While this behaviour by corporations (eg: Zillow buying and flipping, or Blackstone buying and renting out houses [0]) is inflating housing prices across the country, I don't see them stopping anytime soon even in the face of temporary losses (in the case of Zillow here). As a corporation they can withstand this, triage the situation internally and get smarter about flipping in the future.
Personally I feel that this only makes housing more unaffordable in the long run for most people and only policy level intervention by the government is going to stem such actions in the future.
Obviously real estate/housing is seen as a good investment because it's one of the few asset classes available to average/retail investors where they can access leverage in a massive way to build up a portfolio of housing assets over time so if any legislation about this is even considered, it'll probably face a lot of opposition even from people it won't possibly affect (because that's what happens these days + FUD).
I guess I don't really see any meaningful changes in the near future that'll make housing affordable for the masses (at least in some of the most desirable real estate markets, can't talk about rural markets as I don't know enough). For more context, I live in Toronto and unless I settle for owning a condo or housing in the suburbs, owning a house in the city is pretty much a no go for me and most of my peers.
I'm generally against taxes on stuff that is not vastly limited (buildable area in a good location is very limited compared to other stuff), but progressive tax here would solve a lot of problems (eg, 0% on your first property and primary residence, 1% yearly on your second one, 2% on third, ...). This would basically make owning more than two or three properties very expensive, and owning hundreds or thousands of properties impossible.
The Netherlands just implemented an 8% property transfer tax for investors in the housing market. This seems to have discouraged a lot of investors from buying up homes in the past year compared to previous years. Still there are massive shortages on the housing market though.
You can never go below cost... that's a nonissue. But we have shitty houses, worth $100k in labour and materials going for millions+, due to sheer unavailability of housing.
Housing is something people need to live, not an investment option.
Also, USA has a problem with building large apartment buildings, where even overcrowded places like san francisco still build single family houses, instead of 5, 10+ story apartment buildings everywhere.
It doesn't have to. You can still build an apartment highrise, and sell the apartments and make profit... and the owners, if it's their only realestate, still get taxed at minimum rate.
It doesn't work like that. Please see an accountant to advise you on this, because if this is really what you think -- e.g. that the profits of developers or even owner-developers are not taxed -- then you are in for a world of hurt if you get audited. Only the unit you are living in is allotted special cap gains privileges. Not other units, even if those units are built on property that used to be a SFH. Tax treatment for developing residential real estate is a complex beast.
here you can build a multi apartment building, sell each apartment as a separate unit to different people, and the common property (hallways, grass around the building, etc.) is divided between the apartment owners (and they pay whatever amount for taking care of that). After all the apartments are sold, the investment firm owes nothing there anymore. Of course they pay VAT, their profits are taxed, etc, when selling the apartments, but after that, they have nothing to do with that property anymore.
What I was talking about was basic property tax, which should be higher for each property (house, apartment,...) you own. This would make owning many properties very expensive, and force people to sell.
> Of course they pay VAT, their profits are taxed, etc, when selling the apartments, but after that, they have nothing to do with that property anymore.
Well, that's what you'd expect, no? After they sell the units, then whoever owns the units pays property tax on them.
Or do you want to pay property taxes on a unit you no longer own?
No, i'd like property tax thats (near) zero for your first property/house/apartment, and then rising for each next one. This would make hoarding properties impossible, and using properties as investment (atleast if we're talking more than one) very expensive.
I was just saying that my idea is not problematic with multi apartment buildings, because once the apartments are sold, the owner doesn't have to pay property tax anymore.
"Personally I feel that this only makes housing more unaffordable in the long run for most people"
In the long run, housing prices are determined by supply and demand. Supply (housing stock) is increased when prices are high (as developers can make money). And supply stays flat when prices are low (but developers don't destroy the existing homes).
If this short term trading by Zillow etc. is causing market prices to be high at the moment, you'd expect that to increase long term supply. So future prices would be lower than they would be without Zillow.
I've seen Zillow in interviews claim that they are actually physically improving the homes before selling. And they sell for basically what they bought for it intentionally, so they're not actually inflating prices.
They're improving homes, helping sellers get out of homes faster, and not raising the prices.
This isn't like those home flippers on TV who buy a house for $70K, put $20K into it, and sell it for $200K. The story you're commenting on says they sell 90%+ for less than they paid.
This isn't a simple "Zillow buying homes must be bad". More analysis required.
