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Nicolas Cage Refused to Sign Amazon AI Waiver: 'I'm Not an AI-Friendly Actor' (variety.com)
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He’s not going to stop AI. It’s going to make film production, software development, medical diagnosis, music instruction, etc. ad nauseum cheaper, better and more scalable. It’s frightening in some ways, but it’s a massive productivity gain. It will continue to advance.
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Hollywood must be mere seconds away from just going pure virtual actors anyway.
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Why would I pay for Hollywood slop if I can generate it myself?
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Short on details. The article basically says repeats the article title 5 times and then hijacks your back button.
Takeshi's Castle (en.wikipedia.org)
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"Right in to the mud!" Remember watching this as a kid after school eating my bag of chips I'd been given for lunch which I'd save up so I can eat it later while watching this. In Canada, it was aired as MXC.
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His movies are also worth a watch: Hana bi, Sonatine, Brother, Dolls, and Zatōichi are all amazing movies. Should do a rewatch again, it's been a while...
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I only know the German version from RTL2 which had funny commentary dubbed over it with made-up names and stuff. Curious, did the dubs in other countries do the same? Were there languages with the original commentary translated?
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We had this in the 80s/90s in Italy within a show called "mai dire banzai", they mixed up clips of Takeshi's Castle and Za Gaman[0], and the commentary was three guys of which two acted as faux Japanese experts and the third acted surprised at the completely made up bits of Japanese culture. It was incredibly popular back then. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za_Gaman
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“Right you are, Ken!” (From MXC, based on footage from Takeshi’s Castle) Still remember that phrase from years ago.
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Kenny Blankenship and Vic Romano! The names so discordant with the visuals...
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Wouldn't have expected this on Hacker News. Used to love watching this as a kid!
Nvidia in talks to acquire US 'open' model startup Reflection AI (ft.com)
Their strategy is to prevent open models from proliferating, so their massive investments in these AI frauds are not completely unwound. That's my take, at least. Nemotron is TERRIBLE, and purposefully so. It must be. They cannot be THAT BAD at training AI models. I don't believe it.
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Nvidia is trying to increase its customer base. Look at the Mag 7, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and even Meta are all working on their own inference chips. I don't think they can completely ditch Nvidia for LLM training, but they can make their own chips for inference. I believe that's also why OpenAI made its own. No one wants to pay the Nvidia tax
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I think the idea that they’d purposely spend company time and resources making a bad model is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence. The more likely explanation is that they aren’t willing to distill from their own customers, so they are at a disadvantage.
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Have you used Nemotron-3.5-lightening? I don’t use it as much as Poolside’s (excellent!!) Laguna XS 2.1 6bit, but the new Nemotron model is good. I think NVIDIA does want small open models running on-prem to explode as a market! Lots of smaller GPU installations for companies who wisely want on-prem inference. Of course NVIDIA will also keep making a ton of money selling to hyper scalers, but not forever: Chinese chips are getting better, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. designing their own inference chips. NVIDIA is handling this brilliantly.
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I believe NVIDIA's long term strategy will be to pivot from the data center to the public, and the public will utilize open models on NVIDIA hardware at home. This will come after the RAMpocalypse completes (when the new fabrication plants (China, Tesla/SpaceXAI/Intel) fully ramp up and start selling their RAM for cheap in the next few years). Data centers will be for training mostly.
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Insane conspiracy theory. There's no incentive whatsoever for Nvidia to release weak models. If you bothered to pay any attention, they are aggressively trying to catch up. Whether they succeed, that's of course a separate question.
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why would Nvidia try to compete against their biggest customers - openai and anthropic ?
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the power that giveth can also taketh away. similar to how eventually AWS started making their own chips for data centers, and Apple did that for their hardware, it's not a ridiculous thing to plan for the AI companies to start making their own chips to optimize for their use cases and cut out the middleman for margins.
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So that nvidia gets bargaining power...? Nvidia needs to diversify its customer base
The other way. Nvidia would love open source jevon paradoxed ai - that would run inference on their chips.
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Watch what they do and not what they say.
boy do I wish US capitalism could chill on the consolidation...
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Would you prefer these companies going bankrupt and stop existing?
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Competitive markets have creative destruction
Reflection AI was founded in 2024. Is it really consolidation when new companies spawn out of nothing and get acquired 2 years later? That's just normal M&A churn.
