Zellij instead of tmux (not necessarily better, but it's easier to use)
Xonsh instead of bash (because you already know Python, why learn a new horrible language?)
bat instead of cat (syntax highlights and other nice things)
exa instead of ls (just nicer)
neovim instead of vim (just better)
helix instead of neovim (just tested it, seems promising though)
nix instead of your normal package manager (it works on Mac, and essentially every Linux dist. And it's got superpowers with devshells and home-manager to bring your configuration with you everywhere)
rmtrash instead of rm (because you haven't configured btrfs snapshots yet)
starship instead of your current prompt (is fast and displays a lot of useful information in a compact way, very customizable)
mcfly instead of your current ctrl+r (search history in a nice ncurses tui)
dogdns instead of dig (nicer colors, doesn't display useless information)
amp, kakoune (more alternative text editors)
ripgrep instead of grep (it's just better yo)
htop instead of top (displays stuff nicer)
gitui/lazygit instead of git cli (at least for staging, nice with file, hunk and line staging when you have ADHD)
gron + ripgrep instead of jq when searching through JSON in the shell (so much easier)
> something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.
There seems to be a thing that some people hate "fedoras". I think it's to do with the "Fedora guy" meme. The hat Jerry Messing appears in is not a fedora; it's a trilby.
A trilby is a hat with a quite narrow brim, and stiffened; it's often woven and patterned. It can be made of just about anything (such as leather). You can't really mess with the brim; it's flipped up at the back and down at the front, and it stays that way.
A fedora is a soft felt hat with a wide brim. The hats worn by both the cops and the robbers in 30's gangster movies are all fedoras. Felt hats are not woven; they're felted, and that means they have to be made of wool or fur (I guess a panama fedora is an exception, but then I think a panama fedora is just a panama hat that is the same shape as a real fedora).
Where I come from, a trilby is associated with racecourse bookies and the criminal fraternity, as well as tacky seaside "kiss-me-quick" hats, made of something like cardboard. Fedoras, on the contrary, are stylish.
They're also very functional. They shed rain like an umbrella, without dumping it down your neck. The only thing wrong with them is that they make a good aerofoil - you have to "hold onto your hats" if it's windy.
"In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."
There is a great Jewish joke about markets: Shlomo was returning from Antwerp, when he met Moishe: "Look at this bag of diamonds I've bought there! only 1000 florins, it's easily worth double that!"
"Wow, that's a hell of a bargain, how much do you want for it? 2000?" "deal!".
Shlomo went home. He told his wife Sarah about his daily business. "So Moishe bought this bag for double the price without bargaining? He must know it's worth much more than that, you moron! Buy it back tomorrow!"
The next day, Shlomo met Moishe : "listen, I'll take back the bag of diamonds. 3000 florins?" "deal!"
That night, Moishe told the story to his wife Debrah. "Imbecile! can't you see you've been gamed? You're now 1000 florins poorer than yesterday, and what do you have?"
The next day, Moishe met Shlomo: "listen, I've think about it, I want to buy back the diamonds. 4000?" "deal!"
So this little back and forth game goes on for a week, when someday, Shlomo said to Moishe: "Listen, I'd like to buy the diamonds back after all..."
"Too late, I've sold the bag yesterday to a merchant from Hamburg!"
"What? You've sold a stranger a bag of diamonds that was making us 1000 florins A DAY?"
A bit naive to assume there isn't quite a bit of centralized control of media in the West. Not only are the media largely owned by a scant few large conglomerates - the government itself also gets routinely involved in controlling the narrative.
But when 13 was passed it wasn't about grandma. Jerry Brown put together 1978 Prop 8 for that. Howard Jarvis convinced voters that the state was taxing their money away for no reason and demanded big cuts as a vengeful "revolt".
It's gross down to the core. Look at the kind of things Jarvis was saying:
> The public school system is second to none in waste, incompetence, and zero results. I think the public school system is a cancer on this society. The only difference between the public schools and the Mafia is that the public schools steal more money.
