That’s fine as a “second order” rebuttal, but you’re leaving out _third_ order effects which are where all the action is in terms of the unique horribleness of real estate rental.

The world is full of goods that share many of the nasty features that the real estate rental market has. For example, it’s not hard to find goods where:

- The value partially derives from the limited supply

- The limited supply is artificially limited by forces that the market cannot correct for (either because law prevents entrance of new competitors, or because would-be competitors are colluding to form a cartel that is deliberately restricting it)

For instance, taxi medallions and diamonds meet these criteria.

What makes rental housing special is other qualities:

- The vast majority of a rental property’s value derives from its proximity to publicly funded resources which the seller did not create themselves. If your tax dollars pay for a new park, the value of that park is vacuumed up by the landlords near the park. (This is what it IS to be an economic rent… thus the name.)

- Demand at the low end is extremely inelastic. People have to live somewhere if their life is entangled with that city. Compare with diamonds or taxi medallions, which you can opt out of.

- In theory, most landlord-tenant relationships operate on a year-long cadence because it mixes flexibility with predictability. The renter doesn’t have to commit their life to staying in a particular city for multiple years just to please some landlord, and the landlord gets to re-auction the rental rights by re-setting the price once a year, keeping up with the going market rate. However, in practice, most renters end up wanting to stay more than one year, and are not mentally or logistically preparing to move. Thus, a substantial price increase is disruptive. You might be tempted to say that the real problem is that the renter went in blind without guarantees about what they were really getting signed up for, and thus a fix could be to secure much longer leases which schedule the rent increases up front. However, as the lease duration goes up, the chances go up that the renter experiences changes in life circumstance that make it impossible or intolerable to continue renting. Barring the creation of a society of debt prisoners, the landlord will inevitably end up enduring lease breaks. Because the switching cost is uniquely high, this creates a fundamental dilemma: people don’t want to move until they do, yet they need to be prepared to move frequently - unless they secure longer leases, which they can’t realistically promise to honor.

So yes, you have cartel behavior and supply distorted by out-of-band zoning restrictions that the market can’t correct, but those are par for the course. The real anger comes from the fact that a place to live isn’t really a “good” in the first place - everybody needs one, and while a roof over your head and good plumbing is worth _something_, the rent you’re paying is driven primarily by a segment of our society _preventing_ you from being able to live close to the public center unless you pay their troll toll. This is where the perceived injustice comes from. When you layer in the Gordian knot of lease duration, rent increase, and the high switching costs, that’s when people really start to hate you.

Right - but coming back to the original question, if I'm not mistaken, the explanation is that the blogpost is measuring information gained from an actual outcome, as opposed to _expected_ information gain. An example will help:

Say you're trying to guess the number on a 6-sided die that I've rolled. If I wanted to outright tell you the answer, that would be 2.58 bits of information I need to convey. But you're trying to guess it without me telling, so suppose you can ask a yes or no question about the outcome. The maximum of the _expected_ information add is 1 bit. If you ask "was it 4 or greater?", then that is an optimal question, because the expected information gain is min-maxed. That is, the minimum information you can gain is also the maximum: 1 bit. However, suppose you ask "was it a 5?". This is a bad question, because if the answer is no, there are still 5 numbers it could be. Plus, the likelihood of it being 'no' is high: 5/6. However, despite these downsides, it is true that 1/6 times, the answer WILL be yes, and you will gain all 2.58 bits of information in one go. The downside case more than counteracts this and preserves the rules of information theory: the _expected_ information gain is still < 1 bit.

EDIT: D'oh, nevermind. Re-reading the post, it's definitely talking about >1 bit expectations of potential matchings. So I don't know!

Nailed it, but I fear this wisdom will be easily passed by by someone who doesn’t already intuit it from years of experience. Like the Island de la Muerta: wisdom that can only be found if you already know where it is.

I see what you're getting at, and your sentiment is thoughtfully expressed, but come on... it's Calvin and Hobbes! It's part of that rarefied echelon of media that taps into something true about the human condition. Calvin doesn't need to be a manual for how to live your life - it's enough to be an island you can sometimes visit when you're in a Calvin mood.

Well said. In fact Calvin shouldn’t be a manual for life, I think. What makes it so funny is we know that Calvin is way off base all the time, but he’s got a great imagination and we’ve all struggled in the same ways, with the same things, and wish we could just wander off with our imaginary tiger and leave the world’s problems behind, too.

The conversation is about trying to do everyday activities inside of a combat zone. The international community's opinion about the war is, I should think this is obvious, not the relevant factor. It doesn't matter what people think of the war, only that _there is war_. I think it's safe to say that Ukraine and Gaza are both plenty distracting places to work.

