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In what way does buying a property and renting it create wealth? Isn't buying a property with the intent to rent it manipulation of economic conditions?

If you think buying a house and renting it out "manipulates economic conditions" you need to prove it because that's a claim, especially with regard to "manipulate."

The manipulation is in the political limit of housing supply and the limit on land value tax rates.

Maybe it is (I'm not so sure but I'm open to the argument), but even if true, it's a completely separate thing from someone buying a home and renting it out.

The homevoter hypothesis is mostly nonsense. There isn't a coordinated, conscious effort to restrict the supply of homes based on rational expectations of excess returns. People restrict the supply of homes due to misguided aesthetic reflexes, racism, nostalgia, and a bunch of other stuff, not because they are mustache-twirling capitalists.

Yes. The land is wealth, the house is wealth, and _living in_ the house is wealth. Like it or not, not everyone can afford to buy a house. Maybe they don’t have a down payment, or can’t get a good interest rate on a mortgage. Instead of renting money and using it to buy the house, they need to just rent the house instead. If there were no rentals available of any kind, they would go homeless¹. Having them renting something instead of going homeless makes wealth for both them and for society as a whole.

¹ We’ll just assume that homesteading is impossible these days.


A comment the adds nothing to the discussion but derails the conversation with an anecdotes from the writers childhood because how this topic vaguely reminds them of something kind of similar.


PA did this with construction zone cameras. I'm not sure where that landed because its been a while since I've seen one. I successfully appealed my ticket to the magistrate. It initially started as a pilot program and the law requires signage which during the pilot was quite inconspicuous. After the launch the sign was changed to a tiny little thing, about 1/5 the size of the pilot program.

I was going 5 over the reduced speed limit, in the slow lane with rush hour traffic. That thing must've issued thousands of tickets.


The problem is that you need to have decent legislators and hold them accountable, and unfortunately we seem to be backsliding on making that happen.


There's a data type precedence that it uses to determine which value should be casted[0]. Nvarchar is higher precedence, therefore the varchar value is "lifted" to an nvarchar value first. This wouldn't be an issue if the types were reversed.

0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/data-types/data-...


So such issues can appear in more products and more datatypes (int and bigint have same problem).

This is really bad rule for SQL's "equality" operator.

Still optimizer should be able to handle it - if the result is the same, optimizer should take faster path.


This is definitely not always the case[0], let's not pretend these companies give a fuck about the communities in which their data centers operate[1].

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

1: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...


Community has nothing to do with it. They are asking about energy mix because that is important to enough of their customers that it is worth looking at.


I got the battery extension and it lasted more than 10 months (I have it on a 30 minute refresh). Highly recommend TRMNL if you want something to hack on without fussing with hardware.


glad to hear this. we made a couple more power savings improvements this week, publishing something on the blog about it ~tmrw.


The powers that be have always saught wealth. At some point they gained enough power to start usurping the law that was supposed to keep them in check.


We should have made it clearer that monied interests have a choice: be kept in check by the law, or by the guillotine.


The problem is, the guillotine solution to regulation only becomes feasible after the monied interest have thoroughly fucked society, to a level that would make living as blue-collar working in Detroit downtown today feel like being a banking executive living in Geneva.


Do you believe that the monied interests will stop on their own before we get there?


I'm too entralled by TikTok to build a guillotine.


Is that why the TikTok ban fell through?! …figures.


I'm not doing FIRE, I have children and just live below my means. I'm hoping to retire around 55 assuming the AI bubble doesn't nuke everyones portfolio.


If that’s a real concern of yours, maybe park what you think you’ll need in money market funds / gold (FX hedge)?


The typical FIRE requires compounding growth. You start with portfolio worth 25 years of expenses but if expenses keep on growing due to inflation and portfolio shrinks because of expenses and zero growth, it can get hairy quite fast.

There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.


Typical FIRE also requires access to affordable healthcare. In the US that is going away with ACA subsidies.

Five years ago I paid for “market rate“ insurance through my business for my family because we did not qualify for ACA subsidies. The cost was about $40,000 per year.


Yeah, and the tooling is changing more quickly than JavaScript and is riddled with security issues. I think the best move right now is at best using AI as a (in)glorified Google / Stack overflow and waiting until the dust settles on tooling.


And that’s what I use it for. A rubber duck or a quick reference for verifiable questions. Maybe 5 or 6 questions in a typical day.

I think when I was a beginner programmer it would have been far, far too alluring. But these days the actual coding part doesn’t feel like the hard or time consuming part.


Unity isn't written in C#, it's C++. C# is used as the scripting engine.


Yes, of course, but the actual games are written (primarily! sometimes they will optimize something when actually necessary with a lower-level language! that's great!) in the scripting language.

The OP implies heavily that writing a program in a language with anything but pure manual memory management makes you lesser as a programmer than him: "Unfortunately, a lot of people never move past this point on their journey as a programmer" implies he has moved further on in his "journey" than those that dare to use a language with GC.

(and with respect to C++ note that OP considers RAII to be deficient in the same way as GC and ARC)


Indeed to the extent that Casey has a point here (which sure, I think in its original context it was fine, it's just unfortunate if you mistook a clever quip at a party for a life philosophy) C++ is riddled with types explicitly making this uh, choice.

Its not near the top of the list of reasons std::unordered_map is a crap type, but it's certainly on there. If we choose the capacity explicitly knowing we'll want to put no more than 8340 (key,value) pairs into Rust's HashMap we only allocate once, to make enough space for all 8340 pairs because duh, that's what capacity means. But std::unordered_map doesn't take the hint, it merely makes its internal hash table big enough, and each of the 8340 pairs is allocated separately.


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