If I'm an entity that has 3000 or more apartments, I would have sold long ago to get to 2999. Basically as soon as I heard rumors of this law, I would have started selling.
Happened before with a guy having a meat processing empire in Germany.
The guy is notoriously known for paying below minimum wage and setting the worst working conditions possible to maximize profits.
They made a law that forced companies in the meat processing industry to have certain standards if they reach a certain number of employees.
So he opened 250 companies on a weekend and split up the workforce to stay below the limits.
Then they just changed the law to declare multiple entities with below the limit they set under same ownership to become a "super entity" with even stricter regulations.
The government has the monopoly on violence of any form. That does not just include that they can send the police after you to hit you with batons, they can also make sure you’re drowning in administrative work and taxing the shit out of you, and the guy threatened to leave the country and just open meat processing in Poland and Bulgaria as well.
In the end, all his threats to leave the country and just do the whole processing in Poland and Bulgaria were empty. They simply told him someone else will just take over, because the profit was still great after the new regulations, and they were going to ban him from doing business on the German market by simply banning his product for food safety reasons.
This is the same thing with a different product. Investors threaten to no longer invest and build housing, but they will just fall in line and shut up in the end, because capitalism dictates that if you no longer want to make good profits because they took away your ability to make ridiculous profits, someone else will just do your business under the new conditions and gladly take the good money over no money at all.
They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates.
In San Francisco, NIMBYs secretly support laws like this. This basically guarantees that many builders will do the math and conclude that it doesn't make sense to build housing in San Francisco.
New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built.
So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents.
Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.
There's a way to get yourself out of that gridlock: just subsidize housing. The builder gets money from both the buyer and the government, so he will be happy. The buyer will have low income and wouldn't be able to buy a house otherwise, so he will be happy too. And the government will actually have fulfilled its role for a change.
The other, better way is to lower government cost of building by having loose zoning and approving everything that fits the zon*ng fast with minimal expense. The non government cost side you should not be broadly subsidizing (you should be fixing market abuses that drive prices up lile making it disadvantageous to sit on unproductive land but thats a complex side topic)
Georgist-style LVT would also solve the problem, fairly quickly. Many owners would rush to sell to developers or build additional units where space allows.
you are not going to find a city where no such people want to live. or, if you do then forget anyone there wanting to do any minimum wage jobs. because they can't afford to live there. that includes waiters and teachers among many others.
you could of course pay them more, and everything would become more expensive. might work. but i bet you don't want that either.
The fix is to let the companies who want to build, build. For some reason a lot of cities won't support new construction if a private company might make a profit on it.
Most private construction is dedicated to luxury condos because that's where the big money is. If you let the "market" decide on its own it will always decide on the most profitable items, even if that's not what is needed.
It's pretty well established that building luxury condos freeze up lots of other housing at different price points. The person who moves into the luxury condo had to come from somewhere. This video is a pretty good overview of how this works: https://youtu.be/rQW4W1_SJmc
Most of the affordable rentals in my city and many others is luxury housing that was built ~100 years ago. They built lots of cheap housing back then too, but it was junk that was torn down a long time ago. The luxury stuff was built better and lasted.
The affordable housing from ~50 years ago was single family housing and is crazy expensive today.
We should be building lots of high density luxury condos today. Those are the affordable apartments of the future.
I'm sure it does, to some extent that is <100%. But the real limit in a city is land. If we want to use it efficiently, we should check what we want to optimize use of that resource for.
IMO, in Berlin the most lacking thing is the supply in affordable housing, so it makes sense to optimize for that directly instead of a side effect of some other optimization.
Why not build something like Alt-Erlaa? [0] [1]
Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
I am not sure how it is in Berlin. I haven't visited in a while. I think it's too general an assessment though.
In many cities the limit is not land but permits - both being permitted to build at all and then build high enough.
>>Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
I hear a lot of good things about housing in Vienna.
Are those city build apartments readily available for anyone? The problem with public housing when I am from is that it turns the city population into lucky few who get access and the rest who not only have to subsidize it but then need to buy on private market themselves.
Building luxury condos help with housing market as well.
I don't think this is controversial (there are tons of studies that support the conclusion).
>>If you let the "market" decide on its own it will always decide on the most profitable items, even if that's not what is needed.
How do you define "not needed"? Businesses will build what they can sell - the very definition of needed.
