petsfed (u/petsfed) - Readit News

petsfed commented on The Folk Economics of Housing aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/kareemm

legitster · 9 days ago

> The houses are purchased by hedge funds and other smaller investors.

The hedge fund thing is way overblown. Even if they buy up homes in hot markets, their incentive is still going to be to sell them if/when the market cools. Corporations do not enjoy the same tax incentives as homeowners in this country, and the risks/costs to rent out older homes just doesn't pen out for non-local investors. If PE wants to get into housing, it's such a better deal for them to just build apartments.

Currently less than a percent of homes are owned by private equity. And the majority of those are owned for the purpose of turning around and selling them, like Home Partners.

(Zillow also tried buying up homes for the purpose of arbitrage and it ended up blowing up in their face).

petsfed · 9 days ago

I suspect that people conflate "buying a house as an investment" with "investors bought a house", which is leading to the incorrect idea that hedge funds or private equity are somehow cornering the market.

I think the reality is that the main component of investor pressure is from people who hold onto an overly large/well placed home far past the point of utility, because they want to sell as late as possible and maximize their return. Follow that with small-time landlords, and then finally actual explicit investors buying homes as some kind of commodity. A lot of the dysfunction of capitalism (so-called "late stage capitalism") is induced by people trying to outsmart the market, time the market, etc. when they really don't have the knowledge or information to play such games.

petsfed commented on Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness yro.slashdot.org/comments... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute

deeg · 10 days ago

I debated with myself on whether to use "naive" but it seems the most appropriate description. I barely know Woz outside of a 3-hour lecture but it appears that Jobs took advantage of his naivete, lying to him on multiple occasions. It worked out (financially) for Woz and he seems to have a great attitude about it, one of the reasons I admire him. He seems to successfully walk the line of not caring if people take advantage of him while not getting wrecked. I think it fair to consider that a facet of being naive.

petsfed · 10 days ago

I think "innocent" and "guileless" also bracket the sense you're going for, but they don't quite fit either.

Like, he doesn't see the malice in other people, but its not because he's innocent/naive of such intents, nor does he lack the skills to look for it (guileless), but because (as you say) he doesn't care if people take advantage of him, up to a limit.

Properly calibrated, that's really admirable.

petsfed commented on My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading washingtonpost.com/opinio... · Posted by u/cs702

PaulHoule · 16 days ago

The current situation might not be stable in the long term.

Ukraine now regrets giving up their nuclear weapons.

The "red line" of Ukraine attacking either Crimea or internationally recognized Russia was crossed and revealed to be a bluff.

The wall against proliferation will eventually break. For the life of me I can't figure out how Iran had a much harder time refining U235 with centrifuges than Pakistan did in the 1970s; I mean, I can understand how the US has been unable to deploy centrifuges to make enriched uranium for reactors (the same reason we can't have so many other nice things) but why Iran?

The lesson of Gaza may be that a people in a similar situation might want to have nuclear weapons at all costs. There definitely are paths left out of the conventional analysis of proliferation paths (accelerator-based methods, AVLIS) and even though they could reduce the footprint of producing the fuel they are also all super-high tech.)

petsfed · 16 days ago

Its definitely not stable, because the nuclear-armed countries' only arguments against nuclear proliferation are "trust us, you don't want this" and (said quietly) "if everybody has these, we'd lose a lot of power". So non-profileration efforts are a game of cat-and-mouse. We needed to have an ironclad "we are demonstrating that nobody needs nuclear weapons by doing x,y and z", and instead, Russia and NATO both said exactly that, then kept provoking each other to see who would flinch first over Ukraine.

And I agree, nuclear power is a ridiculous casualty of that scramble for power.

petsfed commented on My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading washingtonpost.com/opinio... · Posted by u/cs702

PaulHoule · 16 days ago

... it drives me crazy that there is a drumbeat over this every year in the US, which feels some real guilt over this and has had some reconciliation of it with Japan whereas people in China, Korea and elsewhere in Asia are 1000x angrier about what Japan did to them than how Japan is angry with the US and where there has been much less reconciliation.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud spread over atomic energy.

petsfed · 16 days ago

It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets things done, and that fades the more countries have nuclear weapons. So, insofar as there is a sinister motive to Hiroshima drumbeating, it's specifically to preserve the viability of the nuclear threat. Consider how different the current war in Ukraine would look if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. How different would the situation in Gaza look if any of Israel's immediate neighbors also had nuclear weapons?

I'd also argue that the correct emotional response to the destruction rendered by a single airplane (vs. the 325 used for the Tokyo Firebombing) is abject horror, and that should cause any person to seriously question their use.

