I've built multiple JavaScript project at scale, and I would never trust it over java or C sharp. JavaScript allows you to make way too many mistakes.
I do think Dart is the best of both worlds though. Having real types, not hacked together typescript stuff is very good. That's the other thing the nodejs ecosystem feels like a bunch of duct tape slap together again and again
Java's thread support is as correct as can be and provides sufficient primitives that if you can't use a multi-core machine efficiently it is your fault, not the fault of your language and runtime. Same for C#.
This holds for "high-level" resources.Wwith the multi-threaded model you can share a single large immutable configuration object between all threads, or pass a database connection from one thread to another with close-to-zero cost.
Java and C# languages are a bit more CPU efficient. In the cloud computing world a website publisher pays real money for server CPU and RAM but can use the CPU and RAM on your computer or phone for free.
The weird transpilation system constantly breaks. I guess maybe one day they'll be better tooling around this, but it's not there yet. And I've worked with node in some capacity since 2013, things always feel fragmented and broken
Have you tried Vite[0]? It's an amazing dev server I learned about in an HN post. It does a fabulous job of TS transpilation and has many other niceties for dev work.
BTW, with modern browsers, why would you need to transpile JS (as opposed to TS)?
The issue is you'll have to ask for credit card numbers in order to prevent abuse, so you're not really giving anything away. I would still evaluate anything you call free as I would any other product. Plus integrating into my workflow, pitching it to my manager, these things have a real cost.
I'd actually argue you shouldn't offer anything for free, but instead charge whatever makes sense factoring in you're going to have to support customers even if it was a free product. For example if your offering website uptime monitoring, but it's not accurate that can cause a real cost to me
If I was evaluating a free product I'd be wary of getting locked into it and then discovering missing features that I would have to pay for. That is essentially your business model, but even paying for a product I'd be wary of lock-in these days. Software can be complex enough that you don't discover missing parts or find the API is written in such a way that moving to a different platform is impossible without starting over, long after your business depends on it. So how does anyone know the product will remain free forever, is it open source? Can I fix problems on my own or will I have to pay you? Part of your marketing should be to show how those who try the free tier won't be locked in so when they grow they have a choice of buying from you, other vendors, or doing it themselves. Basically you are giving away a horse, but potential customers realize you have an ulterior motive and hence are going to be very wary of your gift horse.
I've heard over and over again that the free customers cost more in support costs than the paying ones. Opportunity costs and burnout are both threats to the success of your projects.
How big of a team do you have. Even if it's from your personal funds, if you're maybe paying a few contractors $10,000 a month, that's still an investment.
I hate these moralizing articles, if we have a drunk driving problem then write an article about that. But if people want to drink in their own homes let them be.
Are you saying there aren't downsides inherent with drinking itself? I'm onboard with letting people do what they want, but if what they want to do has negative effects the least we should do is make them aware of that.
There are downsides to eating Oreos, but we don't need articles which state obvious facts.
Much wrong has been done in this country by telling people their behavior is a moral. As long as you don't hurt me or anyone else do whatever you want, you're free to drink yourself silly every night
I would argue that benefits have also come from moralizing about certain practices. Consider smoking cigarettes, for instance, which has seen dramatic decreases in use over several decades in the US [1]. I suspect that the large amount of moralizing in schools, on TV and in movies, and other places had something to do with this given that it's still more common (perhaps because it's less taboo and still seen as "cool") in certain European countries [2], not to mention many other places around the world that weren't significantly different from the US some decades ago. This has public health benefits that everyone at least indirectly benefits from, without mentioning the more direct issues such as second-hand smoke or, in the case of alcohol, drunk driving or other crimes exacerbated by its use.
These aren't so obvious facts, and we DO write articles and run campaigns about the harms of junk food and overeating.
None of this is "moralizing", its simply reiterating the harmful effects of behaviors so others can make balanced decisions. Nobody is born aware of the dangers of junk food and alcohol, and they're easy to forget too unless one has personal experience with it (by then the damage is already done).
>they can’t afford to house people for free or shoulder the country’s massive rental arrears, which could be as high as $70 billion.
