Visiting Chelsea Manning in prison - <AUTHOR> https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/xychelsea/ <comment><USER2> I find it very sad that the bulk of comments on this matter are about Manning being trans rather than the injustice of jailing a kid for 30 years for blowing the whistle on war crimes.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Manning should spend 30 years in jail, but she wasn't convicted for whistleblowing.

She was acquitted for leaking the few files related to war crimes; she was convicted of leaking 750000 unrelated documents.

<comment><USER4> Uh yeah. The charge is whatever will stick. Military courts will never uphold the law as written if they feel the need to punish a soldier for being non- soldierly. (The judge, Col. Denise Lind, intentionally came to an illegal ruling to punish someone she didn't like. She's a traitor.)

The law is very clear that it's your _duty_ to stop illegal actions, not merely report them and carry on. Chelsea tried just reporting the problems but that didn't do anything and she was given direct orders to continue the illegal activities. The guilty party (us, our government) doesn't really have a leg to stand on when complaining about the measures she was forced to take.

Imagine a convicted kiddy fiddler complaining that their legal business files got examined in court with their illegal files. Nobody would case, It's the price of crime...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > She hopes that the world hasn't forgotten about her.

No, we haven't. And we also haven't forgotten about the war crimes she published.

<comment><USER6> Hmm I'm not sure. I'm not from US, and while I am very familiar with Edward Snowden, I have never heard of Chelsea Manning, I had to do a wiki search to read a bit about her. I guess the international coverage just wasn't the same in her case.

<comment><USER7> She was more famous under "Bradley" before she came out as trans. Maybe that rings a bell?

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately you are pointing directly at a major reason why the world forgot about Bradley Manning the war crimes exposer: she changed her name to Chelsea Manning and the media story changed to transgenderism / trans rights.

So, basically the media story and the name changed / got more complex, and a lot of people got left behind / quit caring.

<comment><USER9> Also, it's harder to make the case that Manning was a whistleblower. Manning just dumped as much classified intel info wikileaks as she could. More of a disgruntled employee than freedom crusader IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those people who are curious about the act of disseminating information like Manning did, allow me to summarize.

When you get a clearance, and often even when just working with confidential documents, the DoD has you sign an SF312, which is a classified information non-disclosure.

When you join the military, one of your first acts is to be sworn in, and you swear an oath, "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

Now let me say this as clearly as possible:

The Constitutional oath outranks the NDA. Period. If in doubt, the oath wins, every single time.

That being said though, there is more room for nuance in the stories, primarily due to what kind of information is revealed, what it's intended purpose was, and who is was distributed to.

In my opinion Snowden was more aware of this than Manning, because he did due diligence to review the documents before sharing them, and then making sure to limit damaging information that was actually vital to _actual_ national security, and was very specific with the organizations he shared the information with about these requirements.

Manning did a huge document dump, which I think was well intentioned and had the right reasons behind it, but he didn't think it through in detail enough or take the time to redact the information.

So even if the constitutional oath outweighs the SF312 NDA, it's still breaking the law, but we need to draw very clear distinctions between breaking an NDA and the too oft-cited charges of "treason", which by definition is aiding and abetting the enemy during times of war.

I would also like to point out the hypocrisy of the establishment when it comes to classified leaking, because people in the White House and on the Hill leak all kinds of classified material whenever it happens to be expedient to them politically. A good example of this is the Cheney leak that outed Valerie Plame. Where are the cries about treason against Cheney? (whom I personally think is demonstratively more of a _traitor_ than any of the aforementioned names...)

To me, one of the primary problems DoD faces these days is that there is little to no punishment for being openly unconstitutional, and people have not only forgotten their oaths and their importance, but have failed to call out others who have acted against theirs. To me, an oath still means something, but I want to know... if I could prove someone broke their oath with knowledge, what is the legal punishment offered?

Whatever it is, that is what we need to be doing against those in positions of power who spend more effort undermining the constitution than defending it. (and personally, I think the true enemies of the constitution wear business suits and ties, not thwabs...looking at you wallstreet)

<comment><USER2> I completely agree. Manning was clearly well-intentioned, but she leaked information including diplomatic cables that was not relevant to war crimes or any such malfeasance. The only effect of those leaks was to hurt the interests of the United States.

