Apple used to charge for MacOS. And then they made it free because hardware sales more than made up for any costs of the platform.
Apple themselves claim they don't care if AppStore is profitable. Schiller himself suggested they cap AppStore revenue at 1 billion.
If it's so costly for them to run why don't they let devs and users use the alternatives? Alternative payment methods, alternative app distribution etc.?
I think this doesnt really add up. Cause as soon as the US would invaded Russia, not only would Russia nuke the invading armies. They would very probably also start nuking command infrastructure. Which might or might not trigger the MADs doctrine.
Let me try again. The US has about 1400 nuclear weapons or more precisely it has "intercontinental delivery systems" to deliver that many warheads to targets in Russia. (If it is cheating on its obligations under the New START treaty, it could have more.) The US would use most or all of those 1400 warheads on Russia before it starts its invasion. It makes no sense to start an invasion of Russia (e.g., with tanks and trucks) without first thoroughly nuking it (hitting cities, infrastructure and military bases).
(And it makes no sense to nuke Russia without first evacuating US cities and advising Americans to make fallout shelters, which would mostly consist of trenches dug into the ground covered by logs or plywood covered by a plastic sheet to keep out the rain covered by 18 inches of dirt.)
I wonder if this is still true once population growth reaches zero or negative. It seems like the baked in assumption of housing is that someone else is going to need it more tomorrow than you do today. I think this is an experiment the U.S. will begin running in earnest in the near future.
That if won't happen anytime soon neither for the Earth in general nor USA in particular. Media often loves to move goals from population growth to agin g population to fertility rate, etc. All those while connected do not negate the fact that population is growing, and growing fast. That 'once population growth reaches zero or negative' is very theoretical and UN is constantly underestimating population growth. So no, we will not see that in our lifetimes.
I think you are missing 'in our lifetime', even though you are quoting 'will double in ~150 years'. Also 'declining every year' doesn't mean it won't start growing again.
Most developed countries will probably run the experiment before us, as long as we can keep the country appealing enough to keep attracting immigrants.
Buy housing in hyper desirable areas that rarely become more dense. Everyone always loves the beach, whether there are 1% fewer humans next year or not.
Yes, but only because you can overcharge rents to people who can't afford housing. If everyone could afford housing, it wouldn't have any return.
The return on housing rents is equal to the minimum (psychological) expectation that landlords expect. It's an arbitrary vig/rake, and like all arbitrary vigs/rakes, it's around 5%. It's an expected gift for owning the house. It's a gratuity for being wealthy enough that you're never forced to buy or sell.
An aside is that this rate was set in one context by currency and convention: an English pound was 20 shillings, and a guinea was 21. So when you won an auction, you would pay the auction house in guineas, and the auction house would pay the owner of the item in pounds, giving a 4.75% share to the house. Racehorses are still sold this way, although aren't any guineas or shillings any more, it's now 1£ and 1.05£.
Owning capital has a cost - the cost of capital (aka, the cost of money). At minimum, the cost is the risk free interest rate.
The owner paid a pretty penny (or borrowed, at a higher than risk-free rate) to buy the property. The previous seller did the same, or invested capital in building the property itself. So therefore, "owning a house" is the last chain in a sequence of investments, all of which costs money.
Yeah, it would be interesting to have more transparent costs, especially with inflation. New siding every 20 years is $40k, a new roof might be $30k every 25 years, a new driveway, etc.
Biggest of them all: interest. On a $1M mortgage, you’ll almost pay $2M as interest over 30 years even at 7%.
Historically interest was never as low as during the pandemic. And most people bought houses using mortgages. The average “cost” of owning a house is much more than the selling price, even before you account for the upkeep.
The mortgage interest is one of the few costs that people (sometimes) account for. Usually with a hand-waving "my mortgage payment is lower or about the same as my rent payment" - which ignores that a rent payment covers everything whereas the mortgage payment only covers principal, interest (and sometimes insurance and property tax, if escrowed).
In many places, this can be substracted from taxes, effectively slashing 35-40% of the cost where I live. So does almost all renovation costs (not upgrades though, just repairs).
Also, where I live 7% wasn't the case in past 20 years, and even now its rather 1.5% + whatever bank puts on.
I just shudder to think about all my trips to Home Depot over the last 20 years of owning a home.
I never did those when I was renting. Yes, I didn't get to renovate or pick my paint colours. And yes my money paid down someone else's mortgage. But I suspect if you add it all up...
which is a bit of a non-sequitur - who cares what your rent is paying towards? The landlord could be smoking weed with your rent money and you'd not be affected (financially).
You should add it all up. Some of the things you purchased at Home Depot can be counted in the cost basis of the home and reduce your capital gains tax if you later sell it.
Really? Really? So if you bought a shack in Vancouver twenty years ago for a song and now it's worth the entire symphony orchestra you can sell it with no taxes?
No wonder prices up there have gone bonkers even by US standards.
