Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
They haven't raised rents because they are in competition with other landlords. If all landlords' costs go up (e.g. taxes) then all landlords will raise rents to maintain the same previously optimal profit margin they were extracting.

To put it another way, why not raise taxes to $1M/sq.ft.? $1B/sq.ft.? If if were true that it wouldn't be passed on to tenants then you've found the magic money tree.

Comment · 1 month ago
I think this is actually the problem with Georgism. The world has plenty of dirt. Locations are in short supply. Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations, which is an important economic activity. For example, most of London's suburbia was created by the building of the metropolitan railways around 100-150 years ago. Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations, and the railway companies made back the money they spent to build the railways by selling these new Locations for home building (now known as Metroland).

Although we don't have LVT in the UK, it interesting that we have another restriction on the creation of Locations: Planning laws in the UK are extremely hard and expensive to navigate and get permission to build pretty much anything, so the creation of new Locations is pretty much impossible. And that doesn't seem to be a good thing.

Comment · 1 month ago
> Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.

This is simply not true in the same way that consumers are not always rational and always pay the exact correct price.

Landlords regularly charge less than full market rate, for example when they have a good tenant, as the costs of a new tenancy and the risk of a void are higher than the incremental marginal rent (once taxed at the landlord's marginal rate) is worth to that landlord. Unlike what most people seem to assume, being a landlord is not a zero-labour job. Things that require additional labour on the part of the landlord have to be worth it.

The thing that changes this calculation is an increase in costs. You are right that landlords are not charities, so they will generally avoid a loss. The primary costs for most landlords are mortgage interest and taxes. Increase the taxes and some of these landlords will now be underwater and will increase prices towards highest market rate as a result.

Comment · 1 month ago
It also clouds disk usage stats, as a big chunk of your root device is taken up by the swap file. I'd rather look at `df /` and see the size of my OS installation without anything else.

Partition resizing is not exactly difficult, and I can count the number of times I've ever actually had to resize a swap partition in the last 30 years on the fingers of one foot.

Comment · 3 months ago
I guess the name is intending to evoke the "batteries included" metaphor, but it seems pretty terrible to me.

If we're sticking with the crates/cargo metaphor, surely this should be called a "pallet".

Comment · 6 months ago
NIMBYism and BANANAs are certainly a problem, but this is the planning departments themselves acting capriciously , failing to even apply the law correctly, or having extremely onerous requirements. This applies to individual householders as well as large infrastructure projects. Just look at the lower thames crossing, where we spent £1.2 BILLION pounds of taxpayers money on pre-construction costs and compare that with the original Dartford tunnels and bridge which cost £191M TOTAL in 1990. It's just bonkers.
Comment · 6 months ago
Great site. This data should really be more accessible. Planning in the UK is a total crapshoot, subject to the whims of the planning authorities. In our case, a simple rear extension and dormer loft conversion, similar to hundreds of thousands across the country, we ended up having to appeal which added 2 years and tens of thousands of pounds in costs to our extension project. Our area shows up as a high refusal area, which tracks.

It would be good to add appeal data in (also a public gateway) to show which councils are just being unreasonable.

I personally think the planning regulations in this country are the cause of many ills, including the housing shortage. It just costs so much to get through planning these days, it is often just not worth it. Data like this could help us get that changed.

Comment · 6 months ago
I wrote streampager a few years ago to scratch a similar itch. It works well enough for my own uses (and is/was used in library form as the built-in pager for sapling and jj).

I think it still needs some work for more general use which I unfortunately don't have time for at the moment.

Comment · 7 months ago
I don't believe demand for labour has increased. We used to force children as young as 6 to enter the labour force, and people used to work 6.5 days per week. Demand for labour has been in free fall since the 1970, evidenced by stagnant wages in most of the developed world. Furthermore capital is accumulating at the top as the capital owners use their position to extract it from the people below them. AI will only accelerate this. We are in for some interesting times for sure.
Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
The visual IDEs of the 90s (MSVC, Borland Delphi, heck even MS Visual Basic) were way more tightly integrated, performant and usable than anything we have today, despite running on hardware with a fraction of the power. It seems so bizarre how much we've regressed.
Comment · 10 months ago
Or DNS.

I think the article is just nonsense.

Comment · 10 months ago
The love for diesel came from a catastrophic misunderstanding and the resulting belief that CO2 must be reduced at all costs. Diesel engines of the past produced slightly less CO2 per km than petrol engines in exchange for much worse overall emissions. The fact that they were slightly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption helped with the sales pitch, too.
Comment · 2 years ago
I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.
Comment · 3 years ago
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class in two and pit them against each other. If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.

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