I'm not here to dispute that nuclear power is good or that the alternative to bombing Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki was worse than the bombings. It's that while Truman et al may have understood the extrema situation the Allies were in, that's no guarantee that future users of atomic weapons would be so deliberate.

petsfed commented on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible news.uscg.mil/Press-Relea... · Posted by u/rwmj

trenchpilgrim · 19 days ago

It's not just that they used a game controller, they used a super cheap crappy controller instead of something backed my a major company with millions of R&D funding or a modern device with better sensors (hall effect/TMR) better suited for controlling vehicles in something other than an arcade game.

Like, they couldn't even spring an extra ten bucks for the same controllers that Navy uses.

petsfed · 18 days ago

Is Logitech not a major company, backed by decades of experience building these things? Its not MadCatz, that's for sure. I mean, logitech is the undisputed king of low-to-mid-range joysticks, and has held that title more or less since microsoft stopped making joysticks and gamepads in 2002. Microsoft didn't make a PC-friendly controller again until 2005. They basically ceded the market during that period of time. Of course, logitech hasn't sold as many units. But they know what they're doing.

Granted, a Logitech controller not the first party controllers, and I'm prepared to believe that the Xbox people made a generally better controller, but I'm not convinced it was so much better as to be an actively bad idea to use the Logitech device. Like, once you get to the "pretty good, people won't return it" phase of controller development, its just fine tuning for gameplay performance, and there's absolutely nothing about controlling a tourist submarine that makes e.g. controller latency or even signal integrity above and beyond the baseline the bottleneck. I'd wager that the real reason they picked it likely devolved down to "what driver is our embedded controls engineer most comfortable integrating into our system?", which has a much larger impact on system safety.

I agree with a sibling that there's an argument for using a wired controller. But that's pretty much as far as that criticism goes for me, speaking as someone who writes firmware that does need to be reliably low-latency and responsive, game controllers barely even register on my radar, except that I wouldn't do it myself if I didn't have a specific use case for it.

petsfed commented on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible news.uscg.mil/Press-Relea... · Posted by u/rwmj

post_break · 19 days ago

The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive, he could have made another hull, and he could be taking more trips down there for better of for worse. The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

petsfed · 19 days ago

>The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

Emphasis mine.

Everybody hammers on the controller like using a gaming controller was somehow more indicative of the unseriousness of the endeavor than, you know, the firing of the guy who said the hull was unsafe. Based on what I've read, that was one of the few authentically competent design decisions of the whole bloody thing. Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US?

The US Navy has been using off-the-shelf game controllers for years now[0], because they work. And as a bonus, the submarine designers can be confident that if Stockton Rush or Seaman Manchild or whoever throws his controller in a fit of rage when his submarine doesn't work right, the controller will still work afterwards.

Absolutely, there were problems with the control scheme (reportedly, the motors were wired into the control board wrong, so the x- and y-axes were reversed). But that's not the fault of some usb controller communicating with the control box. That's the fault of the people working on the actually bespoke portions of the submarine.

0. https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-mane...

petsfed commented on Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market denverite.com/2025/07/25/... · Posted by u/matthest

standardUser · 24 days ago

I agree there are political considerations, but we are talking about a scenario where the only damage done is that the buyer must continue to live in the home they purchased at the price they purchased it for, and where the recipient of government benefits is a household capable of purchasing a house, presumably at the height of the market. Is a tax dollar better spent placating grumpy homeowners who already have a place to live they can afford, or by more directly building more housing and infrastructure?

petsfed · 24 days ago

The scenario to address is people who are forced to move (via e.g. layoffs, company relocations, industry collapse, etc) who are also suddenly saddled with a mortgage far higher than they can realistically payback while still moving on to whatever opportunity necessitated the move in the first place.

The first order consequence of treating housing as an investment vehicle is high prices, sure, but the second order consequence is that you dramatically increase the stakes when individual people buy any house whatsoever.

I would much rather give checks to every homeowner whose home value falls than to force even a single laid-off autoworker or whatever into bankruptcy (good luck buying a home after that) if they elect to move somewhere else for a new job and can't sell their house for enough to pay off their mortgage. If the consequence of a government policy to build more housing is that more people become homeless, then its failing.

petsfed commented on ‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video] bbc.com/news/videos/cy8k8... · Posted by u/nathanyz

dralley · a month ago

On the other hand - when Israel struck the parking lot of that hospital a couple of weeks ago everyone was so confident that the IDF was lying when they said that there was a command bunker just underneath the entrance of the hospital.

Not only did that end up being completely true, but the IDF killed Muhammad Sinwar in that strike.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/world/middleeast/gaza-hos...

petsfed · a month ago

You understand that you just said "they're the monsters for using human shields, but not us for shooting through the human shields", right?

Make no mistake, its 100% a war crime to use civilians as human shields. But that doesn't magically absolve the IDF of also committing a war crime. And if they can't meet their military objectives without committing war crimes, maybe that's a sign. In any case, bombing a hospital to kill a terrorist is a very efficient tactic if your goal is to create more terrorists. If you learn nothing else from the UK's administration of Mandatory Palestine, learn that.

petsfed commented on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places chrisbarber.co/A+list+of+... · Posted by u/cjbarber

constantcrying · a month ago

>I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right?

