As is true for many hard alcohols, you typically get what you pay for when it comes to Baijiu. Moutai Prince is terrible compared to Moutai but the difference is not in the immediate flavor. It’s mostly in the after taste.
Baijiu has many different taste categories. Moutai and the like are known as “Jiang Xiang” which roughly translates to Soy flavor. That’s the umami you’re referring to and it’s an acquired taste.
I find Wuliangye to be more approachable to beginners because it sits in the “Nong Xiang” category and tastes more floral. It’s not cheap but that’s where I recommend newer Baijiu drinkers to start.
Thanks, that's interesting about the difference being in the aftertaste between Prince and Moutai. Will see if I can find a bar selling the Wuliangye one.
Do you drink wine? The best analogy for the difference between Moutai vs Moutai Prince is the difference between a $100+ bottle of fruit forward Napa Cab vs a supermarket red that tastes like it had sugar injected into it. A beginner might call both a “sweet” wine, but the depth of the flavor is night and day for anyone who’s had any experience. Or the difference between a structured Bordeaux vs an astringent mess of a red blend. Both would taste acidic to a new wine drinker.
The expensive vs cheap baijius are the same way. Try some Wuliangye or Fenjiu for a couple of different taste categories to see what you like. Avoid the cheap stuff as your subconscious will tell you it’s terrible even if you’re not tasting the difference upfront.
this ignores the basic economics which is that it’s too expensive to build housing. Labor is expensive, materials are expensive, and permitting is expensive.
The thesis being offered - which you will likely disagree with - can be read as - the economic capacity certainly exists, but the regulatory regime prices it out of the market.
Given that a regulatory change about AirBNB is under consideration, perhaps they should also consider changing the regime that has created the housing shortage and is actively putting working families on the street.
Until they change this bad regulatory regime, and regulate to provide enough housing rather than regulate to keep existing conservative homeowners happy, then they will continue to put regular folks in Hawaii through a meat grinder of housing austerity.
My perspective is that you can only regulate things out of production. You can't regulate things into production. If that were true, politicians could have made us all rich by their wise words and actions. But they don't. Because they can't. That's not the source of wealth.
Where we do agree is that things can be regulated out of production. That's clearly what's happened in Hawaii, intentionally, to limit the number of people in Hawaii. That's the entire source of the permitting costs, high labor costs, etc. etc. etc.
The prices were intentionally set high for new housing by regulation. That can be changed.
Further, it's slightly more tricky to regulate things into production, but we do it all the time. Take for example, roads, or water treatment, or any other public service. That's entirely the product of regulation, not of the free market, and would not happen otherwise.
Further, we can regulate non-publicly owned entities into production, and we do so frequently. For example financial products like a 30-year mortgage are entirely a creation of regulation, and would not exist without hearty regulation backing them. We can do similar things for construction loans, for training in the trades, for social housing, for pretty much anything.
Housing is a very solvable problem. However we actively choose not to solve it, and in fact we actively choose to make it more expensive in order to benefit those who already have housing, and to benefit those who speculate on it.
So if I have these views of housing, why am I not opposed to AirBNB? Because AirBNB is actually meeting some real need from real people, it's not pure speculation, or pure rent-seeking, like the regulatory regime that institutes housing austerity. There's real human gain from AirBNB, it's not merely an economic gain.
And I'm not entirely in favor of AirBNB either, it's just that it really really grates me that this is being falsely sold as a solution to the housing crisis. It is not. It's barely related, but related in a way that shows the true underlying problem: supply versus demand for housing.
You say its overpopulated, I see a state of mainly suburban small towns at least outside resort developments when I visited the place. There’s no shortage of space to meet demand if one builds up like is done in Japan or Hong Kong.
If Hawaii were overpopulated, we would see people leaving for other areas because there are too many people. Instead we only see people leaving because it's too expensive.
Agreed that housing on vacant land isn't the answer. The answer is to build up, in more socially-orinted ways.
seriously, mankind has been able to do this for 10s of thousands of years and all the sudden now, we're so pathetic we can't build housing anymore. do people really believe this?
It's not that we can't build more housing, it's that all the economic output has become concentrated in a few very small areas. This means that if you want a high-paying job you have to live within those very small areas or find a niche in a rural area that pays well. The middle between those two extremes has been pretty well erased in our economy.
