There is scarcity which mean those selling can reduce the set of candidates by pumping up the prices. Its a simple mechanic, not a very sophisticated approach...

> There must be a way of determining who has the right to occupy the scarce resource..

yes! exactly! We haven't attempted to examine the question let alone attempt to answer it.

Lets say we have:

1) renters serving small numbers of customers.

2) renters serving large numbers of people.

3) renters rarely serving the same customers.

4) renters regularly serving the same customers.

Lets say (for sake of simplicity) people spend half their income on rent, lets say we can infinitely increase rent as the bill is (inevitably) forwarded to the customer they serve (everything involving labor becomes more expensive) and lets assume perfect scaling.

Then you can (and we do) have a city where wages are low and everything ("produced" locally) is cheap OR you can have a city where everything ("produced" locally) is very expensive and wages are high.

You somewhat increase productivity by forcing out people who can only do manual labor but it doesn't scale nicely. Eventually the buildings only serve as investment vehicles rather than nurturing the cities productivity.

We should wonder where the money goes really. I have a mental picture where eggs are cheap but if you want a fried egg with a slice of bread it is going to cost you 100 times the price of an egg because the fried egg is mostly made up out of rent.

I think it would make much more sense to have government do the wealth extraction and to configure rent to have the proverbial eggs fried cheaply.

Cities not just import stuff produced elsewhere (because they cant do it themselves) but they also export a lot of valuable services. Those would be a lot more attractive if they didn't scale with rent prices 1:1.

I'm not claiming this is the holy grail, its a rather raw train of thought. It seems to me to have as much economic activity as possible one could force the price of the raw resources down by a whole lot. Forcing people to fry the egg at home doesn't make much economic sense, we can have professionals do it for you at scale.

It could be interesting to run the numbers on room service vs having your own kitchen? Why do we need a million kitchens in our city? They are just sitting there taking up space not being used? It seems as bad as having the empty buildings increasing their own value by making the resource more scarce.

One more thought:

Do we want university graduates or do we want land lords? Why would we want land lords to enrich themselves with money the students don't really have? The student automatically becomes an expensive employee. Education turns into a scarce resource. If it was a game (and it is) the "let the market figure it out" approach is easily defeated.

There are so many corrupt non-profits to which one can make tax deductible donations. Would it be possible to reform/tweak/hack the [existing] donations to help their bottom line?

I bet someone out there is already doing this.

    function cason(x){
    switch(x[0]){
      case "movie": switch(x[1]) {
        case "name"       : return "Interstellar";
        case "year"       : return 2014;
        case "is_released": return true;
        case "director"   : return "Christopher Nolan";
        case "cast": switch(x[2]){
          case 0: return "Matthew McConaughey";
          case 1: return "Anne Hathaway";
          case 2: return "Jessica Chastain";
          case 3: return "Bill Irwin";
          case 4: return "Ellen Burstyn";
          case 5: return "Michael Caine";
        }
      }
    }
    }

Say we live in a town where we make all the decisions and our word is law. Our imaginary town needs 2 garbage men, one to pick up the bags, one to drive the truck. We need a truck, fuel, some place to dump, our garbage men need some cloths, a place to sleep and they need to eat.

We take some city land, build 2 house and a garage.

With them serving tens of thousands of customers we can both pay them a nice salary and make the service cheap.

Now we can add a 3rd person who does nothing and pay him a huge sum for his services. We can make fancy documents dressed up with powerful geometry and invent some fancy title for this 3rd person. Say we call them Lords.

With tens of thousands of customers it seems like it doesn't matter. They can pay an extra 100 bucks annually and we could easily finance the 3rd or perhaps a 4th person who also doesn't work. They could live in great wealth without anyone getting upset over it. We could lower the salaries from the first 2 and make room to add a 5th.

Then one day the plumbing starts to leak. It might be portrayed as if the Lords repair the plumbing but the reality is that it requires a plumber.

What I'm trying to say is that however complex we make the bureaucracy, the way stuff works hardly changes. At least not until the bureaucracy becomes so important than there is no more room for the work.

I think that problem can be solved long before.

> No one is obligated to rent a property from someone else. You rent if you believe it's in your interest to rent, instead of buy. Why stop two consenting people from entering into rental agreements, both of whom believe it's in their interest?

In the existing formula our 2 garbage men are obligated to rent a property. The citizens will have to pay whatever the greedy unproductive landlords want them to pay.

That people can afford this only makes the problem worse.

