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Comment Re:I'm spending 60% of my monthly income on rent (Score 1) 940

Ok, my office building weighs a million tons. Include the cost of moving it a dozen miles over other people's property and I am sold. Don't forget to convince the 250 people who live on the other side of office to move, or you move their property for them. If they need help, you can feel free to convince their spouses and kids, in turn their organizations etc. too.

Comment Re:I'm spending 60% of my monthly income on rent (Score 1) 940

Sure. Feel free to convince the stakeholders which includes voters and government that taxes will increase enough and incomes will increase enough in such a way that building ten storey roads will become viable. Note that increase in income gives only a little direct increased income to the organization responsible for making roads. Most of the increase is indirect, which may or may not materialize for that particular county/city, and even state in case of land close to state borders.

Include the cost of this convincing in the "solution", and let us see how much of a solution it seems then. But in isolation raising the number of storeys ten fold is NOT a solution.

Comment Re:Not me, not in California (Score 1) 940

Credit scores don't work like that. When you take out a mortgage and establish a history of paying it, your credit rating goes up, not down.

Goes up after you have repaid $400k. Until then it is down. Or probably break even somewhere close to having repaid $330k-$360k. So opportunity cost remains for most of the repayment period.

Comment Re:I'm spending 60% of my monthly income on rent (Score 3, Insightful) 940

The solution is to go up. Even in Manhattan, much of the land is restricted to four stories. Most builders would prefer to go to 25 to 50 stories, allowing six to twelve times as many people to live on the same land

Not necessarily. 4 storey vs 25 to 50 storey is about ten-fold increase. So your "solution" is not a solution if the single storey roads to the place are not also replaced with 10 storey roads. They could be widened 10 times too, if there is space.

If building the 10-storey road is the government's responsibility, you are advocating socializing the external costs and privatizing the profits.

Comment Re: Colorado sure has nice beaches (Score 1) 940

The point is that it's a problem when people who were born and raised in an area can't buy there

This can happen due to

1. land monopolists/collusioninsts, and
2. new economic opportunities in an area for certain kinds of people.

The first is surely a problem - morally, as per free-market-principles, and as far as collusion is illegal, it is a problem legally too.

But second? Why deny certain kinds of people have opportunities in an area, access to that area just because they were not "born and raised" there ? Many great innovations in history have happened by people away from their homelands. This is because of 3 reasons :

A. People motivated enough to move away are likely to be motivated enough to work harder to succeed.

B. 100 talented people living in density of 1 per 500 square miles are much less likely to produce lasting value than those same 100 talented people working together. Teams of great people are more than the sum of their parts. Which means moving their asses to where the good people and opportunities are, for the benefit of themselves and society at large.

C. People away from their homelands MUST work hard. Often there is no family to fall back on.

Comment Re:I can't say I fully agree (Score 1) 637

If your position is correct, why does it have no supporting evidence.... You are intellectually lazy.

You don't even specify which exact "position" you are asking about from the GP post, and you are calling the other person lazy?

Heard about pots, kettles and tendencies to absorb visible electromagnetic radiation?

Comment Re:Social mobility was killed, but not this way (Score 1) 1032

right wing plant

I don't understand the American view about left and right, so, my honest question for you is - do you call him a right winger ? He doesn't seem like that to me, or as general definition of "right".

Toward the end of the rant, he even mentions that probably government getting into the business of educating (at least guaranteeing it) might be a good thing. The idea he expresses against guaranteeing loans by governments is also not much of a right wing attitude - since guaranteeing loans is socializing the loss and privatizing the profit. Right wing nuts typically love such loan guarantees.

Comment Re:Social mobility was killed, but not this way (Score 1) 1032

In civilized countries, education due to having huge positive externalities, is government subsidized. Spending a billion dollars to subsidize education gets a trillion dollar returns - but 20,000 dollars spent to subsidize every single student doesn't necessarily make him earn 20 million.

Government is the one entity that can and should take the burden of all financial expenditures of this nature. But that is too "communist" for Americans so they enjoy the loans.

Government, if anything, guarantee the loans. In other words, only the losses are socialized, profits are all privatized into universities and banks.

Comment Re: "Is this what we wanted?" (Score 1) 260

Yes, but you didn't address the fundamental difference between ways of enjoying movies/shows and music. It is drastically different. How?

When one hears a piece of music for the second time, they like it MORE than they liked it for the first time. The degree of enjoyment grows for a while - longer for some music, less for some other. It is easy to find music for me which keeps increasingly pleasant for five times of concentrated listen sessions. Many other people are like this, at least for the genres I am interested in.

When you "discover" a new genre, the "learning curve" is even steeper. I have hated music of some genres which in a few months became the only genre I listened to for a while. With this steeper learning curve, comes much more happiness too. When I develop the taste for a new genre of music (happened only thrice in my life), for a while, people can tell I am happy just by talking to me on phone, or meeting me briefly. Of course it fades then.

Movies/shows are decidedly NOT like that for many many people. At most, most people can enjoy a movie twice within a few days - and that is a different enjoyment when it is watched the second time.

Comment Re:When "favours" dramatically increase conversion (Score 1) 100

When you have a monopoly on idiots, you can afford to choose a few people and not do them favours. Better if those people represent a minority, unpopular view. E.g. many Sikhs in India are patriotic, and only a vanishingly miniscule minority are separatist like this Facebook page advocates.

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