There could be a lot of reasons 'why' but the biggest reason for me is that land/location value usually has nothing to do with the actions of the individual owners. There exists cheap/marginal land that can be had for almost nothing because it either has nothing or is near nothing while there also exists land which is rich in minerals, fertile virgin* cropland or forest, or other natural resources or is is valuable urban land which happens to be located near well paying jobs, good schools, good food, entertainment, accessible open space, or has really good weather or views. As the physical space of varying quality along all these different dimensions is in fixed in supply its price is determined by demand. Oxygen in the air is another "essential requirement to live" but fortunately it cannot be enclosed as easily as land can. Water is already somewhere in between. Land is differentiated from housing, food, and other essentials because there is no work required to produce and distribute it. It just exists and those who happen to own valuable locations are unjustly able to take the economic rent which is the common right of everyone. For a lot of things, you're right, it's often best to leave the production and allocation up to market forces and we end up with an abundance of food and other goods. But there is no real market for land and other natural opportunities because it's not something that can even be produced in the first place.**
Questions to consider:
- When someone claims a house costs more because the weather is mild and temperate (like coastal California), who should be paid for the good weather? Why pay the previous owner?
- When someone claims a house costs more because the local schools are really good, why not pay the municipality more for the schools? Aren't you paying twice by first paying local taxes that fund the schools and then paying the previous owner?
- When someone claims a house costs more because it is on a hillside with a panoramic view of mountains, bridges, bodies of water, and city skylines, who should you pay for the natural topography and shining lights? Why pay the previous owner?
- When someone claims a house costs more because it is near a lot of high paying jobs or is close to shopping, doesn't it seem like a significant amount of profits and wages of the businesses and employees (particularly the least profitable businesses and least paid employees) are being siphoned off to land owners?
- When someone claims a house costs more because it is close to a quality transit station/stop (and other public services) doesn't it seem like you are paying twice to access those services? Once as a fare or usage fee and again as rent or payment to the previous owner?
* land that has never been farmed before or forest that hasn't been logged before as sustainable soil management and forestry do in fact carry a long-term cost for production. Still, there is location value as it relates to climate conditions, access to water, and access to markets for labor, processing, and distribution.
** even landfill (common in parts of the sf bay area, manhattan, and boston) are only done because the /location/ is so valuable that it is worth the cost of filling in with soil moved in from elsewhere. It's less common today not only because of higher costs of dredging and filling but because we also tend to be more aware of the cost of environmental externalities.
Be sure to carefully read the description of the graph. Every time I link this, someone assumes that the green & red indicates are the yearly returns, but the entire point of this graph is that it is cumulative. If it is red 20-30 years into the line, that means that money put it at the beginning had a negative cumulative return after 20-30 years, not that the 20th or 30th year was negative. Also observe the graph is inflation adjusted.
Yes, it's true. The idea that you can just stick your money in the stock market and see 7% returns every year is somewhere between "mistaken" and "a lie". It is not a coincidence that this idea has arisen during a time of loose monetary policy and a stock market that is being inflated by it over the course of a couple of decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, this would have been considered risible, and indeed, people did not generally value stock equities. (See the chart for why they may have felt that way.)
It is not an even remotely accurate model of the stock market to think of it as a 7% return that you can casually compound over time. Anyone who speaks of that model or uses that model doesn't know what they are doing. Your debt certainly compounds over time, but your assets can't be modeled as doing that.
A couple of further observations:
Part of the reason why the stock market can offer 7-10% gains in a year, when the economy does not offer such gains in general, is precisely that "room" is made for those gains by the years in which it loses big.
This is also part of why we have a pension fund crises, because even in the relatively friendly stock market of the past couple of decades, even these so-called professionals would blindly use a high-single-digit return estimate per year, and even in the past few years, that has been an inadequate model. The bailout they're going to need if the stock market actually crashes (popping the "Everything Bubble"?) will be literally unaffordable. (Not paying in sufficiently is also a problem, but that is also itself a consequence of absurdly optimistic models being generally accepted.)
It's been a massive windfall to people who have been homeowners for 40 years in California. High rents due to the fact that you're not allowed to build new housing, high property taxes paid by new residents, while old residents pay nothing, high income and sales taxes to paper over the gap in the budget left by the lack of property tax paid by longtime residents.
The whole system has been optimized to milk as much money as possible from newcomers. The people in power in California even scapegoated the newcomers for a long time, and pretended that they were unwanted. Now that the system has finally become unsustainable, we get these ridiculous takes about how somebody "extracted wealth" from California.
There's an old Irish saying that goes "A man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man." If you have a drinking problem, you just need to avoid drinking period.
I have some close friends that have drinking problems and what I learned from their experiences:
1. If you're an alcoholic and think you can handle a single drink, you're lying to yourself.
2. It's honestly not worth it. Life is better than being stuck in a multi day binger. The physically effects are taxing on the body.
