We could probably grow a normal clone of you now and add the brain damage manually and have adult organs in 18 years. If you have 100B why would you not want to spend a trivial portion ensuring that you make it to 100 instead of 80 especially since this makes 200 or 2000 more likely.
This would never be available to anyone except the parasitic billionaire class. If every other issue be resolved I see no reason we should allow this. Anyone who can afford a billion for a spare human needs higher taxes
The law is whatever it needs to be to satisfy monied interests with the degree of acceptable of adaptation being a function of the unity of those interests and the political ascendancy of those in favor.
Overwhelmingly this is in favor of treating ai as a tool like Photoshop.
Even those against AI disagree on different matters and will overwhelmingly want a cut not a different interpretation.
Man, I still remember what a pain the migration from PulseAudio to Pipewire was. Sure, it's only a couple packages, disabling a few services, enabling a couple others. But I had to do this almost on the daily, while bugs in Pipewire/Wireplumber were still getting ironed out and were rendering my audio stack temporarily unusable.
The reason is to protect the innocent, of course, they're mostly clueless about security! But I don't know the level of practical benefits for this measure, superficially seems to be rather low, but then (assuming silly usability issues like "appears frozen" are fixed) what's the downside?
Elon is deeply involved in engineering decisions in his companies, and has by all accounts deep knowledge in those areas.
And yet randos on the web keep asserting he's not an engineer. Is there any factual basis for this? Is it just that he doesn't have a degree with that word in the title?
Being an engineer is neither having a degree in engineering which he doesn't have nor managing them and it certainly isn't owning a company that employs them. It's working as an engineer.
He continually says dumb things that aren't true or reasonable and has never worked in the field he's a rich boy who bought things with daddy's aparteid money.
The stereotype is probably if anything less horrible than the reality. There was a notable situation where police were called because 12 year old Tamir Rice was walking whilst black with a bb gun. The officer exited the passenger side of the cop car so fast it was still moving when he jumped out. He immediately fired and executed the little kid. Despite the horror of the situation this is what would be colloquially termed a "good shoot" and officers faced no legal consequences.
Despite officer being 25th on the list of most dangerous professions falling below construction helper and farmer officers are trained as if they are going to war and equipped with many of the same toys. They are taught to prioritize preserving their lives over those they are supposed to protect.
The average person would need a MASSIVE investment in time to learn all the skills required in addition to investment in tools. Furthermore people won't lend joe random the funds required in the same fashion as they would for an actual finished house OR constructing a house via a contractor.
If a minority has most of the wealth then the equilibrium supply may include a lot of supply of second homes, very large homes on large plots for the rich, properties sold at a premium based on how much they can extract from renters, and even investment properties occupied by nobody whilst still having insufficient small basic homes and dense housing.
Capital that could be invested in better serving the bottom half has to compete not only with the use of those resources to further enrich the rich but other investment opportunities.
There is more than enough land for everyone, and rich people aren't really competing for the kind of housing that poor people are competing for, e.g. smaller plots with smaller homes. The demand of the rich does not eliminate demand of the poor, so the market produces different kinds of housing for different clientele.
Think about it this way: assume you supply all the housing to all the rich people. Then there still remains untapped demand of others that can be fulfilled by further production of homes for those specific people.
This story fails when land becomes restricted, which is exactly what zoning laws cause. Zoning is a big harm to the poor.
> rich people aren't really competing for the kind of housing that poor people are competing for, e.g. smaller plots with smaller homes.
This disregards basic geometry. Sure, in some rare situations you only have one small plot of land surrounded by existing construction or natural boundaries. But, in the majority of cases, you have one large plot of land, and you can either construct one big house on it, 5 smaller houses, 10 small houses, or 200 apartments in a block. The rich are absolutely competing for this lot with the poor.
And as inequality goes up, the rich can even start contemplating buying up surrounding properties, tearing down construction, and transforming a small plot into a much larger one.
Given the choice between being homeless and living in favelas, millions in Brazil have chosen to live in favelas.
The reality of zoning laws in Western countries is to provide a target for regulatory capture by the NIMBY crowd. With the result that we're systemically underbuilding housing, then wonder why we wound up with homelessness.
Favelas are a local optimum which systemically is very difficult to get out of and is a sign that the regulator is powerless. It's a great example of a market failure.
There's a couple of "ifs" there and the scenario seems implausible. If I look at the prime real estate in a city it tends to be a lot of skyscrapers rather than very large homes (with occasional exceptions like say a Buckingham Palace). But it looks like the economic equilibrium is lots of cheaper apartments rather than large homes for rich people.
