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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I find Reddit's economics takes so horrible that it's worse, though on most other things I agree that you often expect it to be bad, unlike hacker news.

Reddit's economics takes are amazingly bad. It's common to have comment sections where easily more than 99% of the comments are saying things that are blatantly at odds with the most basic and established economic concepts.

And I get the sense that this represents a large block of people, and politically active ones too! And not merely advocating things that could be bad, but things that would be outright disastrous, like not allowing people to go above a given net worth.

Yes. One of the crazier ones I've seen which is really popular is making it illegal to own an investment property unless it's a purpose built rental. So that's the only that renters would be allowed to live in. Another one is capping the price of food.

Right. The first leads to less building; the second leads to shortages. Neither a lack of homes nor a shortage of food are what they would want.