ItsMonkk (u/ItsMonkk)

ItsMonkk commented on Fixing retail with land value capture worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/marojejian

Aurornis · a month ago

> Retailers take on all the risk

> landlord which has done literally nothing

This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money.

There's also a risk involved in renting out the properties. Not all tenants will pay the rent, and when they stop paying for long enough you have to evict. It takes a long time to get someone's business out and turn the property over so a new business can move in. The rents have to be adjusted to compensate for some of that loss, but in a downturn (e.g. COVID) the losses can all sync up at once and torpedo the financial model used by the landlord.

Retail spaces also need to be kept up. It's common in my area for groups to buy out blocks of spaces and overhaul the old parking lots, landscaping, lighting, traffic patterns, and security so that they go from being sketchy run-down locations to something safe and inviting.

I'll probably get downvoted for trying to add some balance to the conversation because this is an internet comment section and my comment wasn't "landlords bad", but retail property investment isn't really a magical safe investment like everyone assumes. Keep that in mind if anyone hits you up for an investment opportunity related to one.

ItsMonkk · a month ago

Landlords should be pushing for an LVT so that in a downturn that can sync up all at once it is the local government that needs to take that hit. It makes no sense that they currently are the ones to take on society level risks. The LVT is a de-risk to their business. In a downturn they would have no capital losses, and instead only see land taxes fall.

For those that don't know, an LVT causes land prices to drop, where a tax on 100% of the rental value of the land would cause land prices to fall to zero. This would allow landlords who were able to own many more properties, and could use their funds building out extensive retail spaces, and have many tenants pay them rents.

ItsMonkk commented on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time data.stackexchange.com/st... · Posted by u/maartin0

josephg · 2 months ago

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question

I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer.

Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.

ItsMonkk · 2 months ago

The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.

If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.

ItsMonkk commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

squeaky-clean · 3 months ago

Cheaters don't want to play against other cheaters. If they end up against only cheaters that's a kind of soft-ban or shadow-ban and once they figure out that's the case they'll do the same steps as if you had actually banned them. It also angers legitimate players to know that the top ladder tier is for cheaters only. If you're 200th in the world and legitimate, other players will say you only got that rank through cheating.

And the very best cheaters are still good at the games they cheat in, they just want to use cheats to be even better. One famous example in a game I play is Riolu in Trackmania. He was probably one of the top 10 players in the world. But he wanted to be #1. When he was accused of cheating it took a mountain of evidence for anyone to believe the accusations because he could set a world record live in-person. He just used cheats to be able to do it with fewer attempts.

ItsMonkk · 3 months ago

Riolu is a uniquely terrible example. While he used Cheat Engine to slow down gameplay, he could have just as easily used TAS to record and replay his inputs since TrackMania is deterministic. This is still possible today. This will always be possible even with Kernel level anti-cheats.

I'll note here that the work that Nadeo has done on the matchmaking aspect is in line with what I'm thinking and should be expanded throughout the online gaming space. A division 10 COTD player will never see a cheater. If cheaters do show up, as they commonly do in Weekly Shorts leaderboards, the community ignores it. Their region leaderboards do a much better job than typical games of bringing the community together and they promote continuity. When top players smurf COTD on a new name, the community sniffs it out within the hour. TM doesn't need anti-cheat.

ItsMonkk commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

squeaky-clean · 3 months ago

Two reasons this doesn't work

Most competitive games these days are free to play. A cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players until they get banned, and repeat.

For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance. It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see through walls, or because they can instantly headshot people but have bad positional awareness or understanding of other game objectives like capture points etc.

It's like telling a high level chess player that playing against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off the board is similar to playing against an equally skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable learning experience.

ItsMonkk · 3 months ago

The problem here appears to be the banning. If the cheaters are never banned then they will continue to only play with other cheaters, and everyone is happy. And in fact, to a normal player I doubt they care very much if the player is legit and smurfing or if they are not legit and cheating. That player ruins the game they are in.

The ranking system needs to be a better determinate of skill, especially early in a new accounts life, so that they can stop harming normal players games. This might mean changes to the rules of a game to allow this to be done better. The match-maker should take this into account, so that if a player does go up against a player that was far from the skill level that they end up at, it should protect that account from being placed with new players for a time so that they can forget about it.