> ... and even investment properties occupied by nobody ...
Not much of an investment. Something is wrong if that is happening, probably manifesting as a lack of supply. Otherwise what is the point of an "asset" that doesn't generate income, degrades over time and could easily be rented out at a profit rather than sitting unused?
Whatever scenario there is where it makes sense to have an empty property, assuming a sane policy backdrop, it'd always be better for the owner do what they were going to do anyway but also rent it out.
People don't want to rent those homes out because once you're doing so it's difficult to evict a long-term tenant. You just lose out a lot on flexibility - even if you try and manage that risk by leasing out housing e.g. on a yearly basis, landlord-tenant law often overrides that since there are strong ethical reasons for not evicting someone who has since come to treat that rental space as their home.
Short term rentals are better on that score: no one sensible forms a long-term expectation that they're going to live in an Airbnb that they've rented for a few days. (If you think short-term rentals are "bad" for the long-term market or have negative side-effects on the neighborhood, then tax them to manage that tradeoff. But banning them altogether is unconscionable and just leads to houses sitting empty and unused.)
The purpose of housing is not to provide an investment vehicle nor should we optimize for this. Airbnb should just regulated out of existence in most urban markets because we are chronically low on housing and the city doesn't need short term rentals at all.
The purpose of most real estate is to provide shelter for people, not to sit empty and unused. That's exactly what AirBnb allows to those who are only willing to rent short term (because it's their vacation home and they want to be able to use it).
Housing someone provides a fundamentally different kind of value than offering a second home or short-term stay. A home meets an essential social need, while vacation homes and similar uses provide far less public benefit. On that scale, the social value of housing a person is vastly greater than the value of adding another short-term rental bed.
That does not mean hotels would stop being built, because developers and hotel operators are optimizing for a different kind of value. But it is more than enough reason to oppose turning even a single home into a de facto short-term hotel.
The reality is not simply that people are monetizing unused space. The ability to rent homes short term encourages people to buy more second homes than they otherwise would, because the income offsets the cost. It also encourages investment in housing that would otherwise remain in the long-term market, since owners know unused time can be monetized. Some buyers purchase properties specifically to operate them as Airbnbs, and many landlords convert homes that once served monthly or yearly tenants into short-term rentals because they can charge more, adjust rates freely, and often earn more overall.
You are referring to properties held by the already rich (only the rich can afford 'vacation homes').
If they can't afford a 'vacation home' without short term rentals then it should be sold and provide housing year-round and build equity for a new homeowner.
There are some places in the UK (mostly new developments in London) that have a significant number of deliberately empty investment properties despite the law here making it easy to evict tenants. They are not being used for short term rentals either.
Although the easiest route (no-fault eviction) is being abolished soon, wanting to sell a property remains a valid reason to evict.
Some people just buy property as a speculative investment.
I do not think it is the main cause of shortages in London - that is people buying holiday homes, which are often large and centrally located. London provides a lot (restaurants, nightclubs, gambling, prostitution, financial services...) that attracts people with a lot of money to spend from all over the world.
> despite the law here making it easy to evict tenants
"Easy" is relative. "Evicting" an airbnb'er once the term is up will always be orders of magnitude easier than kicking out a long-term tenant who regards that as their actual home. There's not even anything necessarily wrong with this! The easiest way to address the issue is literally to slash any remaining red-tape that's making things difficult for those who would want to AirBnb these properties out, while managing the resulting side-effects (including the plausible effect on the long-term rentals market) by levying a special fee if necessary.
As a bonus, easy AirBnb rental provides an alternative for some who might otherwise want a permanent holiday home.
If we don't have an excess of housing why should we allow ANYONE even one single property to serve as an unlicensed hotel. If we tax un-lived in property extremely punitively nobody will hold them at all and it should soon be sold or rented out.
I'm fine with taxing both long-term vacant properties and AirBnb at fairly high rates, since both have negative effects on the surrounding neighborhood - the latter to a markedly less extent than the former, of course.
If you want second homes to be used productively, just allow folks to list them on AirBnb for planned short-term rental. Long-term rentals are a total non-starter politically for second homes, since you obviously can't ethically throw out someone who regards that rental space as their home. But short-term is actually fine.
As for larger homes, people should be allowed to live in there as larger, extended family groups - a common pattern in non-Anglo cultures. Ban "single family" restrictions since they amount to unconscionable discrimination against such reasonable living arrangements.
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