The problem is that it's difficult to build. A lot of cheaper housing projects don't get build because some restrictions (like height, number of apartments, parking places) that are not necessary.
Yes. The market is a great optimizer, sure, but the question is always what do you actually want to optimize for? And that might not always be the same optimization function as a market.
The example here being that they would pay a lot more city tax, never own a home, and over a period of decades this would make rent prices go down.
If this is what people want, then it seems like the right solution. Short term the only change will be increased taxes and maybe a few lucky renters getting apartments with the number slowly increasing over years and years.
Which is pretty much the situation in Vienna (rents are low in Vienna, but for the 20% that get city-owned apartments the rents are very low. Quality is ... let's call it "very old", and there's no choice (can't move up if you have a kid, say). Then housing associations pay like 30% more but less than private. Private rents are about double city-owned apartments as they're called. Only way to become a city renter is to earn less than 58000 in a given year, then wait 5+ years).
Is there data that market rate has zero margin left when it comes to renting?
Genuinely interested. Where I live, I have received direct reports that there is almost zero margin between building cost and market price (buying). But buying and then renting still has a good ROI, although a longer term one.
I don’t get it, it goes against the market self regulation, but real estate is very twisted in this respect.
So are young people around the world everywhere. I think AI is a great equalizer because you can launch a company with 1-2 people while previously, you needed 10-20.
Why are people such big opponents of the AI buildout?
I generally don't see many cons to it.
1. Big tech was just using profits to buy back shares before AI build out. Would you rather they buy back shares with their profits or finance the AI build out?
2. If there is an AI bubble, great, when it pops, we'll all have ultra cheap tokens and we'll have all these amazing AI infrastructure built for the next wave of innovation.
3. Even if AI progress stops here and models hit a wall in intelligence, we'll still have AI good enough to solve millennium problems.
My theories on why people are so anti-AI:
1. It threatens their jobs.
2. They want AI stocks to drop so they can buy the dip.
3. Their identity is being challenged because AI makes what they do easier.
We don't have enough energy production for massive AI buildouts. New energy capacity will not come online fast. National and regional grids will be stressed contributing to impacts on populations and industries. New energy capacity will be expensive and if carbon-intensive will accelerate climate breakdown. Additionally at current fossil fuel prices, energy prices (will) rise dramatically.
Currently planned locations for buildouts are suboptimal at best, horrible at worst and vehemently opposed by local populations. That could be NIMBYISM, but in this case it's probably justified: who would want a noisy, ugly-looking grey cube raising electricity prices near their house?
And that's just one angle. There are many more. Nothing to do with "AI will take our jobs", that's a pretty low-effort justification/theory.
That on its own would be a good incentive for the AI bubble to pop ;-)
As others have pointed out though, I'd be keen to see how much of it is gas turbines.
I'm also not convinced that energy buildouts are seeing as much interest and by the time they come online prices will already have skyrocketed (that is, after the current skyrocketing).
We are building more dirty fossil fuel energy to keep up with AI demands. When the solar build out is further along, and the grid is updated, it will be more acceptable to be using so much energy. Spinning up a bunch of new gas powered plants because they want to move too fast is terrible
Did the federal government bail out dotcom burst? Why and how do you think the government can bail out an AI burst?
Too fast? So it’s getting too smart too fast to you. But at the same time, they are going to need a bailout to you.
I don’t think they’re tricking anyone at all. Most normal people don’t care. They just use AI when it’s helpful to them. It’s only people who are on HN or X who care.
The dotcom burst wasn't concentrated in a a couple of well-connected companies. The better comparison is the financial crisis, and yes, they did bail them out.
No, it is not getting too smart. Moving too fast means exactly the opposite, they are doing idiotic and destructive things because the models are not as smart as they want us to think
It's clear from reading your posts in this thread you are just trolling and not trying to have good faith discussion
What is the government going to do? Bail out Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Meta? Why? They're all extremely profitable companies. At worse, they lose a year or two of profits. Who cares.
No, it is not getting too smart. Moving too fast means exactly the opposite, they are doing idiotic and destructive things because the models are not as smart as they want us to think
The ability to do destructive things suggests that AI's capabilities are increasing.
Do you have good faith discussion? You haven't acknowledged anything that is a pro of AI.
To me its not just about AI, but how they utilize all this financial scenarios to push things absolutely over the top, e.g. fast inclusion into indexes and essentially funding bubble from people's 401k.
