The point is this: For an area that supposedly nobody can afford, there's a lot of people managing to afford it.

What's your point? Mine still seems to stand.

You're confusing Supply with Quantity Supplied. I don't blame you, I wasn't very clear on this.

The law of supply says price determines quantity supplied; and a higher price increases supply, other things being equal.

If demand increases - say, an employer moved in and starts hiring a bunch of people - then supply will stay the same, demand will go up, which translates into an increase in quantity supplied.

The differences in the terms are subtle, so I'll repeat: Supply (the whole curve, is independent of price) stays the same, Quantity supplied (which is dependent on price) goes up.

This essentially means the article is completely backwards.

Look man, I know you wanted to get this house, but everyone I turn to says I can get at least 10% more for it than what you offered -- well above the cost of interest. That means there's someone else out there who's willing to pay more than you are. If you think it's ok for me to take a 10% loss, how about 20%, or 50%? It's not in anybody's interest for me to take less than about 5%/yr, the rate of interest. Sorry, no, not selling. But if you want a hot market that's insanely liquid, try San Francisco.

This reads like a common economic trope: A journalist (presumably not an economist) observes that A has a positive effect on B, and B has a positive effect back on A. They then proceed to assume that both A and B will "spiral out of control" into infinity, as if the only kind of effect is a proportional effect, and as if the only kind of feedback loop is a positive feedback loop.

Well as it turns out, there's a such a thing as a negative feedback loop. In fact, that's how markets work; there's this law called the law of declining marginal utility. In most cases, given the nature of geometric sums, there's a total, maximum amount of utility that a single good can ever give you, ever, no matter how much you buy.

Let's take a look at the author's argument:

1. People paying high rents have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market.

People paying high rents are, presumably, living in an area with high demand, further suggesting that they have a much better ability to pay for housing than the average person as it is; they just choose to live in a high-rent place because it's more beneficial than an average city or neighberhood.

2. Low vacancy rates let landlords raise rents still higher.

There's no special correlation between prices and liquidity; there's a better correlation between how "hot" or bubble-like a market is, though. Volume isn't the same as price.

3. Developers who know they can command high rents (and sales prices) are spurred to spend more to acquire developable land.

This is a downward force on prices. See also, the Law of Supply: higher prices creates more supply, or at least forces people to use the resources more effectively. Software developers don't need a huge living area, at least not compared to (at the extreme end) farms. In contrast to farms, which can go pretty much anywhere there's halfway decent land. As a result, people (in expanding cities, for example) tend to buy out farms, not the other way around.

This may seem obvious, but knowing it explicitly is a crucial component of knowing how resources are efficiently allocated. It doesn't even matter how resources are initially allocated, if we mixed everything up and assuming low transaction costs (something not typically present in housing markets, though), then people will trade with each other back to the optimum allocations.

4. Higher land costs can force builders to target the higher end of the market.

No, there's this thing called the law of supply and demand. Rates are set based on what the market as a whole is able to bear - where the supply and demand curves meet. And if San Francisco can find 50k buyers for 50k $10/sqft (or whatever) rentals, then that's the market price (a simplified argument, of course, but hopefully still an accurate one).

All the constraints of the dissertation are required to call your HTTP service RESTful; although some of the constraints themselves are 'optional', e.g. Code-on-demand (your server doesn't have to actually use it, but your protocol must support it).

See my second link for an analysis of why the Twitter and Amazon APIs are not RESTful. Mostly, they don't implement the uniform interface, HATEOAS in particular. They don't provide hyperlinks, but instead you have to read their public documentation and hard-code your application with platform-specific URL patterns.

To implement HATEOAS, Twitter could opt to emit a machine-readable URL template (e.g. , or the URI Templates standard). They don't even do that, except on their website, which does provide forms to write a tweet, retweet, shows links to view context, and similar. This means Twitter's own website is more RESTful than their (so-called) REST API.

The Web is designed to not need APIs or dedicated documentation. You might have heard of REST - it's a set of constraints on network architecture designs, which are: client-server protocol, layered interface, caching, stateless connections, code-on-demand (e.g. Javascript), and a uniform interface (e.g. HTML). REST is defined by the principal author of HTTP, Roy T. Fielding.

Lots of people call themselves RESTful (Amazon, Twitter) but aren't even close. A RESTful service is pretty much just like a website: You enter at an entry point, then start following hyperlinks and filling out forms to manipulate the state of your client and the server (respectively).

