I'd never be prepared for being a parent. Nothing would change about me; there'd just be some more annoying shit around me.
If the damned thing would wander into the street and die when it was 3 or 4 years old, that would be a great relief. Not that I wouldn't take steps to prevent it; just that if it happened--and unfortunately I'm very good at identifying and mitigating risks, so it probably wouldn't--my first sentiment would be, "Oh, good," followed by a facepalm at all the annoying bullshit everybody else starts doing about what is now a non-issue because it's dead and not food and thus of absolutely zero importance.
Since I can project that far ahead, I've simply determined to not allow that to happen. When I was a teenager, I wasn't as good at projecting the full span from the current time to an outcome; people insisted I'd have kids one day and talked about what my life would be in 20 years, and eventually I started becoming psychotic and fantasizing about murdering them all. That tends to happen when a threat has you backed into a corner and you can't find an escape. Once I learned to plan and control my own life, their threats became hollow.
Does that mean the male brain is superior, being an evolved version of the female brain with more bits acting in concert to handle more-demanding intellectual problems; or that it is inferior, being a hobbled version with bits weakened and disconnected so as to interfere with cognition?
The Senator from Georgia suggests that children looking at pornography causes human trafficking. How are children the market for trafficked humans, or anything really?
Actually, 92% of new york female prostitutes claim they'd stop if they had enough money to live. I don't believe that would actually happen--they're too used to being insecure to recognize when they have enough to live--and instead figure that correcting our welfare system to be more-efficient and actually accomplish its goals would eliminate 92% of prostitution in the next generation.
He talked a lot about Muslims directly. I'm not sure I heard anything about a "Muslim Registry", but I did hear a lot of attacking the outside threat of muslim invasion through refugees bringing terrorism to our country. It was one of the more disturbing things about this election, albeit I'm more interested in the ridiculous economic assertions coming out of both sides.
The weirdest part of American politics is liberals are fairly-reasonable while conservatives are completely-insane and prone to conflicting and nonsensical arguments; yet at the same time it's the liberals who will go to extremes to shut out anything that conflicts with their views and hold strong to backwards ideals, and the conservatives who can be convinced of the merits of a system if it's dissected and aligned with sensible practices. You'd think the crazy morons would be the ones who would continue to attack something like public healthcare as socialism even after you outline a government-run, taxpayer-funded healthcare system complete with regulations requiring businesses to provide healthcare for employees and a full description of how this government-regulation-created, taxpayer-funded system is a market-driven system even though it forces businesses to supply healthcare to employees and provides healthcare freely to everyone else via taxpayer money; instead, it's the crazy morons who look at the explanation and go, "Wow, that actually looks like a good idea! We should totally do that!"
Honestly, though, Trump has a lot of camera time talking about wanting his hot daughter's sexy body. We elected a pedophile who knows nothing about economics and wants to bang his daughter. The alternatives were an old man who doesn't know jack shit about economics, an old woman who doesn't know jack shit about economics, and an old hippie who knows something about finances but nothing about economics. Jill Stein is indescribable because there aren't words to explain how badly her grasp of economics or American government is without explaining the whole of both fields and her ideal of what she'd do as Dictator-President.
The hypothetical landlord already owns and maintains that property in the current environment - so is making enough profit or whatever to continue being a landlord.
But he could be getting a million dollars more per month if he could somehow turn the 39,000 homeless into 39,000 tenants turning just a $25/month average profit. That's $12,000,000/year of profit, coming off $10,750,000/month or $129 million yearly revenues.
What you're arguing seems to be that in an unstable economy, if a landlord currently rents out property at $250 a month, and a shock suddenly occurs, then he will go bankrupt because tenants can't pay that.
In a stable economy, the lower the class of people, the more unstable those people in particular are. Today, in our greatly-stable, well-recovered economy, a retail worker with 30 hours per week at $8.25 makes $990/month; in January, he could be working 8 hours per week, making $264/month. He could be laid off and on unemployment taking $550/month.
Suddenly, those people can't afford food, utilities, and rent.
UBI stabilizes that, so an economic shock doesn't remove the tenants' ability to pay rent.
UBI makes these people a more-stable, more-profitable asset. When they go from -$10 per each average profit to +$10 per each, 1,000 of them becomes $10,000 of profit instead of $10,000 of loss.
why would a landlord reduce prices if he can get a higher guaranteed utilization at the same price
Because there is latent demand.
There are 1.6 million homeless Americans today. There are 39,000 homeless Americans in my city--who, at $275/month rent, represent $129 million of potential income for the landlord. Today, if he went for that market, he'd get much less income than that, facing a loss--he'd spend $117 million, receive $105 million, and take a $12 million loss. If those people were financially stable, he might make a 10% profit, taking $11.7 million in profits that year.
There are 39,000 units not being manufactured because they can't be sold for a profit. Suddenly, you have 39,000 new consumers who can afford and want to buy your product. What happens?
One issue that has to be addressed in your scheme is inflation due to artificially restricted housing supply.
In my city, we have large swaths of empty buildings. We have landlords and such, and we expand the housing market to meet demand. The mechanism you describe essentially doesn't exist anywhere, although it looks like it exists everywhere. Rent seeking, on the other hand, does exist everywhere, which is why housing in New York City is expensive even though there's not quite as many additional expenses in the course of providing that housing (although every maintenance man, accountant, and so forth will require a higher salary, so wages are going to go way up and thus drive prices in some part).