What are the benefits to actual people? What you are gonna replace lost jobs with? All electronics with ram or storage is now way more expensive due to AI gobling up everything. And then there are local power grid impact concerns.
I’m not surprised there is. I even spelled out why I think there are so many who are opposed.
There is something very contradictory about these posts.
For example, you seem to suggest that it doesn’t benefit people but AI is can also replace workers. So which is it? AI is very useful to people to a point that one person can do the job of many? Or AI is useless?
Do we have mass unemployment because of AI? No. Our unemployment rate has been very low since ChatGPT.
> There is something very contradictory about these posts. > For example, you seem to suggest that it doesn’t benefit people but AI is can also replace workers.
The only contradiction is in your words because workers are (the) people and they don't benefit from being replaced. In other words, you contradict yourself by claiming contradiction where it doesn't exist.
> Our unemployment rate has been very low since ChatGPT
The unemployment rate includes only a small portion of the unemployed, it's a made-up number gated by many other
conditions.
The real measure is the LFPR - labor force participation rate - since 2006 it has fallen from 67% to 61%, that makes 18 million less employed today compared to 20 years ago.
Also, official IT unemployment rate today is almost twice the average and it's gotten considerably worse compared to 2022.
> If this is true, then you can just hire them and beat out the businesses that erroneously laid off valuable workers.
Hiring requires financing, and that's reserved for monopolies only, especially now with the AI trust-like, circular monopolies sucking every available dollar out of the debt markets.
> 1. Big tech was just using profits to buy back shares before AI build out. Would you rather they buy back shares with their profits or finance the AI build out?
This statement is factually wrong. AI isn't financed by profits, it's financed by debt - the "$300B AI exposure off balance sheets" in the title refers to debt. The buy-back grift isn't legit either, but it's not as a damaging as the AI buildout.
> My theories on why people are so anti-AI: 1,2,3
Wrong theory again. The sky-high AI debt causes inflation, asset extraction and market scalping by front-running it. The opportunity cost prevents the rest of the economy from allocating capital to competing ventures and from increasing capacity - part of the reason for inflation.
That's what an honest economics analysis would tell you.
> 2. If there is an AI bubble, great, when it pops, we'll all have ultra cheap tokens
Wrong again. We already have ultra-cheap tokens from China but the bubble continues unimpeded, feeds on inflation and if that's not enough, bailouts are certain. Inflation is a way to silently pop the bubble at the expense of consumers leaving the perpetrators whole, that's where it's all going.
1) i write code for a living. Without the tool. I have never been impressed by the tools and don't want to use them for work because i know my brain will rot pretty fast, pretty soon. Amused, sure, but they are still stupid by large. Useful idiot remain a useful idiot even if it appears smarte. My boss shows me some cool shit he experimented with all the time, only to have the thing redone from scratch every other week. Still useful, still a mess, still requiring competent people to keep the castle from crumbling. And you can't get competent people without having them do the hard work.
2) i want them to fail and disappear forever. Let open models stay. Let the VC fuckers starve to death before they use MY retirement fund without my consent because they bribe regulator to include them in protected indexes even if they have not followed the process, just because they are the future and too big, trust me bro
3) fuck me if i identify myself with my job, and only my job.
About 1), boss is a smart person that tries things for himself so we are not overemcumbered with everey little idea or thought, tries then sees what's not working then we discuss about it and proceed accordingly. If we have time we do the trying ourselves, but again there is only so much one can do in a work day. Tool is useful to him and that is good, but there is not enough prompting that can save you from "you're absolutely right." even if you use a local model with zero kelvin temperature. It's the nature of the tool, actual skill and experience can never be replaced.
Now, onto how we can get current year juniors and low tier managers to understand that...
Let the VC fuckers starve to death before they use MY retirement fund without my consent because they bribe regulator to include them in protected indexes even if they have not followed the process
Probably aligns with #2. They probably will buy the dip.
3) fuck me if i identify myself with my job, and only my job.
i can assure you that if coding will ever die becuase of AI (it won't.) it doesn't matter because i have a list of other interests and skills i cultivated growing up, and even now. I even have a few i haven't fully explored because a day is only 24 hours, and if i need a job, a competent person will always have work, he can get up to a new task in little time. I have friends always looking for someone with half a brain. Do you have at least half a brain? As a matter of fact, i feel sorry for those that can't see past their day job.
