I disagree. It's just another housing bubble. That should be bleeding obvious from looking at the article's FRED chart. Scarcity was not suspended from 2007-2012 when the previous bubble collapsed and brought housing prices down to settle on long-term inflation as if the previous 10 years never even happened.
Blaming NIMBYism instead of loose debt looking for a safe haven is either a well-funded political agenda or mass hysteria of bloggers getting wound up on each others' articles.
I wonder what it sold for, besides the trinkets mentioned at the end. If they had hodled they could clear maybe a trillion on the open market today (which consists of sovereign states).
Highly enriched U-235 would also be a sound basis for a commodity-backed hard currency, though not quite as good as the US Dollar and the Ruble which are backed by Pu-239.
Nuclear bomb construction material has no open market, it's only held by nuclear powers who work hard to prevent anyone else from possessing it (see the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) - that's the big stick, resulting in North Korea tier sanctions. The trinkets were the carrot.
Kazakhstan made a nuanced calculation of the risk of holding the enriched Uranium, concluded it wasn't worth it.
I believe you would no longer be able to copyright the track, then. So, you should encrypt the encoded titles, but record an audio track that is a voice recording of you reading out the encryption key for that track. You know, for DRM.
> I believe you would no longer be able to copyright the track
Why? I'm not sure about US law, but here in Poland it would definitely still be copyrighted (even if you'd be effectively granting an automatic implicit license to use that name for the purpose of referencing the work).
My logic is that you cannot copyright a fact. It is a fact you released an album, and it is a fact you titled it such. I'm free to reproduce that information, say in a catalog, without violating copyright.
There is zero technical reason why housing can't be cheap as hell in this day and age. It's all due to government restrictions. And I'm not talking about shanty towns either - that's what you get when legal housing is too expensive to build!
Indeed, housing can be very cheap. See military barracks or flop houses/SROs. Housing is expensive as a means to keep poor people away from the middle class.
Then why can't you build a perfectly fine cabin on your own rural property without government inspectors coming around and micromanaging.
US/Canadian automobiles are also needlessly expensive, there are many awesome vehicles sold in Mexico etc., like the Hilux, and I don't see it as a conspiracy to keep poor people down, but an overabundance of caution from bureaucrats covering their ass and regulatory capture.
It's really hard to argue the libertarian point of view because you're always trying to point out the "unseen costs".
The secondary market makes universal standards generally helpful. As much as everyone says buyer beware you have to beware a lot less when housing and vehicles were built to a certain standard.
Having to track down whoever built the house to figure out what standards they followed is painful enough when the house is a few years old let alone decades.
Similarly vehicles safety isn't just about the driver (although that is very important) some of the safety changes have been made to minimize impact on others. While everyone bitches about easy to scratch bumpers those bumpers help almost accidents not result in terrible things for pedestrians.
Not to say there isn't regulatory capture or that the rules are the correct strictness. It is just it is less "unseen costs" and more "things people don't think about" of course the only reason they don't think about it is the bureaucracy.
Dude, it's a cabin. It's made out of logs. You should at least be able to opt-out. If you're concerned about resale value then you can pursue a NACHI seal of approval.
You should be free to drive a car with friggin spikes on the front, and the insurance industry should be free to charge you accordingly for the liability risk. That's freedom.
On the topic of housing: As long as it is obviously not normal housing I agree. If people want weird bespoke things in the middle of nowhere then that is different. If you are building your cabin an hour from town I think the government getting ahead of a housing shortage by ensuring your house can be available when you inevitably sell it is fine for everyone.
After all the city gets a house for the supply and you get your money back when you sell. Statistically everyone sells on long time scales after all.
On the topic of cars: that is stupid. 16.5 people died per day in 2019 in the US from being hit by cars. It is in everyone's best interest to bring that number down. It was double that in 1979 and while no one thing necessarily explains a big change like that newer safety requirements have helped a lot.
To be clear while recently some vehicle safety tests that protect the passengers from weird impacts have come up nearly as many regulations are actually related to protecting pedestrians whenever possible. Obviously hitting someone at highway speeds can't be helped but you would be surprised how much technology can reduce injuries in more minor accidents (and by extension reduce deaths in the non-extreme cases).
So you're saying that people should not be allowed to build log cabins because they don't contribute to your definition of acceptable housing stock? What if someone would prefer to live in a log cabin than commie block apartment? Is there any human freedom safe from such communistic arguments?
Regulations are not the primary reason for safety in vehicular design. I know you'll never believe that, however, it probably goes counter to your entire world view, so don't bother responding.
