It’s a fun story, however I also found it really interesting after learning German that this is really overblown outside of Germany.

I once tried to reference it with German friends and they didn’t even understand why it was supposed to be funny!

It’s definitely true. There are so few places that are really walkable in the US and the demand is quite high… once you live that way, it’s hard to go back.

We really need to build more walkable areas, but it’s difficult for a lot of (mostly-nonsensical) reasons.

The only thing to keep in mind, however, is that the math changes significantly when you remove cars from the equation. Our rent is higher than somewhere less walkable, but it’s also roughly equivalent to the full price of owning two cars. So comparatively, we save a bunch of money despite higher rent.

The two are closely connected.

You can’t really build affordable and convenient car-dependent style housing (think single-family suburbs) for everyone because they take too much space. So you’ll always end up with the situation where well-located houses are outrageously expensive and you get cheaper by buying something much further out. Essentially people are willing to pay a premium to no have to drive for a long time to get anywhere.

The only reason why conveniently-located suburbs were ever affordable (think 50s or 60s) is because most people back then didn’t have a car yet, so the demand wasn’t saturated.

Being a scientist is a ridiculously hard career path these days.

Yeah weed easily smells at least as bad

“I wish I could work at home tidying up the house for no salary and have no income of my own!”

As a fun aside: both my wife and I would both love to do this! Unfortunately it’s just too tough financially in the modern world, so it’s never a really serious discussion.

Plus we would have to flip a coin or something to decide who has to be the breadwinner.

We don’t really have a relationship that revolves around power-roles though, so it’s a bit of a different discussion.

At least europe it has kind of switched to the opposite in recent years.

I did a doctorate in physics and women had a much easier time finding PhD/post-doc positions because there is just much more funding available.

Most groups in my institution were majority women.

Professorships are still nearly all men, but that’s largely down to the sexism of the previous generations (back in the 60s-90s when they got their positions). This will slowly shift in the coming decades.

Yeah, I agree with their point but I really don’t think this is the example to use

I’m with you, Marijuana smells just a awful to me (a non-smoker)

That sounds like all the more reason to be for legal immigration and against illegal immigration.

MMOs are the reasons that my typing style involves my left hand covering 60-70% of the keyboard and my right hand getting the remaining 30-40% that I can’t easily reach.

Only need to bring in the mouse hand of absolutely necessary!

(Most) stocks represent partial ownership (read: control) of a company and most of their value is derived from that.

For an extreme example: if the stock price were to drop below the amount of money that could be made by just selling off all of the assets, then someone would (in principle) just buy all the shares, sell the assets and make a profit.

Each share represents a small bit of control over the company and their assets.

My credit cards I’ve had in Germany/Austria were all basically glorified debit-cards which had their own bank account attached to them. Technically I had a credit limit of a couple thousand, but I never went into the negative.

The only difference (for me at least) was that I could use them to rent a car, which is nice.

Trams are the best! I’ll go out of my way to take a tram over a bus any day

They are just so much smoother

Yeah that’s what I mean… it would be good for society if prices went down, but it would also make a lot of people pissed off, so they intentionally dance around actual solutions in favor of shit like this.

I recently moved to Vienna and don’t qualify for the public housing (you need to have lived here for a certain amount of time)but the sheer amount of it (and relative quality) means that even in the private market, competition is much less.

Compared to other cities we have lived in, the rent is much lower and the quality much higher.

Something like 60% of the population lives in either public or subsidized housing!

It’s the perfect solution for the democrats because it sounds good but also won’t actually cause housing prices to go down, so homeowners won’t feel like they are ‘losing’ money.

Sure, here’s a paper which explores the effects.

Essentially, housing prices have hugely inflated (in much of the developed world) because demand is much higher than supply. Prices in the real-estate market are generally really reactive to changes in supply or demand because each ‘product’ is unique and limited, as well as being worth a lot of money so there is more pressure to maximize the potential gains.

This sort of plan increases the resources available to the demand side without increasing the supply side. This drives up prices since there are more potential buyers.

Anyone who couldn’t buy a house without such a program is being added the the pool of people competing for a limited supply of houses. It won’t increase supply because supply is heavily limited by other factors, most notably zoning.

It’s unfortunate, because the thought behind such a policy is admirable. It’s trying to make buying a house more fair and more easily achievable for a broad segment of the population that currently is effectively shut out from owning a home.

In the UK a similar scheme just led to the entry-level segment of the real-estate market inflating faster than the rest.

It also led to a rise in more ‘luxury’ entry-level properties being built.

Again, it’s not exactly the same concept, but in the case of the UK, most economists agree that most buyers actually would have been better off if the policy had never been introduced, since the price rises ended up outpacing the value of the assistance.

The UK had a similar scheme for first time buyers and it’s often cited by economists as one of the biggest things fueling their housing crisis.