Yeah 0. None other than land transfer tax which is very little. And if anybody suggested putting in a sane G7 standard tax policy around this, the baby boomers would come rip their head off and parade it around on a pitchfork.
It's ... actually a reasonable policy, in some way. It can be quite annoying in the USA when you (if single) have more capital gains than you get "for free" ($250k which sounds like a lot, but if you bought in CA 20 years ago and are now moving, that can get eaten up quickly - a $300k house in 2004 would be almost $500k today from inflation alone) you pay tax.
Then if the house you bought with the proceeds drops in value and you have to sell, you can't claim a deduction for the capital loss.
Of course all capital gains taxes whatsoever have the hidden inflation problem, where you get taxed on the inflation caused by ...
In my opinion all these policies which encourage housing inflation are just the result of western neo-liberal economies trying to cover over their abdication of reasonable retirement/pension policies.
Trudeau was on record a couple weeks ago basically saying "we can't let housing prices fall. if housing prices fall, people won't be able to retire" which is a fucked up admission that there's no way to "retire" without passing debt onto the next generation.
It's not going to end well. It either falls apart in crisis / housing bubble pop, or we end up with some kind of neo-feudalist future slowly developing over the next 100-200 years.
> all the tax affordances related to owning real estate vs. equities
The only ones I can think of are depreciation (analogous to capital loss harvesting), 1031 exchanges (loosely analogous to step-up basis; this is the biggest difference) and opportunity zones (analogous to QSBS).
If you borrow against your equities, you can deduct the interest paid on that. That mortgage-interest deductions are bigger is a function of the lending being federally guaranteed more than tax law.
I dont necessarily disagree with you, but there is the safety concerns that need to be addressed for the nuclear energy option to become more acceptable. A nuclear powerplant must be able to explode and not kill a lot of people and render a large piece of the earth uninhabitable. If you solve that for me, then I will wholeheartedly agree with everything you just said.
If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so. When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world. And it is a question of "when", not one of "if". Mistakes, boeing-like profit-maximizing strategies, terrorism, war. A heavy explosive on a nuclear power plant effectively creates a dirty bomb.
I think these arguments shouldn't be wiped under the rug.
> If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so.
But flying is still the safest way to travel, despite a few tragic accidents. This logic doesn't make any sense.
> When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world.
Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly 50x50km and life is actually flourishing in there. You can see it as a tiny natural reserve which are numerous on earth and are generally seen as a good thing.
> but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic.
That depends on the type since not all nuclear power plants are the same design. Here in Canada the CANDU style is very safe in design and uses natural uranium fuel not plutonium. or even thorium.
It's not only the dam (which was helpful for keeping the power plant cooled down) that was destroyed by the russians. There is also evidence that they planted explosive devices in the power plant. The whole power plant is taken as a hostage.
The huge difference is the lasting time. Few days or a week the water has gone and you can start with repairs/rebuilding. But after a nuclear disaster all is polluted for foreseeable future and not usable even if all infrastructure and buildings are intact and look safe.
Which is not true, if you look into for example Three Miles Island reactor meltdown, where from outside point of view, there is no difference and only 600 meters exclusion zone from the reactor.
Furthermore nuclear disasters killed dozens of people, while water related disasters killed thousands of people. Another reason to ban dams.
They usually don't start inhabited, but then the people building and working at it want to live closer, which pulls in the support roles of stores, which bring more people, etc etc etc.
If you build somthing in the middle of nowhere, and employ people there, the somthing will create a local population.
There are not that many big enough inhabited places left in Europe. And if you build them in Siberia, you're back to square one - dependency on the current tyrant in charge.
I love that France uses the same strategy for Nuclear power as I did with SimCity back as a 12 year old. Look at where the Chooz power station is for example. If their reactors had a melt down it wouldn't be France (for the most part) that suffered.
This. The claim that ancient lives were brutish and short, is just a hobbesian concept. That he used to strut his shakey theory.
A significant amount of people reached old age even in the middle ages.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that so many people believe humans used to die of old age at a young age when it’s obviously untrue just from thinking about our modern day experience. Most people hit at least 60-70 before needing any critical medical care, even if they just eat junk food and watch TV all day. What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span? The cable TV? The pre-packaged snack foods?
We need to teach people that averages are generally not a meaningful way to compare things, except in the very rare case of them both being normally distributed and also about the same standard deviation. People are taught to think day to day by comparison of averages and it really harms our ability to reason about basic things in daily life.
Where I live (SF Bay) it is extremely windy all summer, and nearly dead calm all winter except when a big storm comes through. Average wind speeds are about the same year round.
This is not true. You can query the Grondbuch and it will give you all the necessary information of the owner.
Edit: sorry, havent been living in Germany for long. Thought it was the same as the Dutch kadaster. Turns out, it's not and my dealings with it have been unusually easy until now.
The reason why expropriation isn't used a lot is because it costs a lot of resources.
It needs an iCloud log in, so you can't install free software on a kiosk without a throw away account. Which is hard to set up.
Why do you first need to 'get' an app and then install it?
How many affirmations do you need?
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