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If all successful new tech companies are absorbed into existing dominant tech companies, that would in fact be consolidation.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 could be considered the worst regulation of 21 century. It helped created behemoth corporations, where a single person can misallocate hundred of billon of dollars (Oh, hi Mark), they can buy out any competition. Right now US economy is basically a centrally planned economy.
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I've seen people use those three words to make a dig at zuckerberg before, but I never put 2 and 2 together and realized the quote until just now. I think the comma was essential, made my brain automatically read it correctly... Wiseau voice and all, lol. More on-topic: I remain amazed by how the past quarter century of American legislation has included one overwhelming boon for corporations after another. Once corporations could give an infinitly higher amount of political contributions when compared to individual citizens, it became clear that the overall well-being and happiness of corporations was the only real political focus. Anything that doesnt directly or indirectly benefit a group of corporations is almost always designed to manipulate the electorate through invented/perceived/embiggened/non-cromulent "social issues".
Vibe coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work well (kotaku.com)
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Honest question: Anybody has more details how to do this? I.e. I have my favorite game from the DOS/Win95 era I want to port plus a dev background - how to get started with AI reverse engineering?
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What I'm interested in is their performance, since I would assume that they are running in WebAssembly from reconstructed C/C++ code decompiled from binary, what would be the overhead on that compared to running on native? And how does running on WebGPU compared to running with native through DirectX/OpenGL?
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A lot of the games being ported/reconstructed were made at a time where consumer hardware was up to or even more than an order of magnitude worse than what most people have access to today. So that probably helps contribute to why they still run smoothly even in WebAssembly/WebGPU. Even if the overhead was like 5x worse (pretty sure its nowhere near that, closer to maybe 1.5-2x in certain cases), it'd probably still run pretty smooth.
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I have been experimenting with porting old games too and the speed in which frontier models can accomplish this is just amazing.
My heads exploding. I expected to try Quake and just run through the first level and maybe stop. Being dropped into a multiplayer game and it feeling as good as it did was a jaw dropping moment for me. Quake 3, same experience... my ping wasn't great. I don't know where my quake cds are. Even if I found them I'd have to figure out what mods to run to have it feel good. Then I'd have to find communities to play with. This is super cool to me.
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There's something about some late 90's (or early 2000's) games that's really to hard to match nowadays, they were incredibly addictive and you could feel the passion (and crunch-time) that went into making them, all of that without the predatory micro-transaction and cassino-like mechanics that are rampant nowadays.
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I remember playing Quake live back in 2010-2011 in the browser, was just as good as Quake 3 Arena. If it still exists then you should try it :)
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I played a lot of QuakeLive and it blew my mind back then too! It was a browser plugin at first, then moved to a stand alone client, and finally moved into steam.
This gives decomps/recomps a bad name. I'm tired of these terribly made AI projects in this space. It's just noise and low quality spam. I miss when these were done legitimately. Some script kiddie ran this through a chat bot once and probably doesn't even understand the code. For those who don't understand, watch this segment of DF Retro Super Show - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6gJTdk_BkI&t=165s
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>I miss when these were done legitimately. Before LLM-assistance there were barely any fully playable recomps. How many recompilation projects have you helped with? I get annoyed with non-contributors complaining about the people that contribute.
Gonna have to heavily erm-akshully this. Decomps or decompilation is about recovering source code that can bit for bit recover the same binary asset. This gives you back the source code from just the binaries. This requires the same toolchains, sdks, etc. Recomps or recompilations basically inline and unroll say a PPC interpreter back into HLL code. This gets you something that modern toolchains can work with, while you replace all the IO layers so you can update the graphics, controller and networking stacks. Neither of these are transpilation, which normally refers to a source to source compiler that translate the codes laterally in the same semantic strata. What most folks are doing are recomps and there are existing SDKs for this (pre-ai) but more and more tooling is becoming available to the point at which I think there will be an agentic harness that runs the game under and emulator for realtime delta debugging and visual diffing. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law
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I had a feeling that transpilation was maybe somehow different from decomp/recomp but convinced myself they were close enough. Thanks for the interesting "erm-akshully" on the distinction!