The problem is tearing down buildings and creating new apartment units is expensive. The lower the income class, the more financial risk: poorer people are living hand-to-mouth and don't weather financial disruption well, so they miss rent, and then get evicted, and your predicted revenue falls. For landlords to cover this, they raise the per-unit rent for smaller, lower-income units: a $700/month unit might be $1.03/sqft, while a $1,400/month unit in the same area is only $0.76/sqft. The guy who can afford $1,400/month has much more income, meaning he likely has a more-stable job, and a better chance at building savings; he's less-likely to cause a big blip on your expense sheet, so other tenants at that grade won't have to fill in the gap.
Do you see the problem here?
Why would we create new housing units for people who are going to not be able to afford the apartments?
More generally, housing is inelastic. Competition in rental markets isn't really that fierce on stable demand: most apartments are only on the market briefly, and there aren't a lot of empty units. A new competitor has a lot of empty units, and none of the current tenants can buy into them without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars breaking their lease--or going through the process of finding a replacement tenant, or whatever the lease demands. That means a new landlord isn't getting any tenants unless there's an influx of new tenants seeking to rent.
You'll find that any such influx has always and currently does reliably lead to an expansion of the housing market. In some markets, new construction is expensive; in other markets, they make buildings taller, or they tear down urban blight and renovate. This only happens when a lot of people show up looking for a place to rent.
Bureaucrats aren't malicious; they're just blinded by the process. Every bureaucratic requirement fills a need. Every form, every permit, every regulation exists for a reason. When you put all these individual reasons together, you do not get a well-engineered system.
The system I described creates a multi-hundred-million-dollars-per-month profit opportunity. Not revenue; profit. It's literally hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue per year. Greedy landlords are going to be on that like stink on shit; bureaucrats are going to debate the implications of small apartments and regulations to cover them (e.g. do we allow an apartment's egress door to be a pocket door if it's under a certain size? That's banned now, but would be significant for a 244sqft flat), while politicians are going to discuss whether they think they can avoid ghettos in the city by telling these people to go be poor somewhere else (and pass laws forbidding the bureaucrats from approving any new apartments under 500sqft or so to make sure they go away).
Surprisingly enough, what rich people think about their property value isn't going to factor into it much.
You can't redistribute wealth via taxation, you can only print more of it and give it to the lower class.
That's exactly what's happening. Currently, we take, say, $12,000 from someone making $70,000, and use it to fund welfare; in my model, we take $5,500 from them and use it to fund more-efficient welfare.
Think of it this way: Today, we build giant pyramids and tear them down again with about 11% of our income. I'm changing that so that we pay people to do something actually worthwhile. Same income, different results.
Inflation is the devaluation of the current monitory supply in the market
Part of my point was that there's a certain amount of money to be spent--that is, in 2016 there will be a certain total income, in 2017 there will be a certain total income, and so forth. Changing salaries, prices, and whatnot doesn't change the amount of income; rather, it changes the number of jobs and the products bought and sold.
People think about inflation and wages as generators of money, with an ideal that somehow more money is coming out of nowhere to be spent. Then they claim X will happen, demand will occur, prices will rise, and suddenly: inflation. That's... naive. Suddenly markets change, a thing gets more expensive, another thing goes unbought, jobs are lost or gained, and so forth. The mechanism described here is called rent seeking, not inflation.
How does Chapter 13 bankruptcy encourage landlords to risk their businesses on a guaranteed-failure model, encourage banks to make loans for repeatedly-proven unprofitable endeavors, and in general promote a stable housing market that profits from the lowest-income and most-disadvantaged among us?
That's the problem. A basic income is the solution. of which a universal social security is a particular type.
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides housing assistance.
Of households qualified for HUD assistance, 1 in every 4 (25%) get vouchers and receive government assistance. The other 75% go on a waiting list and never receive benefits. Does that sound like a successful system?
Under my Universal Social Security system, an Extremely Low-Income (ELI), 1-adult, 1-person household has $7,256 per year more spendable income (roughly $605/month), and a 1-adult, 4-person, LI household has $6,767/year. A 2-adult household ranges from ELI 2-person $14,595/year ($1,216/month) to LI 4-person at $13,585 ($1,132/month). Note that these range from 111% to as low as 19.6% of household income; the lowest increase to a 2-adult household is 37%; and a VLI 4-person household ($26k income) gets 31% (LI 2-person households range from $33k to $42k of income). HUD generally won't pay more than 33% of the household income.
That reaches 100% of all HUD qualifying households--even households who never applied to HUD. That means the benefit is bigger in most cases and 75% of recipients would have received $0 in the current system.
On the other hand, that benefit also covers stabilizing food; half of it is accounted directly as rent under the model of a household with $0 of other income. Low-income households with small children are SNAP-eligible for their children only (the current welfare system, restricted to children of low-income households, costs 1.4% of all taxable income in the United States--or $1050 per household per year, whereas the current system costs several thousand per household). It's kind of fuzzy, because in theory you can send 100% of that added income to rent if you have more than like $4,000/year income; yet 50 million Americans don't get enough food, so someone needs that money for food, and there are only 5 million HUD HA recipients. You would imagine there is some overlap.