You can no longer live in Podunk Michigan and go down the street and get a good paying job pushing a broom at the local factory. That work is done by a contractor who pockets the wage and gives a quarter of it to their employees. Or the factory closed because it was cheaper to build and ship widgets from somewhere else. So everyone has to either suffer the economic depression, drive for an hour or two to go to work, or move. This housing crisis is the end result of our economic policies of the last 40 or 50 years and the hollowing out of middle America and the consolidation of a lot of industries into two or three huge competitors slugging it out.
If we can fix that system and give people outside of major metros a shot at making a decent living again then the housing crisis would disappear. There are plenty of cities across the entire US that are tearing down houses because nobody wants to live in them and otherwise they become animal nests. Meanwhile there's a housing crisis on the coasts.
One thing I'd like to see is a federal payroll tax credit for remote workers. That would do a lot to reverse the "return to office" mandates of the last couple of years. If you disperse a bunch of bright and talented people into the middle of the country, at least some of them will find ventures locally that bloom into something big.
We can build housing very well. It’s a matter of cost. Labor is not cheap. Have you tried to price out construction recently? You don’t need to take it from a random comment on HN. Price the market and see what it tells you. If you happen upon a magical reserve of cheap labor though, please share with the group, as we’d love nothing more than to pitch in and make our housing problems melt away for everyone.
if you're saying labor is expensive and that building a house is too costly then we're not very good at building housing. if it takes 2000 days of your labor (exchanged for $ then purchase a house of course) but it only took 1000 days a century ago, that means we're getting worse at building housing, not better.
Since this comment has been downvoted, I’ll add more math.
Building housing takes anywhere from 3 to 4 years for any significant development that can make a dent. When the average investor can get 7% with minimal risk in the S&P500, you’re looking at rewarding investors a lot more than that in returns over this time period. People would rather invest elsewhere.
Once you factor that in, you’re looking at a large % required return factoring risks like lawsuits, construction mishaps, etc.
There is a reason every new development looks like luxury housing or luxury apartments. The economics don’t favor Levittown style massive buildouts anymore.
The market will reward those who can bring efficiency to something that’s clearly an opportunity to be more efficient. That’s not where we are with housing right now.
You can’t even run the experiment due to how restrictive the land use is in hawaii. 4% of land is residential and of that a good deal of it is bog standard post war suburban development. Why not just at least upzone the existing residential neighborhoods and attempt to let the market decide for itself if demand is sufficient to justify investing in development instead of making it an impossibility?
Tangential to the topic: articles like this one often talk about “waiting lists” for luxury items like Hermes bags and Rolex watches. To be clear, there is no waiting list, or at least not the type that is counted down with wall clock time.
Your ability to buy the item is solely a function of spend on buying the less popular items. If you’re a big spender, sometimes the “rare” item magically appears the same day for purchase.
> To be clear, there is no waiting list, or at least not the type that is counted down with wall clock time.
What waiting list counts down time?
I’ve been on waiting lists for non-luxury goods (soccer season tickets) and it’s a function of limited supply, the number of people “ahead” of you, and how many holders of the good decide to keep it.
You can’t look at a clock and say, “My tickets will be ready in 11 minutes.” You can get an estimate based on previous year turnover (which is why the Cubs list is estimated to be like 35 years long) however.
I’ve recently started research construction costs due to a desire to build a custom house. Not sure what it’s like in other areas of the country, but in California, everything is negligible compared to labor costs. You would figure that means we get to use all sorts of cool materials and techniques here because the costs of materials are marginal, but no, in fact it’s the other way around. Unless you’re willing to put up with the cheapest and lowest common denominator combination of materials and techniques, people look at you funny and assume you’re okay with your costs blowing up by 10x because now the labor involved is not standard. With the million dollar (and easily higher) house construction costs, instead of the best, we get the absolute worst. That includes using the bare minimum amount of concrete in our shallow foundations that would be a laughing stock anywhere else in the world.
It would be like if every programmer only does 90s style PHP because software developers are expensive enough already and you asking for the latest Python or JavaScript is a desire to pay space rocket numbers.