That said, even though it's totally off-topic, I can't help but respond to this:

>those same governments have been enabling and arming the occupier in Palestine/Gaza, and its media has pontificated that occupation, continuous ethnic cleansing and the hundreds of massacres and hostages - sorry, prisoners - is actually somehow justified

I think Western governments have been quite consistent: they condemn people who start wars. If you want to be supported by the international community, don't start a war. Finishing a war is different: those governments are perfectly happy to provide arms and support to anybody — be they white and European, like the Ukrainians, or non-white and non-European, like the Israelis — so long as it's in service of fighting back against a belligerent aggressor.

It's convenient that your knowledge of what "started" begins on October 7th and all the events of history prior since 1948 never happened, or you just don't care they did. Average Westerner knowledge of Western history, I understand.

Yes, they have consistently toppled governments, meddled in the affairs of other countries, and enabled and funded colonalism and imperialism wherever they went. Although the good news is that Israel is and will be the last true Western colonial state. Also, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just forgot the wars they themselves started, like Iraq over the lie that was WMD and the small matter of 500,000 dead Iraqis - I can assure you the Western governments involved have not condemned it, but they did give Blair a Nobel Peace Prize, so that's something.

Your last sentence is laughable and too historically ignorant to bother responding to, but since its AI-generated I thankfully don't need to give it that courtesy.

> Although the good news is that Israel is and will be the last true Western colonial state.

What do you think Russia is?

You think Russia is a Western power and ally?

I'm Russian myself, and I think Russia is a Western (white European) colonial empire, and the largest one in terms of the sheer number of peoples and amount of territory it still occupies. Just look at the map of its administrative regions.

And yes, it is indeed opposed to other Western powers. That isn't new - at the height of colonialism, European colonial powers were constantly fighting each other. That didn't make any of them any less Western.

Almost as convenient as your suggestion that the only relevant history started in 1948.

No, what it comes down to is whether you can admit that Palestine and Gaza are being occupied by a colonial power that doesn't have the right to be there, has consistently engaged in ethnic cleansing, genocide of entire villages and war crimes since its foundation, and that resistance to it will continue until that fact changes considerably. No-one living in a Western bubble, least of all Israel, gets to set the terms by which a people who Westerners have helped occupy for the last 70 years resist - just ask the Viet Cong. Whataboutism is the fallacy of pointing to irrelevant examples, so no, pointing out hypocrisy is not that. As for asymmetry, I assume you're talking about the fact that one is a heavily armed Western-funded superpower and the other is a handful of militias using the few arms they can get hold of from the only real ally they have in Iran, and not much stronger than they were in 1948 and 1967 when they were villagers being waged "war" on by said superpower.

The asymmetry is that Hamas uses human shields to great effect, whereas the IDF doesn’t and couldn’t because their foe wouldn’t care. It’s all you really need to know.

>resistance to it will continue

‘Resistance’ is an incredible word to summarize October 7th. Is it possible you haven’t looked into the full sordid details of that day? It is beyond comprehension. If you’re disturbed by hate-fueled violence perpetrated purely for the sake of exterminating an ethnic / religious group you hate, then Oct 7th is the genuine article.

The fact is that this conflict is not about resistance, and this is easily seen because the majority of Palestinians have no good faith interest in a two state solution. Go read poll results if you doubt me. Support for Hamas and its actions is robust, even in the West Bank (~70% at one count). The goal here is not merely resisting the occupier. The show’s not over until the Jews are dead and gone. The only real fix is to de-program the people in the region (both sides) from building their identity around a border dispute, and that’s not going to happen until the volume is turned down on the religious element.

Genuine question, are you an LLM bot or are typical Western liberals just this bad at reading comprehension? Everything I've written has already addressed your NPC-like "response" to it. Yes, they support Hamas and want a one-state solution, for the reasons spelled out to you in several paragraphs at length, to which your ultimate response was essentially "whatever idc Hamas does hostages that's aLl I nEeD tO KnoW". Since you've already decided that the little you already know is everything you'll ever need to know on the history of Palestine, and consider Oct 7 "beyond comprehension" but the countless examples of the same atrocities committed by Israelis since the 19th century elicited no such response, you are therefore both proudly ignorant and proudly racist, and should simply drop the act of pretending to care about Palestinians. But then I suppose that's the part of the liberal conceit that sets you apart from conservatives, that you have to at least feign sympathy so you can spend the next few decades behaving in the exact same way as they do. Because when it comes to Israel, the only real difference between right-left is in how much you need to pretend to care about occupied/dead brown people. I suggest you go back to doing what you know best, virtue-signalling about Ukrainian occupation and how much the Ukrainian people need to be saved from Russia.

