im not even disagreeing with you, but i hate that hn seems to have this penchant to point out that unreasonable assertions may still be true despite being ludicrous. can facts emerge from a hypocrite? yes of course, but prices are not affected by buying and holding a tiny supply, so given that reasonable axiom, it is reasonable to demand more comprehensive evidence.
> but i hate that hn seems to have this penchant to point out that unreasonable assertions may still be true despite being ludicrous
Topics like this are hard on HN because a lot of commenters hold a deep, passionate hatred of something: Wall Street, Big Tech, OSes they don't use, even the concept of private automobile ownership. Once they descend upon a thread they're not interested in facts, they just want to tell stories that support their villain narratives. When it starts to get illogical they don't want to back down because doing so feels like an attack on their deep-seated beliefs.
There are some completely illogical economic theories being pushed all through this comment section. It's kind of fascinating to see how bad some of them are. Someone tried to argue with me that cars could be produced for a couple thousand dollars if not for all the regulatory overhead we impose on them in the US. It's almost hard to fathom how someone could believe that without stopping for a moment to wonder why no other country is building these $2000 full featured automobiles without these supposed regulations that increase the price by an order of magnitude.
The tata nano is an example of a low-featured car that sold in India for the equivalent of $2500 in 2008 dollars. You can make a car for pretty cheap if you strip down a lot of the hardware. I think one of the reasons new cars are designed/priced the way they are in the US is that the more frugal buyers always end up buying a used car anyway, so the manufacturers don't target the low end of the market.
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assertion in the first place. Just because they are holding a small portion of all houses doesn’t meant they can’t have a huge effect. The primary reason being that the portion of houses on sale is small as well. Another reason being they are huge institutions with tons of money, and thus can hold houses longer, buy houses are higher prices, influence related markets, etc.
> Just because they are holding a small portion of all houses doesn’t meant they can’t have a huge effect.
There's no reason to believe that someone owning a tiny portion of the houses is setting the market price.
> they are huge institutions with tons of money, and thus can hold houses longer, buy houses are higher prices, influence related markets, etc.
No huge institution is willing to lose enormous sums of money waiting for vacant overpriced houses to sell.
I've lived in many houses. One was in a development, and I wanted to sell it. There were several houses in it that were vacant and for sale with no offers in the previous year. I sold mine in 3 weeks. It was simple - I priced it properly, and I didn't have to pay another year of taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and worry, only to have to lower the price anyway to get rid of it. A couple of the other homeowners were angry with me about that, but that was their problem.
There is reason to believe that someone owning a tiny portion of the houses is setting the market price because that tiny portion is a significant portion of the houses on sale.
Before we even reach the question of how true that is, there isn't evidence that any firm holds a significant portion of the "houses on sale". A starting point here would be the fact that corporate investors buy houses and hold on to them, and thus definitionally don't hold any of the house on sale, but whatever, either way, just flesh the story out instead of handwaving it.
if we start with reasonable but definitely vague numbers that suggest 2M houses are for sale and institutional investors own 500k of the total stock, it suggests this is NOT true; it's unlikely they own all their houses in the same geo market and they're all for sale at the same time. This doesn't mesh with a business strategy (diversification) or the typical model (they rent houses; they don't flip them).
Doesn’t rent have a constant influence on house prices? Along with the data science based rent prices they demand, that implies a constant upward influence on rent and consequently house prices.
Also these institutions would be buying houses in high demand areas.
> It was simple - I priced it properly, and I didn't have to pay another year of taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and worry, only to have to lower the price anyway to get rid of it. A couple of the other homeowners were angry with me about that, but that was their problem.
I think you just explained partly the reason behind why a small number of owners can drive the prices up. But these are usually private owners. Whenever I see bank sales, they're more like flash sale and done.
Those who can afford to sit on the property trying to obtain a higher price will do it. Other owners will look at that and try to keep the price high with the illusory hope that they can also make that much money. Individual owners can suffer from FOMO and are influenced by success stories, so ask a high price hoping to capture as much of the value as possible.
I saw it in action when I bought my house. The seller saw his neighbor selling the house a year earlier for [princely sum] so he jumped to put his house on the market for [princely sum +20%]. The whole neighborhood was following the same playbook, looking at who sold and raising the bar. After a year with that house on the market I became interested and in a 6 month process I ended up buying the house for [princely sum -20%].