I think the danger is when they assume that making money will only require some simple tweaks, happy to sell at a loss in the meantime and then at some point in the future realize that actually the whole things was a capital fueled house of cards. I think one could argue that something like this has happened with Uber and Lyft (though perhaps covid + inflation has more to do with those price increases)
A&W restaurants are pretty prevalent in Canada, at least in Toronto anyways. Just looked at stats: they have about ~1000 restaurants in the country spread over 470+ cities.
But a commenter below said they have around a 1000 restaurants worldwide so perhaps the Canadian A&W is a separate entity from the American A&W otherwise that number doesn't make sense.
Canadian A&W is really good, and tbh it's kinda surprising that Canadian A&W hasn't bought out American A&W and tried to expand there.
That being said, I believe Canadian A&W is much more heavily tilted toward the western part of the country, so maybe they feel they have their hands full trying to grab marketshare in Ontario, Quebec and further.
My wife and I stopped in an A&W in Toronto a few years back—we were walking, and hungry, and just needed food. My expectations were not high at all, but damn—it was good!
While I wouldn't say that their reserve is matching now ( I do not know) there were a few threads on twitter that I read a while back that stated that the folks behind tether were increasing the supply (of tether) to artificially inflate the value of their bitcoin holdings - which is something that they could have liquidated in exchange for more fiat since then. Obviously this is all conjecture.
This is the best reference I could find in relation to what I've said above:
In newly published research, with Amin Shams of Ohio State University, he finds evidence that Bitcoin’s 2017–2018 bubble was inflated by a lesser-known digital currency called Tether. [0]
I think the article's trying to convey that instagram has a more curated look and so by algo-design/human-design doesn't reward videos/reels that are shot on poor resolution phones and those that don't directly follow their guidelines for being promoted - these can be barriers for folks from marginalized communities and folks that have poor access to resources.
Tiktok on the other hand promoted your video to other users on the platform regardless of these 'requirements' and as a result those from poor/marginalized communities had the opportunity go viral and gain followers as well - without investment in the polish necessary to gain the same visibility on instagram. This polish could be in the form of better phones(cameras), better clothing or better backgrounds/scenes.
They weren't downranked, just ensured they didn't spread too much. I wouldn't be surprised if that is how all those marginalized communities started to love TikTok, since it created all these pockets of positivity instead of spreading the same videos to everywhere and everyone where they start to face more scrutiny and downvotes. Downranked would mean that it would have a hard time everywhere even locally within their communities, but that isn't what happened.
I think they used that concept as a basis for their algorithms later, and just changing the recommendation algorithms changes the feel of the entire platform.
I'd highly recommend Darknet Diaries [0] to get a bit more colour on the NSO group for those that are interested. The relevant episodes are #99 & #100.
It seems like a lot of the NSO group's customers (a lot of which are authoritarian/corrupt governments) abuse the system and there's no real check on that power. The host mentions that officially the company has said that there have been 'only 3 instances' of abuse of its systems that they've detected and he goes on to expose how blatantly false that is. Anyways this is now all third hand info - I'd highly recommend checking out the podcast (not affiliated, just a fan).
I mean, they abuse the system like dictators "abuse" guns to kill people.
If you have a company selling a weapon, it's pretty obvious it's going to be used to harm. That's by design.
And just like we were never able to prevent the guns to arrive in the hand of the wrong people, or make sure people using guns respect any kind of rules, why would we expect NSO clients to be well filtered and behaved?
If you are a 40 year old, inactive person, try defending yourself against a knife or a club, especially against a younger person who has had experience using it.
I'm wondering what kind of check would be good enough. Who decides which governments are corrupt? Even if you limit the customer base to democratically elected governments, who is the final authority on which elections are genuine?
If there's an election in [country] and [politician] decisively wins, and [opposition group] says the election was fraudulent and has some weak evidence and a bunch of protests, who decides if they're legitimate? This describes the 2020 Belarus election, but it also describes the 2020 US election.
Munitions suppliers operate in pretty much every country in the world, producing everything from rifles to nuclear bombs for use by that country's government. If all of that is okay, why are hacking tools going too far?
I can’t speak to Belarus but we have a straight answer in the US: Congress.
Feeding that answer is the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is appointed by the 50 State legislatures and the District of Columbia.
The voters tell them who to select.
In an absolute worst case scenario where the results can’t be certified, we even have a Constitutional fallback: the House elects a President and the Senate elects a Vice President.