I'm a custom builder in SoCal and I can say a lot about what you are talking about. There are a few main issues with construction of a house that pop up all the time:
1) Most people just want the cheapest possible. So most contractors are used to dealing with that. Even if it's not really the cheapest long term, and makes no sense.
2) Perspective and incentive. Does your framer know, or care how much money/time engineered lumber can save when it comes time to drywall/tile/etc? Not really, because his material cost in the bid will go up, and he doesn't want to be noncompetitive.
3) Most people think the code is very rigid. There is a section of code that is prescriptive, but there's also a section that is engineered/calculated which is what makes the code very flexible. You can do pretty much whatever you want if you can show it will perform.
4) Guys are afraid of callbacks/lawsuits. So they tend to want to do the same thing, the same way. Keep doing what has been working. There is a lot of resistance to trying new materials, methods, etc. Even if they aren't new, they may be new to that contractor. And they are (rightfully) wary of the training time, and increased likelihood of making a mistake doing something for the first time. So they will send bids with the "fuck you" price.
5) If you want to use some material/method that is not super common, sometimes you are best off asking for references at the suppliers. That way you can try and get a competitive bid instead of asking a guy to do something he doesn't want to do.
6) IDK what you are talking about regarding the foundation. Usually a contractor is just going to follow the plan, and do what the structural engineer says to do, as the structural engineer has to sign off and do inspections. So it makes bidding and executing quite simple. I've spoken to engineers about different foundation strategies. If you want a big, thick, mat foundation I don't see why the engineer wouldn't be open to that. They are very simple...no contractor will care or bat an eye.
In certain markets/jurisdictions it's standard/common to have multiple PEs stamp multiple different parts of the plans. For single family homes. Probably the lowest hanging fruit is energy calcs. For instance getting a PE to do title 24 calcs and stamp a plan is a couple hundred bucks. For $200 you open up a LOT of flexibility in design, materials, etc. Everything from window/door sizes, styles and locations to HVAC duct type.
I have been doing quite a bit of building over the last decade at my house and will do more in the coming decade.
Definitely using as many prefabricated materials from Western Europe as I can.
There have been so many advances in manufacturing in the last two decades and so little sign of them on building sites.
I wish I could use locally manufacturers but where I live (Aotearoa) the building industry has become obsessed with using the lowest quality wood available, (tannalised pinus radiata) and plastic whatsits up the whazo and then supplying the parts unfinished. Meaning weeks of painting and finishing.
In Western Europe they have much better timber and an appreciation of quality we do not have.
Building sites should be places where things are assembled, not constructed. The construction should happen in a factory mostly automated with modern machinery.
Dumping the carbon to ship a panelized structure from western Europe is a huge use of resources, even if you aren't forced to actually shoulder the burden of externalities like carbon emission and irresponsible old growth harvest.
Building with pine actually works really, really well - pine is both cheap and plentiful, and depending on exact geography it's generally a reasonably small carbon footprint. We've spent a long time figuring out how to build well with less than ideal materials and the techniques to do so are well understood, if not always implemented properly. The difference between a well constructed pine framed structure and a poorly constructed one is in the details. Find someone who is paying the proper attention to those details and you'll have a superior product without the massive supply chain and all that entails.
That doesn’t change OPs point though.
Pine is not a good wood and it requires a ton of work to finish it (plaster board, stopping and paint). It’s only attribute is that it grows fast.
Another issue is that building sites have massive wastage. It’s just so demoralising walking past their skips. If walls were prefabricated and shipped it would be hard to do worse than NZs current standard, even with shipping from a long distance.
I’ve seen over ordered materials just binned rather than collected and returned or sold.
I don't think your attempt to show a difference between that and software makes your point.
The bulk of software project costs is labor. And there are certainly a lot of business folks who say "ok, the bulk of the cost is labor, so labor is a commodity, so I should be able to hire any programmer to do any type of software" and hire cheap devs and see things go sideways if they don't stick to fairly simple, rote, lowest-common-denominator technologies that are much closer to 90s-style-PHP than they are to "the latest Python or Javascript."
If you've spent your whole career in coastal California startups or FANG you may never have seen these people at all, they don't really live in the same job posting/hiring/skill set universe. But it strikes me as very similar to "labor is the most expensive part, concrete vs lumber isn't gonna be that different in parts, so I should be able to pay the same for labor for the unusual things."