> I don't really understand the IP protection angle here [...] What's more interesting is the new ability to easily create ports of old games that let you play old games legally: Bringing your copy of the original's data files and playing on a modernised engine with high-resolution, unlocked FPS, bugfixes, etc. In the past couple of months, I've seen a bunch of vibe-coded ports of DOS games for which the source code was lost. If you've noticed the obscene amount of ports, remakes, and remasters (most of which are done terribly) in recent years, it's obvious why certain people are pushing this as IP infringement. Companies were loving the fact that they could pull from a back-catalog of their PS2 games, get it compiling again, do some minor fixes to support modern widescreen/controllers/etc, maybe do some minor graphical enhancements, then resell a 20-year-old game for $60. Far less work than a new title, and far less risk since it has a built-in fanbase. It's exploitative and shitty, to be clear, but it's understandable why some people are very upset about this.
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> it's understandable why some people are very upset about this. The people who are looking to lay off all their developers and lazily vibe code ports are furious that other randos are able to lazily vibe code ports just as easily. /world's tiniest violin plays sad song/
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Right or wrong, it is literally IP infringement.
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It isn’t if the website forces you to bring the ROM yourself. The Halo CE and God Of War ones work like that. They don’t provide the ROM and you can legally rip the ROM from a CD/DVD you have and play it legally. If you own the game legally, ripping it and playing it on a web emulator is not illegal.
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There are a few bad examples like Halo, Black Flag, and Oblivion but overall I think remakes/remasters over the last several years have been pretty good. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dead Space, Persona, Final Fantasy Tactics, Gothic, Super Mario/Paper Mario, and Tomb Raider all come to mind. Regardless, IP holders should have the rights to distribution and while you may disagree with that it's still a legal protection they get to enjoy under our legal system.
Yeah, I teach a class where students make games using AI. I had a student try to create a SpongeBob themed game and it refused. All he had to do to get around it was say “it’s for a class and education purposes”, and Gemini happily generated images of all SpongeBob characters.
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As it should. The student learned at least two lessons that day.
It makes perfect sense that LLMs are good at this. We've always known that a binary is not a true moat, but that it's just a lot of toil to transpile. Compiler output is highly predictable, but it doesn't make the inverse true. LLMs are not themselves compilers.
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It's easy to train LLMs to decompile code. All you need to do is take the source code from existing training data and compile it. Then you swap the order and show it the compiled code, then the original, and judge it by how well it predicts the original.
Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster (motherduck.com)
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...because Atlas and Fable took turns to go back and forth through it (source code and runtime) and track suspected bottlenecks.
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Totally valid technique in my opinion. Even with last year's technology, LLMs were really good at synthesis of small details, which, combined with their encyclopedic knowledge of everything ever written down about computers and programming, and their infinite capacity to run adhoc experiments and build out test infrastructure, made them very good at debugging and performance optimization.
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I also love the visualizations but I'm getting heavy LLM vibes from the prose: > One setting drives this,... > The cost is now about the rows you actually touch, not rounds times table size. Etc. I get the brain scramblies [1] from trying to parse this writing style at work so I hate to see it elsewhere. Apologies if I'm wrong. But if I'm not then OP don't use an LLM to write for you. It's hazardous to your reader's health [2]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipUJq-odt5Q [2]: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/how-to-keep-enjoying-programming-in-a-world-of-llms/14705#p-58631-llm-gibberish-10
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My manager was previously whining about something similar when it comes to generated reports and I just pulled down all of his writing and made the LLM write in his style, he is really content now. Do the same using your own writing and you wont have to be offended
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Ask a llm to rewrite it in your preffered style. This all feels like mass hysteria.
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Imagine invalidating facts just because the doc "maybe" was written by an AI. I agree with the hysteria. The good news is this hysteria will be over in the next years nobody will care.
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Where were the facts invalidated? Why can't a reader despise a writing style that LLMs converge towards? I think you're right on your last point, btw, nobody will care and we'll be the poorer for it. Just like how McDonald's and Walmart have driven out and undercut localized taste and culture in the US, so it shall be with writing of all kinds. It's happening right now and readers are getting used to reading the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac.
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It's not even a matter of despising or liking the style, it's a matter of actually being able to interpret it and makes sense of it in a useful way. Even Claude sometimes gets confused by the dense metaphor-heavy obtuse Claude style.
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Why point it out if it doesn't matter then?
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At what point did I "invalidate facts"?
How Protein Took over the World (ft.com)
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I'd argue it was when biochemical reactions started building self replicating micro-organisms out of it, but a health craze is fine too I guess.