Her case is certainly much less clear-cut than Snowden's, as she was not a contractor and was more likely to be covered by whistleblower protection going through channels.

But realistically, we all know that the US government was never, ever, going to release that "Collateral Murder" video.

The great shame of all this is that whistleblower protections and mandatory escalations haven't been expanded so the next generation of do-gooders can work within the system to right these wrongs.

<comment><USER4> > I completely agree. Manning was clearly well-intentioned, but she leaked > information including diplomatic cables that was not relevant to war crimes > or any such malfeasance.

Documents of illegal behavior were intermingled with the rest. It's not a whistleblower's responsibility to sort through the data, nor would we want it to be. They aren't qualified to know if those other files contribute to the understanding of the situation

Imagine if someone leaked documents of child molestation but didn't leak all of them, allowing the culprits to escape justice because of a weak case.

> The only effect of those leaks was to hurt the interests of the United > States.

That's our fault for letting our soldiers break the law, and for not having _any_ procedures in place to stop this before it got this far. (ie, a whistleblower hotline that actually got stuff done.)

Chelsea witnessed people in the US Armed Forces faking (and cooperating with external faking of) evidence, knowingly sending innocent people to US military prisons where we now know (and she and they knew at the time) they being were tortured and murdered. Any delay in whistleblowing to sort through thousands of files would simply get more people killed.

Delaying for even a minute would have been the morally irresponsible answer.

<comment><USER2> I disagree. Delaying would have been much smarter.

Snowden did it right, working with journalists to release his information in a way that did not hurt US and allied interests without _benefit_.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you, sitting coddled in comfort, think we should have given your paid killers more time to hide the evidence.

The "benefit" as you phrase it is not murdering innocent people, and for them, not being murdered. That's pretty huge!

You're condoning allowing ongoing murder because you don't like the reputation damage that comes from being proven to be a murderer.

Can't take the time, don't do the crime.

<comment><USER2> Your username seems appropriate. You deliberately misconstrued my post.

I'm all for blowing the whistle on warcrimes. Manning released information that was not criminal by any definition, like diplomatic cables.

Snowden's responsible disclosure method was more effective, too. Spread out over a year, every news cycle contained a new headline from him. He had far greater impact.

<comment><USER4> > Manning released information that was not criminal by any definition, like > diplomatic cables.

Which was intermixed with all the evidence of warcrimes. It's not the whistleblower's job to clean up the criminal's papers before reporting them.

And who's to say (are you a judge?) what's relevant to the crimes? You'd have to read every document, in the context of all the others, to begin to know. It'd be wrong to try to pare the archive down, even if it was remotely possible.

Also, we learned a lot of other things that didn't rise to the level of warcrimes themselves but are a lot better exposed.

> I'm all for blowing the whistle on warcrimes.

Obviously not _all_ for it. More like, mostly, or kinda, for it. Well, like, not totally against. Like, you're for it, but only if it's done in ways you approve of. Otherwise, fuck the victims...

> Snowden's responsible disclosure method was more effective, too.

Oh I see, you are totally for whistleblowers, you're even offering advice to Manning on how to make a bigger splash. Well why didn't you say so?

> in a way that did not hurt US and allied interests without benefit.

Yeah, you're clearly just upset that Manning leaked our shit but you've got to realize that nobody cares what the criminals want. We lost the right to complain when we let our soldiers murder people and covered it up.

> Your username seems appropriate. You deliberately misconstrued my post.

No Ad Hominem needed. (Do you even know what that is?) Your point was stupid on it own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> David House here. Still parsing the past. If people can keep the wolves off my back for a second maybe I can update you guys on some truth.

Edit: While we fight, people are dying.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _I will be Chelsea's first visitor since her sister in November._

> _I bring up her recent appeal to reduce her sentence from 35 years to 10 > years, and she seems worried that it didn't receive enough coverage in the > press. She hopes that the world hasn't forgotten about her._

I am afraid world has already forgotten.

Google search for _" site:news.ycombinator.com Chelsea Manning"_ for past month gives three results including this one. _" Manning"_ gives more results, but only in reference to Snowden and Panama Papers, no prison.

And transgender rights activists are more busy with right gender pronouns then with him/her.

