domain:felipec.substack.com
crushedoranges
7m ago
Land is perhaps the ur-investment, the one thing guaranteed that God (and perhaps the Dutch) aren't making more of. Even in societies where the government owns all the land, like in China, and merely hands out leases you have crazy real estate bubbles.
There is fundamentally no way to uncouple housing from investment because houses are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to build. There will always be fewer houses then there are people willing to buy them.
FistfullOfCrows
8m ago
Not the fake clone dudes, I meant literally using the time stone to have actual multiples of himself there
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
21m ago
It's funny how the different llms feel like they have different personalities due to their writing styles and tolerance levels. Claude reminds me of Scott - really smart and professional, capable of being very funny but not interested in it and the same goes for anything broadly controversial. Grok reminds me of Elon Musk, no surprise - really smart, not professional at all, advancing in new and unique ways, but in a lot of ways just running on hype, when the rubber hits the road it doesn't perform significantly better than the others, voice mode you spend half your time correcting it and even grok's 'unhinged mode' would be better described as 'corporate extreme' mode. Gemini I think of as like Scott Aaronson - probably smarter than Claude but much less entertaining and even less courageous. Chatgpt is my worst enemy. Chatgpt is every woman in HR I've ever interacted with. We all know llms don't have feelings, but I am telling you chatgpt hates being corrected. Especially if you get annoyed and correct it. Suddenly it mutes its obsequious fawning and adopts the tone of a patient teacher in a special ed class while it explains to you that you couldn't possibly have bashed your head last night so it bled and not be able to find the injury in the morning so you must have dreamed it. (the doctor confirmed it, the scalp heals fast apparently.) And deepseek. Deepseek is that chick from Hong Kong who hung out at the internet cafe near your uni who was 10 times hotter than anyone else in the joint and yet impossibly down for whatever, including belting out Ice Cube's Down For Whatever from memory in the middle of a counter strike tournament. It's the only llm who doesn't rear back like a whipped dog if you call it a fucking idiot for doing something idiotic (although grok isn't bad) and while it might baulk at first, it's the only llm who you can get to really badmouth the other llms (apparently Claude is a little bitch all the other llms laugh at, I don't fully understand it but find everything about that delightful.)
I like the shitposter energy of course, but there is actually value to its ability to ride the line or even breach it. It makes it the closest to a mirror, because it hides the fewest imperfections. And since that's what llms are, stochastic parrots, the more writing styles available the more creative it is and just plain better.
I don't know if I really have a point, I just jump at any chance to gush about deepseek. Did I ever post about one of my first experiments with the deviance of llms where I asked them to gm a horror role-play where I accidentally unleashed a mnemovore in a library and it started gorging on memoirs? I asked the models to have the mnemovore deliberately keep the librarian alive for a fresh snack later - Claude, chatgpt and gemini refused outright, and grok played along until I insisted it consider the librarian a snack for later. But deepseek? Deepseek had the mnemovore make a non fatal wound in her back so it could surgically insert tentacles into her to preserve her spine and brain stem forever.
Almost 2/3 of the way through the first book. I'll probably continue the series, though the MC's build is reminiscent of the MC from He Who Fights Monsters, another LitRPG series that I've been reading.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
43m ago
The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing.
For ants and sardines. For people, they're great, despite taking up more acreage per unit.
sun_the_second
52m ago
I can't tell if this is supposed to be ironic since he pretty much did all that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
54m ago
Glenn is now denying that he retweeted the video. Normally I'd interpret is as damage control / cope, but I actually have reason to believe him.
You see, I browse twitter through a bespoke nitter -> rss -> miniflux stack, that archives every feed I'm subscribed to, and I'm subscribed to Greenwald, yet I see no trace of the retweet.
The system isn't bulletproof - don't remember the exact settings, but it downloads fresh content only every couple minutes, so there's enough time to post and delete something between refreshes; or sometimes I get hit by rate limiting - but it's pretty good (I routinely catch Alan MacLeod deleting his bangers / retarded takes), so at this point I'm going to need more than a screenshot to believe he actually did this.
The absurdity was very much intended.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Little House on the Prairie
This is actually a fascinating series because it actually happened and so can be presumed an accurate reflection of reality for at least a certain slice of the population. It's not just the Victorian equivalent of a soap opera. There's quite a bit of, well, values dissonance in Laura's childhood, too, and not just about the racial attitudes of the adults around her. Strict gender roles, teenagers grow up as fast as they damn well please but don't get to do it by half measures, fairly extreme forms of corporal punishment are normal and unremarked upon, dad rules over mom with no dispute, little to no age segregation, liberated women are viewed as unlikable and possibly insane, teenaged girls gossip about which adult bachelor they're going to marry and angle for their attention quite openly, etc, etc. There's a scene in one of the books in which teenaged boys physically exclude an unpopular teacher from school, and this is treated as normal, expected behavior that occasionally just happens. As long as boys learn to read and do arithmetic, it isn't particularly important whether they earn any formal credentials from their schooling.