So this Universal Social Security is a much, much better system. It also costs taxpayers over $1 trillion less than the current system.
prices will simply increase to mitigate all the benefit
Let's try this again.
The Cost to the landlord to supply a rental unit is $225. With a 10% profit margin, it rents for $250.
The cost of evictions and empty units to the landlord is $50. This happens because people with only $250 available for rent are unstable, and will suddenly not have rent rather frequently.
How does the landlord rent units at $300/month when all of his tenants have $260/month? Even at 0% profit, the landlord has to rent for $275/month--yet every single tenant shows up with $250/month, and can't pay the rent. That means the landlord experiences a 9.1% loss: he has $1,000,000 of expenses, and $910,000 of income, leaving him $90,000 short.
When you have a steady basic income that leaves your tenants with, say, $300/month available to rent, people don't suddenly lose their jobs, have their hours cut, or have their welfare checks stop. That means that $50/month you need to charge becomes, say, $25/month. Now you can rent for $275/month, and your tenants can come up $25 short off their $300 of spendable rent money and still afford rent.
That means it costs the landlord $25/month less to rent the apartment. The price of rent is now lower than the price that tenants can afford. It's mathematically-possible for the landlord to make a profit.
What part of this do you not understand?
Without basic income: Spend $100 to make thing, people come to buy thing and have $90.
With basic income:: Spend $85 to make thing, people come to buy thing and have $90.
Which of these ends in your business going down in flames, and which ends in a functional market?
The problem is: what happens when renting at what the market will bear means taking huge, multi-million-dollar losses until you have to file Chapter 13 bankruptcy?
The whole point of such stabilization is to eliminate a cost-of-risk, which lowers actual cost, allowing lower rent prices. Fewer evictions means nobody has to pay for those evictions, and the units stay occupied to generate revenue.
BI by any other definition is blatant inflation!
Actually, inflation requires more money to be spent. Creating a greater market demand in one area means people spend money that otherwise could be but now is not spent elsewhere.
Single individual making $150,000 takes home $3,932 more per year; employer cost is roughly $9,300/year cheaper (assuming a low 18%-of-salary cost of employment, although it's usually 25%-40%). Buying power difference is estimated here as a 9% increase, although that's again a conservative estimate.
Single individual making $60,000 (about median) takes home $6,289 more per year; employer pays roughly $3,720 less. Buying power difference is about a 19% increase.
For married households, it's bigger, although the costs to the employer don't change (they drop by the same amount).
Taxes don't need to be raised on the highest income earners; they can be lowered on businesses, notably on payroll (tax taken based on how much wages you pay).
I've generally talked about a Universal Social Security (a type of UBI) in its potential to create broad market effects. That's not possible in these small experiments, so you get incomplete information.
Imagine being a landlord. If an average of 10% of your theoretical rent revenue is lost to evictions and empty units, what happens? You have 10 units that must rent for $250/month to make your profit margin, yet you face a risk of $25/month per unit. Well, to retain the same profit margin, you have to charge $275/month--and what if your tenants can only afford $260/month? You can't rent these units. Mind, your tenants will more likely only be able to stably afford $260/month, meaning they have $275/month but have a good chance of sometimes having only $260, and so that $25/month needs to be higher to cover that risk, and now you've got to charge them $285/month, and it's even worse now.
You can't profit in that market.
Now imagine we change things around. Instead of your tenants being underemployed, part-time workers who can lose hours, jobs, or welfare (unemployment insurance) with the season or just bad luck, they have a guaranteed income. Your tenants will have enough money for food, clothing, personal care, utilities, and a steady $260/month. You have 10 units with a base rent of $250/month to hit your viable profit margin, and now they're only facing a 4% risk. You can charge your tenants $260/month to cover this, and they're stable at that rent: you'll lose money to evictions and empty units at an amortized cost of $10/month, on average, thus still hitting your profit margin.
Do you think landlords will gradually test the waters, then start building out rental properties and attracting low-income tenants, when that stable income is going away in 2 years, or 5 years, or 10 years? It's going to take a while to get ROI.
Financial stabilization brings economic stabilization. When people can't go below a livable income, ever, for any reason, then the supply of a basic service can't be interrupted by a sudden collapse of the demand market. That's central for a market-driven welfare system like any form of basic income.
There's no tanking profits here. Nintendo's stock price dropped because of bad news, thus the sentiment that their stock price will devalue, thus people selling off. We didn't just pick up an earnings report.
They actually were producing a Zelda game at the time; it was taking too long. This was faster to get out, and people liked it. A different development house did most of the work. I'm not seeing the downside.
Nintendo openly advertised that Hyrule Warriors was a bridge game that used Dynasty Warriors gameplay (and engine) with Zelda assets. It had its own story, its own characters, and everything to make it a Zelda game; and it had the gameplay of a Dynasty Warriors game to add some variety and appeal to those sorts.