Is it? Much of Germany is rural, especially manufacturing, you would be surprised.

>But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions.

My point is that the homelessness problem is downstream of drugs. I have never said, nor do I believe, that just putting drug addicts in prison will solve anything. Especially when the prisons are full of drugs, as they are, even in Germany.

I do believe that trying to solve homelessness, while not addressing how to get people of drugs is a pointless endeavor.

>And to be clear, I'm not saying my brother-in-law doesn't need to quit drugs. I'm saying that the in the US's justice system, just putting him in prison until he's clean will just guarantee that he's in and out of prison until he eventually overdoses, all the while dooming his 11-year-old daughter, my children's beloved cousin, to a life of addiction and abuse herself. Moreover, even if he does get himself clean, because of his criminal record, he's doomed to working those same shit jobs, living at the ragged edge of the poverty line, for the rest of his life, because very few will take the risk of hiring an ex-con. Nobody ever relapsed in those conditions, no sir.

But the drugs clearly started it all. It is the root cause, not the lack of housing or distance to jobs. We both know that had he never taken any drugs none of this would have happened.

petsfed · a month ago

Some quick googling suggests that 80% of California's land area is rural, compared to 39% of Germany's. Considering they're very nearly the same size, that's considerable. And also understandable, considering that Germany has more than double the population.

At no point did I say "don't try to solve the drug problem". I even said as much when I said "help the homeless get their life back on track". What I'm trying to say (and clearly failing at saying) is that "don't even bother with 'x' until we accomplish 'y'" misses the fact that at least as it pertains to dealing with making cities people want to live in, its a complex, interrelated system. In my, highly limited experience, for instance, homelessness drives drug use, because its a relatively cheap escape from the desperate reality of homelessness and long-term unemployment. I'm not here to make excuses for people, but I am here to say that its a lot more complicated than "get rid of the drugs, and people won't be homeless". If it were that easy, then Reagan's War On Drugs would've actually, you know, worked.

You should educate yourself on the root cause of the US's opiate problem. While there a lot of recreational drug users who went off the rails, virtually all of the addicts I know personally were initially wildly over-prescribed opiates for a legitimate medical reason, and in trusting their doctor, got addicted. There was a big court case around it. I know, the plural of anecdote is not data, but there is in fact data about it.

petsfed commented on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places chrisbarber.co/A+list+of+... · Posted by u/cjbarber

constantcrying · a month ago

> We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless, and 2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.

I live in a country with a right to housing. The government will literally pay your rent. Public transit is still full of homeless people. Guess why? Spoiler: It is not because housing is unaffordable or because transit is bad.

>Hell, I'm actively watching my brother-in-law and his baby mama descend through the mental illness and addiction process, and even though they've been evicted and are now dragging their daughter through the couch-surfing phase, they still aren't at the living-in-tents-shitting-on-the-street phase of that descent.

And you are sure that, if they stayed completely drug-free and sane, they couldn't find jobs which allowed them to pay rent? The problem here are the drugs, blaming anything else is absurd. There is exactly one way to help them and their child get the parents of the drugs and the child away from them until the parents stay sober.

Literally every single step in that tragedy, as you describe it, revolves around drugs. Seeking the cure in anything but getting rid of the drugs is absurd.

>We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless

No, we don't. The only way to stop people being homeless is getting rid of the drugs. Even if the government is legally obligated to pay for housing there are still homeless people because of the drugs.

>2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.

No. We need to get drug addicts sober. Anything else is secondary. Do you think your brother in law would be fixed if he got free housing, but remained a drug addict? Of course not.

petsfed · a month ago

So, do you live in a country that is notoriously designed almost exclusively for personal automobiles? Whose cities' growth was informed as much by lobbying from the automotive industry as by a desire to use personal automobiles? Do you live in a country where prison sentences are applied in such a way that meaningfully decreases the recidivism rate?

I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right?

And to be clear, I'm not saying my brother-in-law doesn't need to quit drugs. I'm saying that the in the US's justice system, just putting him in prison until he's clean will just guarantee that he's in and out of prison until he eventually overdoses, all the while dooming his 11-year-old daughter, my children's beloved cousin, to a life of addiction and abuse herself. Moreover, even if he does get himself clean, because of his criminal record, he's doomed to working those same shit jobs, living at the ragged edge of the poverty line, for the rest of his life, because very few will take the risk of hiring an ex-con. Nobody ever relapsed in those conditions, no sir.

Maybe its different in Germany. Maybe getting yourself clean and sober will allow you to live a productive and happy life, and once you've served your time, you're free of the stigma of being an ex-convict. But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions. Which, I recall, Germany has some experience with.