<comment><USER13> The correct pronoun is 'her', not 'him/her', and a lot of trans activists and allies do spend an inordinate amount (which wouldn't be so necessary if people made even a small effort to get them correct) of time correcting people on pronouns, but there is a lot of work that transgender rights activists are doing for people in prison in general, and I do know that they've been involved with some of the work to help ensure that she is able to access appropriate treatment while she's in prison.

It seems like it would be very difficult for any civil rights advocacy groups to be able to do much for her though, since she's not a civilian or in a civilian prison.

<comment><USER14> > The correct pronoun is 'her', not 'him/her'

No, the correct pronoun is 'him.' Chelsea Manning, despite his self-perception and despite his name change, is and always will be a man. Gender is an objective, physical, biological fact, not a subjective experience.

There are people who believe that they are disfigured even though they are perfectly normal looking; they are not disfigured, even though they believe so. There are people who believe that their limbs are not their own; those limbs are theirs, whatever their perception. There are people who believe that they are the Messiah; they are not.

When talking _to_ someone, it may be therapeutic (or simply kind) to use the words he prefers even if they are incorrect, but when talking _about_ someone, there is no need to humour his error.

<comment><USER15> I understand what you are saying--your comment will be out of sight soon, by the way--but, does it hurts to "humour" someone? What do you lose or win? Why not just be nice to others?

<comment><USER16> Agreed. The world is not this black and white place we might sometimes try to make it. Rather than writing diatribes about how people are "objectively" wrong about matters of no consequence, why not save the effort and call people what they want to be called?

<comment><USER17> What's the point of titles, adjectives, pronouns if they can be manipulated by the subject?

Statement:

"Dr. Smith ran across the street. She was terrified of what would happen next"

What actually happened:

"A burly transgender man who believes he is a doctor ran across the street."

<comment><USER16> This isn't a police report. In matters of consequence, I'd expect you would call things by whatever is most conducive to the target audience understanding what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whatever sympathies you want to arouse for Pvt Manning for political purposes, however wordily and clumsily expressed, try to keep in mind that throughout all of history, in all contexts, regardless of rank, Manning would have been summarily hanged as a spy and/or traitor rather than merely imprisoned. Manning got off nice and easy.

That said, it was a total failure of the system to allow someone so mentally unstable to have any kind of clearance. Manning's AFQT score was probably 99 at a time when the army had trouble getting anyone literate to join. And so there wasn't a discharge. Here's an interesting interview about Manning's (near) discharge:

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/28/bradley- manning...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/28/bradley-manning- video-transcript-wikileaks)

<comment><USER19> > ...at a time when the army had trouble getting anyone literate...

In 2007? Where are you getting that? For the USMC 01-09 were glory years when it came to enlistment quality, so much so that they tightened requirements - and practically banned recruits and reenlistees with visible tattoos... while doubling in size. I'd be surprised to learn that the Army didn't enjoy the same trend.

<comment><USER20> I enlisted in the USMC in 2007, there were a lot of recruits but the quality was low and they had trouble getting the higher AFQTs joining them as opposed to the Navy or Air Force.

<comment><USER19> Hmm, that is when I got out - two boot drops, both seemed fine. The infantry is much less likely to draw underachievers though, so we'd be less likely to see the low quality recruits.

<comment><USER20> The guys going infantry were the best of the platoon by far. With the exception of one or two nobody seemed _bad_ or outright undesirable, just slightly below what I had expected.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


High School Girl takes on San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/07/doers-in-action-teen-coder-eva-zheng-takes-on-san-francisco.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Good job Eva! Way to inspire people your age and your gender. Have fun in SF!

</comment><comment><USER2> Way to go, Eva! So proud of you.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice work!</comment>


U.OF TORONTO SCIENTISTS SOLVE PUZZLE OF CONVERTING CO₂ EMISSIONS TO FUEL - <AUTHOR> http://news.artsci.utoronto.ca/all-news/scientists-solve-puzzle-converting-emissions-fuel/ <comment><USER2> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment>


Real-Time Collaboration Has Stalled...For Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/real-time-collaboration-has-st.php <comment><USER2> As all of us chatters and instant messengers grow up and enter the "real world", we are realizing that those forms of communication and collaboration can be really useful at work.

Unfortunately, the usual reaction is to get everyone in your office on yahoo/aim/gchat/msn messenger, which is far from ideal.