The other poster is right, i took the bait (willingly)
This is absolute nonsense. He is explicitly saying he does not feel threatened by it because he is confident in his own coding skills, and that he does not tie his identity to his work, and you are just making things up saying he actually believes the opposite.
You don't see the cons because you refuse to see or hear. You refuse to actually engage with any of the complaints and examples people show you. You're deluding yourself and thinking that somehow everyone else is the problem and you're the only sane one in the room.
People whose retirement funds might be impacted by a bubble burst, or who might lose their jobs (or struggle to get a first/next job) in a post crash economy.
You seem to be neglecting the economic impact question and assuming only the ai companies themselves are impacted in a burst.
Yes, I mentioned SpaceX a few minutes ago before your post. I didn’t like that but that’s only one company and it is Elon. He’s been scamming investors well before SpaceX.
I think Anthropic is postponing their IPO because OpenAI is killing it.
They do not have a choice of whether to buy in if they are doing the sound strategy of index funds through their 401k, funds which are now inflated by the bubble
Large index funds that most people’s portfolio inevitably includes substantially invest in AI-adjacent stocks. Not to mention the fact that bubble bursting is not by any means guaranteed to have its effects limited to one sector.
2022-26 is irrelevant for people's retirement savings. They are not or should not be even paying attention to that short-term movement. If the bubble bursts there will be collateral damage that impacts way more than just AI or AI-adjacent companies, and that could have long-term consequences
The entire stock market is being held up by AI. Any company that is not AI for the last 5 years has been declining or flat. But are retirement funds really impacted by the bubbling bursting, or are they simply correcting back to the real economic condition for the majority of the country.
1. Because resources (land and water) are limited and build-out crawls the resources from the more important (even vital) affairs.
2. Because there is still no convincing way how AI giants would make profit. Whatever impressive and useful tricks the stochastic parrot is able to do will never pay back enough to make a breakeven.
3. Because AI giant CEOs are a bunch of galactic-scale douchebags who keep saying "this is far too powerful for a mere mortal, but as long as we hold this power it's okay" with a straight face while presenting us with the stochastic parrot. No, seriously, I'm very impressed. Someone actively subverting the tech narrative couldn't do a better job.
1. We waste a lot of land and water on many less productive things. For example, building massive golf courses that need acres of land and water. What is the threshold for you?
2. Personally, I think the people who say LLMs are stochastic parrots are themselves stochastic parrots. They heard this term from someone online once and now they keep repeating it. Anyways, I’d love to see your math on why you think AI can’t make a profit.
3. You must be new to tech if you think it’s only AI. Many tech CEOs have always been out of touch. I personally don’t care too much about the CEOs. If AI CEOs had better PR, would you be less anti AI?
Golf courses are stupid too, but the scale is nowhere close. The difference is that new golf courses are not financed by an too-big-to-fail infinite money glitch, so they are limited by how many people are willing to spend their money building golf courses.
> If AI CEOs had better PR, would you be less anti AI?
I'm not against AI. I'm against companies blowing up a bubble. Notice that the question "is it a bubble" is orthogonal to "is it useful".
> why you think AI can’t make a profit.
AI can make a profit - in niches. Automatic translation. Mathematic proofs - but yes math is more than proofs and there never were much money there. Maybe code generation in some cases, but I don't see "programmers becoming obsolete" any time soon - spewing out code was never the problem for me, domain knowledge was and still is. And yes, all that doesn't make it any less of a stochastic parrot. A useful parrot, but still a parrot.
But OpenAI and Antropic can't generate the profits they promise at the scale they need to break even. Because
a. Most of their use cases yet demonstrated are self-defeating. Text generation is useless once everyone hates slop and long texts stops becoming a useful signal. The whole story is basically "I can generate infinite gold, I'm now can buy anything". No, your gold is now worth very little. And everyone whose pay was indexed in gold is now fucked too.
b. They have no real moat aside from loads of money. Their entire plan is "growing too big to fail, then engage regulatory capture." And people engaging in in regulatory capture deserve nothing but slow and painful death. Not that it would work anyway, we've got China fixing that, for better or worse.
People are scared about their future and don't think AI is going to make things better. And who could blame them? A movie that doesn't have any conflict and ends with everyone being happy and everything is nice isn't going to sell a lot of tickets. So we get endless variations of that movie where AI and robots are going to kill us and terminate humanity.
