Going by the graph in the article, that's still ~13% of homes owned by investors with >5 properties. And that's total of what is currently held, it speaks nothing of liquidity. That number likely includes investors who have had that property for a long time, the current property buy-up likely means far greater than 13% of the market right now is going to those sorts of aggregators.
Dropping the price of a house by a few percentage points can be the make-or-break for some families. And small changes in availability can have large impacts on price.
If we banned (or severely penalized) all entities from owning more than 5 residential homes, this would probably reduce cost by a few percentage points across the board. That's thousands of dollars.
Personally, I think unoccupied homes in general ought to be penalized (beyond just tax burden, an actual vacancy tax).
You may be interested in learning about the Land Value Tax[0] which will in effect, taxes become more burdensome for leaving land unproductive (e.g., empty housing or land). It also shifts the calculus on home improvements, which means remodeling your home or doing other perhaps large pieces of upkeep will not trigger a property tax increase as it does today, which is better for median home owners as well.
> home improvements, which means remodeling your home or doing other perhaps large pieces of upkeep will not trigger a property tax increase as it does today
I have heard this complaint here a few times, but very few specifics. I would call getting your roof replaced or your kitchen/bathroom remodelled as major home improvements. Do these actually property tax increases?
Depends on how your locality assesses the value of your home. You can probably do a web search for where you live specifically if you want to get into the nitty gritty. In the places I've lived, unless I added more square footage, these won't trigger an automatic property tax increase.
But if the improvements on your house makes the neighborhood more desirable and your neighbor's house sell for a higher price then your locality expects, then your house will be assessed at a higher value the next time the locality does their assessments, which means higher taxes.
Of course, improvements to your home that increase a sale value will affect the taxes, but the buyer has to deal with that.
Do some localities assess homes individually every so often? I wonder...
In many jurisdictions they do, yes. A general guideline is that if it requires an permit it will typically trigger an assessment and thus increase in property tax
If everything else is equal, a roof replacement or other maintenance shouldn't appreciably change the value of the house (not beyond the cost of maintenance).
What WILL change your property tax is an addition or similar that makes your house go from X (same as everyone around you) to 1.2X or similar, then you'll proportionally pay more tax.
(It varies by district, but most USA property taxes are calculated by figuring out the budget for the city/county/school district, and dividing it proportionally amongst the valuations of properties/houses. This is often displayed as a percentage of the value, but it is not a percentage TAX - as if everyone's property doubles overnight but the budget remains the same, the property tax dollar amounts would remain the same while the percentage reported goes down.)
Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
There are many people with type 2 diabetes that are not overweight; and also many people with overweight and even obesity who do not develop type 2 diabetes. The estimate is that around 537 million people have diabetes worldwide, while overweight and obesity is estimated to affect 1.1 billion people.
Carbohydrates do cause insulin resistance and diabetes. India has average BMI of 21,9, yet has very high incidence of diabetes - largely thanks to its carbohydrate-based diet.
I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
School quality’s largely in the same place. You’re not going to make much of a dent without fixing social support, the social safety net, healthcare, mental healthcare, and generally greatly improving stability for the economically bottom third or so of families.
In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.
So we have stats, that's the closest we have to objective, but I guess we can't trust those. You say your anecdote contradicts "the stats", and I genuinely believe you. Sincerely, what's the alternative? Vibes? We gotta steer this ship (society) based on something.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.
Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).
Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.
I am the loud exhaust. Where we live the noise pollution is not a concern and I have no complaints around that. Many of my neighbors have lifted trucks and go vroom cars. Ironically the performance cars are the nicest drivers :)
I get it, I used to drive a GTI. I don't mind just loud exhaust by itself, as long as they are tuned well. It's the pops/crackling/backfires that set off all the neighborhood dogs and sound like they split the air that are a scourge around here. These folks also are the ones driving like maniacs in inappropriate contexts.
I dont personally agree but that is a really interesting argument I can kinda get behind. I guess the question is, what if you have footage of a crime being committed, and you would have a great lead if you only had a way to pair a vehicle with a person?
I also don't agree with the argument you replied to, but a counter-argument to your point is that we don't mandate individuals to wear name tags while in public
I'm fine with license plates being read and parsed. I'm fine with license plates being read, parsed, assessed for violation, and ticketed automatically, or cross-checked for amber alerts. That's literally my line of work.