I think the eviction moratorium wasn't thought out very well. You can't just stop evictions while not compensating landlords, and not developing clear plans for what happens when the moratorium ends. No one is going to catch up on their rent of their behind. What I suspect will largely happen is many landlords will forgo a formal eviction as long as the tenants decide to leave voluntarily. Then those tenants will effectively swap houses with someone else who's behind, wiping the rental debt clean. You only understand this if you've gone through an eviction, but the vast majority of the time the landlord just want you to leave. If you vacate before you actually get to court you can often avoid having the eviction on your record.
That’s like saying you have the right to go after 10x more money than someone can pay off in a year. So you’re going to take 10 years to collect? This is essentially a forced loan.
Really what should have happened is the tenant gets a pause. If there are payments on the building by the landlord, those are paused as well. If it’s a small landlord who say, owns a single house, he gets federal money. This decreases as the size grows, but always enough money must be paid so that the property can be maintained. We don’t want to be creating slums.
> I think the eviction moratorium wasn't thought out very well. You can't just stop evictions while not compensating landlords
Sounds like something that's impossible to administer. How would you prevent widespread fraud - landlord's claiming their tenants aren't paying rent when in fact they are?
The US really doesn't have the bureaucratic infrastructure to handle such matters - or at least couldn't spin one up on short notice.
Yes, it's a real hassle to prevent fraud. Just giving everyone the same and without conditions is much simpler, hard to game and fairer. That's why universal basic income is such an attractive solution compared to more traditional safety nets.
How would that relate to landlords? If everyone has UBI, then everyone has more money to compete for the better rental properties. The landlord would have to get their UBI directly, and that might still not be enough.
If everyone has UBI, then people still have some money with which to pay rent (or at least pay a portion of the rent). That makes it much less likely that you need an eviction moratorium, and lessens the impact of having one.
And of course the assumption "if everyone has UBI, then everyone has more money" isn't right, since UBI as "proposed" my comment would replace other safety nets like unemployment benefits. Many people would get basically the same, just with less bureaucratic overhead. And to pay for the rest of UBI you wouldn't just print money but instead raise taxes, so you would expect the money of someone earning median income to not really change at all (depending on the exact tax scheme).
> people still have some money with which to pay rent
And as a result, money will devalue, and rents will go up. So long as UBI recipients are competing with each other over housing, that's how it will work.
> since UBI as "proposed" my comment would replace other safety nets like unemployment benefits.
If UBI is universal, why would unemployment benefits be cut? wouldn't that mean the unemployed get comparatively less?
> to pay for the rest of UBI you wouldn't just print money but instead raise taxes
The problem with this is that tax rates now follow from UBI.
Previously we might say "The tax people pay is X% of income".
Now we pay a fixed sum $Y to everyone and we need to make up for $Y * P ; where P is the size of the population.
that means the average tax payed needs to be $Y per person. This obviously can't be equally distributed (otherwise Y = 0) but now the relative tax rate depends explicitly on population size. You've just moved the goalpost by making income less relevant, and citizenship more relevant; Now every new immigrant making less than average wage, increases the tax rate for everyone making more than average wage. Instead of opposing tax rates, the wealthy will oppose immigration rates.
The benefit of not guaranteeing tax-derived UBI, is that no one has to care who enters the country, b/c it doesn't have any effect on them.
>If everyone has UBI, then everyone has more money to compete for the better rental properties
But people are only competing for rental properties because they need jobs, because cities are where all the jobs are. If getting a job isn't a requirement, they can move to oklahoma or something and get a cheap rental there.
In the short term, UBI—even a proper one that actually provides a bare minimum to live on—isn't likely to make lots of people leave their jobs for long enough to move expecting to live only off UBI. That's more likely to be a long-term process as people gain more bargaining power and the money distribution becomes more equal across the country.
I suppose this depends on whether UBI is supposed to be a form of welfare, adding a buffer against unemployment, and greasing the wheels of the economy; or if it's supposed to be a star-trekkian form of post-scarcity neo-economy.
Assuming the former; I see a big problem in that the desired outcome: "people gain more bargaining power" as unlikely so long as UBI is only a monetary pay-out.
power is relative. Universal anything can't fix that. It's like saying "everyone should be above average". If everyone got more money, money will just become less valuable. The only effect will be to piss off those with mostly monetary assets (who aren't in a position to sell-off before the change), and increase the value of non-monetary investments.