None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more.
"None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more."
At least where I live, real estate sales are public and you can easily find the sale price at the county assessor's website.
You're either generalizing or just making a mistake stating so definitively that sitting on an asset means being stupid with investments. You know your house and situation but that's far from representative. Sitting on it might turn out to be the stupidest or the smartest decision you can make. If you take the hard stance that it can only mean one thing, you're just being stupid with investments in all the "other" cases.
I am surrounded by people who sat on houses for a decade only to triple their money after inflation adjustment when they sold. We're talking 7 figure profits. Trying to sound smarter than everyone else sometimes backfires.
this is not true, this is the basis for housing speculation. Holding vacant overpriced houses until they sell. Its not a loss until you close the sale.
this doesn't make any sense; you're tying up significant resources and losing out an the alternatives. Nobody evaluates investment returns in isolation.
the numbers I have seen suggest that institutional investors own about 500k of the ~100M residential properties in the US. Small investors probably own about 15M in total. Roughly 2M units are for sale, so even if every single institution-owned unit was for sale they wouldn't be able to exert much influence. The fact that this is a big, complex and widely distributed market IS the reason they can't distort it like they do with specific industries in a given geography.
smoking is not an appropriate analogy at least insofar it is primarily damaging to the individual (claims of second hand smoke aside), whereas exposing oneself during covid is more broadly damaging as the purpose of social distancing was specifically to avoid spreading the disease, not to oneself, but to more vulnerable individuals. moreover it can be indicative that he is self-interested, that is, by acting hypocritically, while not in and of itself evidence, is consistent with 'charlatan behavior' as is, i would add, interviewing a known charlatan dr aman. aman detractors will think he is 'being shown' but the reality is that aman or similar wins legitimacy, which the interviewer knows, since his aim is entertainment, not medicine, in his capacity as an interviewer.
it is not ad-hominem to try to understand a person's motivations for expressing a particular opinion, which is why the above poster referred to 'character' which is not specific to the definition of ad-hominem, but is in the spirit thereof, that is, distracting from the argument. but if the person has shown themselves to be working contradictorily to public health policy, especially in consideration of the hippocratic oath, you may ask reasonably what they are about.
> smoking is not an appropriate analogy at least insofar
Missing the forest for the trees.
The point isn’t that neglecting to mask is exactly the same as smoking. Obviously these are different. The point is that in both cases the person in question is advising one thing and doing another. The fact that a doctor smokes or doesn’t mask up in a pandemic does not mean that their advice to not smoke or to wear a mask is not good advice.
If a person regularly snacks on lead paint but tells you not to eat paint, the advice is still good even if it’s coming from an idiot.
> it is not ad-hominem to try to understand a person's motivations
Sure, but claims of hypocrisy are still not a rebuttal.
No doubt it was hypocritical for Dr Mike to tell others to social distance and then hop on a boat with a dozen people unmasked, just as it was hypocritical for Gavin Newsom to attend a dinner at The French Laundry while telling others to stay home.
This isn’t actually relevant to whether the advice to socially distance was sound, though.
Yet here you are trying to convince folks why this doesn't lead to poor morals, low self-awareness, and a lack of trust in doctors. We are talking about a doctor, of course, not just an average nobody. And we are talking about a doctor with 6 million subscribers. His influence is wide.
Last I checked, a doctor is not the same as a politician.
Do you have a point except to cast this guy as untrustworthy because he did one stupid thing that got photographed half a decade ago? I feel like the pedantry about what ad hominem means and arguments about analogies and now references to morality and politicians is distracting from whatever your core point is.
> lack of trust in doctors
I don’t think demanding perfection from doctors helps with trust either.
that's not right. if photons were truly spin 1, there would be 3 spin eigenstates available, but in fact there are only 2 (Sz=0 is unavailable). the pithy argument invokes the absence of a stationary frame of reference. for all practical purposes, photons are behave like spin 1/2 particles (despite being bosons). see, for example, the jones algebra / calculus.
What do you think you mean by saying 'drives interest rates down'. It seems a leap to think the fed, the entity that establishes the interest rate, will react in the way you describe.