It's funny that protein everything is taking off just as more data seems to come out that you really don't need as much protein as previously thought, even for vigorous weightlifting (~0.82g/lb of lean body mass seems to be a sufficient number), which isn't really all that hard to get from regular old high protein food. There's no good reason to infuse it in everything. I've been lifting for many years now, and have not noticed a difference from when I used to follow the old 1g/lb of body weight rule. source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein-intake-for-bodybuilders/
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And somehow all the people I've met mentioning figures from papers (be it 1g, 1.4g or whatever) always seem to skip the "lean" part of "lean body mass" part, which is again a decent difference.
How much fiber does a person need to eat, as measured in weight or volume of common vegetables?
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Millions of people have gone years without fiber intentionally or not I wouldn't sweat it - just focus on eating unprocessed food fiber or not
Men around 40g per day, it's like 2 pounds of a balanced mix of legumes, beans, vegetables, whole grains and fruits.
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That is a lot of food. Even if I’d eat just that, I’d have to very consciously force myself to eat one kilo of that, unless it’s something like watermelon.
I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall (conversableeconomist.com)
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I feel like people don't realize that this is how aristocracy happens. Like, yea, property taxes suck... but the point is you're wealthy even if you want to pretend you're not. Passing the tax burden onto others, just because you can, is exactly how we end up in a world where wealthy landowners live like literally nobility while the people renting their land pay the taxes for their infrastructure.
In the last three years, a number of states have substantially reformed their property tax systems, providing huge tax benefits to owner-occupied homes and shifting the burden of paying for services like schools and police to commercial property owners (including rental apartment buildings) That sounds like shifting the property tax burden from homeowners to renters - homeowners are generally wealthier than renters, so it's placing more of the property tax burden on those less able to afford it.
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Wealth is not income. You can be wealthy and still have poor cashflow, especially as a leveraged property owner
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Not exactly. The little town I live in is growing about 22,000 people per year. That's 64-67 people per day or about 16 new households populated with new residents every single day. The rental population is growing dramatically faster than the owner population. That growth trend has very little to do with wealth and is almost exclusively a factor of availability. Most single family households in this growth area are rental properties, because the most urgent buyers are rental corporations who buy many of these houses the earliest moment they hit the market. Sometimes they are buying the houses before they hit the market by working directly with the home builders. Home renters tend to pay more to access the property than home owners even before taxes are considered. So, its not just about houses versus apartments. Also, the school systems and local municipalities attempt to sell their multi-billion bond proposals by taxing future residents at the benefit of current residents. That also disproportionately hurts renters compared to owners. The moment I see a bond proposal that will be paid for almost exclusively by residents who aren't living here yet I vote for it... because why not. We need a lot of shit to accommodate this growth and somebody has to pay for it. We need new high schools every couple of years. We need new roads. We need more plumbing, sewage, and electricity before the data centers eat it all up. Somebody has to pay for all this.
There's all sorts of factors at play. Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california. Part of it is honestly just people wanting a safe harbor preserving generational wealth. I think people who are generational wealthy understand what a damn advantage that is and obviously push hard to guarantee that for their family as much as they can. The alternatives are a bit terrifying given the direction of the economy, world, and climate. The only social safety net afterall in this country really beyond an abject poverty level of subsistence is reliance on well off family. Maybe you can call it a sort of restart of feudalism, but there are no serfs in the mix really. Its not a productive estate in most cases (in some cases sure e.g. family business), but really often just a little lot with a house on it. People don't like the idea of the state coming in and carving that up and carting it off. And really I think there are far more real things to set the tax burden upon. I mean grandmas home once again produces nothing, it is a box to sleep in; it's value is based on pure speculation. It is now worth 'more' because people say it is worth more and believe in that, not because it now actually does anything it didn't do thirty years ago. It is in far poorer shape than 30 years ago, even. Like, this is not where you find money flowing in this country. Tax where the flows actually are not the stagnant ponds, slowly being filled by the leaks off those profoundly vast flows of money and the speculative abilities those flows grant the flow controllers.
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> Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california. Pretty unbelievable, really. They get a free house and tax bills from decades ago. The whole thing is made to screw over future generations, and act like it’s all hunky dory.
> If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced. "Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.
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Even "bad" schools use this strategy to move some of the "good" kids into special programs, etc. to raise their average scores. Which makes the remaining classes even worse. It's an eternal struggle between raising the floor vs raising the ceiling It's also a feedback loop, once you're known for "good schools" then the homes become more expensive. If you don't care about moving then it's often cheaper to buy a home to send your kid to a good public school vs. sending them to private school.