Instead, the focus should first be on the pinch-points, i.e. the scarce assets that money is intended to buy. Government housing projects, for example: leverage the large amounts of capital the government has by buying large lots of land and rapidly developing it. Create a large supply of basic housing w/ amenities, and allow this to apply market pressure naturally.
AFAIK, this is the kind of approach China is taking: large social projects for core infrastructure, high-speed national railways; entire cities built cheaply from scratch in remote areas. The large amount of capital pays off when these cities develop into more desirable locations, and unemployment/poverty is decreased.
Yes, power is relative. But with UBI, people gain power against corporations—because right now, corporations have massive power, and people have very little specifically due to our need to keep working in order to live.
With a genuine will-let-you-survive-indefinitely UBI, corporations lose that leverage over us.
I support a UBI that's paid for by increased taxation on the wealthy. Then it's not actually increasing the money supply, just redistributing it.
I also don't buy the argument that even with a UBI fully funded by printing more money, all the benefit would be eaten up by inflation (though certainly, much more would be than if it were paid for by increased taxation). I don't believe that's how inflation works in practice.
With respect, the original post was only "universal basic income is such an attractive solution compared". You've now added a whole new element: "If getting a job isn't a requirement".
If not needing to live in the big city was the case, then that would indeed change the desirability of various properties across the market. This would be the case, with or without UBI. There's also no guarantee that "Oklahoma or something" would stay cheap if demand went up.
But big cities are desirable in other ways too (lots of common resources), plus UBI isn't necessarily so that people no longer need to work; If people move somewhere with cheap rent, but low business prospects, they'll get stuck in that situation, and a different kind of UBI-dependant poverty class with arise.
To TLDR this: this feels like the "Parable of the broken window" - The mechanics of the economy are too complex (and unintuitive) to be captured in a few speculative anecdotes, especially ones as drastic as "UBI making having a job unnecessary" - this is effectively the economic equivalent of a "toy project" - a toy argument so simple if fails to capture the complicated and significant side-effects that such a proposal with have; Needless to say, the road to hell is paved with good intensions, some of the most drastic socialistic changes have been disastrous.
You're asking them to show proof of a null, which is tricky. For example, a landlord could tell their tenants to make the check out to their spouse, deposit rent checks into their account, then turn around to the government with their usual tenant bank account and say "They're stiffing me on rent!"
The government would still go after the tenant to potentially pay back the money that the gov fronted to the landlord (or a portion of it based on means testing). Then the tenant would have incentive to provide proof to the gov that those checks were written out. And the landlord then gets thrown into federal prison for government fraud.
They could catch you retroactively when you report the rental income. Of course you could simply not report the income and hope you don't get audited but at that point you're now also guilty of tax fraud with the intent to conceal your wire fraud, and tax fraud is the type of thing the IRS can sniff out even years after the fact. There will be no plausible deniability possible since the unreported income will correspond to the defrauded payments, it'll be an open and shut case.
We don't exactly prosecute for fraud very much in this country. Otherwise we would see a lot more business owners going to jail for immigration fraud, tax fraud, and wage theft.
This would be equivalent to the government forcing those businesses to stay open and serve customers (renters) who couldn’t pay, while forbidding them from taking other customers who could pay.
The government printed $9T to ensure that real estate bets didn't lose money. It worked and now housing is more expensive than ever. Landlords hit the jackpot last year.
The value they are providing is mostly that they put in the capital to buy and operate a house, and allow others to use the house with much less hassle, less capital investment and more flexibility
You know what the answer usually is? Property management firms. You know, the ones that have the resources to pursue tenants for back rent in court and efficiently line up evictions.
How small? With the federal benefits above and beyond unemployment...there was no reason that such a large portion of people should have been not paying rent. A friend who runs a property management company laid off 60% of his workforce (mostly maintenance guys) because 74% of his tenants stopped paying completely since last April.
Small? A friend who has about 5 houses told me that all 5 were behind or paying only a fraction of the rent. Including the woman who worked for Google as the local rep selling schools on using GSuite. She was making $150k when she filled out the lease paperwork. Google didn't have layoffs but somehow she couldn't write the full check. Go figure. But he still owed money to the bank and the utility company and ...