Whether you like it or not, there is dollar number on the value of a human life, and liability insurance (and vehicle design and regulation) revolves around it. Safety has diminishing returns and there is a market clearing point. Brush guards are just as dangerous as spikes, for instance, would you like to ban them? Or would you make a government form to apply for an exception if the brush guard is for an approved acceptable use by you for someone who has a license for their proper use off-road by someone with an acceptable economic reason fitting the social and economic calculations for the current five year plan determined by your Ministry of Truth?
> So you're saying that people should not be allowed to build log cabins because they don't contribute to your definition of acceptable housing stock? What if someone would prefer to live in a log cabin than commie block apartment? Is there any human freedom safe from such communistic arguments?
Huh? That isn't what I said. I said "there are benefits". You can totally build a log cabin in jurisdictions that require inspections you just need to do a little more than setup some logs... Additionally I bet the definition of "house" is more flexible than you imply from your offhand information.
> Regulations are not the primary reason for safety in vehicular design. I know you'll never believe that, however, it probably goes counter to your entire world view, so don't bother responding.
I mean I can point to regulation changes resulting in additional safety but you don't believe that at all. The reality is vehicle safety has trended very closely to regulations if you pay any attention. Some minimal amount of safety is provided but it isn't like consumers are asking what happens if you impact a another care at 55 MPH vs 35 MPH.
> Whether you like it or not, there is dollar number on the value of a human life, and liability insurance (and vehicle design and regulation) revolves around it.
That is an incorrect statement. California has a minimum liability for injury of $15,000. We do not as a society agree that a human life is worth that little.
> Safety has diminishing returns and there is a market clearing point. Brush guards are just as dangerous as spikes, for instance, would you like to ban them? Or would you make a government form to apply for an exception if the brush guard is for an approved acceptable use by you for someone who has a license for their proper use off-road by someone with an acceptable economic reason fitting the social and economic calculations for the current five year plan determined by your Ministry of Truth?
You are just making shit up now. Feel free to quote any sources rather than making up stuff.
> and I don't see it as a conspiracy to keep poor people down, but an overabundance of caution from bureaucrats covering their ass and regulatory capture.
These are one in the same. Regulation is a euphemism for corruption, market manipulation, favoritism, cronie "capitalism", and so on. The intention might not be to keep the status quo (e.g., poor remain as such) but that - time and again - is the result.
Given these are the facts. This is the tradition. It's not all that difficult to argue the libertarian pov because if nothing else it's obvious what is not working.
Regulations such as zoning are enormous social experiments.
Experiments should have control groups! Where are the control group cities?
Why do experimental social regulations have to be universal? Would life without them be great? Would it be terrible? I doubt that mankind evolved to require so much micromanagement in all aspects of life.
While Houston technically doesn't have zoning they do have defacto zoning laws that look like other city zoning just more broken up.
Deed restrictions, density restrictions, lot size restrictions, buffering ordinances, tax incremental investment zones, history preservations, airport zoning, neighborhood petitioning, etc.
The slope is slippery because, given enough time, lawyers are always be able to form a causal effect chain from human action A to undesirable outcome B.
This implies all such causal chains, regardless of their nature, will always be accepted as valid. If that were true, no lawyer would ever lose a case.
It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech."
It's the 'perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless void' model of society that assumes societies are not made up of humans with brains already aware that people can lie and attempt to game the system, and that no one will ever be willing or able to correct flaws in the system. Even in the case of OP, I doubt the UK could take any arbitrary tweet and sentence someone under the same law.
That said, I think the laws in the UK in this regard are going too far - but a slippery slope implies an irreversible process. These laws exist because the people of the UK want them to. If they wanted otherwise, they could change the laws to reflect that. That isn't a slippery slope.
Okay, buddy, we have this thing called the Internet now. It's a magical place where you can be anonymous and say whatever the fuck you want. The cat has left the bag.
All restrictive speech laws do now is push dissidents underground into radicalizing echochambers like 4chan, while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?
It's odd that you seem to find restricting speech and pushing dissidents underground into radicalizing echo chambers to be a problem, while not being at all concerned about those dissidents' capacity to radicalize orders of magnitude more people and form even bigger echo chambers when given free rein on the biggest platforms the internet has to offer.
The entire point is to slow the ability of dissidents to spread their message, because despite what believers in free speech maximalism claim, truth doesn't always out. "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on" was a meme well before the internet gave lies the speed of light.
>while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?
I've already commented that I reject the slippery slope argument. If the people of the UK find their free speech laws go too far, they can change those laws.
Somehow the world came to a consensus that nuclear weapons should never be used, and that genocide and slavery are reprehensible. Creating and/or modifying viruses to better infect humans belongs on the short global "don't do" list.