I'd love to see another one, with a step forward into blending the gameplay. This is how we got Zelda 2 and Metroid. Imagine if you could solo dungeons with Link while taking open battlefields as in Hyrule Warriors, using the build and leveling systems to affect your character. I don't know where they could go with Adventure Mode; filling in spaces with what amounts to low-quality minigames doesn't count as "content" to me, in the same way that adding 46 minutes of stock drum solos and loop tracks to a CD wouldn't count as "content". The main game, the story mode, with an open-progression world that blended Warriors and traditional 3D Zelda gameplay would be an excellent option to explore.
I've found encounters with emotional intimacy quickly deteriorates my mental health. When I'm emotionally-hurt and insecure, I get away from people; rather than healing, I get worse if people start crowding around with their sympathy. The entire notion of an emotional support structure as a critical component in treating depression, ADHD, or other psychiatric conditions works completely-backwards in my case, to the point of eventually driving me to violent antisocial behavior.
I guess violence is the correct answer to what is perceived as a constant, unending, harmful assault. The perception might be a bit off, but the outcome makes sense. I cope well: I simply don't have any friends, because there's essentially nothing good about having friends, in the same way there's nothing good about using a razor blade to cut yourself repeatedly.
You know when a non techie talk about the Internet as a series of tubes? This is one of those times but about psychiatric meds.
It's worse than that.
"American Mental health is deteriorating" + "We prescribe more psychiatric drugs" = "the drugs are the cause of mental health deterioration!"
As if nothing else has changed.
Maybe the change in tone of the news? The move to clickbate bullshit, alarmist headlines, and fear mongering to get people to come running back to lick the media mouthpieces's hands in hopes they'll warn them about more danger? The increased polarization of American politics? The election of a pedophile who wants to bang his daughter to the presidency based entirely on false economic claims, while all of the opponents in the election had no fucking clue how economics works, either?
We live in a world that puts an assload of stress on people now. We've got a much-better economic position than 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago... yet people believe they're more-threatened and less-stable. They fear for their safety. Do you think this won't generate mass-hysteria and serious psychiatric pathology?
They could; and does that make up a significant fraction of their expenses?
That was the point of a breakdown of expenses. I usually have this trouble with CEO salary arguments: CEOs typically make around $20-$50 per employee per year, and giving the entire executive management cash compensation (bonuses, dividends, salaries) to the employees would let everyone take an extra trip to Starbucks every week or three. Pretty much all the money is going to employee salaries.
I would not assert that Wikimedia's grants and awards or conference travel expenses comprise a large portion of their expenses without some numbers on how much they spend on that kind of thing. It could--start-ups are frequently so poor at managing their finances--but it's unlikely.
I'm not saying "a few administrators" are costing them anything; I'm saying there are other expenses besides hosting, and we don't practically know what. Wikipedia could be hosting colocated servers--lots of colocated servers--getting swapped out a lot.
Wikipedia has 300 servers in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam running Ubuntu Linux clusters. That's not a one-administrator job to begin with; and there's a ton of expert knowledge required:
Sysadmins who are specialized in cluster administration (I've done this; we should have actually hired a consultant to help design the cluster and train me on how the fucking things work, because it was a potato-grade disaster to string it together from bits of shit off Google);
Database administration (I've set up a MySQL cluster; I don't know how it works or how to fix it when it's out of sync now, and we got dedicated DBAs to replace it with something better. I can actually manage a MongoDB cluster competently, though, for what that's worth);
Network engineers (because putting clusters and databases together requires more than just plugging the cables into a switch on the same segment--I've worked in businesses that ran that way and eventually faced enough self-destructive failure to pay millions to have the network torn apart and reassembled);
Storage administrators (because reading the FreeNAS installation manual doesn't actually qualify you to engineer a storage solution based on need and expected load);
Security engineers (because we all want to hack Wikipedia and fill it with dick pics and Paypal scams);
System administrators (who know how to keep your shit running, keep it patched, and otherwise implement the things that we've decided to have done);
Systems architects (because we have dozens of moving components requiring specialized knowledge, and somebody has to bring all that together to work out what pieces to assemble);
Project managers (because the work has to actually get done, instead of having pieces of the work get done while balls get dropped)
For some of these, you'll need multiple at the scale of Wikipedia. One sysadmin might have a little trouble administrating 350 servers in two countries; or he might not, but then you have different needs for your reverse proxies, storage back-end clusters, software environments, and so forth, and an all-purpose Sysadmin isn't as good as someone who's got application-side clustering and someone who's got system-side clustering. This is the same reason you have psychiatrists and neurosurgeons, even though both have a lot of the same overlapping knowledge about neurological disorders.
So right there we've got around $700,000-$1,300,000 for one of each, in salaries. Let's not forget that benefits are 25%-40% of wages in the United States, so you could be looking at an extra $175,000-$325,000 there. Then you have your 6.22% payroll taxes and other minor things. You're looking at around $1.7 million for each set of one of each of the above; with an average of three of each, that's $5 million.
Then, you spend $2 million on the hosting connections.
Then, you have HR, you have accounting, you have legal, you have corporate organization. You have your firm expenses--servers get old, hard drives die. You have electricity and utilities for your offices, although a hosting provider giving a colocation facility should incorporate power costs into hosting costs for your actual data centers.
These costs grow over time. As Wikipedia gets more traffic, they need more servers, incurring more expenses to maintain hardware. As they get more servers, they need more administrators to keep it all running. When they get enough employees, they need to pay additional per-employee to cover regulations such as healthcare under the ACA and unemployment insurance.
