I find it pretty hard to believe that they crime situation has changed that much since these hotels were the top of the heap as far as occupancy. Changes like that take time and it takes even more time for a reputation to develop.

Maybe it has something to do with business travel, the rise of zoom and work from home has almost certainly resulted in a decrease in the amount of business travel, why go to another city just to sit on a zoom call with half or more of the people you are going to meet. I bet these hotels were so full primarily because of this kind of travel

Remember those comments about how awful touch screen phones would be because previous touch screens sucked?

They literally never showed anyone using one outside, the most public place was a plane. It blows my mind that people seem to think this devices is a replacement for a phone, something you will wear all day, it has a 2 hour battery life. It doesn't even have a cellular connection that they mentioned.

It's a Mac book pro with a completely insane input and screen configuration. In fact I would prefer you could attach it to an external monitor and use it as a regular computer when you don't want the whole AR VR thing. You use it at a desk or on your couch, maybe moving around your house a bit.

Sharing 3D photos and videos of their cats is what people will use it for.

the Apple II killer app was visicalc and Apple didn't write it. The original iPhone didn't have apps at all.

I have seen comments like this a lot about using these out and about as a mobile device. Why do so many people go for this use case. In none of these presentations did apple show anyone outside, the only public place I caught was on a plane. These aren't mobile devices, they have limited battery life and, as far as I can tell, no cellular connection.

This is a laptop replacement, not a cell phone replacement, if you can really call it a replacement of anything. Honestly for the cost I would want to be able to plug it into a monitor and use it like a normal computer when I don't feel like doing the VR thing. Thinking of it as an alternative to a 15" Mac book pro is more reasonable than thinking of this as an alternative to an iPhone.

If you have to pay tax on the money you pay into your mortgage then you will be forced to raise rents by about 30-40% just to break even. The value of houses won't suddenly drop, that cost will be passed on to the tenant and since it's universal it will happen everywhere so moving away isn't an issue. Same thing with depreciation although both should be limited to apply to tax on income from the actual property covered the mortgage and depreciation apply to so you can't let one place rot to cover profits elsewhere.

Same thing on the tax for multiple properties, hit a landlord with that and watch his rents go up.

Vacancy tax on the other hand is a much better idea. Making it more expensive to rent out places just makes rent higher, taxing people on leaving a rentable place vacant is a much more effective incentive.

Rebates are provided on the state level. Here in MA you can get a low temp heatpump system installed and subsidies will cover most of it, yes even in a rental property you own.

The problem is time. Sure, maybe I can get an extra 100 or so a month if I save you money on your heat bill and provide inexpensive central AC which is a nice touch and maybe thats enough to pay the non subsidized cost in a reasonable number of years but there is also the matter of time. If a tenant moves out at the end of august and I can't rent until November 1st (probably getting a lower rate not renting on September 1st) because of this install as a landlord I'm loosing out on even more money that that 100 bucks a month needs to pay back.

Now I'm the sort to do stuff like that. It may not pay out but when things are new they break less which makes my life easier and the tenant. Also I find renting a nicer place results in way less turnover which is a huge savings on time and energy. But for many landlords who take the passive part of "passive income" very seriously they won't bother because they are just looking at the bottom line right now, not over the next decade.

The subsidies today cover a much much much smaller fraction of the cost than they did then. In fact there is a pretty solid connection between the rise of subsidies and the cost of schools since there was no reason not to raise prices as subsidies went up to make sure you capture as much revenue as possible.

This is the reason that progressive reformers focus on free (or price limited) state schools because that would give people the opportunity to go and sure, you could pay for an expensive private school but at some point it becomes crazy to shell out vs going to a state school. This would put a negative pressure on private tuitions while subsidies put a positive pressure on them.

yes but the difference between a thriving community and a destroyed one can be as little as a single company deciding to close a factory and thats a bad gamble if want to, say, buy a house where you live or start a business in one of those towns. When the one employer up and leaves you are the one stuck holding the bag. In cities it takes a much bigger change over a larger period of time for the fortunes of the entire area to change, in a small community it can literally happen overnight.

Microsoft reported a 2022 profit of $135.62B.

Profitable again indeed

His first claim that you can't meet people to expand your options is completely true.

You also can't meet anyone who isn't geographically located near the office you work in. I work with people from all over the country.

For young people early in their career, this 100% will limit their options.
The number of jobs I have gotten in my career because I knew someone is vanishingly small compared to the number of jobs I got by applying and interviewing without a reference. I think of the near 20 jobs I have held in my career, 1 of them was a reference.

Obviously not every job can be done remotely, some require specialized equipment, some require physical access to certain locations and some require dealing with the public directly. But software engineering? The thing that IBM does the most of? That seems just fine to me. As does customer support (if you need access to their stuff you generally have to travel anyway), product and project management, and almost all people management. It would be easier to list the jobs that DO require being in a particular physical location than the other way around, especially for a company like IBM.

None of the examples given here sound like things that can't be done remotely except maybe the ones that can't be done in the home office as well (physical access to client hardware for instance).

The Bolt starts at 26,500. If you think that 39,990 is only slightly more than 26,500 then I have things to sell you, lots of things, that are only slightly more expensive than what you would pay for them elsewhere.

Only if people will buy them. I just saw a 9000 sq foot monstrosity go up in a neighborhood that has 2000 sq foot average homes, topping out around 3000. Big family homes in a family community. this developer bought a plot of land and absolutely filled it with this huge house because on paper that will be worth several million dollars, but its not clear if it will sell for that because the size and amenities don't really fit with the community and the types of families that tend to move to that area.

I'm sure it will sell eventually but probably for less per sq foot than a smaller house would have which, when your cost to build scales by the sq foot is not so good.

Show me, on the doll, where the bad website touched you.