> I’ve recently started research construction costs due to a desire to build a custom house.
Worth examining pre-fabricated homes, where most of the work is done at a factory and the semi-finished wall panels are delivered by trucks, craned into position, and tied together like Lego® blocks:
Housing prices are dropping, as would be expected with the interest rate hikes.
House prices are set at the margins, just like any asset. Even if the folks with 3% mortgage rates sit tight and don’t sell, there will still be downward pressure on prices because prices are not determined by non-transactions. There are plenty of listings for those who need to exit the market and liquidate, driving inventory up.
Just a quick glance at Zillow and Redfin will show that Bay Area prices have already retreated 10-15% and in some cases back to 2019 levels. Every other listing has 100k+ price cuts or more.
> House prices are set at the margins, just like any asset. Even if the folks with 3% mortgage rates sit tight and don’t sell, there will still be downward pressure on prices because prices are not determined by non-transactions.
YES! There is a sort of delusion that has taken hold of people who became “house rich” in the past couple years. They seem to think that if they don’t sell, their house will still be worth whatever fantasy number they have in their heads.
It does get me thinking about the psychology of these economic cycles and how the transformation of that delusion to acceptance/sadness on an individual level will impact their buying habits and risk taking. On a large scale, it is easy to see this is sort of spiraling into a protracted recession.
Similarly, the delusion of the "house poor" hoping for another 2008 is frankly hilarious.
The difference is, if you picked up a house at 2.7% you will be winning for a long time. There are fewer ARMs, which means a small more protracted "collapse". Housing supply is still non-existent and will be into the near future. Wages will need to keep pace with housing costs in order to provide anyone a chance to succeed. Even after a so-called "recession" in housing they'll still be too expensive. For example, if my house dropped 50% in value, it'd still be way over what I bought it for.
The only deluded people are the ones not holding property. Make no mistake, if you didn't buy/refinance in 2020 you lost out on a literal once in a lifetime opportunity to lock a massive short against the fed.
> you lost out on a literal once in a lifetime opportunity
I don't think anyone can make claims like this, lots of people made the right decision by not buying into an inflated market with job instability around the corner.
I think the correction is needed, any people who didn't overextend will be fine if they intend to stay put for 5-15 years.
Yeah this the thing - somehow those of us who chose not to over-extend in times of exuberance are the ones who lost out? I've been renting for a long time, but my market still doesn't let me buy a home that I could live in with my family for an amount that won't make me lose sleep when rates go up (like everywhere outside the US, most mortgages are ARMs here). Like many of this board, I'm in the upper-echelon of earners in my location, but I refuse to over-extend on a housing loan like many folks in my location.
The only difference is that recently I've resigned myself to the fact that maybe I'll never own in my current location - which even though may be emotionally sad, at least I don't have a crazy monthly payment for a shoebox apartment.
The parent comment is making a really good point (in a roundabout way):
It is just another variation of "timing the stock market". Even if you're correct you can end up losing so much money on the upside that long-term you lose compared to people who buy into a bull market.
Depending on the exact circumstances of when you bought, your mortgage rate, how much prices fall, how long you can hold, and how much prices recover you can still end up losing by not having bought during the run-up.
Here's a made up bay area example:
A house sells for $2m in 2014. Due to rising prices over 8-10 years you end up buying for $3m at 2.5% interest in 2021. The market then tanks by 30%. That puts the house back at $2.1m. Over the following 5 years the market recovers somewhat and the house is worth $2.8m in 2026.
A naive view says "see! it was correct not to buy in 2021! waiting was the correct choice."
But that's not the whole story.
Buying in 2021 means you did not pay $5k/mo rent from 2021-2026. That's $270k. Not all of that will go to principle but some will. And you're 5 years ahead of the mortgage payoff schedule compared to not buying.
Speaking of time value of money... buying in 2021 means you got 2.5-3% interest on your 30 year mortgage. Depending on how things play out buying in 2026 might end up with 4-6% on the same mortgage:
2021 Purchase @2.5%: total interest paid $1.26m
2026 Purchase @4%: total interest paid $2.15m
2026 Purchase @6%: total interest paid $3.47m
In this scenario buying in 2021 ends up with the bank paying _you_ to take the mortgage since inflation is up. If you assume inflation says around 2-2.5% after that you more or less borrow the money for free.