The WMF had $29 million of expenses in FY2012.
They're doing a bunch of bullshit work keeping servers up when, I guess, we could just host it on a TOR onion node or Freenet from someone's home PC.
You mean like running the site in 47 languages, including a Simple English Wikipedia, and having administrators who at least make sure the site is tended and not being hijacked by morontards?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never be prepared for being a parent. Nothing would change about me; there'd just be some more annoying shit around me.
If the damned thing would wander into the street and die when it was 3 or 4 years old, that would be a great relief. Not that I wouldn't take steps to prevent it; just that if it happened--and unfortunately I'm very good at identifying and mitigating risks, so it probably wouldn't--my first sentiment would be, "Oh, good," followed by a facepalm at all the annoying bullshit everybody else starts doing about what is now a non-issue because it's dead and not food and thus of absolutely zero importance.
Since I can project that far ahead, I've simply determined to not allow that to happen. When I was a teenager, I wasn't as good at projecting the full span from the current time to an outcome; people insisted I'd have kids one day and talked about what my life would be in 20 years, and eventually I started becoming psychotic and fantasizing about murdering them all. That tends to happen when a threat has you backed into a corner and you can't find an escape. Once I learned to plan and control my own life, their threats became hollow.
Does that mean the male brain is superior, being an evolved version of the female brain with more bits acting in concert to handle more-demanding intellectual problems; or that it is inferior, being a hobbled version with bits weakened and disconnected so as to interfere with cognition?
Actually, attacking the argument would be easy.
The Senator from Georgia suggests that children looking at pornography causes human trafficking. How are children the market for trafficked humans, or anything really?
Actually, 92% of new york female prostitutes claim they'd stop if they had enough money to live. I don't believe that would actually happen--they're too used to being insecure to recognize when they have enough to live--and instead figure that correcting our welfare system to be more-efficient and actually accomplish its goals would eliminate 92% of prostitution in the next generation.
He talked a lot about Muslims directly. I'm not sure I heard anything about a "Muslim Registry", but I did hear a lot of attacking the outside threat of muslim invasion through refugees bringing terrorism to our country. It was one of the more disturbing things about this election, albeit I'm more interested in the ridiculous economic assertions coming out of both sides.
The weirdest part of American politics is liberals are fairly-reasonable while conservatives are completely-insane and prone to conflicting and nonsensical arguments; yet at the same time it's the liberals who will go to extremes to shut out anything that conflicts with their views and hold strong to backwards ideals, and the conservatives who can be convinced of the merits of a system if it's dissected and aligned with sensible practices. You'd think the crazy morons would be the ones who would continue to attack something like public healthcare as socialism even after you outline a government-run, taxpayer-funded healthcare system complete with regulations requiring businesses to provide healthcare for employees and a full description of how this government-regulation-created, taxpayer-funded system is a market-driven system even though it forces businesses to supply healthcare to employees and provides healthcare freely to everyone else via taxpayer money; instead, it's the crazy morons who look at the explanation and go, "Wow, that actually looks like a good idea! We should totally do that!"
Honestly, though, Trump has a lot of camera time talking about wanting his hot daughter's sexy body. We elected a pedophile who knows nothing about economics and wants to bang his daughter. The alternatives were an old man who doesn't know jack shit about economics, an old woman who doesn't know jack shit about economics, and an old hippie who knows something about finances but nothing about economics. Jill Stein is indescribable because there aren't words to explain how badly her grasp of economics or American government is without explaining the whole of both fields and her ideal of what she'd do as Dictator-President.
The hypothetical landlord already owns and maintains that property in the current environment - so is making enough profit or whatever to continue being a landlord.
But he could be getting a million dollars more per month if he could somehow turn the 39,000 homeless into 39,000 tenants turning just a $25/month average profit. That's $12,000,000/year of profit, coming off $10,750,000/month or $129 million yearly revenues.
What you're arguing seems to be that in an unstable economy, if a landlord currently rents out property at $250 a month, and a shock suddenly occurs, then he will go bankrupt because tenants can't pay that.
In a stable economy, the lower the class of people, the more unstable those people in particular are. Today, in our greatly-stable, well-recovered economy, a retail worker with 30 hours per week at $8.25 makes $990/month; in January, he could be working 8 hours per week, making $264/month. He could be laid off and on unemployment taking $550/month.
Suddenly, those people can't afford food, utilities, and rent.
UBI stabilizes that, so an economic shock doesn't remove the tenants' ability to pay rent.
UBI makes these people a more-stable, more-profitable asset. When they go from -$10 per each average profit to +$10 per each, 1,000 of them becomes $10,000 of profit instead of $10,000 of loss.
why would a landlord reduce prices if he can get a higher guaranteed utilization at the same price
Because there is latent demand.
There are 1.6 million homeless Americans today. There are 39,000 homeless Americans in my city--who, at $275/month rent, represent $129 million of potential income for the landlord. Today, if he went for that market, he'd get much less income than that, facing a loss--he'd spend $117 million, receive $105 million, and take a $12 million loss. If those people were financially stable, he might make a 10% profit, taking $11.7 million in profits that year.