If you have an existing plain-old-HTTP API, you might want to build a hypertext interface on top of it that users can browse and submit documents with. Use a hypermedia data format like JSON-LD, Hydra, or JSON Hyper-schema to expose machine-readable hypertext. HTML is perfectly fine too, and preferable if you want to navigate the API with a Web browser.

See:

http://martinfowler.com/articl...

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-...

(1) That's not the argument that GGP made

(2) That's still not how economics works. The point isn't to get AT&T to lose money, that doesn't help anyone; the point is to make sure that goods/services are honestly and accurately described.

Uh, no. You said "The winner is AT&T" and that's objectively wrong. Whoosh indeed.

Economics doesn't work like that. Prices are set by the market, as a function of what people are willing to pay and how much it takes to produce the product.

If costs go up, that creates a change in supply and raises prices, and both marginal profit and quantity supplied will drop.

If AT&T chooses not to charge that equilibrium price, that means they're taking a loss, in the economist's usage of the term (as opposed to an accounting profit, i.e. they might still turn a profit, but it's less than what it could be).

Um, yeah, it does, it's illegal to offer just a wage now.

Which is stupid. I was just with a driver who's a teacher by day, he doesn't need a second set of benefits - that would just take money out of wages and it ends up hurting the people that the state purports to help.

Right. The point is Netflix has plenty of servers, and there's at least one location for them that's providing better service than L3 is, at least to just one customer. But right, this is L3's problem.

In any event, again, this is basic network (mis-)management issue, not a Net Neutrality issue.

It's still hard to tell what's going on here because both parties only seem interested in depicting the other as evil.

Level3 blames Verizon. There's some nasty stuff going on there if what they say is true. But none of it uniquely affects Netflix, it affects all Level3 customers. This is the kind of network management that the FCC has declined to intervene in.

They claimed that Verizon literally unplugged half the connections between two networks that are only half congested.

Presumably, if they added more links, the connection to that Netflix server (among other Level3 customers) would go up, but it couldn't do any better than double. (Bitrates might more than double now that there's no packet retransmissions, but it probably wouldn't increase an order of magnitude, which is what the VPN user claims.)

If a VPN really is faster, then Netflix clearly has access to unused capacity via other routes that they're not providing to customers. That is, the VPN is just doing the routing that Netflix isn't doing.

Either that, or the VPN customer is accessing the same Netflix server, which would make the VPN story is a lie, because VPN, of course, doesn't let you blast through network congestion.

Regardless, none of the accusations claim Net Neutrality violations.

What words are you talking about? I quoted directly from the FCC's rationale, and asked three questions and you answered zero of them.

And no, the FCC's only proper job is to allocate radio spectrum. Manipulation or regulation of speech is prohibited by the First Amendment.

I'm perfectly happy with OpenRC over here (I'm a Gentoo user, mostly). It has parallel startup, a fairly straightforward configuration, it's possible to run multiple instances of a daemon, and it works with Linux and BSD systems.

And most importantly, I can still run my own cron, syslog, and date systems.

How is Epoch different?

What problem is this solving, and how is Epoch uniquely solving those problems?

Crikey.
It's the shill in his natural habitat.
This particular specimen is drawn to government authority like an ignorant moth to a flame.
Note how he repeats the same myths even though he's been corrected several dozen times before.
Biologists are yet unsure whether this means his species is completely unable or willing to learn, or just that dedicated to his job.

See, I can do that too, and funny thing is, regardless of who uses this rhetorical device, it doesn't really answer the fundamental question much. Why can't the FCC do it's damn job?

The FCC specifically declined to intervene in this. From their published rationale:

As discussed, Internet traffic exchange agreements have historically been and will continue to be commercially negotiated. We do not believe that it is appropriate or necessary to subject arrangements for Internet traffic exchange (which are subsumed within broadband Internet access service) to the rules we adopt today.

Different example please?

I buy a 100Mbps connection from a local data center. Explain to me how that's different than "throttling."

If they're really getting less than their contract provides for, couldn't they just use the courts?

Why do you need the FCC?

What evidence do you have that Netflix video content is uniquely being throttled? That if I were to host my video website on L3, it wouldn't have the same connection issues?

Keep in mind Netflix is a majority of Internet traffics, so symmetric pipes are necessarily impossible.

If the FCC was really going to help, isn't that a failure of the premise of Title II regulations in the first place?

They're owned by Amazon now.

And before they were known as Twitch.tv, they were known as Justin.tv.