For all the noise around what happened in January, the actual lawful process is extremely cut and dry. The former President’s lawyers brought their best legal arguments to bear in jurisdictions across the country, and even the Judges he himself appointed, even the ones that were most forgiving and way more than fair basically laughed them out of the courtroom.
Our election system is solid. It’s messy, it’s debatable, it’s possible to dispute, but it is reliable, lawful and legitimate and we elect the mooks we deserve, not necessarily the ones we would like.
We elect the politicians “we deserve” from a ballot consisting of a selection made by the few thousand richest people in the country - the ones fund the candidates.
I’ll just put this out here: if the RNC and DNC reverted to a closed primary in every State for all candidates, not only would I not shed any tears but I would be cautiously optimistic that this would be an improvement in our overall electoral politics because I am not a fan of the various flavors of populists that are beginning to realize power.
Regardless of how we get our nominees though, the quality of our elections and the integrity of the outcome is unquestionable. You’re free to disagree with the qualities of the processes we use, but the process is written down in advance and followed.
Not to mention how primary results become conveniently bungled (one party in particular comes to mind) when they favor candidates which are not particularly well liked by the establishment. The fact that the national political committees are private corporations doesn't instill much faith in the fairness of their electoral processes.
In EP 47 of Darknet Diaries the author cites an interview in which they said to have an ethics board which makes such decisions based on a variety of factors. They might find a country having issues with corruption, but still would like to help them catch them so called terrorists.
>a lot of which are authoritarian/corrupt governments
The son of my Brazil's authoritarian and corrupt president is a customer. The son himself is a politician and I have zero doubt that privacy was/is going to be abused.
The statement for that those that don't have fb accounts or don't want to login:
"I wanted to share a note I wrote to everyone at our company.
---
Hey everyone: it's been quite a week, and I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you.
First, the SEV that took down all our services yesterday was the worst outage we've had in years. We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure. This was also a reminder of how much our work matters to people. The deeper concern with an outage like this isn't how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones, run their businesses, or support their communities.
Second, now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.
Many of the claims don't make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.
But of everything published, I'm particularly focused on the questions raised about our work with kids. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it's very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids.
The reality is that young people use technology. Think about how many school-age kids have phones. Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe. We're deeply committed to doing industry-leading work in this area. A good example of this work is Messenger Kids, which is widely recognized as better and safer than alternatives.
We've also worked on bringing this kind of age-appropriate experience with parental controls for Instagram too. But given all the questions about whether this would actually be better for kids, we've paused that project to take more time to engage with experts and make sure anything we do would be helpful.
Like many of you, I found it difficult to read the mischaracterization of the research into how Instagram affects young people. As we wrote in our Newsroom post explaining this: "The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced. In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse."
But when it comes to young people's health or well-being, every negative experience matters. It is incredibly sad to think of a young person in a moment of distress who, instead of being comforted, has their experience made worse. We have worked for years on industry-leading efforts to help people in these moments and I'm proud of the work we've done. We constantly use our research to improve this work further.
Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition.
We're committed to doing the best work we can, but at some level the right body to assess tradeoffs between social equities is our democratically elected Congress. For example, what is the right age for teens to be able to use internet services? How should internet services verify people's ages? And how should companies balance teens' privacy while giving parents visibility into their activity?
If we're going to have an informed conversation about the effects of social media on young people, it's important to start with a full picture. We're committed to doing more research ourselves and making more research publicly available.
That said, I'm worried about the incentives that are being set here. We have an industry-leading research program so that we can identify important issues and work on them. It's disheartening to see that work taken out of context and used to construct a false narrative that we don't care. If we attack organizations making an effort to study their impact on the world, we're effectively sending the message that it's safer not to look at all, in case you find something that could be held against you. That's the conclusion other companies seem to have reached, and I think that leads to a place that would be far worse for society. Even though it might be easier for us to follow that path, we're going to keep doing research because it's the right thing to do.
I know it's frustrating to see the good work we do get mischaracterized, especially for those of you who are making important contributions across safety, integrity, research and product. But I believe that over the long term if we keep trying to do what's right and delivering experiences that improve people's lives, it will be better for our community and our business. I've asked leaders across the company to do deep dives on our work across many areas over the next few days so you can see everything that we're doing to get there.
When I reflect on our work, I think about the real impact we have on the world -- the people who can now stay in touch with their loved ones, create opportunities to support themselves, and find community. This is why billions of people love our products. I'm proud of everything we do to keep building the best social products in the world and grateful to all of you for the work you do here every day."