I think this space is bound to see quite a bit of growth in the near future, and it's far from a solved problem. That's why we're building <http://shoptalkapp.com> :)

<comment><AUTHOR> What makes this different from Campfire or group chat in Gtalk?

<comment><USER2> It's quite a bit different from group chat in Gtalk. The biggest difference is that the rooms are persistent and any time you log in you can scroll back to catch up on missed conversations. With Gtalk (or any IM service) group chats are usually ad-hoc and treated more like meetings: you start one, talk for a while, then close it. The idea here is to have a constant stream and have topic- or team-oriented rooms where people can always go to ask questions or get ideas from their coworkers.

It _is_ , however, very similar to Campfire. Right now, the advantages over Campfire include performance (which is actually quite key for real-time conversations like this), and the ability to sit in multiple rooms at once and receive notifications about messages to you in background rooms (also pretty important, we've found). That said, we're in beta! So, we definitely plan on differentiating ourselves more in the coming months.

<comment><USER3> That is pretty similar to how a few starts i've worked at have treated skype. Unread message counts are analogous to the bg chat thing you mention, you can also get the scroll-back.

Please make a non-web client -- maybe an air app, even.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FREE PDF: Swift 2 Cheat Sheet and Quick Reference - <AUTHOR> http://swiftmonthly.com/?cheatsheet <comment><USER2> If I'm giving out my email, this doesn't qualify as "free".

</comment><comment><USER3> Signed up with temporary email - 404'd on downloading the pdf. Anyone else?

<comment><USER4> Same here, download doesn't seem to be working</comment></comment>


Study of 60K shows hydroxychloroquine's potent prophylactic effect on SARS Cov2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.iltempo.it/salute/2020/04/28/news/coronavirus-farmaci-efficaci-news-danni-cura-annalisa-chiusolo-artrite-terapia-idrossiclorochina-sars-cov2-1321227/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not a double blind study, just another study showing that people taking hydroxychloroquine for lupus or arthritis suffered no deaths or hospitalizations in Italy.

However, since many cases are asymptomatic anyway, these results could be coincidental despite the large group studied.

The most compelling anecdotal evidence is that lupus is usually a strong comorbidity for infectious disease, and in this case it appears to not be.</comment>


Silhouettes of the bomb: what can we learn from the shapes of atomic weapons? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/04/22/bomb-silhouettes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Relatedly, I find it deeply troubling at some level to know that the exact shape of the Earth (specifically, mass and magnetic distribution) is highly classified, since it's important to ICBM guidance.

<comment><USER2> Source? I'd like to read about this.

<comment><USER3> Could be something to do with this:

[http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/)

 _" NASA's Applications Satellites and National Security Requirements:_

 _NASA planned on launching the Geodynamics Experimental Ocean Satellite-3 (GEOS-3) with a radar altimeter whose data would generate more accurate gravity models than any measuring devices previously flown. The data would be used to meet civilian requirements and by the U.S. Navy to improve the accuracy of its submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Because it also had the potential to be used by the Soviets for the same purpose, the DoD requested NASA to encrypt the data, limit the acquisition of data over the ocean areas where Soviet ballistic missile submarines operated, or delay the planned April 1975 launch until the issue could be resolved. It also requested encryption of the data from the even more capable radar altimeter planned for SEASAT-A. NASA rejected these requests but quickly agreed to restrict the dissemination of the GEOS-3 data collected over the regions where Soviet ballistic missile submarines operated (Document 38). "_

However is it still the case that NASA continue to withhold this data, or is it data collected by the NSA/NRO/et al's satellites that's considered classified?

<comment><USER4> they should be keeping that secret; good gravity models are a major part of the difference in accuracy of American missiles vs Russian ones.

<comment><USER5> Yes because the last thing you want is for the "soviets" to be able to hit their target. Surely them hitting instead a city near by or just using bigger nukes to compensate for lesser accuracy is a much better approach.

<comment><USER6> No, the more inaccurate their targeting, the harder it was for them pull off a counter-force first strike. No need to lead them into temptation....

Once they're launched, you've already lost catastrophicly, no matter exactly where they come down.