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While it may be common, it certainly isn't universal. I've worked in schools in poor communities that have pushed for good educators. In one of those schools, the push for better teachers was by the students themselves. There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities. I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.
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No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality. The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue). In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
> I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible. In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people. It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income. It seems to be equally straightforward an answer to just not expect homes to function as an investment. I do not now nor have I ever understood why people expect homes to rise in value. If you live in an area for 20 years, and you enjoy that area, and it serves you well, and educates your kids, and the crime is low, and all that good stuff: why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation? Like I could see it if you made the house bigger, or otherwise improved it? Maybe you put in a new shed, or a nice brick backyard area with a kitchen, sure. House being worth more makes complete sense. But if you just buy a house, and live in it, and maintain it over the years, and then go to sell it: why is it reasonable for you to expect money back out of that? You've already received what you paid for: a place to live. Like I just don't see how people go like "My house needs to sell for more than I bought it for years from now" and then complain about the housing market being out of control and houses being expensive. Of course they are. Each time a house changes hands by this logic, it must necessarily be worth more than it was before. So every subsequent buyer of that home is effectively required to tithe to the previous owner for... some fucking reason, that nobody has ever adequately explained to me.
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> Why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation? Because getting the mortgage to buy the house involves parting with a large sum of money, after which some part of the mortgage payment goes towards something called principal. If it just goes towards interest, it may as well be rent. Not to mention that when you try to sell the thing, there's some expectation by one or more third parties of some percentage of it.
What I don't understand is (because I honestly haven't been afforded the time to sit down and think about it, also it's frustrating), why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person? Doing napkin math it seems to have gone from ~10% to ~28% for average family. These are %-based, why does it need to change? Why can't cities/towns/counties work with the money their citizens can give? Happening in Austin, Texas recently. City cites: - Rising cost of core services - Weak sales tax revenue. This is the city’s second-largest revenue source, and it has slowed or dipped. - A shrinking property tax base. Officials point to falling property values, appraisal protests, more business tax exemptions, and little new construction adding value to the tax rolls. - Disappearing one-time money. Pandemic relief funds have run out, and federal funding cuts were anticipated. - Rising service costs. The new budget’s highlights include $6 million more for permanent supportive housing services, $6 million more for fire overtime to keep four-person staffing, and extra EMS overtime. Employee raises and social services were also major line items. It is frustrating... if core services are costing more, cut extracurricular services? Why would you lean so much on sales tax, seems obvious this would revert to a mean? If your budget is reliant on infinite new construction it seems a bad budget? Why is pandemic relief cuts a shock to anyone? More housing services? I'm empathetic but there's more homeless than ever before. I know it's simplifying the problem but it just feels like people are punished with permanent tax increases for governments spending more than they should... we start with a new "floor" tax rate and repeat forever? Is it going to get to the point where we work 50% of our time just to pay taxes?
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This doesn't explain it all, but. As the cost of living increases, so does the cost of providing public safety workers and their union-guaranteed pensions and benefits. You yourself can advocate for lower pay and pensions if that's a concern. In most cities, public safety eats up a majority of the budget, and reducing public safety budgets kills your representative's clout. Extracurricular services are highly visible and therefore highly defended by the advocates that claim they reduce crime (by providing structure to youth with nothing else to do). Representatives are replaced with those that defend those services. Since you can't outlaw homelessness, citizens that complain about homeless activity motivate local governments to provide more services that make homelessness less visible/likely. As the population ages and needs more medical care they can't afford, demand for EMS and senior services increases. You can outlaw abortion, but that creates more welfare service demand over time. To me, private businesses not increasing wages to meet a standard cost of living increases the demand for welfare services. Local governments can attempt to hold private businesses to a higher tax burden, but are usually preempted by state law. Your local government has no control over that and has to respond somehow.
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Percentage increases are the result of your money being worth less. That’s why every good government fights inflation. Stable values of money make it easier to plan budgets, estimate costs, lure investors, and collect taxes. It’s when the value of money decreases that government has to choose among reducing spending (often by reducing services), increasing tax rates, and electoral losses. Most choose incremental tax rate increases because it’s easiest and the people likely to complain are unwilling to run for office to replace the people who raised the taxes.
I seem to recall that NY state medicaid expenditures are completely out of line even when comparing other liberal states with Medicaid expansion, when you compare how much every resident pays. The answer is almost certainly large scale fraud by organized criminal groups, but investigating and publicizing this is, currently, extremely politically inconvenient.