How many times must it be explained that building luxury mansions still brings property prices down. Nobody ever voluntarily builds crappy low income housing. That’s never how development works. You let people build the new fancy buildings they want to build with all the margins and high prices. Then, when a bunch of rich people move in, that’s people that are no longer chasing all the other apartments. Eventually, way down the road, these swanky apartments will be tomorrow’s old and crappy ones in the neighborhood that’s not hip anymore, and low income people can rent them. This is how things actually work, and it’s fine.

What is NOT fine is when you have banks and private equity bullshit chasing homes purely as an asset to flip. That’s the thing we need to curtail, because it’s just money laundering at the expense of the American homeowner.

> Then, when a bunch of rich people move in, that’s people that are no longer chasing all the other apartments.

Maybe? Seems to me that there's a certain level of wealth where this no longer is true. Housing has (unfortunately in my eyes) become one of those black boxes that you put money in and money comes out; it's an investment. But what you're telling me goes contrary to what I know about the housing market: no, actually, houses depreciate in value because they'll have to ask poor people to buy / rent the place at some point. Can I go buy a mansion built in 1930 for a bargain price?

(I do agree about the private equity part, just the first bit doesn't pass a sniff test from me)

Oh, understood, the housing will "trickle down", right?

How many times do we need to learn that trickle down economics doesn't work? Making the rich richer and happier will never "trickle down" to the poor, it will stop at the rich.

With land, this is particularly obvious. There is a finite amount of land. The more of it is occupied with luxury mansions, the less land will be available for high-density housing. Building 1 new luxury mansion removes land from the pool that could house dozens if not hundreds of people. And rich people don't move in from cheaper housing to more expensive, they just keep both, or they buy the new mansion as a vacation home.

Property is an investment, and there are huge vested interests in keeping property values going up - and not just from rich people, but virtually everyone who owns their own home. You have to fight a lot of these interests to force prices to go down. "Just build more" doesn't work, the space in and around a city is limited.

Building a luxury mansion on top of unused and uninhabited marginal land - sure, that can bring prices down. But building a luxury mansion for one family by replacing dilapidated, and therefore cheap, high-density housing which used to house a dozen families brings prices up. And in practice, that is what is happening in cities. Old low-rise multi-family buildings in nice neighborhoods are being modernized and then converted into single-family mansions.

This is almost exactly wrong. Like, if you wanted to invent a plausible-on-its-face position that formed a perfect -1 dot product with the truth, this is what you’d come up with.

Polite western society has become so disconnected from what earnest religious belief feels like that they have become unable to comprehend the world around them, which hasn’t. They project their own materialism onto the own world and conclude that sectarian hatred is overblown because after all, who could really get that worked up about some dusty book? The idea that the Sudanese are just innocent victims of big evil powers fighting over gold is the kind of thing that makes a good theme in English class. We’re now dealing with an entire generation that was only taught this “counter-narrative”, and simply pattern matches it to every single thing. Yes, you can always construct sentences that recast any bad world events as being caused by our own callous indifference to the beleaguered and noble savage. No, that is not an automatic shortcut to truth and wisdom. The West does not have a monopoly on making terrible, short-sighted, violent choices.

But putting aside the diminishing of African agency, even if you do focus on the involvement of outside forces, the Sudanese civil war is notably characterized by the involvement of _middle_ powers, and not particularly Western ones. They are there for varying reasons, all of them nihilistic but only some of them materialistic. Ukrainians are there, for instance, because Russians are there, and it’s a lawless place where you can kill Russians. That’s a lot of things, but a simplistic gold grab it is not.

I trust the statistics far more than {RANDOM BUSINESS OWNER|ANECTATA}

Ah yes, The Lord of the Rings, an allegorical tale about how it is always wrong to wage war. Anduril, the flame of the west, refers of course to an evil sword wielded by an evil king who wrongly stands up to protect the people of middle earth against the forces of Mordor (a misunderstood and vibrant economy that is merely protecting its own interests). It can be so frustrating when people misread Tolkien's unsubtle, moralizing polemic for some kind of expansive mythology with more than one thing to say.

I think trying to keep a tally rather misses the larger point. You can’t properly determine the most impactful bad science of the last 30 years, because you’re not aware of all of it! These meta-studies are showing how often you find bad science when you dig deeper, but that’s just a rate of incidence, not an absolute number. There’s a whole iceberg of findings we haven’t begun to press on. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn out to be fraudulent? The real concern is about what kind of damage has been done to the foundations of knowledge, which compounds as we continue to do research on top of shoddy prior work.

Fraudulent research can be damaging along multiple axes, and I completely agree that there is probably a mountain of undiscovered fraud out there that continues to have negative downstream effects. I'm more skeptical of the idea that undiscovered fraud has a negative effect on the public perception of science. If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia, why would undiscovered frauds affect the way nonscientists think about science?

> If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808891