This. I struggle to see how higher savings by the wealthy can cause me to take on any more debt. Is the argument the wealthy use cash to invest in assets (houses), thus driving up the price and causing middle and lower class people to be forced to borrow more to buy a house?
Savings is probably confusing here, because savings change based on your socioeconomic position. People go from not saving anything, to saving cash, to saving in assets.
Some of these assets have a poorer counterparty who is getting access to that money in return for repayment + interest. Perversely, the more money is available in these assets, the lower the interest rate and so the more money these counterparties can borrow. This drives up the cost of physical assets being bought with this money, like homes, because the value of the home is dictated by the debt load a buyer can bear. Lower interest rates means you can support more debt, which means someone will take on more debt and outcompete you for that house.
I'm definitely speculating, but I could see banks having a glut of money to loan contributing to the low interest rates that have existed for a while now (thinking of money from a supply/demand perspective). With those lower interest rates leading to more interest in buying homes and pushing up prices (during the subprime crisis, to folks that couldn't necessarily afford it). While you'd also expect a housing construction boom, its certainly plausible that the industry would have to play catch up to demand. (It seems easier to me to hire a realtor to go look at homes than to start or expand a construction business). Zoning/other regulations can also slow down that process. The low interest rates also make larger/more expensive homes more feasible for buyers, due to the fact that a smaller percentage of the monthly payment is interest. I could certainly see ways that the above would lead to an individual having a higher debt load than they otherwise would.
Banks, having surplus cash, offer low-monthly-payment loans which allows more people to buy them, by the way earning 0.6-0.8 * X to the banks.
Since there is a lot of cheap credit price stops constraining the demand side. You can get almost arbitrary large loan with arbitrary long timespan. This causes prices to rise. Houses seem like good investment so wealthy buy them restricting supply side, causing prices to rise even higher.
Rising prices make it impossible for most to save for the house. They have to take loans.
Now poor people who want house need to pay the inflated price + credit fees on top of that. Sellers see their assets rise in value, creditors see more customers and more revenue.
If there was no cheap credit then the prices wouldn't rise so much because nobody would be buying them.
Now, I don't know how true is all above but that seems to be the explanation of the issue I've seen many times.
They are not forcing you, it's that the 1% have savings and want that savings to make money so it's invested. Portions of that investment go into banks who loan out money to the middle class.
The middle class uses this money to buy cars/houses which helps the 1% to increasing their savings, which they then invest a portion of into banks...
BUT like another comment discussed, a lot of this is going over seas. Right now this cycle is pushing US asset values higher, but at some point this will come crashing down, and the money that was invested in under inflated markets will be valued correctly/over valued.
At which point that money will flow back into the US.
But people do want to own homes, but the problems is debt and the fact that homes are seen as a way to accumulate wealth. Affordable housing clashes with that.
Also, the article seem to treats building a new road as an unalloyed good.
It's worth having a discussion about whether this makes sense and is something to strive for.
Unfortunately, because society has been based on this for so long, the people who spent their lives paying off a 30 year mortgage would never agree to make any changes that would reduce the value of their house. You'd need to come up with a plan to transition away from a house-based model of wealth over a long enough period of time where current home owners don't get screwed but people know what it means to buy a house now.
And I don't think any plan that's long-term enough to be sensible could actually survive politics long enough to be successfully implemented.
Do you think advertisement works? It is certainly possible, using advertising, to convince many people that NOW is the special time when taking on debt is actually OK, because rising house prices lift all boats. (Not really that different from any other gold rush..)
Which is what happened before 2008, when there was very little oversight in borrowing (e.g. NINJA loans). We know empirically that if the lenders are not obligated to make sure that the loans can be repayed, predatory lending will occur and cause social problems.
No, nobody is buying your products. Nobody wants to hire you. Nobody is investing in a company that will hire you. If you have no income you must go into debt. It's that simple.
I'm pretty sure that because Tor Browser ships w/ `privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing` set to `true` by default since 9.0 [1] (Oct. 22 2019 [2]), users can resize the windows now without affecting their fingerprint.
We just need to make sure the browser suppliers are in total opposition to the surveillance capitalism and personalised advertising industry.
So while Chrome is such a dominant browser? No. It’s not gonna happen. Google will keep writing “inadvertent errors” that exempt their own tracking cookies from user instructions to delete them.