And why the scare quotes for our adversaries who build 40,000 nuclear warheads, most of them aimed directly at us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool :)

But also see Rapatronic photographs, at <10ns after detonation: [http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3104424/posts](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3104424/posts)

</comment><comment><USER8> I still don't understand how this stuff is so hard. The US pulled it off in a few years, in the 40s. Total cost of a few billion. The biggest issue is enrichment, but again, they did it within that time and budget. Several other countries/physicists were on to the same idea.

Even a simple gun type with a 20kton yield is enough to severely harm a city, right? So even without the complexities of implosion or thermonuclear, it seems any dedicated actor, even a private one, should be able to pull it off. Delivery systems aside; I'd guess testing ICBMs would be difficult enough by itself.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER9> Making a gun-type bomb from enriched uranium isn't that hard. Any shop capable of building an auto engine could do it. Even machining uranium isn't that hard; there's a Union Carbide tech note on that. It requires a respirator and protective gear, but not remote controlled machine tools. That's why anti- proliferation people are so concerned about enriched uranium.

But enriched uranium is hard to make. The old gaseous diffusion process was incredibly inefficient - plants over a mile long to make tens of kilograms. Centrifuges have changed that. Centrifuge plants aren't all that big, about Wal-Mart sized. They're still expensive. Highly enriched uranium is only made for bomb purposes; power reactors don't need it (although some submarine reactors have used it), so it's not made without good reason.

There's some concern about laser enrichment, which apparently works quite well and is seldom discussed. The US has at least one laser enrichment plant.

Plutonium bombs are hard to get right. A gun bomb with plutonium will pre- detonate. It takes an implosion. Making a perfectly symmetrical implosion is hard. The explosive lenses have to be very uniform in density and accurate in dimension, while being made out of a soft plastic explosive. There are tricks to the joints where the lenses meet, some of which are still classified. Then there's the whole detonator thing, although getting the big pulse required is easier than it was 50 years ago.

Plutonium is a by-product of reactor operation. Thus, there's more of it around than is really needed. The US and the former USSR made way too much (tons). But working with plutonium is a huge headache. The dust is radioactive and poisonous. The PUREX chemical process to refine it from reactor fuel rods is difficult; places which did it tend to be toxic waste sites now. Its machining properties are strange; it expands when heated but then doesn't contract fully. Plutonium bombs usually have a neutron generator to get things started, and surrounding shells to perform neutron reflection and tamping. While the general principles are well known, it takes a lot of engineering R&D to get it working right, including many non-nuclear test explosions.

That's why we don't see terrorist groups making bombs from spent fuel rods.

<comment><USER10> Are there _any_ naval reactors that don't use HEU?

<comment><USER6> Super carriers have a much bigger space budget than submarines, so I wouldn't be surprised if they used less enriched uranium. On the other hand, refueling is a total pain, so that might put a premium on the total U-235 in the fuel rods (granted, some of the U-238 will breed into plutonium and some of that will burn up, but...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This brings to mind the story of John Coster-Mullen - the first person to build an accurate historical replica of Little Boy. I'd recommend reading the New Yorker article on it. It's a pretty fascinating read.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/atomic- john](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/atomic-john)

</comment><comment><USER12> "You have the long-barrels that look like gun-type designs."

No. That setup was abandoned very early on, as in even before the end of WWII. The OP should have spent more time reading this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon) and less time speculating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not in artillery. It was a narrower diameter than either implosion or Teller- Ulam until probably the 70s or 80s, at which point we'd given up on nuclear artillery.

(I am confident the author of the blog is knowledgeable about the US arsenal.)

<comment><USER6> Fascinating; per Wikipedia, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W79](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W79) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48) they used a "linear implosion" technique, but it sounds like it had about the same inefficiency as the Little Boy gun assembly design. Which for safety reasons alone are iffy to field, and even more I'd imagine in a _quickly_ accelerated artillery shell....

<comment><AUTHOR> From reading Command and Control, a lot of the US arsenal was manifestly unsafe for a long time. Based on the number of accidents, and lack of criticality, I suspect there was some super secret design choice or design flaw which meant many classes of weapon would never go critical at all. Someone probably made the decision that only a deterrent was important, so a bunch of unsafe weapons should instead be rendered largely inert while making other gestures of readiness. I don't have any data to support that other than just the lack of unintentional nuclear detonations.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle- re...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


So you want to learn morse code - <AUTHOR> http://www.hfradio.org/koch_1.html

<comment><USER2> There is a pretty decent program out there to teach you to copy Morse Code quickly. I can't remember the name of it but it was DOS based so very light- weight. I had to learn to copy 20WPM with 96% accuracy back-to-back. The highest I'd been able to accurately get was 32.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried a lot of DOS morse tutors, and the best one out of the lot is Morse Academy (though SuperMorse and Ward Cunningham's "Morse Code Teaching Machine" are also good).