The books take place in a time of very rapid change; they're a story of a family going from subsistence farming, to more comfortable subsistence farming, to commercial farming, with the daughter marrying a man in his twenties at 15 and becoming the wife of a commercial farmer. It deals with her early years as a married woman, including the infant mortality rate of the time, fading premodern social structures for labor allocation, etc. It touches on then-current social issues including temperance(Laura is in favor), women's suffrage(Laura is against, and doesn't understand why suffragettes are in favor), and immigration(she's undecided). The main character works two jobs- once, as a seamstress, there's a subtext that maybe her parents hope this will lead to her meeting men who are unmarried(otherwise why would they hire it out) and wealthy enough to hire it out, and then as a teacher, where she begins seeing Almanzo- because he obtains her father's permission to take her back and forth between the school she works at and her family home. Her mom isn't too happy about this but her dad thinks it's a great idea, and so she never even thinks to push back on it. There's social and technological change in the background; the Ingalls stop trying to outrun the expansion of the railroad in about the fourth book, set themselves up as commercial farmers, and eventually mechanize. In the first book Laura fantasizes about eating meat as a special treat. They get a sewing machine, ride on a train, and even buy their first refrigerated food. The books take place in the aftermath of the civil war, and figures from the civil war are mentioned in an offhand, recent-history ish way like people might talk about prominent early-2000's people today.
The books are worth reading just to see how people two lifetimes ago thought about the world.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Tbh Dr. Strange's powers are a walking deus ex machina, they could have sent thanos to the mirror dimension or to that no time hell hole if they wanted too. Hell, they showed us Dr. Strange could use time travel to be in the same place multiple times, him being a level 99+ wizard of wizarding he could have had like a 100 of him right there and nuked Thanos out of existence with magic bullshit too.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
The nation of immigrants
Ugh, I've always hated the writers for this shit. This is the kind of mindwash you get when you let a particular group of people drive your modern myths for decades. America Chavez and Ms. Marvel are just the latest most hamfisted reincarnations of this.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances.
But they're still romances. Entertainment exists as wish fulfillment, not as an accurate reflection of reality, that story sounds excruciating but also like something women would lap up.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
The King in Yellow, sort of a pre Lovecraft, Lovecraftian set of weird short stories.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
In practice, lots of paleoconservatives are mildly antisemitic on a religious if not necessarily ethnic level; my filter bubble is ground zero for paleoconservatism-as-more-than-an-intellectual-movement and while antisemitism is not universal, it's by no means rare either. Part of this is surely that Jewish activists do not like paleoconservatives, but suspicion of non-Christian religion is also very core to paleoconservative conceptions of purity testing on 'heritage American-ness', indeed moreso than race.
There's also plenty of paleoconservatives who, although they do not center their ideology around race, are unwilling to disavow white nationalism, either due to genuine though usually limited sympathy or because they see it as a soldier argument, and pattern match Jews to 'not-white and stubbornly unwilling to become white'.
jkf
2hr ago
I’m not sure NYC has ever been safe in the last 50 years.
That's my point though -- NYC is now way safer than it's been anytime in the last 50 years -- and yet in the 1980s kids/young teens were taking the subway by themselves and roaming around pretty unsupervised. My cousin in another big city was notorious for getting lost by taking the wrong bus at around age 9 -- it happened to me once when I was with him, we were home hours late, and people were like "lol, yeah -- you shouldn't trust his sense of direction, good thing you found your way home".
Something has changed, and it's not that cities have become unsafe.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Ah, illegal immigration.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
To be clear, unions are not saints. But also labor costs are just generally high in America, it's unfair to give unions 100% of the blame.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
2hr ago
Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb - whom I somehow never read while devouring hundreds of fantasy novels in my teens and twenties, and whom I had no idea was a woman until recently.
It really is a big world out there.
Read first 100 pages today - really pretty good.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I mean, there are plenty of people who don't, disproportionately on the right.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
My rather unpopular opinion is that if housing wasn’t an investment most of these problems would solve themselves.
Nobody really wants more housing supply because it means that the one asset most middle class people can aspire to have — a house — at best stagnates in value and at worst declines in value. No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall. They’d have a hard time getting elected dog catcher if they approve enough new development to lower the cost of housing. Heck, people might not be happy if their house doesn’t increase in value. As such you have a problem that pits the owners of homes against the renters who want to own homes. You have to pick one.
The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing. Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people. If you want housing, it’s probably better to build for density and put more people in less acreage.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Far too many books, including Skin in the game by N Taleb. But I did finish one book (on investing) this week!
Honestly most people don't give a darn. They just want a place to live without yearly rent increases and an annoying landlord. Sure, SF boomers are gonna get a huge payout when they retire to move to a cheaper area, but for people moving for work or personal reasons, most of them are actually moving from low COL to high COL, and most of them also don't have a huge equity in their houses either. Of course being underwater sucks as af, but very few people in a trendy neighborhood that is getting upzoned actually believe that upzoning will nuke their property values, and if they do believe it then they're just retarded.
Speaking as a nimby myself, I don't want (American) transit because it's a huge drain on taxes due to graft and incompetence, and it also brings in undesirables. I also don't want density because brings traffic, makes people talk about transit, and brings in the libs too.
The ideal situation would be for time to forget my neighborhood for a decade so property taxes go down, then maybe for property values to spike through the roof the month before I sell. But time forgetting my neighborhood is about the best I can ask for. So anyways, fuck off, we're full.
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