A huge part of the cost of building a house right now is the excessive regulation. By deregulating we will be able to build houses for less money and so builders will be able to sell them for less money. In addition apartments and especially larger apartment buildings are straight up illegal in many areas even though demand is high. Legalizing these units which are much cheaper than SFHs would allow all housing prices to decrease as some of the people competing for SFHs instead buy a condo.
Land prices rise with income but housing constraints mean each family needs more land. Just look at the rental market in austin collapsing 20% while incomes continue to rise to empirically falsify your working paper.
I'm aware, and I was hesitant to use it when the doc first prescribed it. Personally I'm not so worried about this anymore, there are days when I don't take it (either forget or wake up too late in the day) and I don't feel any different. I never felt like I craved it or had any sort of rewarding feeling upon taking it. I never took Adderall so I can't compare, but from what I know the mental effects of Phentermine are much weaker.
Usually it's prescribed for no more than 3 months, but the doc recommended taking it for longer. He mentioned that addiction risk is negligible for most people. Very solid doctor who specializes in those thing, so I took his word for it after a bit of Googling.
You need to remember that people experience reality differently. For you eating the healthy number of calories may be easy. For others it very much is not. I have heard it described as leaving your thermostat at 45 in the winter to save money on your gas bill. Sure, you could do it, but it would cause a lot of suffering. GLP-1s are able to change the way people experience hunger so that it only feels like the thermostat is at 65 instead of 45.
It’s not unreasonable to bet that their 60% margin on data center products disappears either though. It only takes one competitor to get their act together and those margins will be cut in half.
Nvidias business is about data center now. The data center gpu’s sell for 50k+ each and have unit margins over 70%. They’re making truly fuckloads of money off the AI boom.
Trumps ability to control the narrative is pretty much wholly based on his tweeting skills. He is legitimately a top tier tweeter up there with @dril and the likes. It is incredibly entertaining and end of the day that’s what politics is about now.
A monarchist? Can you explain what a monarchist is? I would think having the position of Vice President would largely imply one is particularly not a monarchist.
JD Vance is/was the personal assistant to Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who believes we need to get beyond the weaknesses of democracy & egalitarianism in order to preserve the sort of freedom that billionaires need to have. Thiel and Musk are also the financial & political patrons of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin, who AFAICT is the person to reintroduce the idea of non-electoral monarchy/autocracy as a credible goal to politics, out loud.
> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]
Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Yes, he endorses Yarvin. And that could be real. He could really believe it, and really want to follow it.
But it seems to me that Vance has been, shall we say, rather mobile on his positions. I wonder if we have ever seen what he really thinks. (You decide whether that would make him less dangerous, or more.)
reply