There are 39,000 units not being manufactured because they can't be sold for a profit. Suddenly, you have 39,000 new consumers who can afford and want to buy your product. What happens?
One issue that has to be addressed in your scheme is inflation due to artificially restricted housing supply.
In my city, we have large swaths of empty buildings. We have landlords and such, and we expand the housing market to meet demand. The mechanism you describe essentially doesn't exist anywhere, although it looks like it exists everywhere. Rent seeking, on the other hand, does exist everywhere, which is why housing in New York City is expensive even though there's not quite as many additional expenses in the course of providing that housing (although every maintenance man, accountant, and so forth will require a higher salary, so wages are going to go way up and thus drive prices in some part).
The problem is tearing down buildings and creating new apartment units is expensive. The lower the income class, the more financial risk: poorer people are living hand-to-mouth and don't weather financial disruption well, so they miss rent, and then get evicted, and your predicted revenue falls. For landlords to cover this, they raise the per-unit rent for smaller, lower-income units: a $700/month unit might be $1.03/sqft, while a $1,400/month unit in the same area is only $0.76/sqft. The guy who can afford $1,400/month has much more income, meaning he likely has a more-stable job, and a better chance at building savings; he's less-likely to cause a big blip on your expense sheet, so other tenants at that grade won't have to fill in the gap.
Do you see the problem here?
Why would we create new housing units for people who are going to not be able to afford the apartments?
More generally, housing is inelastic. Competition in rental markets isn't really that fierce on stable demand: most apartments are only on the market briefly, and there aren't a lot of empty units. A new competitor has a lot of empty units, and none of the current tenants can buy into them without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars breaking their lease--or going through the process of finding a replacement tenant, or whatever the lease demands. That means a new landlord isn't getting any tenants unless there's an influx of new tenants seeking to rent.
You'll find that any such influx has always and currently does reliably lead to an expansion of the housing market. In some markets, new construction is expensive; in other markets, they make buildings taller, or they tear down urban blight and renovate. This only happens when a lot of people show up looking for a place to rent.
Bureaucrats aren't malicious; they're just blinded by the process. Every bureaucratic requirement fills a need. Every form, every permit, every regulation exists for a reason. When you put all these individual reasons together, you do not get a well-engineered system.
The system I described creates a multi-hundred-million-dollars-per-month profit opportunity. Not revenue; profit. It's literally hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue per year. Greedy landlords are going to be on that like stink on shit; bureaucrats are going to debate the implications of small apartments and regulations to cover them (e.g. do we allow an apartment's egress door to be a pocket door if it's under a certain size? That's banned now, but would be significant for a 244sqft flat), while politicians are going to discuss whether they think they can avoid ghettos in the city by telling these people to go be poor somewhere else (and pass laws forbidding the bureaucrats from approving any new apartments under 500sqft or so to make sure they go away).
Surprisingly enough, what rich people think about their property value isn't going to factor into it much.
You can't redistribute wealth via taxation, you can only print more of it and give it to the lower class.
That's exactly what's happening. Currently, we take, say, $12,000 from someone making $70,000, and use it to fund welfare; in my model, we take $5,500 from them and use it to fund more-efficient welfare.
Think of it this way: Today, we build giant pyramids and tear them down again with about 11% of our income. I'm changing that so that we pay people to do something actually worthwhile. Same income, different results.
Inflation is the devaluation of the current monitory supply in the market
Part of my point was that there's a certain amount of money to be spent--that is, in 2016 there will be a certain total income, in 2017 there will be a certain total income, and so forth. Changing salaries, prices, and whatnot doesn't change the amount of income; rather, it changes the number of jobs and the products bought and sold.
People think about inflation and wages as generators of money, with an ideal that somehow more money is coming out of nowhere to be spent. Then they claim X will happen, demand will occur, prices will rise, and suddenly: inflation. That's ... naive. Suddenly markets change, a thing gets more expensive, another thing goes unbought, jobs are lost or gained, and so forth. The mechanism described here is called rent seeking, not inflation.
How does Chapter 13 bankruptcy encourage landlords to risk their businesses on a guaranteed-failure model, encourage banks to make loans for repeatedly-proven unprofitable endeavors, and in general promote a stable housing market that profits from the lowest-income and most-disadvantaged among us?
That's the problem. A basic income is the solution. of which a universal social security is a particular type.
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides housing assistance.
Of households qualified for HUD assistance, 1 in every 4 (25%) get vouchers and receive government assistance. The other 75% go on a waiting list and never receive benefits. Does that sound like a successful system?
Under my Universal Social Security system, an Extremely Low-Income (ELI), 1-adult, 1-person household has $7,256 per year more spendable income (roughly $605/month), and a 1-adult, 4-person, LI household has $6,767/year. A 2-adult household ranges from ELI 2-person $14,595/year ($1,216/month) to LI 4-person at $13,585 ($1,132/month). Note that these range from 111% to as low as 19.6% of household income; the lowest increase to a 2-adult household is 37%; and a VLI 4-person household ($26k income) gets 31% (LI 2-person households range from $33k to $42k of income). HUD generally won't pay more than 33% of the household income.
That reaches 100% of all HUD qualifying households--even households who never applied to HUD. That means the benefit is bigger in most cases and 75% of recipients would have received $0 in the current system.
