark on this, and speaking like a landlord.
> This doesn’t feel like a policy failure, IMO. Renters have the option to live in a free standing home while they save for a down payment, and “investors” have an incentive to increase density/add to the housing stock.
First, when you have a renter, your payment is the "mortgage + tax liability + chunk of profit usually 25-50%"
Nobody, except for IT can save in predatory environment like that, no matter how much you wish it so.
And you're double-dipping by having THEM pay your mortgage and handsome profit on top. And for what? A "let them eat cake" comment. Im sure someone paying 50% or more their income can 'save for a mortgage'.
Knowing this scam, by the time they save up 50k, the bank will demand 100k down. But landlords can just capitalize on existing equity. Its a scam, through and through, that punishes renters.
We do need residences. And they're simple to build. They're called "rent controlled apartments". But 'ewww socialism' rears its ugly head.
> "mortgage + tax liability + chunk of profit usually 25-50%"
25-50% is absurdly false.
We own a second home which we've rented out for years (wasn't the original intention, but anyway ...). The rent covers mortgage, taxes, and upkeep. Profit is minimal, less than 10%. Once you factor in eventual renovations, like replacing the roof, floors, etc., there is no profit at all, or very little.
Go read the briefs from the Realpage lawsuit, and maybe you won't consider me much the fool.
I keep getting anecdotes as some sort of glorious rebuttals. No matter. When the people are at their last end and the guillotines come, I will not shed a tear.
Please point me to the brief documenting that those landlords are making 25 - 50% profit.
And I see you showed your true colors with your second comment. I'm sure if the revolution you're praying for actually comes, you'll definitely be in the vanguard!
irrelevant fun fact: people think that the vast majority of those who were visited by Mme La Guillotine during the French Revolution were nobles. In fact, the vast majority, ~85%, were from the "third estate" (commoners, which also excluded clergy).
> your payment is the "mortgage + tax liability + chunk of profit usually 25-50%"
You would have to be yielding 10%+ on your rental to get anything near that. In my part of the world - rent is cheaper than the interest the mortgage would bear.
> First, when you have a renter, your payment is the "mortgage + tax liability + chunk of profit usually 25-50%"
You think landlords make 25 - 50% profit on a SFH rental unit? You're so comically wrong that there's no point in discussing the rest of this post (which is basically a list of every failed housing policy in existence).
Allow builders to build more units. It's that simple, which is part of the problem for some people.
Or in other words, small independent landlords (using that arbitrary 5-house cutoff) own 17.29% of Caliornia houses, and other landlords own 1.71% of California houses.
It would seem but as someone else pointed out it's likely just houses and not multifamily homes. It's not really clear from the web site but it seems like it's just single family homes.
It's a pretty weird statistic because it ignores the denser forms of housing that are also owned by investors. So while 45% of Californians live in homes they don't own, "only 19% of homes are owned by investors" (the article repeatedly mixes the terms "home" and "house")
High property tax rates means low ROI. You can be easily paying 2%+ market value in property tax in those northeastern states.
California incentivizes holding onto real estate with prop 13, which caps property tax increases to 2% per year for the entire time you or your beneficiaries own it. There are people paying less than $10k per year property tax on $3M+ properties, and they can rent for $7k+ per month.
Seeing Hawaii, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming at the top makes me wonder if their definition of "investor-owned" is actually picking up vacation houses/second homes? Just those are all small states with significant vacation housing markets, wonder if that is driving things here.
The article does state they were included, but is it "obviously" true that they should be? Who is more of an "investor", someone who purchases a primary residence to build equity or someone who purchases a second home to vacation in, spending large amounts of money to maintain it and allowing it to sit empty for long periods of time?
In what sense? An investor seeks a return on their investment. The former achieves this. The latter spends money for pleasure. I suppose you could argue that they are an investor seeking non-monetary return, but in that sense everyone is equally an investor, just with different goals.
Pretty amazing this all started as MLB Advanced Media more than 20 years ago streaming baseball games on the internet before YouTube existed! When I joined, they were streaming NHL, MLS, WWE, HBO, and many others. Then they spun off and sold to Disney and became Disney+. I wonder if any lines of code from those very early days still get executed.
Regardless, this is terrible for sports fans. Disney will chop this up into “baskets” with one watchable thing padded with lots of other unwatchable-to-mildly-interesting stuff (college hockey from a single camera angle anyone?). Then, when you want to watch some event, you’ll open your ESPN Premium +- whatever app, get excited when you see the event on the home screen, only to be upsold to start your free trial of ESPN NFL++ Hulu Fans Only Bundle. The only solution is to boycott the whole damn thing, which is what I am doing, and I love having the extra cash for tickets to local minor league games, etc.
The system’s brightness decreases when the companion star swings around behind Betelgeuse. It also dips when Betelgeuse goes behind the companion star but much less so because Betelgeuse is so much larger.
Learning LISP, Fortran, APL, Perl, or really any language that is different from what you’re used to, will also do this for you.