Google and their services are indispensable for billions. Doesn't he deserve a personal life where he can do whatever he wants to do instead of being beholden to humanity and serve it with his brilliance forever?
I'm not criticizing his morality. Billionaires like Larry Ellison buy private Hawaiian Islands, but they mostly go there on vacation and don't just disappear there for months! I'm just asking why Larry? Why are you bugging out like it's the end of the world? Is there something you know that we don't? :/
I had never heard of the company before but really interesting how there was no due diligence by the financiers/VCs before they wired in the money. Is this generally the norm?
Also surprising that a company that became a unicorn at its last financing round didn't have a CFO and that the CEO 'maintained control over operations, sales, and record-keeping, including invoicing, and he was the final decision maker on what revenue was booked and included in the company’s financial records.'
Googled the person, apparently he co-founded a company previously that was acquired by Google and he claims to have previously served as the CTO of Zynga and holds 60 technology patents - so perhaps the stellar credentials were a check in the column against auditing financials.
Other tidbits:
- Founded in 2015:
- Series A: $11 mil (at inception)
- Convertible Notes: $24.7 mil (Apr '17 to May '18)
- Series B: $20 mil (Sep/Oct 2018) | valuation: ~$500 mil
- Series C: $60 mil (Nov '19 to Jan '20) | valuation: ~$1.1 bil
While raising Series C round, overstated ARR by about $51 to $55 million in investor presentations. And after audit (in May 2020), valuation dropped to about $300 million.
At my funded company: external accountant / renta-cfo, selected from a list of two or three shared by one of the VCs. We could have fought for a person we wanted, but why? At early stages, one competent cfo is probably the same as any other. That person attends board meetings and directly communicates with the board.
I think what you're missing is that oil extraction doesn't happen in a vacuum. The externalities of extracting oil from the arctic circle would be massively detrimental to the local environment. Not to mention the fact that any accidental oil spill or a well blowout would wreck havoc on the biodiversity and local species in the region mostly because according to the consensus opinion of many scientists, "we do not have the technology, nor the infrastructure, to deal with the specific challenges of a disaster in this region."
Here's a list [1] of a few other reasons on why this is a bad idea.
Ahh, this makes sense for why we wouldn't want to drill in the arctic, and I hadn't seen these arguments before, so thank you.
The article was very unclear about this - it implied fossil fuel exploration in the arctic is bad because the arctic is "most sensitive to climate change", but what it really should have said is "least able to deal with the environmental damage that inevitably accompanies drilling".
Am I still correct that as far as climate change affecting the arctic, burning one barrel of oil extracted from the arctic is the same as burning one barrel of oil extracted from (e.g.) the middle east?
I mean I'd say Mackenzie Scott (fka: Mackenzie Bezos) is someone who should be lauded more here. Not that it's a competition or that one takes away from the other but she's doing more to chip away at the status quo of philanthropic giving vs others.
In 2020, she gave away nearly $6 billion to 500 organizations. And has distributed $2.74 billion so far this year to about 286 orgs. From what I've read, these grants/donations don't come with any strings attached unlike grants from a lot of big foundations.
J. K. Rowling too, though not on quite the same scale: she would be a self-made billionaire, but she's given away enough that I don't think she's a billionaire anymore.
To me, she seems like a really admirable public figure in general.
Agreed! Unfortunately, quite a bit of the money that she donates to some of these organizations goes into the pockets of extremely well-paid executives. That what's always bothered me about giving to charity orgs more widely. Luckily, there are websites that allow you to check how much charity organizations are actually spending on their programs vs. their expenses...
I do think that giving directly to individuals who will make sure that all of the money is spent wisely is an interesting alternative approach.
Personally I feel that this only makes housing more unaffordable in the long run for most people and only policy level intervention by the government is going to stem such actions in the future.
Obviously real estate/housing is seen as a good investment because it's one of the few asset classes available to average/retail investors where they can access leverage in a massive way to build up a portfolio of housing assets over time so if any legislation about this is even considered, it'll probably face a lot of opposition even from people it won't possibly affect (because that's what happens these days + FUD).
I guess I don't really see any meaningful changes in the near future that'll make housing affordable for the masses (at least in some of the most desirable real estate markets, can't talk about rural markets as I don't know enough). For more context, I live in Toronto and unless I settle for owning a condo or housing in the suburbs, owning a house in the city is pretty much a no go for me and most of my peers.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-bets-6-billion-on-bu...