snrplfth

34 ms·

271.
by snrplfth 10y ago
I mean, as compared to the cost of making it look lived-in, or just stopping by so as to technically "be occupying it". Rents in Vancouver are at a very low ratio to the cash value of property, as bad as 70:1 (value:annual rent.)
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Amusingly, you can't just move to Canada for 4 years. They are pretty good at finding and deporting people.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
That means tenancy contracts, risk of damage, and a whole raft of legal obligations.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
I tend to think that the effectiveness of advertisement and memery really depend on the context. When it comes to something where a choice has direct effects and costs - when buying a plane ticket or an appliance, for example - there is a s
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by snrplfth 10y ago
I agree this is likely. You know, it's a funny sort of thing - people work in the left-coast SV bubble-world making friendly-looking social media applications and suddenly they find they're being looked at by the Old Media crowd l
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Likewise!
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Just a few concluding notes here on my end: Yes, I understand why people are angry. People get angry about all number of thigs, more or less justifiably. The problem is that most of the cures being proffered for this percieved unfairness w
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by snrplfth 10y ago
>Which countries are you talking about specifically? I'm talking about countries across the world in Africa and South America, as well as in Asia such as Indonesia, and the countries I mentioned before their reforms - India and Chin
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Sure, they targeted key industries and sometimes "got them". But so did a lot of other countries try the same thing, and they didn't get them. I'll note also that throughout most of their boom periods, both Singapore and
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Picketty's work is generally about wealth inequality moreso. He asserts that the returns on capital investment exceed the average growth of the economy at large, and that therefore the share of wealth going to the top of the wealth sca
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by snrplfth 10y ago
When I say "any system imaginable" I mean his tendency to elevate the social/anthropological realities over the other realities: that if we can plausibly believe people could act in a certain way (and there's so many p
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by snrplfth 10y ago
The cost of the educational system is a complex thing, but generally speaking, if a) competition in a sector is tightly restricted and b) large amounts of subsidies are available for consuming that good, then c) prices will climb sharply, a
283.
by snrplfth 10y ago
International waters are sort of a middle-space, where the precedence of property arrangements is not as fixed as on land or in territorial waters. As such it's a way of seeing systems of property at work in a vaguely "less govern
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Yes, the question of the "unbuilt factory" and the "untrained worker" is a good one. But also consider the unmade good and the unproduced service - things not created because they were not part of the smaller set of good
285.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Of course, I would agree that free trade and no protectionism is not good for every single person all the time - just in the same way that people whose jobs are automated, or simply do not exist any more due to changing demand, often find i
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by snrplfth 10y ago
I would say yes, historically and presently in various "unowned" regions like international waters and more importantly in "cross-border" exchanges where parties to a trade generate some system of property trust due to t
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Scarcity still applies to robots/automation. Robots are not free, the resources used to make and maintain them are not free, and they still exist in a world where information and time are limited. Note that the fast-food-worker, defini
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, I disagree with David Graeber on the very nature of money and exchange, so take that as you will. I'm well aware of the argument though. I don't think most economists have ever argued that markets exist outside frameworks of
289.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, yes, comparative advantage changes, and must be discovered through tests in markets. So the fry-cook becomes a computer scientist - but people still desire fries. So, the person who is now least bad at fast food cooking can move int
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Here's some citations for you: https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/irish-fami... https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/ograda-fig... As you can see, domest
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by snrplfth 10y ago
The point is that comparative advantage is discovered in the market. I may think that I'm the best at painting houses - and I may be better than most! - but in striving for the best gains I can, I may find that my comparative advanta
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by snrplfth 10y ago
How can a textbook saying "the planets and asteroids orbit around the sun" be right if it's middle-school level? Or one saying "life is generally divided into five kingdoms" be right if it's middle-school level
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by snrplfth 10y ago
It's a good recommendation. Even if someone disagrees with it, it's the ideal primer in understanding what the arguments and ideas behind classical/marginalist/Hayekian economics actually are (rather than just hearing ab
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by snrplfth 10y ago
But those economies that did well were ones which moved in the direction of freer trade/economies. This is not to say that they had perfectly free trade or didn't pick winners with industrial policy - it's just that they star
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Except that those exports of high-price-per-calorie food (meats, dairy, wheat) were what paid for large imports of low-price-per-calorie food (rye, corn). If they'd shut down exports, those imports would not have come and the famine
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by snrplfth 10y ago
1/ I think you may be focusing on the wrong part of comparative advantage - the point is that different countries, regions, companies and individuals will be better or worse than each other for any number of reasons - climate, skills
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Milton Friedman was largely in favour of freedom of movement, but he famously noted that you can have either a welfare state or open borders - but not both. (And note also that in a broad interpretation, things paid out of tax money and giv
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by snrplfth 10y ago
I think cluelessness has a lot to do with it - though it's increasingly hard to believe that people are still unaware that price controls generate shortages. Maybe some policies just have that property of being politically feasible eno
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by snrplfth 10y ago
But the Scandinavian governments and economies are not socialist in the sense of "the government/state/collectives own the means of production". It's true that the Scandinavian countries have high levels of taxation
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by snrplfth 10y ago
It was well-developed, but when you can't import machinery and fertilizer, your agricultural production is quickly limited. And when the prices of the products that you sell are price-controlled, there's no reason to expand prod

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