Buying in 2026 costs you around $1m-$2.2m over the life of the loan.
In this example even accounting for the market dropping 30% _and_ not fully recovering it still made more sense to buy in 2021. Remember this is just one example with a lot of assumptions. I'm not saying this is what will happen. I'm merely pointing out that you can predict prices are inflated, wait for them to fall, and end up losing compared to a "sucker" who bought at the peak.
If you look at the national picture in the USA prices haven't really budged by much at all, it would seem reasonable that they will but when and by how much is the million dollar question:
I suspect what is happening is that the affordability crunch is causing a noticeable drop in demand in the HCOL areas (hence the pronounced decrease in prices in the Bay Area I noted in the original comment).
The availability of remote work and the retreat of the HCOL population to other areas in the US is likely causing an increase in demand elsewhere, as we have seen as a macro trend since the beginning of the pandemic. This demand will keep supplies low in LCOL areas.
Yeah I think a correction is likely - haven't seen anyone being nearly that pessimistic (or optimistic probably if you're younger and in the USA) but shifts from 5-15% depending on the market have been predicted by plenty of firms.
The history between May and August was deleted on Redfin. Either there is a way to pay Redfin to delete history or @lotsofpulp is right, or maybe a convenient bug?
Yeah that's a trick. They take it off the market and then relist which resets the clock. They do this so buyers won't assume there is something wrong with the property due to the price changes.
I might be wrong and have just looked at a couple houses where the data is missing now. I set the Zillow filter to “price reductions”, which Redfin does not have, but I compared a few homes and both listed price changes.
The houses I had favorited with the missing price changes are gone from my Redfin favorites list now (owner decided to remove listing?).
Zillow definitely has better history though, and a filter option to show price reductions.
Houses are set on the margin, but that doesn't mean the "lock in effect" doesn't have a net positive effect on prices.
There is heterogeneity of sellers in how much they "must" sell (versus alternates like rent it out, not move at all if they're nearly indifferent between cities, etc). Clearly "lock in" reduces total sellers.
There’s a lot of negativity towards capitalism here in this thread which is hard for me to understand when the average Hacker News user is upper middle class chatting away on social media in the middle of a work day. It seems like capitalism has done exactly a great job in lifting people out of poverty and continues to do so.
A lot of the negativity simply comes from being detached from real problems, in my opinion.
I've got no idea about the general demographics of the site, but I for one am here in the middle of the day because I'm unemployed, not because I'm well-off.
Wow, webmd made it really hard to find the primary source for that.
To be clear, they are attributing this drop off of this flu strain to be likely due to pandemic mitigation efforts, as well as maybe lucky timing and some specifics of how this strain spreads
Since it doesn’t seem plausible to repeat the wide scale pandemic mitigation controls any time soon, I doubt we can keep wiping out flu strains, but we could certainly reduce the damage the flu does if we want to
There are 2 things happening at once that seem to be causing a rift in online discussions:
1. It seems like people are severely underrating the flu and always have been. Remember when we closed all restaurants and bars and suspended all sports events when the flu killed an estimated 1 million people in 1968-1969? No you don’t because society seemed to have shrugged that one off. Ditto for many years when the flu kills upwards of 600k worldwide [1]
2. The reported CFR (Case Fatality Rates) across different countries is all over the place causing a lot of panic and overstated mortality rates. Countries like Italy report almost 7% whereas in Germany and South Korea, the CFR makes Covid-19 look like no big deal (Closer to 0.1%). I suspect that’s because Italy is well under counting the true denominator, while countries like SK have tested thousands of people per day making their data much more comprehensive.
There’s something unique about this year’s outbreak that seems to resonate deeply with more people. Ultimately it’s definitely not “just the flu” but it’s closer to that then a guaranteed death sentence.
We may see more damage from the secondary effects (people losing jobs, runs on medicine and supplies causing people to die) than from the virus itself.
What I believe unique about this year's outbreak is that it is the first "social" pandemic; where in everyone is connected to a nonstop stream of both information and misinformation regarding its development.
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