FishFace

We define a function f':P(M)->M such that f'(A) is a meme simultaneously making fun of all memes in the set A.

We extend F transfinitely by defining F(l) where l is a limit ordinal to be f'(A) where A is the union of F(a) for a < l.

I guess I'm skeptical. First: it seems pretty random ecks dee, so I don't think there'll be much emotional significance to finding your daughter when she's old when you got there with the "Ebony Rooster that shoots bouncy eggs." Second, it's easy to say that every choice matters but the proof of that will be in the gameplay: will it be very limited evolution of the world or will it be a crazy simulation like Dwarf Fortress? Either has pitfalls, I suppose.

The EU desperately needs its own infrastructure, starting with banking and IT. And probably needs to start blocking the sale of companies to the US.

Given he was sanctioned in August, I guess not.

But you can easily remember the approximate position of the lever, which is all you really need to get appropriately warm water for hand washing. The problem with normal hot and cold taps is really that it's hard to replicate the settings, even approximately. (Also, while you can try to remember "half turn cold, two turns hot", you then have to do arithmetic to get any different flow - ew)

Since the cold water supply will fluctuate in temperature from day to day, you won't actually get exactly the same temp unless you use a thermostatic mixer (which exist for showers but I'm guessing are hard to find if they exist for sinks, because... why would you need one?) even with your solution - so I think the single lever version is always good enough.

I don't understand what centre-bias means here.

OK. I don't think we disagree over very much at this point.

Protip: switch to “yes, and”.

Right back atcha, pal. You had ample opportunity to agree that the biggest problem is lack of housing. Instead you embraced the narrative of the OP.

As far as I understand, in the USA large corporate ownership of housing is a recent phenomenon, whilst vacancy rates have been trending downwards. Example chart

What is "all the empty and unused housing"? Why are vacancy rates going down if this is pushing the price up?

I agree: if large companies bought up enough housing stock that they were able to let it lie empty to push prices up (and then actually did it) it could cause a big increase in prices/rents, and that would be a big problem. But we just do not see it in the data.

In contrast, we do see that, in the USA, home building has not kept pace with increases in population. This chart plots the ratio of population growth to housing growth. It was about 1.5 in the 70s, meaning that for every 3 people who were born or arrived in the US, 2 houses were started. Nowadays that ratio is around 2.5.

There is a MASSIVE OBVIOUS explanation for huge increases in rent/house prices.

If people really thought that companies buying real estate might, at most, contribute a few percent of the price, while limited supply has led to price increases of hundreds of percent, then we'd be getting constant memes about insufficient house-building and pushes to change that, rather than this kind of thing.

I want to change the narrative, because if all people hear is "COMPANIES ARE BUYING UP HOUSES AND JACKING UP RENTS" they won't push for the policies which will have a bigger impact.

EDIT: Here is a chart of the ratio of population growth to house-building in the USA. Notice that it's increased from about 1.5 to about 2.5. That is a massive difference. A company with 17% of the homes in a city can squeeze residents in that city for 17% of its available housing if they don't mind sitting on an asset that isn't paying them anything.

Meanwhile, the population has increased by about 50%, but you only built homes for half that. That's a bigger effect even if you believe that companies are willing to sit on vast quantities of empty housing, which we know they're not.

When people are forced to spend more on necessities, they don’t cut necessities. They can’t. They’re necessities.

Well then, we're back to some people cutting their costs by doing all the things I said above. You dismissed them all as if reasons why they're not practical are reasons why they're impossible.

You’re saying if all rented properties were owned by single landlords who owned no other properties, rents today would still be just as high?

All those landlords have the exact same incentives to charge as much as they can get away with, to subdivide properties and to exploit their renters as corporate landlords do. Consolidation can allow prices to increase - but it doesn't always, and typically not by a lot, until consolidation reaches very high levels. 3-7% is what I've read for company mergers (note that the case studies include large market shares and companies dealing in necessities).

So I propose that corporate landlords have manipulated the market by no more than 10%. So about 6 months of house price increases at current rates, or two years at less crazy rates. Everything else is caused by low supply and such.

I mean, if every house for rent is owned by someone who only owns a small number of houses. They still want to charge as much rent as they can get away with. Always have.

Your point by point objections don't really change the picture - these are all things that people do. In a market that is not completely elastic, if you increase prices, some people will stop paying and we will see that in the data. Every time I've checked this for the USA (where this argument is usually made) there is no recent increase in vacancy rates.

So how about I offer you an alternative scenario: investment companies are seeing that housing is shooting up in value already, due to low rates of building, hence making it a more attractive investment relative to other things. So they buy them up and charge high rents - but at the same time all the individual owners of rental property also see that they can charge high rents, and do so. All we've done is swapped who is screwing renters, not by how much.

If this has "literally been studied" then I'd be very happy to see the studies - like I said I've tried to find data on this, and never found anything to suggest that replacing individual owners with corporate owners increases prices. Maybe my search-engine-fu is lacking (but also... every other time I've discussed this online no-one has come up with anything either. What I'm trying to say is that I don't hold this position for lack of trying to challenge it.) But in contrast, I've seen plenty of studies comparing population growth to house building and coming up with a huge deficit.