Google owning the dominant browser and mobile OS is a travesty for privacy. What we really need is a consortium of companies to rally behind FireFox for mutual benefit, like how Linux is done
Mint Mobile is an MVNO that runs on the T-Mobile network. Google Fi is also an MVNO, but it runs on T-Mobile, Sprint, and the regional US Cellular. Since T-Mobile merged with Sprint, the coverage of Mint Mobile and Google Fi will eventually be similar once T-Mobile converts the Sprint towers, which is in progress.
If you live in an area where T-Mobile is weaker (rural areas or areas outside of metropolitan areas), AT&T and Verizon will provide more consistent coverage than both Google Fi and Mint. AT&T is GSM-based and will work on the Librem 5 and the PinePhone. Verizon is CDMA-based and might not fully work on these phones.
AT&T Prepaid is currently offering an unlimited plan with 22GB of unthrottled 5G and 4G data for $50/month plus tax with monthly billing. There is also an offer for 8GB of 4G data for $25/month plus tax with annual billing.
GSM-based networks still seem to be the more reliable option for Linux phones, but it's good to see that Verizon might also be compatible with some effort.
Could you share your reasoning as to why this is Apple abusing its market position?
To me it appears that Apple is simply giving users control and transparency in what data is being used. I understand your point to be that because Apple is so large and controls a large market, they can't make changes like this? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that is your point, then I would have to disagree. By this reasoning, what could Apple do that wouldn't count as accusing I its market position?
You're 100% right. Everything Apple does can be construed as "abuse" if someone is willing to argue in bad faith.
iOS now tells you when one app pastes content from the clipboard, if the contents of the clipboard came from another app.
e.g., You copy a zip code from Messages, and then switch to the "HN-Maps" app. If HN-Maps sniffs the clipboard in order to suggest that zip code as a destination, you see a notification that "HN-Maps pasted from Messages."
That sounds like a good feature for me as a user, but a terrible feature for app developers that want to constantly and silently scan your clipboard for keywords they can add to the data they sell on their shady data exchanges.
They can and will complain that Apple is "abusing" its monopoly power, but this isn't abuse at all. Next, I expect them to complain that Apple's feature that shows you which apps are draining your battery is also abusing their power to make users uninstall apps that are greedy for battery.
iOS is a shopping mall, and when you write apps for the platform, you're renting a space in the mall and must able by all the regulations in the lease that were put in there for the benefit of the landlord. Part of the landlord's interest is their pocketbook immediately--see the app store's 30% haircut--and part of the landlord's interests are the long-term viability of the mall.
The landlord--Apple--has to care about things like user satisfaction, because the tenants--facebook, et al.--would happily burn down the entire platform for a buck or two.
Maps actually make a perfect example of why this needs to exist, even without malicious actors.
Your zipcode example starts off as a perfectly well-meaning example of clipboard-sniffing, but after a very short meeting with "reality", quickly turns into passing strings to a geo API because there's a lot more addresses than just zipcodes we'd like to detect.
And it just so happens that the most significant provider of such an API, is also one of the most significant providers of adtech going ..
You can see how quickly it goes from "providing seamless UX" to "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
You'd expect first-party apps to handle this properly. The intention is that you probe the clipboard metadata (which doesn't display this warning) to see if the clipboard looks like it might be useful to you - and then act (or offer to act) if it does.
So first-party apps should have bought into the data-detectors stuff wholesale.
An example of this would be the url bar in Safari. If you try to paste into the address bar, you'll be offered "Paste and go" if the clipboard offers a url-like object, and "Paste and search" if it's a non-url stringy object. You'll get the "Safari has pasted from Mail" warning after you select one of these, because the contents were not exposed during the metadata operations. This is the expected behaviour.
I have never really been a fan. I use it mostly to discover new books and track my reading and goals, which seems to work just fine. However, the Android app, which I use the majority of the time, is pretty bad. The Home tab is blank, with only a search bar and a button to "find your friends." Seems odd for the app to start there. I guess they are trying to push the social media features of it? I'm not interested in that.
On my previous phone (iPhone 6s), the app seemed to be much better designed, though it has been a while since I have used it. Honestly, my biggest gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. I generally try to support smaller retailers when making purchases, and would love to find another service that helps me track my reading and discover new books.
