That doesn't sound like a problem of inflation. I think it's related to people migrating out of rural areas and into big cities. When you have a decreasing local population, home prices tend to fall.
That doesn't solve the issue of housing being unaffordable to new buyers. How do you address affordability if the prices stop dropping before they reach a price at which an average young worker can afford to buy a starter home?
We need to allow smaller houses such that people can afford to buy them then. Or we need to build apartments of all sizes so people can afford to rent them. The above is not an exclusive or - buying a house is a great choice for some and a terrible choice for others.
Affordable housing used to include a room where you share a bathroom and kitchen with the entire hallway. Affordable housing used to include tiny shacks. Air conditioning used to be something not even the rich had.
If the prices dropping to the cost of construction plus a 20% profit margin isn’t enough to make housing affordable then those people just literally can’t afford to buy housing.
As someone not familiar with these libraries, image_get or image_read seems much clearer to me than imread. I'm wondering if the convention is worse than your instinct in this case. Maybe these AI tools will push us towards conventions that aren't always the best design.
image_get is clearer—unless you've used Matlab, Octave, matplotlib, SciPy, OpenCV, scikit-learn, or other things that have copied Matlab's interface. In that case, using the established name is clearer.
(Unless, on the gripping hand, your image_get function is subtly different from Matlab's imread, for example by not returning an array, in which case a different name might be better.)
People are quick to state this as if it's a slam dunk case for 'we shouldn't make them any more', but I don't understand the thinking there. An individual coin can be used many many times to facilitate many many transactions before it eventually falls out of circulation through loss or damage. The amount you should spend on making coins of a given denomination has nothing to do with what the total face value of those coins is, but needs to be traded off against the value to the economy of having those coins in circulation. If spending more money on producing higher quality coins enables them to remain in circulation twice as long, it might be worthwhile even if the cost exceeds the face value.
It's a different story if the material value of the metal in the coin exceeds its face value - at that point it makes sense to go to a bank, change money into pennies, then scrap them and sell the copper. That would be bad.
But the reason pennies are a bad deal isn't because of their manufacturing cost, it's because their handling costs exceed the value of incorporating them in a transaction. Should a store go to the trouble of keeping pennies available, counting them, storing them, transferring them to the bank? Or should they round up change to the nearest five cents and take a 4c hit on each transaction where you'd have been able to use pennies? If your average transaction value is over a hundred dollars or so, like most supermarkets, and you only handle cash on one sale in 50 say, if handling pennies in your cash-management operation takes more than a few thousandths of one percent of your budget, it's costing you too much.
> It's a different story if the material value of the metal in the coin exceeds its face value - at that point it makes sense to go to a bank, change money into pennies, then scrap them and sell the copper. That would be bad.
Well, that is highly illegal and not very profitable vs the amount of risk. You'd be better off doing almost any other crime.
In my countries a decade or so ago we had a copper coin for roughly 1c. People started hoarding and defacing the coins then selling it as copper scraps. It was so rampant that I think it would have been infeasible to punish eveyrone. So the Govt just discountinued it.
The is a really good, IMO, Saturday Night Live skit about this where the contestants try to guess Republican or not of various people. Some of the bits do a great job of pointing out how some of the values people claim to believe in are only applied selectivity when it benefits their side.
I pretty much agree with everything you said, but trying to think of a counter example I'm reminded of the movie Moneyball. Reviewing the detailed stats of each baseball player vs. the cost of hiring them seems pretty close to measuring "time doing useful things on the field". I'm not sure how common this practice is in general in current professional sports.
It's also worth pointing out that the "Moneyball" strategy ultimately failed because it produced a team who could succeed in the regular season, but fail consistently in the playoffs and ultimately lead to good players leaving due to salary constraints.
Before TSA existed we could get through security without paying the extra $85. Why doesn't the TSA just pre-check everyone? It just feels like a scam to me.
It's just more examples of enshittification over the decades. Nevermind the checkin, the premiums for first class are absurd (and nowadays there's at least 4 different tiers of flight, not just 2), you don't get free snacks anymore, seating is smaller, etc. Those times of treating customers with respected ended quite a while ago (except during COVID of course. But that's mostly over).
>customers with respected ended quite a while ago (except during COVID of course. But that's mostly over).
I definitely didn't feel respected during covid. There was a mask rule, standard for the time, fine. But then they give out drinks, okay. They were extremely strict, you must sip your drink and have your mask on again within less than a second. Long sips, unacceptable. Pause in your sip, unacceptable, there needs to then be two sips with an intermediate remasking. The air staff were quite 1930s Germany as far as the rigor of their enforcement of this rule. This has all the charm and beside manner of a driver laying on their horn 200ms after the red light turns green. Quite bizarre, the mask fetish, when most passengers were vaccinated and there's this huge vector of spreading the disease called touching things with pathogens on their surface aka fomites.
Where was this? When I travelled here in Europe we could just take our mask off while eating/drinking. No second rule. That would indeed be super annoying.
What I find annoying these days are those people who theatrically mask up and then look at you like you're supposed to do the same. Luckily it's very uncommon in aviation now. A bit more in the metro but they can just walk elsewhere if they want.
Absolutely. Why have any charge at all? Why is the government expecting me to pay for it? Fuck the poor I guess, they wait in line.
Why should I have to pay at all? Why not make everyone going through security pay $5 every time to recoup the costs for the TSA through user fees?
And it's not like it's only $70-85 every five years, it's per person so I'll have to buy for my whole family. Quite a bit more than just $70! And in the end it's all bullshit anyways. Just a way to sort people willing to give up the money versus those who don't know, don't want to, or can't pay.
Why should I pay for your TSA Precheck? Let’s be real though, we are only talking about taking your shoes off and belt. It won’t kill you to do that. If you have a disability that doesn’t enable you to do either, I’m sure they will make an exception.
And kids up to 17 don’t need Precheck if flying with a parent
Are you really complaining about spending $70 once every five years to give me TSA Precheck? You won't even notice paying for my Precheck.
Why should I pay for your usage of the TSA? Why not have all $7.55B entirely funded by direct user fees, handing the TSA agents cash or tap a credit card while you go through the scanner? Why should I pay for your airports (often constructed with massive tax subsidies and grants)? Why should I pay for the highways you drive on to go to your airport?
> we are only talking about taking your shoes off and belt.
No, we're also talking about stereoscopic facial scans, high resolution millimeter wave scans of my body, yet another centralized government database tracking my movements, having to showcase all my valuables to all the other passersby by dumping all the electronics out of my bag, wasting my time, wasting our tax dollars, for pretty much no benefit. Ooh but I can skip the line if I surrender more biometrics and pay extra! How nice!
> If that’s your concern, why would you want TSA Precheck where you have to give the government your fingerprints and go through a background check?
I'd rather just have practically none of it because it's largely a waste of money and time and a major inconvenience while providing practically little real security.
> Not getting blown out the sky is a pretty big benefit.
Tons of other countries have far more basic security at airports. They're not constantly having planes blown out of the sky. Airlines operated for decades before the formation of the TSA and millimeter wave scanners and taking off our shoes and stereoscopic face scans and yet they were not getting blown out of the sky.
I don't think he's saying no one should get rich, just that wealth inequality is already too large and seems to be on a path to continue growing. I think most people would agree there is some point where there is too much wealth inequality, we just disagree on whether we're already past that point.
Assess the empty properties to their actual value, and then lower the overall rate.