This is obviously correct. Somehow people just can't accept the pigeonhole principle that if X people are trying to buy Y houses and X>>Y, a lot of them are going to be disappointed regardless of what laws you pass.
It's obviously incorrect. If X people are trying to buy Y houses, and 1 of them can always buy Y/2 houses, then you'll need to build a hell of a lot more than Y houses if Y is only equal to X. Right now in most places, Y < X, and a certain percentage of people can still buy many more than 1, so it seems like that's a real problem shouldn't continue during times of scarcity.
When N_for_sale > N_individuals_and_couples_buying, it is still possible for N_dissatisfied to be > 0 for the reason you give. But N_dissatisfied must be > 0 whenever N_for_sale < N_individuals_and_couples_buying, even if everyone is limited to having at most one.
Agreed, but I wasn't disagreeing with their whole sentiment, just their assertion that the GP was obviously correct, namely that it doesn't matter how many homes people can buy.
Less supply couldn't possibly be helpful for those disappointed, but also there's less supply than there would be if access to it as a commodity was limited, supposing that all other artificial restrictions and funding models could rely on less concentrated investments, which I think they could
> It doesn't matter how many houses anyone owns if you just build. more. housing.
That's what people with disproportionate access to capital would want people to believe. It absolutely matters if there's a ceiling and a floor on the production rate of every aspect of the supply chain of housing. If it doesn't matter how many houses someone owns, then it wouldn't matter if builders don't outpace the ability for particularly wealthy people to borrow and own as much as they possibly can. It's a particular type of commodity that should be appropriately controlled in a way that reduces the whole "tragedy of the commons" type effect.
There's always a finite supply, and there's always some contingent of people who will try and get as much as they possibly can, leveraging as much generational wealth as they need to, if they need to.
There should absolutely be a limit on the number of homes, within a particular region, someone should be able to buy, as long as a sufficient threshold is met for what can reasonably be called a scarcity problem. If an individual average home of any type would require the mean family income to quadruple in order to service the mortage, or the downpayment would require 5x their annual salary pre-tax, that seems like a very liberal threshold.
They give several well-considered criticisms of the question - it leads people to focus on socioecomonic status, it doesn't correlate with other measure like whether they report experiencing joy recently, etc. It's not much of a defense to simply say "well, it's the standard".
My criticism is about how the dramatic language differs from the banal content of the article.
Titling it "The World Happiness Report Is a Sham" and calling it "beset with methodological problems", I would expect some more serious scientific malpractices, like data fabrication, calculation errors, sampling problems, p-hacking, etc., not "I think there are some problems with this variable".
Disagree. Whether I'm entirely fabricating data that claims A by writing numbers into an Excel sheet, or whether I'm doing a survey that measures B and then claim it means A, isn't materially different in outcome. The outcomes are just as bad, and that's what people care about. Maybe you as a researcher care that the former is more immoral, but to everyone else it doesn't matter.
I think there's a difference in outcomes between fabricating data, and getting data that still remains validly gathered, but measures something subtly different.
And I think the general public can make meaning of that
difference and have a stake in both – in the same way that the general public knows that stock market values and economic security are different things, even though people still have a lot riding on retirement plans based on stock investments.
Is joy related to happiness, or are they two separate concepts? That depends on your cultural background and the languages you speak.
The World Happiness Report can be traced back to the UN General Assembly Resolution 65/309, which was proposed by Bhutan. Therefore the intended definition of happiness in this context is similar to the one in Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index.
Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.
Today they are bloated with administration that is nothing but a cost center, meanwhile they eliminate tenured professorships and have classes taught by tenuous adjunct faculty who are paid poverty wages. Universities could easily right the ship by cutting the administration and focusing on teaching and research, but the people who need to make the decision to do that are the ones who would be cut.
Continual cuts to both state funding and federal research support is a large part of it for public universities. Essentially, every time there is a major budget crisis, state support gets slashed, and it never gets put back when things get better.
Tuition is one of the few levers left, and while people will object to tuition hikes for in-state students, very few people will do the same for foreign students.
More money, more income. That's why flood of foreign money is good for a university. But, it is a fallacy to think that this has no cost.
In my experience, the large influx of foreign students are typically at the masters level. MS classes are typically (not always lol!) more advanced than undergraduate classes. So, you need more qualified instructors, such as your tenured/tenure track faculty to teach them. When you take T/TT faculty out of undergraduate classes and replace them with teaching faculty, you lose a lot. (Let me know if you need what's lost to be spelled out.)
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Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.
I guess it is not strictly necessary, but it brings in a lot more money, which the university is of course very eager to take.
It's just focusing on different things. Sure they had wood and metal tools, but they also had literal snake oil, watered stock, and people selling you the Brooklyn Bridge.
For certain tasks for me, having a movie running while I'm working is more productive. It gives something to take your attention when you have to wait for something without getting sucked in to endless scrolling.
> A company will know that you just got paid and so charge you just a bit more for your chicken nuggets than they do when you haven’t been paid in two weeks.
I know there's various data apps can collect. On iOS at least it seems like you have to grant permission for the app to access most of it. But how on Earth is this supposed to work? How does the app on my phone know if I just got paid?
Author here - they can only do surveillance pricing on you if they know who you are when you're paying. They can't do that at a kiosk or counter because they would only know whose paying when you use your credit card and have already seen the bill.
If you use an app they already know you who are and so the second you open the app it's showing you the surveillance prices.
> The debt facility is being made through the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which was formed under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to foster the growth of clean energy technologies.
> The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed during the Biden administration, created another pot of money under the LPO known as the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program. That program was created to restore existing power plants to operation provided they avoid or reduce pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration kept it largely in tact, rebranding it the Energy Dominance Financing Program.
Congress passed the Energy Policy act of 2005 and then the Inflation Reduction Act allocating money to the DoE to make these loans.
It sounds like this is the actual problem and instead of paying exorbitant salaries or fixing the entire US education system Ford just needs to face reality and accept how long repairs actually take and pay for that time. That and/or redesign their cars to take less time to repair.
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