It's consent only if the other voluntarily agrees. Individually they could chose not to be garbage men but that doesn't mean we no longer need garbage men.

Sure, we can have a thousand applicants and the winning one could be someone willing to drive 2 hours to get to work.

On a personal level that might seem like a reasonable way of doing things, as a town or city trying to organize it self its just poorly done. The citizens pay more than it costs and they are not getting anything for it.

We've sacrificed efficiency for exploitation. Or we've collectively done a half ass job organizing our shit and now we have to pay for it.

>Some people prefer to rent: they don't want to be obligated to live somewhere for 10 to 30 years. They prefer to be free of commitments and loans.

There is never any obligation to live some place. That would be inefficient. If rent contracts are replaced by lease buy contracts you don't need credit. You can pay rent 12 months then leave. The land lord would be obligated to buy back your share of the house or he has to sell it.

> Landlords also provide useful services to their tenants: they are responsible for all upkeep associated with the property.

I don't want their services because they are madly overpriced. I want the actual market to do these things.

> Property owners are forced to tie up their assets in the real estate.

no no no, they chose to do this because it makes a good investment. We can regulate it to be highly undesirable to own property which will drown out everyone except those who really need it.

> Lastly, landlords assume risk. If they can't find a tenant for their property, then it sits idle and they take a loss.

This would be the desirable mechanism. Sadly there is so much demand they would have to ask absurd amounts of rent to be able to not find anyone.

> When you own property, you can lose a significant amount of money if the property depreciates, as happened during the last recession.

This can only happen if the market value grows beyond the new value. Don't feel sorry for investors. We are currently forcing people out of their home to satisfy all that greedy exploitation. Investors only risk losing part of their investment. Its not like they are out on the street like tenants during the great recession.

> When you're renting, your risk is capped - you owe the rent but that's it.

I'm perhaps a lot older than you. I've seen many cases where people died and the relatives had to pay rent, clean out the house and return it into the claimed original state in less than 30 days OR pay some truly insane amount of money.

Say the previous owner build a garage, do you want it? Say they moved some walls around, put in a fire place and got a fancy kitchen? Say there are 20 trees in the back yard?

Mum died, you get 30 days. Don't forget to dig out the swimming pool as well.

Greedy unproductive cruel dictators they are AND they own you. Its a much to attractive scheme, it should be heavily discouraged in favor of economic activity, efficiency and quality of life.

I've paid the construction cost of my house 3 times now but every year I have to work more hours per month to live there???

Maintenance involved 1 phone call every 2 years and roughly 0.005% of the value of the place.

Almost every house on the block has the same owner. A decade ago we were allowed to buy it. Now they only sell houses to investors with the tenants still in them. The market value is about 7 times the construction cost.

They take 10 times the value of the house and not do any work.

If rather than me paying them they paid me the rent they would still be making crazy money without lifting a finger.

I work, other people have to pay for my work. Half of their money goes towars lazy greedy unproductive dictators. 1/3 of their money went to lazy greedy unproductive dictators too.

Then add taxes and they have to work 8 hours to get 1 hour of my labor.

And that my friend is ruining economic activity. Cut them all out and you will have an explosion of enterprise. Let the ponzi people take a risk and invest in that.

I didn't start pondering what is wrong until I see people having to pay rent for flooded houses.

Without risk it is not investment, it's pure exploitation and we are forcing people into it.

You would accumulate a good percentage of madly overpriced rentals that no one wants then they go bankrupt one by one. You get those delicious market dynamics we [apparently] crave more than any social convention. Buildings should be hot potatoes that you don't want to hold for to long. With this much demand it wont even affect housing prices but even if it did, who cares?

Gradually, (in stead of rent) people pay tax at market rates. We can keep the large scale wealth extraction and continue to force people into productivity only it would be the government doing it.

The same logic applies as with the teachers, taxi drivers, cleaners, garbage men, restaurant employees etc: If you don't like it you can just leave the city. Get some of that delicious mobility going and gtfo. They can just leave for the sake of efficiency and availability. Its that simple: Just go away.

If you have to chose between [say] 1) a corner store OR 2) a land lord it should be obvious which one to get rid of.

If they are contributing to quality of life by selling food and employing people we should consider giving the store a tax cut. One could also extend the tax cut to the people working there and have cheap stores.

Its hilariously unproductive to have a usury scheme of greedy unproductive rent seekers extracting wealth from every transaction that is some how remotely related to real estate.