I want strict, strict guardrails on when and where that occurs. I want that information erased as soon as the context of the citation wraps up. I want every company/contractor in this space FOIA-able and held to as strict or stricter requirements than the government for transparency and corruption and other regulation. I don't want every timestamped/geostamped datapoint of every law abiding driver passing into any juncture hoovered into a data lake and tracked and easily queryable. That's (IMHO, IANAL, WTF, BBQ) a flagrant 4th amendment violation, and had the framers been able to conceive such a thing, they'd absolutely add a "and no dragnet surveilance" provision from day 1.
If that seems hypocritical, my line starts with "has a crime occurred with decent likelihood?" "Lets collect everything and go snoopin for crimes" is beyond the pale.
> but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
Two weeks ago, my parked car, along with two other parked cars, was rear-ended at 3:15am by a drunk driver (the car interior smelled like alcohol), in an unregistered car that was not his. He then fled the scene.
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
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What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
Indeed, I already see this in the consumer space with Frigate users. Letting modern cameras handle the inference themselves makes running an NVR easier. Pretty soon all cameras will be this way, and as you say the output will be metadata that is easily collected and correlated. Sounds useful for my personal surveillance system and awful for society.
I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?
We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.
> We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it
Cool, change the First Amendment first. Your face and name aren't private under our existing framework of laws - no standard legislation can change this.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:
- go to and from a place of worship
- go to and from a peaceful assembly
- conduct free speech activities
- conduct press/journalism
- petition the government
If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.
> It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against
Freedom of the press is directly related to privacy: if I can see something in public as a private citizen, I can report on it, and you may not create any laws abridging this.
I'm not commenting on surveillance dragnets or how the government uses the data or if the government is prohibited from using it by statute or case law - the First Amendment doesn't apply there (Fourth and Fifth do.)
I don't know how the First Amendment applies, could you elaborate? And assuming it does, that does not seem like an impossible barrier; time, place, and manner restrictions are a thing. And like I said, we already do it at some level.
Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association? Or is the argument that it's private entities and the Constitution only limits the government?
Even in the latter case, at least we could do something about the government using private data collection to do things they are not otherwise permitted to do under the Constitution. That's some BS we should all be on board with stopping.
No law can prevent me from operating a corporation that collects and publishes license plate data for lawful purposes (basic freedom of the press.) If I can see something in public (where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists), I can report on it. Very few exceptions exist to this - think national security or military installations.
> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?
Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.
We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.
Alright, I will accept that what you say about license plate data is true (though I know there remains ongoing debate about it, IANAL so I cannot claim to know anything more).
That gets you as far as distributing the license plate, location, and time. But if you combine that data with other non-public data, then it is no longer a First Amendment protected use.
As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country with no effort and store it indefinitely. "No reasonable expectation of privacy" rests on a definition of reasonable that made sense in the 18th century. Our technological progress has changed that calculus.
> As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country
This is a commonly echoed sentiment for the Second Amendment too ("These idiot founders! They could never have imagined so much individual power - We need to take rights away!"), and I am in hard disagreement for both.
I cherish the fact that our legal system is so intentionally slow that these types of "progressive" efforts to reform the Constitution are basically impossible.
The founders clearly intended the second amendment to be about military service, we have contemporary evidence to support that. The idea that it broadly applied to individuals on their own is an interpretation that didn’t really gain steam until well into the 20th century.
Have you ever read any of the Federalist papers? This is extraordinarily ignorant - even left-leaning SCOTUS justices do not agree with you (see Caetano, etc.)
As far as I am aware, there's no Federal law prohibiting the publication of SSNs for lawful purposes (which is the typical default.) In Virginia, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli (4th Cir. 2010) touched on this very issue, and ultimately concluded that publishing SSNs is protected speech (some nuance there, but this was the outcome.)
License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.
Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
I’m surprised that SSNs could be published like that. It’s curious that nobody has attempted to “do a journalism” and publish the SSNs of HNW individuals. It seems there would be little to stop you.
> Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
That’s obvious, and you seem to be going against yourself here. If some details are considered too sensitive for publication then it would follow that a judge may be able to interpret the law to prevent mass publication of even sensitive public or semi-public data by creating an interpretive carve-out. But if you can publish SSNs then there’s little to no hope for that. It almost seems that the law is “autistically” tilted in favor of data brokers.
Someone ought to set up a tracker that updates a list of known HNW individuals with last detected location based on license plate data and/or facial recognition. Maybe also a list of last detected million dollar+ supercars. That will get some bills started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop
AI != AGI != neural networks != LLMs
But Tao did mention ChatGPT so i believe LLMs were involved at least partially.
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