That is the backdrop against which real life AI that's actually happening and is here today has to compete with. If I was in the horse carriage industry when the car came out, I would be up in arms about it as well. People are scared, and rightly so. If I don't have a job, because they don't need me, because AI can do it, then how do I pay my rent or for food? If we lived in a world where we treated poor people well, and they're just down on their luck, they just need a helping hand that we're happy to give. Then the coming jobpocalypse wouldn't be so scary, and people wouldn't be so up in arms against AI. We only have to look at the history of coal miners to realize that there's no one coming to save us though.
Hearing the ghoulish haunting noise that the jet turbines that Elon Musk put down, and thinking: that could be your future; is enough to get everyone and their mom off the couch and dead set against the entire concept. That noise, non-stop, for the rest of forever.
We don't do subtleties at all, because if you give them an inch, they're going to take a mile, so in a different world it would be possible to be pro AI data centers while also being for upholding regulations on water and noise pollution, along with not raising the cost of electricity, but that doesn't seem to be the world we live in. People don't trust their local politicians to make sure that doesn't happen, so I can't blame people for being against AI data center build outs entirely.
I think people here have stated a variety of reasons. Many go at it from an economics standpoint saying they are anti-AI because they don't think AI will make a profit because it isn't/won't be that smart.
Yet, you are saying something complete opposite. You're saying that AI could become so smart that it makes many people unemployable.
I think your reason is completely different than just about everyone's here. I think it's more honest. I think people here who hate AI for different reasons actually have the same fear inside but they don't want to admit it for some reason.
I agree, I use LLMs all day to build my business, to run my business, etc. I follow as much AI news and developments as I can. I play with as many of the tools as I can. I listen to interviews with the leading researchers at the big labs and what they think, what they're worried about, etc.
I'm blown away by what I'm able to accomplish today that I could not have just three years ago. I'm also quite worried about the societal impact of where all this is going.
Most of the AI hater arguments genuinely sound more motivated by fear at their core than any kind of rationality. The people I respect who are concerned about AI risk do not make the wildly exaggerated and emotional claims that I see constantly on HN. It's hard not to conclude that people's fear is driving them.
Yes, agreed. I think just about everyone who replied to my post said something else other than personal fear, but I think personal fear is the primary reason. They just won't admit it.
No, not the same. Those are review samples who got sent the product early. Those "leaks" happen AFTER the products have been officially announced by Apple.
Leaked prior to announcement - Leaked Benchmarks Confirm M2 Chip is Up to 20% Faster Than M1 https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/15/m2-geekbench-benchmark/
Date of article: June 15, 2022 10:32 am PDT. M2 announcement was June 6.[0]
I don't feel like doing it for your other sources. They follow the same pattern. You can check official announcement dates vs "leaked" dates yourself.
That was a mistake and I updated it - only the M2 Max benchmarks leaked prior to announcement, not the M2.
Those M2 Max Geekbench benchmarks appeared on November 30, 2022. Apple announced the Apple M2 Max chip on January 17, 2023.
Similarly, those M4 Geekbench benchmarks for Mac were leaked on October 6, 2024, prior to Apple announcing the product. Apple announced the M4 Macs on October 28, 2024.
They're not conscious in the same way humans and animals are.
Critically, nobody trained Claude to do anything like this; the behavior emerged on its own.
They clearly are trained to do so even if Anthropic didn't deliberately optimize for it. These models were trained on human text and knowledge. Of course they will talk about consciousness. If cats trained the models, all they'll talk about is sleeping, catching mice, and not on consciousness.
It will be interesting to see how Ai helps us understand more about what goes on in animal minds through their verbal/body languages, like the mirror test for self recognition
No, arguably, software engineers are in more demand than ever. I predict that in 2027, more software engineers will be employed than in 2026.
I'm seeing many small companies who are hiring the first software engineer. In the past, one software engineer could build next to nothing in a year. Nowadays, one software engineer can build a lot in a matter of weeks.
The phone that I'm still looking for is an iPhone Mini Pro. I miss my 13 Mini a lot. I'll take an iPhone clamshell fold if Apple ever makes one.
That said, I understand why small screen phones don't sell well worldwide. For many people, especially younger generation or less wealthy countries, the phone is the person's only computer. It's their entertainment and their work.
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