3. You'll always have those urges and that feeling of wanting to drink isn't as bad as the act of actually drinking and the damage the follows.
If you have those urges, attend AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and refresh yourself on why you don't drink. I remember going out to dinner with a friend and the waiter knew my buddy. During the conversation he asked would I like something to drink. When I said no, he asked if I was a "friend of Bob". At first I had no clue what that meant and asked who was Bob. Later I found out he was referring to the founder of AA.
I personally don't drink around those that battle with drinking. I understand the struggle.
Stay sober. Reading about Tristan and it reminds me of all those people I lost as a child. I watched so many friends OD to heroin and other drugs.
You solve this easily by assessing value and buying the land rights for a period of time - say 7 years.
So basically you lock down the price in an auction once every 7 years giving you enough predictability and time to justify your investment.
This is how these groups operate in present day already
1. businesses renting space in cities - they lock down rent for say 10 years
2. individual apartment renters - price is usually locked down for 1 year
3. domain name system - you lock down piece of land in "string space" for a year
4. electromagnetic spectrum auctions (LTE, 5g spectrum bands for telephone companies) every several years usually when new technology is deployed
5. technology patents locked down for 20 years
6. Government LAND to LANDOWNERS - locked down once, with expiration time at infinity and passable down through generations
It helps to see what Georgists actually want to achieve with LVT - proper auction mechanism for something everybody needs and there is scarcity of it - land.
For political reasons they attack it from the position of tax, not from the position of an auction. Which makes it a bit convoluted and confusing unfortunately.
If you take this a few more steps, what happens is that those employees that can work more remotely without significantly decreasing productivity will leave, because of the savings. Which will decrease land prices from those that truly benefit from co-locating, increasing their profits.
A LVT will generally greatly decrease the concentration of wealth. The massive concentration of wealth in the Bay Area economy comes mostly from land owners extracting an inordinate amount of wages, something far greater than the 30% that is typically considered livable. Tech takes from others far less than the landowners take from laborers.
Tech is flashy and gets all the attention these days, but it's not the big story when it comes to exploitive capitalism in the Bay Area. What's really driving poverty and homelessness and evictions are the housing austerity imposed by wealthy landlords and landowners and homeowners to maximize their financial gains.
The only reason real estate works as an investment vehicle for people is because it's a slow market.
The inefficient pricing and the slowly updating pricing allows for the HIGHEST amount of leverage to work for people.
In any other market, unsophisticated investors would have been margin called overnight. Instead they get to sit for years on slowly moving prices, and use those years to continue boosting their collateral as if nothing happened.
So you can't expect a significant drop in home prices just yet. But definitely pay attention to foreclosure auctions. The court houses are not even processing these yet until the economy turns back on in the local municipality. You're too early, but wait for it.
For now we are all trying to quantify just how leveraged people were. Many people don't think there were that many AirBnB speculators to affect the housing market. So every article to the contrary just helps form the picture.
For the 2008 great financial crisis, it only took 7% of mortgage holders defaulting to cause the market convulsions (as in there really weren't that many "bad" borrowers, people overwhelmingly played by the expected rules to the best of their ability). Expect that the % necessary to cause distress to banks to be bit a higher these days, due to some marginal reforms, but also watch to see how many are going to default because that could also be a much higher percent its interesting because so many more people already won't be able to pay their mortgages because the unemployment already happened first.
This fish is quite common on the markets in Tunisia. We actually avoid it in the hallucination season because it mostly causes bad trips. It tastes good.
Economists have studied this pretty extensively. What they've found is that every time a city doubles in size, its economic productivity goes up by around 5-7%[1].
This relationship seems to hold across a remarkable range environments. In the ancient times, in modern times, in the Renaissance, in American, in Europe, in Asia, in the first world, in the third world, and so on.
This is what makes bootstrapping a new city so difficult. Let's say your economic metro has 10 million people. even if you manage to coordinate 100 thousand leaving together, the new city will still have nearly 50% lower productivity than the old mega metro.
Density seems to boost productivity by making it easier to quickly spread innovations. Think about Silicon Valley. There are hundreds of tech companies in a single job market. New technologies and approaches. Employees switch companies every six months and bring the best practices to their new firms.
Take those same companies and disperse them across the continental US. Workers don't move firms because relocating is expensive, unpleasant and risky. Instead of bouncing between jobs every six months, people stay "loyal" to their local employer for decades at a time. Every time a new innovation is discovered at one firm, it takes orders of magnitude longer to diffuse across the industry.