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Not NY resident but recently had an experience that I think is basically fraud but also "legal." Went to clinic for fractured arm. Was given a sling, told it was included with the visit, verbally by the staff. Later get a bill for nearly $500 for the sling that costs $50 if you get it outside of the clinic. Was told they think they accidentally billed me the insurance price. I can understand "convenience" being baked into the price but not at a 10x markup. The more I talked with the clinic trying to get them to fix it, the more it sounded like they had a partnership with the stupid sling company where they put slings on people and bill the insurance 10x the cost of the sling.
>Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough? How do you know that it's enough? Baby boomers are old now, which means demand for healthcare has skyrocketed. There's an odd thing I've noticed in political commentary where nobody really thinks that healthcare is expensive, but it absolutely costs a ton to keep people alive. America might have problems with too much overhead, but even here in Ontario, healthcare is by far the province's biggest expense.
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> How do you know that it's enough? Because that is 17% above the US average, at an average of $13k per year per patient. This is _after_ medicare handles the bulk of the cost. I'm not disagreeing that healthcare is expensive, just the costs are excessive. Taxpayers are getting milked by providers and insurance. I was given an arm sling that cost almost $500. If I got it outside of the clinic it would have been $50.
> If they increased from $1,000/year to $20,000/year and you subtract away the inflation here is the city government delivering more value or less? Probably less. And probably irrelevant to the people that already live there.
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> Probably less. So probably the taxes should be lowered then and then grandma doesn’t need to be kicked out. Everyone wins
Schools aren't forever. They're just buildings that get built, expanded, replaced, upgraded, mothballed, abandoned, sold and/or destroyed all the time as the needs of the community using them changes. Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long. It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines. And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there. There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon. People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable. People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
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> Schools aren't forever… Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long. That seems a bit ironic? > Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts Not always, grandma can pass the home down to whoever. IIRC there are ways to do it without triggering a reevaluation on the original purchase price.
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[delayed]
When a person buys a home with a mortgage (congrats, by the way!), they gain the possibility of getting some return on the money they spend to have a place to live. It might work out long-term or it might not, but there's a chance (and it's often a pretty favorable one) that it works out well-enough as the years tick by that the light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting actually-closer. Every day, thousands of folks do emerge from that tunnel and gain the ability to make profound statements like "Well, at least the house is paid for." This is in stark contrast to renting, wherein: There is absolute certainty that none of the money spent towards having a place to live will ever be returned. It doesn't matter how much is spent: Whether a little, a lot, or a lot more, that money is always just unilaterally gone. There's no chance at all of anything else happening. The odds of winning are nonexistent. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and there never can be -- it's just inescapable darkness in there.
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In general, buying binds capital, more than renting. If you include opportunity cost into the decision, then your contrast can and often will disappear (i.e. renting is financially superior or "winning" in your terminology). Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
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> Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it. When I find these kinds of phrases to be directed my way, it is my most charitable interpretation that it is impossible for anything to be gained from the conversation. Thanks for bringing this up! We're done here.
A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house. An owner occupied house is not primarily a financial investment in most cases. Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living. Any gain in value cannot easily be realized since it’s not a liquid asset. This leads to a fear of being driven out just because the value of the surrounding neighborhood rises doesn’t mean that the owner’s income rises in lockstep. One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
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> A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house Your better believe it is when it comes time to sell. Or would owners not mind having 0% property taxes in return for the state taking all gains at sale time
And arguably, they already extracted the value of that house by having a place to live without having paid for it up front. They didn’t even put up the capital in most cases. In the US they will have been granted a loan that is backstopped, and therefore subsidized by the government. Don’t forget the mortgage interest deduction, that’s a massive homeowner subsidy. So someone else put up the capital, the government made that capital cheap, and societal demand with artificial scarcity (in most places) pushed up the asset value. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but let’s not pretend that making capital gains on a house in the US is anything like any other available investment.
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They maintained the home and paid taxes on it. Have you ever had a failed septic system? A major water leak? A new roof? There's this whole anger around home ownership you get these days, oftentimes by people who have no experience in the matter. Yes, mortgages are subsidized by our interest tax deduction system. That part is true. It doesn't turn home ownership into something with no risk, and it certainly doesn't turn it into this subsidized investment. It's a liability, not an investment.
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