Actually it works perfectly and it's called a one-time pad!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40951166

Points: 73

# Comments: 27

Shoot, there goes the argument I was planning to deploy against Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40402032

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

With current interest rates of around 5%, one could get the same stream of income ($2.8k/y) by just plonking $50k or so into a high-yield savings account or money market fund.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfield

you mean protrust lobby :)

Then surely I have failed to convey it!

In any case, my edited point about "deadweight loss" is perfectly consonant with the parent poster's feeling of guilt, and with what I presume is your feeling of disgust; it is in fact the economic term of art for that at which you intuitively recoil.

(Although you're kind of equating a very, very expensive home, in the overall scheme of things, with the minimum requirements of decency, if you really think that he's exploiting someone's inability to afford housing, but w/e.)

Now let's get into the controversial stuff...

> Housing is a basic human need like food and clothing.

Agreed. But it's also an asset, because someone has to build and maintain it and have exclusive use of (at least parts of) it, and being a basic need doesn't automatically create a right to something (for obvious reasons) so that asset is gonna trade hands voluntarily like any other. Its price will fluctuate, sorry.

Now, NIMBYs using government fiat to drive down housing supply in their market is an annoyingly common failure mode of local democracy, maybe that's all you're upset about.

Nope! First of all, it's come from no one's pockets until you sell. Until then it's just a hypothetical, theoretical gain on paper.

Second of all, when you do sell it, the money will come from the pockets of your willing buyer :-)

Edit: if you still want to feel bad about something, let it be this: that the rise in your home's value represents wealth that has been created "by the community" in the sense that it's only because of many variables of the surrounding community that the land has become more desirable and therefore more expensive; and your ability to capture all of that increase via your untaxed monopoly on the ground rent creates a deadweight loss for the broader economy.

But that's why we created the universal land value tax and used it to replace all other taxes! (Hello from the year 2078!)

a friend of mine just left a quantitative hedge fund recently that, in anxious anticipation of noncompetes possibly being banned in new york, asked all of its employees to sign new "nonassociation agreements" as a fallback... these basically say you're not allowed to work with your current colleagues at future employers... which is arguably more draconian than a noncompete... it would be ironic if this became the replacement.

[edited for punctuation]

I remember thinking even then that there was something off about his arguments, and I'm not surprised that he has since been exposed as a likely fraud. For example, throughout his talk, he kept making the point that when someone made a self-serving claim or argument, he would "hold on to his wallet," making an analogy to pickpockets. He then concluded his talk with a transparently self-serving argument that the importance of studying irrationality was growing over time because (as just one example, I suppose), the share of deaths attributed to preventable causes (self-inflicted, etc.) was increasing over the decades, making it sound like society is becoming more irrational. This seemed very weak to me, because that's exactly what you would expect if civilization is making progress over time... if science and technology keep eliminating the exogenous causes of death, over time we should be left with just the endogenous ones. Anyway, I thought of raising my hand to ask if I should reach for my own wallet, but was too young and nervous.

As far as I can tell, the linked article in fact makes exactly the same point:

> They [the founders] also knew that merit was not enough; merit without virtue to accompany it could produce tyranny. They knew this, of course, through history.