I think with the amount of corporations and existing homeowners buying homes that the demand is strong enough to keep prices high no matter what happens. There are billions of dollars set aside to gobble up homes in the event of a price drop. In my area, 20 percent of homes are owned by investors and realtors delist homes that don’t sell as opposed to drop price.
> In my area, 20 percent of homes are owned by investors and realtors delist homes that don’t sell as opposed to drop price.
This has been so weird to see over the last couple dips.
In the ‘08 crash, banks were sitting on houses that were developing mold issues because they had been sitting vacant so long. These houses were getting more damaged and less desirable by the day, and before long would require hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix (up from the low-tens already evident) but they still preferred to sit on them. They weren’t listed, or were listed but at too-high prices and they were just ignoring offers, not even responding.
Then you look at “depressed” housing prices that are still way over historic norms, so you’d think builders would keep going… but no, they totally halt all work, no new houses until prices are heading up again.
Something’s super messed-up about the housing market in ways that it wasn’t in the last millennium. Recessions don’t even fix it, they just make everything pause.
So far the agentic stuff seems focused on shopping. Online shopping is remarkably seamless and optimized for me so the potential productivity gain is not enticing.
I’ve encountered a number of errors dealing with LLMs so would be wary of the results.
I also think there’d be an incentive to enshittify by having vendors pay to get preferential prioritization from the LLM. This could result in worse products being delivered for higher prices.
The people doing this at this point are mostly rich rail enthusiasts. No one is doing this to actually get around. The most popular routes are the more scenic ones, like through the mountains. They’re not hitching a car into the Acela to go from NYC to Boston.
And rail car enthusiast associations, which usually consist of passionate but not very rich people - they will pool money together to afford a trip like this every now and then, so usually they'll go "ok we got 20k in membership fees this quarter, where can we go with this money" - so yeah, it will absolutely matter to them.
Tangentially, someone I knew from school worked at the Franklin Mint for a while and he told me their collectibles customers were mostly moderately well-off empty-nesters who now had this money to spend but really weren't into second homes or fancy cars.
I'm not sure that is true — I mean the rich part is true, but not necessarily the rail enthusiast part. One of the times we took the California Zephyr there was a private car on the end that I understood to be some sports-team tycoon who was more or less afraid of flying.
You do see these cars up in South Station occasionally attached to the Regional. Ive always assumed more of a Boston -> DC routing for those. Entertain some guests, get business done etc.
I think the Cardinal is a popular route for a lot of those guys. It’s the scenic way to Chicago. Instead of going from NYC and sort of hugging the south shore of the Great Lakes, it goes south to Dc, then to Charlottesville and over the old C&O route over the Appalachians through Charleston, WV and on along the Ohio river to Cincinnati and then eventually Chicago.
All of which could be solved via a VPN of Seedbox.
The point being, my movements around the homepage aren't tracked and used for pushing more ads. My microphone isn't being recorded for AI training or recommendations algorithms. The intricate ways I use the platform isn't being sold to some third party data company. I just open the film, and it works..
Your IP address being logged in a bittorrent swarm is far less concerning to me than the 100 page privacy policy which explains how they will take rectal scans and sell them to cancer research agencies or something.
Fair point about it being less invasive than adtech sites, but my comment was just addressing the claim that piracy doesn't “track users and send a bunch of telemetry”.
Torrent-trackers broadcast ip-addresses, timestamps, and torrent metadata; even if you consider it minor or mitigated by VPNs/seedboxes.
Your characteristics are you. Businesses already having that data allows them, specifically, to market their junk in a way they have an advantage over other businesses.
It's imbalanced: it screws the economy, and can be used to influence you -- to show you information which encourages conformance/lowers diversity. Freedom of choice is diluted by unknown leaking of your personal characteristics.
Yeah, according to my router, my IP address hasn't changed in 8 months. But this site has me torrenting a bunch of anime, porn and Russian audiobooks ... while I was sitting on a beach last week in Hawaii.
(And I know I'm not being used as an unwitting seeder).
What's actually happening, it looks like, is it's finding any hits on the same Class C subnet as mine.
This ends up more looking like a precursor for some "I know what you're downloading" bitcoin extortion.
The President of the United States, of course. Or one of his subordinates, who, according to this missive, has the full authority same as the U.S. president, of course.
"An assault on the king's men is the same as an assault on the king" and all that...
I disagree. The large corporations in total own hundreds of thousands of homes in their portfolios. The value of renting or selling can be boosted significantly by introducing scarcity on the margins between supply and demand. A vacancy of a small percentage of the portfolio can ensure the rest of the portfolio is worth much more.
To elaborate a little further, it’s not necessarily the act of having it sit empty but rather keeping the pricing high regardless of whether the property stays empty. That becoming industry standard becomes a recipe for prices spiraling out of control, at least for a bit of time.