I sort of sympathize with your viewpoint, but i'm curious why this doesn't extend to other human needs?
- shouldn't we also allow hungry individuals to walk out of grocery stores w/o paying for food and w/o risk of prosecution?
- shouldn't we also allow sick individuals to avoid medical debt collection and medical bankruptcies?
- shouldn't we also allow individuals to not pay tuition?
If i were to take the analogy further, shouldn't struggling businesses also get cloud hosting charges forgiven by government decree? Should public agencies in budget crises stop paying programmers salaries by government decree? Should struggling small startups stop paying software licenses by government decree?
I'm genuinely curious where the one stops and why.
Of course tution should be free, and no one should have medical debt. I'm almost laughing at this being a "gotcha". Same with food and housing, it should be guaranteed by society.
But no, I don't think you should be able to walk out of a grocery with whatever you want. But the difference is a grocery provides a service, it has a function. A landlord is mostly a parasite extracting money but provides little value. if anything landlords just makes it more expensive for everyone to get a roof over their head.
Depending on when they got the houses and where they are, 5 houses may have cost less than $100k for each of them and may not be taking in that much rent.
That is less than the cost of one house in much of California now.
With that kind of thinking, we can soon make sure the person with 5 houses has much fewer houses, possibly 0? The problem with redistribution is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
How? By buying a house someone else could have bought and actually lived in, thus increasing the prices for everyone? How does buying and renting a house provide something not already there?
Not everyone is wealthy enough or wants to move into an area and buy a house. Landlords make this possible. They also keep up with all the maintenance that any homeowner is familiar with. Houses are in a constant state of decay.
Except that landlords make a profit. The rent is higher than the mortgage+expenses. The landlord assumes risk of depreciation, but the response to the 2008 financial crisis showed that risk to be minimal.
That extra profit is an incentive for landlords to buy more, which pushes up the price of houses overall, whether being bought to live in, or bought to rent out
> The landlord assumes risk of depreciation, but the response to the 2008 financial crisis showed that risk to be minimal
Then it seems you think risk is overpriced. That fair enough.
But if the whole market of landlords disagrees, the burden is on you to demonstrate otherwise.
> the response to the 2008 financial crisis showed
That's like saying "the fact my house didn't burn down showed that my fire-insurance was worthless". That's not how risk works.
If you disagree, buy a house yourself, and offer it at lower-than-market rental rates. If no one with skin in the game is willing to do that, what can be done? It's not like the lower-end rental market is only affordable to the 1% - There are plenty small-time middle-class landlords.
> By buying a house someone else could have bought
I interpret "others are struggling having roof over their heads" as struggling to make rent, not purchase a house. If you struggle to pay the bills, it might be hard to get a mortgage.
> thus increasing the prices for everyone
The price is higher because someone else is taking on the risk. The alternative is prices are lower, but increasing the risk (and up-front cashflow requirements) for everyone.
> How does buying and renting a house provide something not already there
The house was already there to buy. Now it's there to rent. Again, I'd assume those who struggle the most are looking for rentals.
Or that landlords use other indicators as proxy for likeliness to repay, such your race, age, or education level. It's kind of like how "ban the box" initiatives basically made job prospects for people who are stereotyped to be criminals (eg. young black men) worse.
>DOLEAC: So we found that, on average, across the U.S., in places that ban the box, employment fell by 5 percent for young black men who didn’t have a college degree and by 3 percent for young Hispanic men who didn’t have a college degree. And so the next question is, who are they hiring instead? And we found, on average, the people who benefited were older men of color. So if you’re trying to avoid people who are actively involved in crime, older people are a pretty good bet. Criminal activity tends to decline with age.
Sure. The irony is that it won’t really matter because COVID. Landlords are desperate for cash, so they’ll wind up taking anyone with the deposit and first month’s rent - i.e. as the gp described, it will be the great deadbeat shuffle.
If a landlord nulls out the rental debt, that's completely on them. I would be quite wary renting to a person that missed 6-12 months of rent on their previous lease.
These debts are going to be chasing folks for a long time.
The pandemic made the situation a little different than usual. Many people got laid off for no fault of their own last year and couldn't find new work also from no fault of their own, the cities were just shut down for a while.