On the other hand, that benefit also covers stabilizing food; half of it is accounted directly as rent under the model of a household with $0 of other income. Low-income households with small children are SNAP-eligible for their children only (the current welfare system, restricted to children of low-income households, costs 1.4% of all taxable income in the United States--or $1050 per household per year, whereas the current system costs several thousand per household). It's kind of fuzzy, because in theory you can send 100% of that added income to rent if you have more than like $4,000/year income; yet 50 million Americans don't get enough food, so someone needs that money for food, and there are only 5 million HUD HA recipients. You would imagine there is some overlap.
So this Universal Social Security is a much, much better system. It also costs taxpayers over $1 trillion less than the current system.
prices will simply increase to mitigate all the benefit
Let's try this again.
The Cost to the landlord to supply a rental unit is $225. With a 10% profit margin, it rents for $250.
The cost of evictions and empty units to the landlord is $50. This happens because people with only $250 available for rent are unstable, and will suddenly not have rent rather frequently.
How does the landlord rent units at $300/month when all of his tenants have $260/month? Even at 0% profit, the landlord has to rent for $275/month--yet every single tenant shows up with $250/month, and can't pay the rent. That means the landlord experiences a 9.1% loss: he has $1,000,000 of expenses, and $910,000 of income, leaving him $90,000 short.
When you have a steady basic income that leaves your tenants with, say, $300/month available to rent, people don't suddenly lose their jobs, have their hours cut, or have their welfare checks stop. That means that $50/month you need to charge becomes, say, $25/month. Now you can rent for $275/month, and your tenants can come up $25 short off their $300 of spendable rent money and still afford rent.
That means it costs the landlord $25/month less to rent the apartment. The price of rent is now lower than the price that tenants can afford. It's mathematically-possible for the landlord to make a profit.
What part of this do you not understand?
Without basic income: Spend $100 to make thing, people come to buy thing and have $90.
With basic income:: Spend $85 to make thing, people come to buy thing and have $90.
Which of these ends in your business going down in flames, and which ends in a functional market?
The problem is: what happens when renting at what the market will bear means taking huge, multi-million-dollar losses until you have to file Chapter 13 bankruptcy?
The whole point of such stabilization is to eliminate a cost-of-risk, which lowers actual cost, allowing lower rent prices. Fewer evictions means nobody has to pay for those evictions, and the units stay occupied to generate revenue.
BI by any other definition is blatant inflation!
Actually, inflation requires more money to be spent. Creating a greater market demand in one area means people spend money that otherwise could be but now is not spent elsewhere.
Nobody has to pay more. A Universal Social Security is $1 trillion cheaper than the current US welfare system.
I encourage you to take a look at the spreadsheet labeled "WageTax", and the one labeled "EmploymentCost".
Single individual making $150,000 takes home $3,932 more per year; employer cost is roughly $9,300/year cheaper (assuming a low 18%-of-salary cost of employment, although it's usually 25%-40%). Buying power difference is estimated here as a 9% increase, although that's again a conservative estimate.
Single individual making $60,000 (about median) takes home $6,289 more per year; employer pays roughly $3,720 less. Buying power difference is about a 19% increase.
For married households, it's bigger, although the costs to the employer don't change (they drop by the same amount).
Taxes don't need to be raised on the highest income earners; they can be lowered on businesses, notably on payroll (tax taken based on how much wages you pay).
I've generally talked about a Universal Social Security (a type of UBI) in its potential to create broad market effects. That's not possible in these small experiments, so you get incomplete information.
Imagine being a landlord. If an average of 10% of your theoretical rent revenue is lost to evictions and empty units, what happens? You have 10 units that must rent for $250/month to make your profit margin, yet you face a risk of $25/month per unit. Well, to retain the same profit margin, you have to charge $275/month--and what if your tenants can only afford $260/month? You can't rent these units. Mind, your tenants will more likely only be able to stably afford $260/month, meaning they have $275/month but have a good chance of sometimes having only $260, and so that $25/month needs to be higher to cover that risk, and now you've got to charge them $285/month, and it's even worse now.
You can't profit in that market.
Now imagine we change things around. Instead of your tenants being underemployed, part-time workers who can lose hours, jobs, or welfare (unemployment insurance) with the season or just bad luck, they have a guaranteed income. Your tenants will have enough money for food, clothing, personal care, utilities, and a steady $260/month. You have 10 units with a base rent of $250/month to hit your viable profit margin, and now they're only facing a 4% risk. You can charge your tenants $260/month to cover this, and they're stable at that rent: you'll lose money to evictions and empty units at an amortized cost of $10/month, on average, thus still hitting your profit margin.
Do you think landlords will gradually test the waters, then start building out rental properties and attracting low-income tenants, when that stable income is going away in 2 years, or 5 years, or 10 years? It's going to take a while to get ROI.
Financial stabilization brings economic stabilization. When people can't go below a livable income, ever, for any reason, then the supply of a basic service can't be interrupted by a sudden collapse of the demand market. That's central for a market-driven welfare system like any form of basic income.
There's no tanking profits here. Nintendo's stock price dropped because of bad news, thus the sentiment that their stock price will devalue, thus people selling off. We didn't just pick up an earnings report.