For the example you choose for Chess, you might force players to do Chess Puzzles before they can queue for their first match. A normal player would then never see any cheaters.

ItsMonkk commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

LMYahooTFY · 3 months ago

Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real?

A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.

ItsMonkk · 3 months ago

This argument is that the match-making software is incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters would quickly find that the only people they match-make with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that the cheaters exist if they never play against them.

ItsMonkk commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

MetaWhirledPeas · 3 months ago

> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today

I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.

I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.

That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.

ItsMonkk · 3 months ago

Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.

However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.

Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.

But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.

ItsMonkk commented on The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into thereader.mitpress.mit.ed... · Posted by u/haritha-j

dangus · 3 months ago

The problem that UBI will never get over is the fact that it just smells like something suspicious. It smells like something capitalists can exploit.

Landlords and other oligopolistic goods-sellers with a lot of leverage and cartel-like dynamics can now count on a base income for everyone. I don’t see how low income housing doesn’t instantly becomes more expensive across the board, with profits funneled to established landlords.

At least with SNAP/EBT, your landlord can’t take that money.

UBI is sold as a cheap program to run because it eliminates the application and verification processes involved with existing benefits programs. But those same concepts could be applied to existing programs.

Other pro-worker reforms could also replace the whole UBI idea, where UBI just feels like a band-aid for a society with worsening income inequality and increasing corporate control. It has a “fix the symptom” vibe.

ItsMonkk · 3 months ago

This is why the best form of UBI is a Citizen's Dividend funded through a Land Value Tax. Any increase in rents through the CD just make their way back into higher taxes that then raise the CD.

ItsMonkk commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm

jandrewrogers · 7 months ago

That isn’t what’s happening. A lot of these areas are permanently hollowing out far beyond fast food, at least with respect to local businesses. Lots of places in decent neighborhoods are boarded up and stay that way. This is an issue even in some cities with strong population growth.

I recently had the mayor of a major west coast city tell me this was a permanent trend, that there was no way to reverse the loss of these small businesses and that the disposition of all that real estate was a major issue, compounded by a loss of basic neighborhood services like groceries that used to operate out of this real estate.

The future isn’t other businesses that somehow magically pay higher wages. The future city planners are seeing is all delivery all the time from warehouse districts, and ghost towns of commercial real estate for which there is no purpose. Even city centers are starting to turn into suburbs in terms of occupancy density.

ItsMonkk · 7 months ago

Sure, but this has nothing to do with the land values which are still extremely positive. It has everything to do with Prop 13 allowing speculation. Repeal Prop 13 and all of those lots will be better cared for and rented out.

ItsMonkk commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm

thfuran · 7 months ago

>in their place will be other businesses that employ people of higher than minimum wage.

Why would raising fast food minimum wage create these businesses?

ItsMonkk · 7 months ago

If one of these fast food places shuts down, it's not like the lot is just going to sit vacant forever.

The primary effect of these types of laws is that businesses that employ fast food workers are less profitable, and thus when they compete against other businesses for a given lot, will bid less for the land. If the marginal buyer changes, it would have to do so to a business that relies less on minimum wage fast food workers.

ItsMonkk commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm

roenxi · 7 months ago

But that was the best job they could find. Presumably those people are going to be unemployed now. I mean, maybe they're kids and their families will have enough slack to just adsorb the change but in theory they need welfare checks now to survive since they probably can't justify anyone paying them $20/hr. So it actually costs the broader economy more than the salary they lost - firstly the work they were doing isn't being done, secondly someone else now has to work to earn the keep of the person who was just laid off because the job that paid them around what their skills were worth just got regulated out of existence.

ItsMonkk · 7 months ago

The abstract states that there are 2.7% less fast food jobs, not 2.7% less jobs. There might be 2.7% less fast food restaurants as a result of this change, but in their place will be other businesses that employ people of higher than minimum wage. Those businesses might hire the best fast food workers while the average fast food worker continues to be employed doing fast food. As a result, there may be no people who have now become unemployed as a result of this change, and only increases in wages. The data is inconclusive.

Regardless, instead of arguing over which commercial property takes which spot and trying to engineer the perfect fit with the limitations we are dealing with, we should be increasing the amount of places that are zoned for commerce. This will bring increased demand for labor, which will increase wages.