"I'd be very interested in downsizing but even if I buy a smaller house, my property tax is likely to go up so I'm not going anywhere."

So three assumptions I could infer from that under the old Prop 60/90 rules:

1. Not old enough to bring your current property tax with you. (https://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/prop60-90_55over.htm)
2. Doesn't matter if you bring your current property tax with you, a smaller place would cost more than your current place, thereby negating some (all?) of the benefits of retaining your current tax assessment.
3. You want to buy in an area where this rule does not apply (in a county in California that does not have this transfer approved, or outside of California.)

Apparently Prop 19 changed some of the rules...

https://www.thomashenthorne.co...

Correct. Institutional buyers use leverage. If rates are high, they can't use the cheap money conveyor belt to leverage up.

I suspect that criminals (like institutional buyers) buy where the return is higher. Instead of spreading their money out across the US, they're going to purchase in areas of high demand to make sure their "investment" doesn't go down. While I cannot give specific examples in the US real estate market, a similar market across the border in Vancouver gives one indication:

https://news.gov.bc.ca/release...

"More than $7 billion in dirty money was laundered in B.C. in 2018"

It could mean that B.C. is that more corrupt... or that Janet Yellen is dramatically underestimating how much dirty money is being moved into real estate in the US.

Either way, I think the impact on real estate prices is not negligible, but that's just my opinion.

Asset acquisition is a side effect of ultra-low interest rates. People borrow money cheaply, use it to buy assets, and then borrow against the assets as they appreciate to buy more assets.

https://fortune.com/2023/05/05...

"...But it isn't just about home prices: Interest rates on âoefloatingâ loans offered to firms like Yieldstreet are still in the 7% to 8% range, Joshi says. Those high interest rates, coupled with frothy home prices, mean that buying new single-family rentals doesnâ(TM)t make a lot of sense right now for some institutional investors.

Joshi says Yieldstreet is waiting for either house prices to take another leg down or interest rates to come back down. Or both.

âoeIf short-term [interest] rates came down around 4%, and if home prices were about 15% lower than the peak last year, that is a valuation that supports the equity return that investors need to make,â Joshi tells Fortune...."

I mean, you could specifically come out and say, it is against the best interests of public policy for hedge funds to purchase starter homes, and build in penalties/subsidies to help re-balance the distribution of homes. However, you'd probably get push back from existing homeowners who want to sell for a higher price, if such policies dampened investor demand, and thus real estate appreciation. You'd also probably get push back from states and local governments who want the higher property assessments so they can collect more in property taxes...

I mean, seriously, there's a reason that real estate traditionally turned a blind eye to dirty money and the use of real estate for money laundering. If the criminals stop buying real estate... the prices don't rise as fast, and realtors/brokers stop getting fat commission checks.

https://www.reuters.com/world/...

"If finalized, the new rule would replace a patchwork system that anti-corruption advocates have said has allowed bad actors to hide the proceeds of illicit activity by buying homes through legal entities or trusts, without financing.
Last year, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that criminals for decades have anonymously hidden such ill-gotten gains in real estate, estimating $2.3 billion was laundered through U.S. real estate between 2015 and 2020.
Financial institutions have long been expected to flag suspicious activity to regulators, but cash real estate transactions generally have not been subject to such rules. The new requirements would demand real estate professionals involved in such transactions collect and report data to FinCEN about the property being sold, the seller and the beneficial owner of any legal entity receiving the property."

China is moving away from holding long-term US debt. Their holdings peaked at $1.3 trillion in 2014, and it's down to about $770 billion, give or take a few billion, in the last few months, a decline of 40%. Part of this is selling existing bonds, some of it is redeeming bonds that have matured. They are not buying nearly as much as they used to, and it's not an issue of trust that they won't be paid back. They bought them because they fully expected to be paid back, and they were. The Chinese government is in part worried about capital flight, and is trying to keep foreign currency in the country, partially for trade use and partially to prop up the market for the yuan (which officially trades within a narrow official band but unofficially trades much more widely). They're also shifting to other assets like agency bonds and short-term T-bills and notes, which gets them some profit but keeps dollars cycling back into China. They're not completely out of the T-bond market, but they are reducing their overall position.

It is not "full" with tritium. On Earth, tritium makes up 10E-18 of hydrogen atoms. There are about 4.6E49 molecules of water on/in Earth. Rounded off, that's about 10E48 hydrogen atoms in water. That means there are about 10E30 tritium atoms in all the water on/in the planet. Using Avogadro's number, that's 10E30/6.023E23, or 1.66 million grams of tritium. So yes, technically there is much more tritium in the oceans, but it is still less than two metric tons in the entire world, and that's only if you could process the entirety of the world's water supply. It would be much less expensive to manufacture it, whether by CANDU reactors, TPBARs, or lithium blankets.

That's just someone sending to a wallet. What was the last confirmed communication or transaction from Satoshi?

Manning was convicted under the UCMJ. Manning technically faced the death penalty, but that hasn't been sentenced under the UCMJ, much less carried out, in decades. The US military hasn't executed anyone since 1948. The last people executed on even remotely similar terms were the Rosenbergs in 1953. Everyone else executed by the federal government since then has been on conviction of kidnapping, rape, and/or murder.

The idea of Washington being anointed king was never a serious one. He did set some standards that would be followed for almost 150 years, but his role has been somewhat overvalued in the nearly 250 years since his presidency.

The primary US source of tritium is, as I mentioned, specialized rods called tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) that are inserted into one of the reactors of the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee. Each rod can produce 1.2 grams of tritium over a lifespan of 600 full-power days. They have run up to 1792 rods at one time, allowing for just under 1.8 kg every 1.65 years. Cooling ponds may produce some tiny amount of tritium, but it is not recovered.

To expand on the tritium point, only a small amount of tritium (a few dozen kilos) exists on the planet at any given time because it has a half-life of only about 12 years. In North America, the primary civilian source is a byproduct of the CANDU reactors in Canada, and that's only a few kilograms per year. The other major source, used for supplying tritium for US nuclear warheads, is a fission reactor in Tennessee where special rods are irradiated over the course of months to produce a few hundred grams of tritium.

To have enough tritium for fusion, effective lithium blankets need to be developed that capture neutrons and produce tritium (Li-6 + n = He-4 + T) to be fed back into the plasma. To my knowledge, this has not yet been demonstrated, though work has been ongoing.

The Constitutional Convention was very much a consensus project, with Madison doing most of the work of assembling the agreed ideas into a single document. Washington's primary role was to keep order and enforce secrecy; he deliberately chose to provide little input into the actual ideas, as he knew that anything he said would hold undue sway over the participants.

What recent post has been made and signed by Satoshi? The last confirmed communication is from April 2011.

This would have been a great visa to have during covid.

TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt both have published source code, and third-party security audits have been published for both. Neither was found to have any significant flaws and there have been no serious indications of backdoors found in almost 20 years of their availability (first TrueCrypt and later VeraCrypt when it followed TrueCrypt's cancellation).

It was stored in the blockchain, which isn't part of a wallet, and the actual CSAM was limited to at most a handful of small images, with most of it being links to CSAM. If you have a wallet, you probably have at most a couple of megs of data, and that's basically the Bitcoin addresses and associated keys. The blockchain itself is currently over 500GB, and there is little need for most people to download significant portions of it, with even that just the most recent parts.