Think of the major improvements in software engineering during our lifetime. Things like devOps, test driven development, microservices, rigorous source control, code review, open source, containerization, and the like. Silicon Valley adopted all of these practices years, if not decades, before the average IT department in Tulsa or Jacksonville.
> You’ll have to summarize any key points from the book, since I don’t own a copy.
The first few chapters of Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing describe the distinction between competitive capital (whose price signals the economy to create more) and land (which cannot be created) and thus why they should be taxed differently. I think it is mostly based on this essay by Mason Gaffney: “Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George” (http://masongaffney.org/publications/K1Neo-classical_Stratag...)
> You say that property tax is a tool to reduce inequality, but I’m not 100% sure about that. For example, I don’t even know where my property taxes go
Broadly speaking, progressive taxation is all about taxing any income that is above and beyond what the average wage-earner earns from wages and competitive capital, and using it to fund services that are used by everybody. Virtually everyone has their own labor, whereas income from ownership of natural resources and monopolies is concentrated, so taxation of income above and beyond wages and interest reduces inequality.
Increases in land rent are unearned income that are not due to the owner’s wages and do not incentivize the creation of capital, so it is fair game to tax it as part of a progressive income tax system. If we don’t tax it using property taxes, then land value increases only become a windfall to the owner, leading to greater wealth inequality.
> Further, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do if my home value doubles just because of natural reasons
The subject of this article is California’s ”severe shortage of houses.” What you are supposed to do in response to the price signal is expand the building so that more people can live on your lot.
Moving offices is really disruptive to people's lives, and causes a huge amount of turnover in your workforce. A brief excerpt from Peopleware[1]:
"The typical person being moved today is part of a two-career family. The other half of that equation is probably not being moved, so the corporate move comes down hard on the couple’s relationship at a very delicate point. It brings intolerable stress to bear on the accommodation they’re both striving to achieve to allow two full-fledged careers. That’s hitting below the belt. Modern couples won’t put up with it and they won’t forgive it. The company move might have been possible in the 1950s and 1960s. Today it is folly."
They also cite a case study of a major project at Bell Labs which was moved from New Jersey to Illinois. The authors interviewed the former manager of that project:
"I asked him what he saw as his main successes and failures as boss. “Forget the successes,” he said. “The failure was that move. You can’t believe what it cost us in turnover.” He went on to give some figures. The immediately calculable cost of the move was the number of people who quit before relocation day. Expressed as a percentage of those moved, this initial turnover was greater than the French losses in the trenches of World War I."
(FWIW, that's just one of many insights from that book - I highly recommend it.)
As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant:
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different." (The Rich Boy, 1926)
All of the information normal people--like you and me--use to price transactions like this is completely irrelevant. Rich people have access to many services and price structures that are completely different than normal people. Any guess about what it costs to make a transaction like this via normal channels is likely completely wrong (other than "free", assuming they are doing business with the bank in question).
It's always amazed me that humans - even those without much 'high tech' - can adapt to environments as diverse as the arctic, Kalahari desert, or jungles of Borneo, but god forbid the government stop mandating the precise number of parking spots places need, because no one would be able to adapt.
It depends on the city, but there's a weird entitlement in some big, dense American cities from people who feel they have an inherent right to store their car for free or very cheap on public land, when that land is in the middle of a dense city with a ton of competing uses for public land (bike lanes, sidewalks, pickup/delivery zones, street trees, bus lanes, heck even traffic lanes). In the densest cities, these also tend to be more affluent people. Oddly, though, also usually the kind of affluent people who consider themselves environmentalist and liberal. At least that's true in NYC and DC, two cities with substantial neighborhood pushback against reallocating street parking to other uses, happening in well-off neighborhoods that are full of signs promoting liberal causes (Upper West Side NYC, Dupont Circle DC, etc.).
I can see it in lower-density, car-dependent areas, where you arguably need somewhere to park, and poorer residents of apartment buildings without their own off-street parking might be impacted. But the cognitive dissonance around being an affluent liberal in Manhattan and suing to stop a bike lane [1] because you don't want to lose free street parking in Manhattan is absurd. Of course, they're still environmentalist because they support banning straws.
Depending on your ability to work remotely, I would make the "case" that you should consider Portugal.
Lisbon and Porto are super popular with ["digital nomad"] remote workers who work for international companies so earn in USD but spend [much less] in Euros for a superb lifestyle.
There's a reason @paddycosgrave moved Web Summit to Lisbon.
