pancake

Very interesting. I'd say China will only increase and cheapen its production even more, which will allow them to push their influence. They have been focusing on doing exactly that, by building efficient transportation networks, putting increasingly more companies' equities in the hands of the state (and therefore sidestepping investors), and, recently, setting up abundant facilities for cheap, green energy production. All three of those policies rely for their swift and massive realization on what US policymakers nowadays seem to refer to as "non-market" dynamics, which are basically out of the question for them.

Imagine a situation wherein everyone has more or less the same amount of money. They can afford the same number of houses, let's say, two small, or one larger house. Even if there's some inequality, it's not hard to imagine people buying larger or smaller homes and yet everyone being able to afford one. Renting is an afterthought in this scenario.

If inequality grows larger, some people will not be able to afford ownership, and then renting becomes profitable; those who can afford more than one house will buy more than they need, increasing demand and then offering those homes for renting and getting profit. This in turn increases inequality, but as long as the forces pushing it down prevail, this state can last for long.

The crisis breaks out when these mechanisms eventually come out of balance, pushing a large share of people out of the market, and homeownership starts concentrating.

The idea is that investing is only profitable when people don't have what they need; any solution that gives them that (increasing public housing is a popular proposal here) will reduce profit. In fact, profitability is at a maximum now because of the housing crisis, and even just going back to step 2 would reduce it. A "perfect" solution would give everyone homes at the best price physically possible and with full liquidity, which would sink renting yields to basically zero.

Objectively, yes. But it was polarizing at the time because some of the people present were investing heavily in real estate.

You can imagine ;)

Seriously, though, I said (irl) the home affordability crisis in my country can't be truly solved in any way that simultaneously still allows people to invest in homes (rent them out, sell them at higher prices, do business with tourism, etc) to any meaningful degree. Everyone around had very strong, diverse opinions on that.

The benefits of a free market have been discussed by communists in the past, and newer experiments like the reforms implemented by China make it clear that socialism is compatible with a free market, to very good results.

Thanks for engaging with OP in a civil fashion, especially when you felt attacked... Anyway, hmu if you want to discuss this in more depth.

Tissue, cell and organ donation (including blood, semen and oocytes) can and should be done strictly not-for-profit. This is how it's done in Spain (well, you do get a snack when donating blood and a small amount of money for oocytes since the process is quite long) and there's usually no shortage of blood components in hospitals. Local governments do a lot of campaigning, set up mobile units etc., which seems to work; people see all of that, think of it when planning their day, and many even go in small groups to donate.

Haha yeah, absolutely! Might be too messy to consider it "well used" though... But it does motivate me, seeing all the signs I put there and imagining one day I will conquer that mountain. Maybe not even on the second attempt, but definitely one day.

Fake article

Yes, that's true and a better way to look at it, thanks!

Well, I was amazed by proof systems like Coq or Isabelle, that let one formally verify the correctness of their code. I learnt Coq and coded a few toy projects with it, but doing so felt pretty cumbersome. I looked at other options but none of them had a really good workflow.

So, I attempted to design one from scratch. I tried to understand Coq's mathematical foundation and reimplement it into a simpler language with more familiar syntax and a native compiler frontend. But I rushed through it and turns out I had barely scratched the surface of the theory. Not just regarding the proof system, but also with language design in general.

I did learn a lot though. Since then I've been reading more about proof systems and language design in my spare time, and I've collected quite the stack of notes and drafts. Recently I've begun coding a way more polished version of that project, so on to round two I guess!

One of the largest projects under my GitHub account is an attempt at a proof-based programming language that I had to abandon because I underestimated the theoretical work involved, did not RTFM enough and months into it realized the entire thing was unsound af.

The private sector is ceasing to be China's primary driver of growth, with that role year after year being further taken up by the state. Diminishing private funding is obviously not good, but it does align with their goal of reaching socialism by 2050. We'll see how their economy does from now on...

Rule 34/34