The US government decided they didn't want these people to just go homeless en masse (at least not in the middle of a pandemic) and thus put the eviction moratorium in place, thus showing that they recognize we were in an extraordinary situation.
Don't know about you, but I can't blame people for choosing not to go homeless when the government explicitly said you don't have to go homeless even if you can't pay your rent. So I wouldn't negatively judge ability to pay rent in this case if I were a landlord.
Granted, I might prefer someone who didn't get behind on payments if I had two otherwise equal applicants, but I wouldn't assume they're just not going to pay rent this time as well.
Landlords call previous landlords for references. To my knowledge, there is nothing against the law in sharing missed or late rent payment information with a new landlord.
This isn't very common because it's easy for tenants to lie and provide fake references or say they were living with a parent or relative, it's typically a waste of time for the landlord. Most landlords simply rely on official records like credit and background checks, proof of income etc.
1. Pause mortgage capital payments, so the landlord only needs to pay the interest - it might help somewhat
2. Or instead of (1), pause mortgage payments altogether (a "payment holiday") so there will be no negative consequences of the landlord not paying the mortgage for this time. For extra points, also freeze the accrual of interest.
3. Pay the landlords some fraction of their lost income, e.g. 50%, so they can afford to pay their mortgage lender, and won't end up getting their property taken by the bank (which would ultimately result in the tenants being evicted)
Only for GSE mortgages, and they just paused payments, didnt eliminate them (unlike rent which is essentially eliminated / uncollectible). Also, property taxes can be substantial and often higher than the mortgage depending on your area, and that wasn't addressed.
Ok but GSE is the government, so it's not like the government isn't helping landlords. And what is actually happening to people with other mortgages? Are landlords failing to meet private loans and getting foreclosed as a result? Or are they getting some relief too?
> and they just paused payments, didnt eliminate them (unlike rent which is essentially eliminated / uncollectible)
I don't buy this complaint (if I understand the situation correctly). The argument was purportedly that you can't make mortgage payments without rental income, but you can't lease your home anymore because it's occupied. But when you get the relief, you don't have to make mortgage payments for that duration at all... not now, not in the future. You only pay for months that you are able to lease your home. i.e. the mortgage payments for those months are eliminated. (Right?) That seems like a much better situation than renters' as far as the mortgage payments go (who legally owe backpay rent and might now end up homeless, landlords's care to follow through notwithstanding), certainly not worse.
> Also, property taxes can be substantial and often higher than the mortgage depending on your area, and that wasn't addressed.
Also not buying this one. The stimulus + unemployment were there for landlords too. For landlords who have half a dozen homes and can't afford all of them together, I'm sure they have plenty of resources at their disposal and wouldn't face eviction or the risk of landing on their streets like many of their tenants.
Schedule shifting means you're NOT paying for these months when you didn't have revenue. You'll be paying for later months... at the same time that you'll have revenue for it. Which is drastically unlike the case for renters, which they'll be obligated to backpay in the near future.
What does this even mean? In the US atleast, mortgages are a fixed set of payments. Usually, it is a total of 360 payments. You dont pay "for specific months" you pay a specific number of payments. Deferment means you still make all 360 payments, just at different times. Without deferment, you make 360 payments. With deferment, you also make 360 payments. In either case, you pay.
Renters backpaying rent is questionable. Once a renter is behind 12 months it is unlikely they will ever catch up. The typical response is the fear of credit blemishes -- except even this fear is gone in places like NYC -- many renters are holding occupancy of the property until all past rent is forgiven, wiping out all past liabilities.
> What does this even mean? In the US atleast, mortgages are a fixed set of payments. Usually, it is a total of 360 payments. You dont pay "for specific months" you pay a specific number of payments. Deferment means you still make all 360 payments, just at different times.
Which is entirely the point, and which is the luxury renters don't have. Say for example you have 1 year of mortgage left ($X), and the pandemic is also going to be over in 1 year. The schedule shift means you will need to pay $0 by a year from now (i.e. when the pandemic & associated reliefs are over). You will simply have to pay $X in 2 years—which you can obtain by evicting your tenant and getting your rental income the second year. By contrast, your tenant will have to pay the entire $X after the moratorium is over in 1 year (not in 2 years). That's terrible in comparison. They don't have the luxury of shifting everything an extra year like a landlord.