It's one of the cheapest cities in Europe and [unlike Barcelona] everyone speaks English. There is a good "tech scene" and a fantastic work-life-balance; surf, great food & warm/welcoming people.
A few things to consider that many people over-look:
+ Socio-Economic and Political stability.
+ General safety/security and crime levels.
+ Sanitation and healthcare availability/cost.
+ Availability/cost of healthy [organic/unprocessed] food.
+ Lifestyle to actually live in the place: is it "cheap" but a nightmare to live there?
+ Contract-law for short-term apartment/room rentals.
Portugal will exceed your expectations on all of these.
Portugal is very welcoming to US citizens, you won't have any "visa issues" the way you will in many of the [superficially] "cheaper" Asian countries.
If you want your budget to stretch much further, consider Braga. The cost of living is less than a third of SF, internet is fast and you get most of the benefits of Porto & Lisbon (or can reach those cities with a short train journey).
Note: I am [slightly] "biased", my Wife and I have recently "escaped" from London [after working there in tech for 10 years] and we are busy setting up a Co-living/Co-working House in Braga: https://github.com/dwyl/home
We will be opening at the end of this month and our target cost per month [1Gbps Internet, all bills, cleaning & gym included] is $300 (USD).
We chose Braga because it has all the "ingredients" for an awesome place for tech/creative people to escape the bigger cities and focus on their work while still having access to all the amenities great healthcare, superb organic/vegan food and good libraries/meetups/etc.
Apathy may be a huge part of it, but that doesn't negate the very real policies that are put in place to prevent people from voting:
- Extremely long poll lines, especially in underserved areas or those mostly populated by racial/ethnic minorities.
- Making people vote on a work day without federal holiday means that it's a financial obstacle, and employment risk. Again, this mostly hits the poor and underserved.
- No paper trail, and extremely hackable voter machines, not enough movement to fix them. [1]
- Voting Rights Act rollback: it was almost impossible to vote if you were Black in racist-run parts of the south (really, look at this [6]), and the protection against this got rolled back in 2013. There's been a bunch of voting law changes since [8].
- ID requirements that have been researched thoroughly and demonstrated to do almost nothing to reduce fraud but virtually always lower turnout, usually to minority populations. [7]
Aside from the topic of voter turnout itself, there are many other ways the democratic ideal is attacked by policy, such as gerrymandering[2], or the fact that we often refer to political parties as "half the country" when in reality only ~26% of the electorate voted for the current president[3], it was a single-digit percentage that voted for each of the eventual candidates in the primaries[4], and even "the electorate" is a lot smaller than our adult working population because felons aren't allowed to vote and we imprison more adults (mostly from poor and underserved populations) than any other industrialized nation. [5]
All this to say, yes, there's a lot of understandable apathy in our system, and we shouldn't judge their lack of desire to vote as some kind of moral failing. But there are many people who would love to participate in a democratic process but there are many concrete (and solvable) factors (with evidence and history beyond "an assumption") preventing participation, and the end result almost always favors a small group of people who don't represent the general population and already have a lot of power.
Stuxnet changed history. Any "game of chicken" style equilibria is broken if the probability a nuclear actor's command and control drops below 100%. If there is even a 1% chance that when a Big Red Button is pushed the missiles fail to launch the game becomes unwinnable. Simulations of imperfect information in dynamic brinkmanship where both players are known to have advanced cyber capabilities results in a single dreaded endgame: general nuclear exchange.
We have moved into uncharted domains. And herein lie demons. Past Rules of Engagement universally agreed upon regarding the use of kinetic weapons no longer apply. For wiser heads to prevail in the current global climate, the voice for peace must become the loudest one.
Rules of engagement for cyberspace operations: a view from the USA
For all useful purposes, it's false. A detailed in-person survey of homeless people in King County found that 10% of them said that homeless services were part of the reason they moved to Seattle, and it's more likely that they moved from other parts of Washington than from far away.
Homelessness rates in Seattle track rising (and falling! lol) rents very closely, which is a difficult-to-explain coincidence for anyone who really believes that the cause is actually random people from all over America catching a bus to Seattle to get into a shelter.
* https://cayimby.org/its-only-a-housing-market-if-you-can-mov...
* https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
* https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/we-need-affordable-housi...
Just off the top of my head.
Edit: Wow, some of the comments here are like exhibit A for Jerusalem Demsas' piece on how housing breaks people's brains:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing... - "Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes."