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I feel like everyone online is becoming some anti-capitalist socialist and losing all critical thinking and it's making me crazy. Firstly, institutional invest

I feel like everyone online is becoming some anti-capitalist socialist and losing all critical thinking and it's making me crazy. Firstly, institutional investors own ~3% of single-family homes in the US , even in hot markets, they rarely exceed 10%. The lack of supply is outweighs the private equity problem. GPUs are manufactured goods where production scales with demand. When AI investment inevitably contracts, that fab capacity will redirect to consumer products. I don't know where this idea comes from that NVIDIA is conspiring with these companies to never sell consumers GPUs. It only takes so many GPUs to build out a streaming service, would they just stop making GPUs entirely? It doesn't make any sense if you think about it for more than 2 seconds.

zahlman 10mo ago
Becoming? I've been hearing these takes for over a decade.
- octoberfranklin 10mo ago
  A decade ago it was the fringe lunatics. Now it's the only thing that seems to be "surfaced" and "boosted" in any of the infosilos like reddit/youtube/etc.
  - zahlman 10mo ago
    I don't think it's because there are more people on the fringes, so much as because there's so much more "surfacing" technology in use.
    - octoberfranklin 10mo ago
      That was my point. Well that and the fact that the "surfacing" is very very aggressively selecting for this particular viewpoint, which used to be a fringe lunatic one.
osiris970 10mo ago
What's immensely frustrating is so much of this conspiracy shit, comes from the U.S. as well. A population where the median is living better every year, and better than 90% of the world. It's mind boggling, people don't understand how good they have it. I'm not against progress, obviously make things better, but the perspective is important.
pfannkuchen 10mo ago
Devil’s advocate: depending on the ownership turnover rate, the pricing impact of institutional investors could be outsized compared to their current ownership share if their property acquisition ramped up recently. I think a better metric would be what percent of purchases are made by institutional investors. This is because pricing is based on sales, not on the overall stock including properties that have been sat on for a long time. Have you looked at that metric? One heuristic that points in the direction of this being meaningful is that a lot of SFHs seem to be owned by old people who have lived there for a long time. I agree that the comparison is stupid though since computer hardware is much easier to scale with demand. If anything this may show that hardware manufacturers are betting that this demand spike is temporary and they aren’t yet willing to ramp up production since they could end up sitting on unsold inventory after the bubble pops.
Cornbilly 10mo ago
On the flip side of that, I’m tired of HN libertarians treating capitalism like some sort of infallible religion.

zahlman 10mo ago

Becoming? I've been hearing these takes for over a decade.

octoberfranklin 10mo ago
A decade ago it was the fringe lunatics. Now it's the only thing that seems to be "surfaced" and "boosted" in any of the infosilos like reddit/youtube/etc.
- zahlman 10mo ago
  I don't think it's because there are more people on the fringes, so much as because there's so much more "surfacing" technology in use.
  - octoberfranklin 10mo ago
    That was my point. Well that and the fact that the "surfacing" is very very aggressively selecting for this particular viewpoint, which used to be a fringe lunatic one.

osiris970 10mo ago

What's immensely frustrating is so much of this conspiracy shit, comes from the U.S. as well. A population where the median is living better every year, and better than 90% of the world. It's mind boggling, people don't understand how good they have it. I'm not against progress, obviously make things better, but the perspective is important.

pfannkuchen 10mo ago

Devil’s advocate: depending on the ownership turnover rate, the pricing impact of institutional investors could be outsized compared to their current ownership share if their property acquisition ramped up recently. I think a better metric would be what percent of purchases are made by institutional investors. This is because pricing is based on sales, not on the overall stock including properties that have been sat on for a long time. Have you looked at that metric? One heuristic that points in the direction of this being meaningful is that a lot of SFHs seem to be owned by old people who have lived there for a long time. I agree that the comparison is stupid though since computer hardware is much easier to scale with demand. If anything this may show that hardware manufacturers are betting that this demand spike is temporary and they aren’t yet willing to ramp up production since they could end up sitting on unsold inventory after the bubble pops.

Cornbilly 10mo ago

On the flip side of that, I’m tired of HN libertarians treating capitalism like some sort of infallible religion.