Common misunderstanding but the fed does not set rates on treasuries (bills, notes, etc) the primary instrument the government uses to finance its debts.
Those rates are set via auctions driven by the demand for safe haven returns on investments, particularly returns when equities are risky. As demand for treasuries (safety) goes up, the rates on those same treasuries go down.
The fed sets the interbank exchange rates, these influence treasury rates but are a very different thing.
i understand what you mean now. you are referring to the yield of treasury bonds, which, at least historically for <10 year tbills, do track the fed rate.
i did not read the study. an obvious confounding factor is that doctors with better board scores are hired into better hospitals with better patient populations, and thus better outcomes.
> The researchers compared outcomes for patients within the same hospitals who were cared for by doctors with different exam scores. This allowed the researchers to eliminate, or at least minimize, the effect of differences in patient populations, hospital resources, and other variations that might influence the odds of patient death or readmission, independent of a doctor’s performance.
This is also pretty much the easiest thing the factor out through mixed effects modeling (among other methods if required). But your statement that higher scoring physicians go to places with healthier patient populations is not correct across all disciplines. Often it can be the opposite: the best physicians go to the major hospitals (usually but not always university affiliated) located in major population centers that draw in the sickest/worst/rarest cases from the surrounding geography.
to be clear, this is an opinion pertaining to the preferred behavior of eg the american government and not anything like a summary of its history in this regard. that is, the tech industry since its inception in the 60s has accepted, to its benefit, [massive] federal subsidy.
probably not - 'monads' are an interface (typeclass in haskell) for which specific functions (bind, unit) need to be defined. you can do monadic programming in any language, including python. that is, functions are central to the implementation and use of monads, so being 'function-free' seems contrary.
I'm using the term "analog computing" to mean using non-digital (or even digital but in a nonstandard way). A quantum processor is not digital as each qubit has an uncountable number of states. A quantum computer would likely have a classical (digital) part to measure the quantum processor's registers, which are a bunch of "analog" states. And even if one wants to use terminology in a way that qc isn't analog, it would still objectively share many qualities with "normal" analog computing (basically all of its differentiators against classical compute).
Then again, I should probably also ask what you mean by "analog computing", and why you think quantum error correction would not allow qc to be classified as analog.
For context, I did research on crafting a high-fidelity (error-correcting) quantum gate (successfully).
viscosity has very interesting units - stress (force / area) divided by rate (1 / time). viscosity is measured (a field known as rheology) by, in some way, moving a thing through a fluid at increasingly fast accelerations, or equivalently, at increasingly high frequencies. that is, imagine moving your hand back and forth in a fluid - the faster you do so (the number of back and forth motions per second), the more resistance you will feel from the fluid. for newtonian fluids, the resistance you feel (measured in force / area, ie the area of your hand), is proportional to the frequency of your hand moving back and forth in the liquid, so, the graph is a line. non newtonion fluids do not have a linear relationship between shear stress and shear rate. air is also a fluid - all gasses are, and thus possess rheological properties. air, however, at stp, is essentially an ideal gas, that is, it is non-interactive, and thus, has 0 viscosity. the point here, is that viscosity is a consequence of the interactions of particles. as gases become denser, their viscosity increases. liquids, for comparison, is ~1000x as dense as air. the details of how molecular interactions lead to viscosity is actually quite complicated.
Thank you. I seem to have trouble using rate as a concept, especially dividing by it :)
But I think I get it when I add a virtual distance into what you are saying.
You are saying (force / area) / (1 / time). I add two distances that cancel out: (distance * force / area) / (distance * 1 / time) and get (energy / area) / speed, which is energy used per area and speed. I can feel that, and it seems to be what you are saying, right?
the statistics of a collection of particles, ie fermions or bosons, depends on their symmetry under commutation. that is, the wavefunction of the collection of particles, which does have physical meaning isofar as its square is the real density of the particles, must also obey this symmetry, ie it must negate (-1*) under exchange of two identical fermions. so it's not that the 'fermion' cares, but that the consequence of (anti)symmetry under exchange affects the density of a collection of such particles, which leads to a measurable difference in their statistics (how likely they are to be close to each other) compared to non-symmetric (normal) counterparts.