> Renters backpaying rent is questionable. Once a renter is behind 12 months it is unlikely they will ever catch up. The typical response is the fear of credit blemishes -- except even this fear is gone in places like NYC -- many renters are holding occupancy of the property until all past rent is forgiven, wiping out all past liabilities.
Well it's up to you as a landlord if you don't want to pursue your tenant for their debts. You could offer a schedule shift if you wanted to, or do whatever else you wanted, if you really wanted to get your money back. If another landlord doesn't want to pursue their tenant, it's up to them. Not up to us to get sad about it.
Employers don't put many jobs there. Even in NYC, very transit oriented, is do crowded and expensive that commutes are long, and often too crowded ("straphanging") and with transfers that don't let you get that time back for book/podcast.
Oh I'm in full agreement, this is one of the many reasons I left la.
Once I went to car free I got rid of about 25,000 in credit card debt in 6 months or so. Much of why so many Americans are so desperately poor has to do with car ownership. While it's possible to get Uncle Jimmy's Old Jeep running, most people just finance something. Once you make your car payment your insurance and gas, that's easily a third of your income. Compared to a $100 a month bus pass
Not in the US there isn't. And the ones there are are:
1. Expensive
2. Not particularly family friendly
So if you are a high earner with roommates or a partner and no children, you have options. For the remaining 90% of the workforce, it isn't particularly feasible.
Same. I used to be impressed by cities like NYC, and then I moved to Japan for a few years and I realized that I'm not sure there is a city in the US that makes the top 5, or possibly top 10, best cities in the world. At least not in terms of livability.
People have over an hour commutes riding transit in nyc too. You only luck out if you manage to secure a job and an apartment along the same transit line, and that's rarely easy or cheap. Especially if you suddenly get a new job.
I had a starling Revelation today. People just don't read anymore, instead they buy a book so they can take some photos for Instagram and then shove it under a couch or something.
The biggest problem with so much access to information, is it's simply impossible to absorb it all. You can read tweets from hundreds of people before you can get through the first chapter of Harry Potter.
I fear this has caused a permanent dumbing down of society
> I had a starling Revelation today. People just don't read anymore, instead they buy a book so they can take some photos for Instagram and then shove it under a couch or something.
There's some selection bias here, because you wouldn't know about all the people who do read but don't post it to instagram.
Perhaps it has to do with the type of fiction and maybe a little bit with school? When I was done with high school one of the things I celebrated was that I would never (have to) read a fiction book ever again. Literature class turned me so off from reading that I was fairly convinced about this.
A couple of years later I stumbled across Light Novels, which led to Web Novels, and eventually more fiction of other types. Nowadays I sometimes wish that I would read less. Sometimes my binge reading can get out of hand.
Perhaps there are others that have been turned off from reading? Perhaps they simply haven't come across the type of fiction that would grip them? Fiction is about entertainment after all. Books will offer you the widest variety of stories. More so than any other entertainment medium. There should be something for most people.
Functional literary is quite high, but it is both a subject of research and social criticism that American culture is reverting to an oral - rather than literate - culture.
When the Internet really took off in the mid 1990s I thought to myself with all the websites, IRC, email, blogs more people than ever are reading. Sure it's not books which are the crafted thoughts of writers instead the Internet is a million concepts.
I would like to read the last 10 books I bought none of which I finished and only a couple of which I've started. Instead I find myself scrolling hacker news and Twitter.
Twitter isn’t really better than Facebook, it’s short content designed to provoke an emotional reaction. HN really isn't either, although the emotional reactions here are a lot fewer and far between.
Pick up the book on the top of the stack and read the first chapter right now. You’ll be happy you did!
Ironically I can't even read this due to the login wall.
I hate the social media aspect of LinkedIn so much. I don't want to validate you , I don't think physical appearance was any role in the hiring process, but LinkedIn keeps telling me to upload a picture.
It's still the best way to find a job, but I try to avoid the social aspects.
I do think Dart is the best of both worlds though. Having real types, not hacked together typescript stuff is very good. That's the other thing the nodejs ecosystem feels like a bunch of duct tape slap together again and again