I just want to pay for the ice cream, pay the people involved in making the ice cream happen. Why would I pay 80% to someone who doesn't do anything I need?

You click on user contributions, if/since there are to many talk page entries filter down to article space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribut...

Years and years of arguing without any article writing.

It just struck me that we might be that we are missing the most important part of the topic.

You are not just saving whole cents left and right but in the process you will also be required to emotionally detach yourself. On the large scale the choice is really between engineering empathy vs psychopathy. If we minimize cost and maximize what people have to pay we cant be all to concerned with peoples well being.

I've had lots of other jobs, I can easily earn twice what I get now. I just one day had the rather silly realization that doing a lot of cycling to improve my shape is a lot of work. Its not work like a job, you have to push yourself until you cant do any more if you want to make progress. It seemed odd to do work without getting paid. It clearly is possible to be both productive and physically active.

You can imagine what it looks like, without a money driven thought process I do 2 times the work one could expect from an employee. You would think it is enough but that is not how the system works. There are other employees who are suppose to get more work out of me, they have no idea about the work, are really unfit and earn a lot more. My effort doesn't make cleaning cheaper or result in better cleaning. They just scale down the number of workers, get larger bonuses and the owners of the company make more money. With 2/3 already going towards the bureaucracy the 1 cent extra is really a joke.

For the people in those jobs to feel productive they have to emotionally detach themselves. I have to buy cheap products made by wage slaves who are probably much worse of, they might not be able to sustain themselves. I'm similarly forced to not overthink it.

Its not impossible for the animals I eat to see some daylight. Its not that if we abolish child labor or slavery the economy collapses. People are just making a lot of money telling that story or they need to tell themselves that in order to cope with the system.

If you can spend 1 euro extra and double a hundred peoples salary the money is the least of your concern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R5G5hTC7pc

next quest

Where was the free and open source distributed search engine?

"oh we cant support any protocol or any other technology! We don't want to be promoting anything! Unless we get paid of course!"

Where was p2p video? Why no BitTorrent? Not to long ago hosting video on a server was crazy expensive but at that time people still visited small websites.

It should have been as simple as:

But in stead we got youtube which is short for: adware, censorship, spying, completely unreliable, a crazy resource hog to the point of not working on hardware older than 5 years.

And then there is privatized law making & privatized law enforcement.

If I put stuff out there from my own computer from the comfort of my house I'm subject to plenty of laws and regulations created by my democratically elected governments.

There are no multibilion robots shooting from the hip, there is no false-positive punishment without dialog. If I break the law the situation is carefully examined, I get fined or even imprisoned. Its not a perfect system but its better than persecution by robot.

The Google constitution (TOS) is something like: We may terminate you at any time without explanation.

That's not someone you want to enter into a relationship with.

Something modeled after YACY should be the default search engine. Its wonderful, you have it crawl the pages you frequent and it finds everything, other users crawl other things, nothing google could ever do.

In stead, if I type "1+1" in the search box you send me to google to solve the problem.

the end user searching for the content

the webmaster or author of the content

the search provider

If I'm searching for something that I know exists and I cant find it there is no excuse. The search provider failed to do its job.

There is not but the webmaster should have done this and that. He was hit by a bus 10 years ago and we should be happy the content is still available.

A good search provider would link a vanished website to archive org if the content is exactly what the customer wanted.

Long long ago when posting interesting links in comments didn't trigger commercial hysteria people would cite bits of texts and have a link to the full text. Later this became simply citing a chunk of text. I use to drop a few lines from the citation into the search engine and find the original work.

Just look!

https://www.google.com/search?q=Looks+like+only+page+6+is+in....

As i'm writing this there are exactly 45 search results above the one that should have been displayed.

There is no excuse like HN not ranking enough, they didn't not index the page, the other results didn't match the query better.

If we do this with 4 exact lines from a less popular site it will end up some place on page 20 of the search results.

Another example, I really don't care for indexing but here is an article that I always (jokingly) refer to as my greatest work.

The exact title:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+wrath+of+the+book%22

A really weird result. Safe to say nothing matching is there.

The first many words from the text:

https://www.google.com/search?q=I+think+someone+%28you%29+sh...

It doesn't find it.

Then we check if it is even indexed...

https://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.go-here.nl...

And there it is! Why does it even crawl the page?

It also lists websites that have the number 8616 on them and ones with both the word "blog" and "here" in the text.

I'm not suppose to laugh?

480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s

And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.