I hear this kind of phrasing frequently in the discourse nowadays, but it doesn't seem like a useful framing to me. Is there a safe amount of chocolate? A safe amount of sex? Are we supposed to stop enjoying every pleasure of life as soon as someone does a large study with high enough statistical power to show some negative effect on health, no matter how small?

The question is whether the enjoyment we derive from these things is worth the risk, not whether there is a "safe level", whatever that means.

Sadly a lot of Americans hear "foreign bank account" and immediately think "tax evasion" without realizing there are a lot of ordinary Americans overseas who just want to pay the rent and save for retirement but can't because Uncle Sam follows us wherever we go for life.

> What happens when prices actually start to fall? Because that’s not just a hypothetical. It’s already happening in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas...

Then two paragraphs later

> In The Atlantic, Rogé Karma recently pointed out that housing prices are rising fastest in the very cities once seen as escapes from high-cost coasts, places like Phoenix and Dallas...

So which is it?

There is truth to the fact that the way the housing market is intertwined with the financial markets creates some risk, but those risks are manageable - a nationwide downturn in housing prices is exactly the kind of scenario addressed by the Fed's stress tests for banks.

The article is full of bizarre logic. An increase in housing supply leads to a fall in prices, which leads to a fall in supply? No, in fact the conclusion contradicts the premise. The author is making the classic econ 101 mistake of confusing the supply curve (which is supply as a function of price) and quantity supplied.

And finally the author explains his own solution which is... an increase in supply! But only the kind of supply he approves of ("small scale, incremental development"). Left unexplained is why this type of supply, if carried out on sufficient scale, wouldn't have the negative financial effects he worries about.

Look, I think anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in both places understands that there is a major difference in the way private companies relate to the government in China versus in the U.S. For example, it's far more common for U.S. companies to sue the government over laws or policies they disagree with, whereas in China it's just taken as given that officials have a lot of discretion.

You bring up Meta having US intelligence onboard - I assume you're referring to the Edward Snowden / PRISM revelations. Remember that this was a huge scandal precisely because the idea of American companies working with intelligence agencies to spy (even inadvertently) on Americans is considered so repugnant. Whereas in China it's just taken as given that the government can read your WeChat (or whatever) messages whenever they feel like it, and any encrypted messaging apps that gain a following are quickly removed from app stores.

This is not a distinction without a difference; China is a totalitarian state where you have essentially no right to speech or privacy. The U.S., for all its flaws, is not like that.

> DE-nationalizing... geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest...

Can you not see the hypocrisy here, when China functionally bans almost the entire U.S. internet sector?

It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"

Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.

As I said, export controls are such a minor part of the problem as to hardly be worth mentioning. The pervasive control I'm speaking of is things like the fact that ByteDance (like all large Chinese companies) would have an internal CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions.

> having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion

This is wrong on many levels. No one is talking about nationalizing TikTok (which is not a PRC company) and certainly not ByteDance.

Chinese state control over private companies is far more pervasive, and less bound by rule-of-law, than that of the U.S. Export controls are not even the H2O molecule at the tip of the iceberg.

> Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership

Bytedance is not being forced to divest; they can leave the market, just like Google and many others had to leave China.

And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.

But what really requires evidence is the extraordinary claim that housing is some kind of special case market where prices don't respond to supply, despite the fact that places with high supply elasticity (Texas, Tokyo, Vienna) are more affordable than places with tightly limited supply, and despite the fact that housing prices took off in the U.S. just as strict zoning became common.

Prices increased during covid because everyone was suddenly spending much more time at home and wanted more space, a home office, etc. This is well understood.

The top 1% have more money to buy everything, not just houses. But most other goods are getting more affordable over time, not less.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-can-we-really-learn-about-...