i really like my fediverse community. i really miss a lot of people, and miss out on discussions i’d like to be part of, that have migrated to BlueSky.
i’d love it if there were some good way to bridge between here and there. i have no idea how tall on order that would be.
@BenRossTransit @matthewstoller Sure. We’re painting in broad strokes. But where exurbs are distinct markets, it’s easier, not harder, for homebuilders to exercise market power. In places with a lot of old, underutilized supply, things get complicated, whether an older unit is plausible substitute for a home in the suburbs depends on a lot on things like crime, the state of the home and the state of neighboring homes.
@BenRossTransit @matthewstoller The key point is that it’s hard to find places where new private supply responds to consistent demand to bring down prices. Austin is perhaps an example, at least in its rental market. But developers and home builders are profit-motivated and cautious. They try to exercise pricing power in a forward-looking way, not to meet demand until price falls to marginal cost. Barriers to entry are high enough they usually succeed.
@BenRossTransit @matthewstoller It’s precisely because they’re substitutes that their price is relevant as well. That is, to support high costs, it wouldn’t be enough to for, say, urban apartment supply to be constrained, if imperfect-but-decent substitute single family home supply were price elastic. And vice versa! If urban apartment supply were price elastic, sitting on suburban land would be much less profitable. 1/
@BenRossTransit @matthewstoller I’m not so interested in a pissing match over what the “main” barrier to price elastic supply is. I think the way to think about it is a wide variety of actors, from incumbent homeowners to the most prodigious suppliers of new homes, have a strong interest in preventing price elastic supply of homes, and all dutifully do their part. 2/
@BenRossTransit @matthewstoller I doubt national home builders “coordinate” tacitly or otherwise with “NIMBY” incumbents, urban or suburban. But each party doing the naive thing of resisting pr putting a high price on new supply is a Nash equilibrium — as long as everybody else is doing it, it’s the best thing to do for everyone (except buyers, of course). 3/
@BenRossTransit @matthewstoller It’s an easy equilibrium to find and sustain —each subsector acts like there are no substitutes to worry about, acts like they alone have pricing power, then collectively they do as long as no subsector defects and goes for quantity rather than margin. US housing has fallen into and put a moat around a lucratively sluggish groove. /fin
@wim time value means a lot more now than it did a few years ago when interest rates were very low. if pulling films like this is a new thing, that would make some sense.
“In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023!” @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder
@wim if there is, i’d like to read it!
@realcaseyrollins They get some money, because they write it off as a total loss and get some of their money back as a tax deduction.
In theory they should be better off marketing it, for every dollar they earn, they only lose like 21¢ of deduction. Maybe they’d also have to invest to bring it to market?
These are cynical, self-interested operators. I doubt they’re just insane. I’d like to understand why this makes sense to them (then reform the tax system so it doesn’t).
“The [crypto] industry mobilized this year, forming a network of independent expenditures under the umbrella of Fairshake to weaponize a broken campaign finance system to their advantage. Fairshake has become the single largest outside spender in this year’s elections thus far, with $120 million in cash on hand, even greater than the notoriously well-armed American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).” #LukeGoldstein @ddayen https://prospect.org/power/2024-08-15-democrats-complete-big-crypto-reset/
“so many children dream of moving to Hollywood, becoming an executive, and destroying all copies of a movie they didn’t work on. truth be told, I remember sitting on the floor of my living room, watching the Oscars, imagining deleting the nominees for the tax breaks.” https://www.thewrap.com/coyote-vs-acme-warner-bros-discovery-filmmakers-respond/
@cczona i suspect the librarians were horrified. leadership is doing it on purpose. they are explicit culture warriors ravishing their spoils.
Is Grok’s new image-generating AI willing to produce scenes including Xi Jinping?
I recall Midjourney chose to prevent this, while leaving most Western political figures fair game. I wonder whether Elon, with his strong economic dependencies on China, wouldn’t make the same choice.
(i’d test it out but hell no i don’t pay musk for any premium features.)
Nausea.
Screenshot of tweet by Steven Walker @swalker_7: DEVELOPING: New College of Florida dumped hundreds of library books this afternoon. The school also emptied the college's Gender and Diversity Center, tossing hundreds of their books. Working to file a story now.
The right to seek justice in public courts should never have been treated as alienable. It’s long past time to undo the mistake. ht @mav https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/nx-s1-5074830/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit-disney
@brendan gack! thank you. will edit.
( i’ve written about the idea here https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9416.html )
( thanks @brendan for pointing out the duplicate link in the version of this that i first posted! edited. )
“Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly in Epic v. Google, [Federal District Judge James] Donato held his final hearing on remedies today… ‘We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,’ said Donato. ‘The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.’” @seanhollister https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220491/epic-google-android-app-store-monopoly-remedies-hearing ht @manton
who really owns Congress?
a package of napkins, branded in giant letters “Big Napkin”
Great reading on the Robinson-Patman Act, a law passed by Congress that Presidential administrations since Reagan and US courts just… stopped enforcing:
From @pluralistic “The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street” ¹
From @maxmmiller #BryceTuttle “Stopping Excessive Market Power Before It Grows Into Monopoly” ²
(trying again with your cool footnotes @marick!)
¹ https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities
² https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-13-stopping-excessive-market-power-monopoly/
@mcc @steely_glint @nazokiyoubinbou there’s lots not to love in JVM world. but i still use libraries i wrote 25 years ago. their ancient ant builds would still have worked, though I’ve migrated them to better tools for my own sanity. four years is like a blink in JVM world. those are new, “modern” projects.
@Jonathanglick Suggests some avenues for reform! Perhaps they can be for-profit divisions or oligopolistic, but not both. Perhaps big in media must, as in pretty much every other sphere, imply some degree of public control.
(“Regulation” is, after all, a usurpation of control rights despite notional private ownership, creating hybrid ownership from a control perspective.)