They actually were producing a Zelda game at the time; it was taking too long. This was faster to get out, and people liked it. A different development house did most of the work. I'm not seeing the downside.
Nintendo openly advertised that Hyrule Warriors was a bridge game that used Dynasty Warriors gameplay (and engine) with Zelda assets. It had its own story, its own characters, and everything to make it a Zelda game; and it had the gameplay of a Dynasty Warriors game to add some variety and appeal to those sorts.
I'd love to see another one, with a step forward into blending the gameplay. This is how we got Zelda 2 and Metroid. Imagine if you could solo dungeons with Link while taking open battlefields as in Hyrule Warriors, using the build and leveling systems to affect your character. I don't know where they could go with Adventure Mode; filling in spaces with what amounts to low-quality minigames doesn't count as "content" to me, in the same way that adding 46 minutes of stock drum solos and loop tracks to a CD wouldn't count as "content". The main game, the story mode, with an open-progression world that blended Warriors and traditional 3D Zelda gameplay would be an excellent option to explore.
Phone-based games are cocaine: low-effort, cheap rewards.
I've found encounters with emotional intimacy quickly deteriorates my mental health. When I'm emotionally-hurt and insecure, I get away from people; rather than healing, I get worse if people start crowding around with their sympathy. The entire notion of an emotional support structure as a critical component in treating depression, ADHD, or other psychiatric conditions works completely-backwards in my case, to the point of eventually driving me to violent antisocial behavior.
I guess violence is the correct answer to what is perceived as a constant, unending, harmful assault. The perception might be a bit off, but the outcome makes sense. I cope well: I simply don't have any friends, because there's essentially nothing good about having friends, in the same way there's nothing good about using a razor blade to cut yourself repeatedly.
You know when a non techie talk about the Internet as a series of tubes? This is one of those times but about psychiatric meds.
It's worse than that.
"American Mental health is deteriorating" + "We prescribe more psychiatric drugs" = "the drugs are the cause of mental health deterioration!"
As if nothing else has changed.
Maybe the change in tone of the news? The move to clickbate bullshit, alarmist headlines, and fear mongering to get people to come running back to lick the media mouthpieces's hands in hopes they'll warn them about more danger? The increased polarization of American politics? The election of a pedophile who wants to bang his daughter to the presidency based entirely on false economic claims, while all of the opponents in the election had no fucking clue how economics works, either?
We live in a world that puts an assload of stress on people now. We've got a much-better economic position than 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago... yet people believe they're more-threatened and less-stable. They fear for their safety. Do you think this won't generate mass-hysteria and serious psychiatric pathology?
They could; and does that make up a significant fraction of their expenses?
That was the point of a breakdown of expenses. I usually have this trouble with CEO salary arguments: CEOs typically make around $20-$50 per employee per year, and giving the entire executive management cash compensation (bonuses, dividends, salaries) to the employees would let everyone take an extra trip to Starbucks every week or three. Pretty much all the money is going to employee salaries.
I would not assert that Wikimedia's grants and awards or conference travel expenses comprise a large portion of their expenses without some numbers on how much they spend on that kind of thing. It could--start-ups are frequently so poor at managing their finances--but it's unlikely.
I'm not saying "a few administrators" are costing them anything; I'm saying there are other expenses besides hosting, and we don't practically know what. Wikipedia could be hosting colocated servers--lots of colocated servers--getting swapped out a lot.
Wikipedia has 300 servers in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam running Ubuntu Linux clusters. That's not a one-administrator job to begin with; and there's a ton of expert knowledge required:
For some of these, you'll need multiple at the scale of Wikipedia. One sysadmin might have a little trouble administrating 350 servers in two countries; or he might not, but then you have different needs for your reverse proxies, storage back-end clusters, software environments, and so forth, and an all-purpose Sysadmin isn't as good as someone who's got application-side clustering and someone who's got system-side clustering. This is the same reason you have psychiatrists and neurosurgeons, even though both have a lot of the same overlapping knowledge about neurological disorders.
So right there we've got around $700,000-$1,300,000 for one of each, in salaries. Let's not forget that benefits are 25%-40% of wages in the United States, so you could be looking at an extra $175,000-$325,000 there. Then you have your 6.22% payroll taxes and other minor things. You're looking at around $1.7 million for each set of one of each of the above; with an average of three of each, that's $5 million.
Then, you spend $2 million on the hosting connections.
Then, you have HR, you have accounting, you have legal, you have corporate organization. You have your firm expenses--servers get old, hard drives die. You have electricity and utilities for your offices, although a hosting provider giving a colocation facility should incorporate power costs into hosting costs for your actual data centers.
These costs grow over time. As Wikipedia gets more traffic, they need more servers, incurring more expenses to maintain hardware. As they get more servers, they need more administrators to keep it all running. When they get enough employees, they need to pay additional per-employee to cover regulations such as healthcare under the ACA and unemployment insurance.
The WMF had $29 million of expenses in FY2012.
They're doing a bunch of bullshit work keeping servers up when, I guess, we could just host it on a TOR onion node or Freenet from someone's home PC.
You mean like running the site in 47 languages, including a Simple English Wikipedia, and having administrators who at least make sure the site is tended and not being hijacked by morontards?