Some commerical and shareware windows morse tutors look decent, but I haven't had any luck getting them to run on Linux under Wine; and the freeware Windows morse tutors leave a lot to be desired.

As for Linux, pretty much all of the Linux morse tutors I've tried pale in comparison to Morse Academy.

Morse Academy is what I'm using to train every day. I've started with it sending characters at 25 wpm, with spaces in between to get the effective sending rate down to 15 wpm. This is called the Farnsworth Method, and it's working great for me.

I also combine this with the Koch Method, which is just adding a character at a time to those you already know and practicing until you know that character, and then adding another one, etc.

Sometimes the new character will be too close in sound to one or more characters I already know, so I drill just the characters that I'm having problems with until I no longer confuse them for one another, and then move back to studying the whole set of characters I know so far.

All this and more is easily done in Morse Academy. I just wish there was a Linux clone of it, as it's not quite perfect and could be improved (for example, from time to time there's a tiny glitch in the audio that could make me miss a character. I think this is due to imperfect emulation on the part of dosbox, which is what I use to run DOS programs).</comment></comment>


Time travel in Haskell for dummies (Tardis monad) (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://kcsongor.github.io/time-travel-in-haskell-for-dummies/ <comment><AUTHOR> The first "wow, neat" moment of the article is the single-pass Haskell function that replaces every element of a list with that list's largest element. Haskell's laziness makes for some crazy possibilities and some totally incomprehensible performance properties.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are contrarian anecdotes so alluring? - <AUTHOR> Every single time there's a discussion on HN about how "X helps to achieve Y" someone will say, without fail, "I tried X and nothing happened", or "I tried X and all this terrible stuff happened".
They'll say this in response to a weak study. They'll say it in response to a large, well run, meta-analysis of other large well run studies.
I've probably done it.
Why is the contrarian anecdote so common? WHy do we feel the need to drop these into discussion? <comment><USER2> Probably because the human brain evolved long before there were any large, well-run meta-analyses of scientific studies.

50,000 years ago, if someone made a claim, and you had experience to the contrary, it was important to your tribe to hear the counter-evidence, lest they start making decisions without all the currently-available information.

Our brains may rationally absorb "this effect holds true for 95% of participants, and if it doesn't for you, that's within the range of normalcy (the other 5%) but doesn't invalidate the findings". But our instincts aren't as nuanced.</comment>


The Silicon Valley Suicides - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I wonder how many of these children have been given anything to live for, rather than simply goals like material gain.

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is that you are supposed to figure out what to live for on your own. If anything, they are given too much to live for, so when something turns sour they do not know what else to do.

<comment><USER4> Depression of being left behind is also an important factor.</comment></comment></comment>


Project Delta aims to create the perfect cookie (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_05_a_bakeoff.html

<comment><AUTHOR> An industrial food developer pits their traditional R&D model against two trendy software development methodologies: religious XP and 'open source'

Of course Gladwell makes his usual obvious, almost trollish mistakes, piled in great heaps: _"On the one hand, there was the 'open source' movement. Its patron saint was Linus Torvald, the Norwegian hacker who decided to build a free version of Unix"_</comment>


Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-housing-rent-cap/berlin-approves-5-year-rent-freeze-in-german-capital-idUSS8N20O06F <comment><USER2> As much as I can sympathise with the predicament, this decision, and the Berlin housing market in general, absolutely baffles me.

When I moved here I was warned of 100 people turning up to a flat viewing, and laughed it off as some hyperbole. Only later did I find out that it _actually happens_ , albeit the maximum viewing I went to was around a meagre 50. Having come from the UK, I found the situation in Berlin to be absolutely ridiculous. There are _already_ strict rental price limitations in place (based on location, size of the property etc.), and although these can be skirted, in general they're clearly very effective.

Again, I sympathise with city housing being very expensive, and don't believe that purely gentrified city centres are likely to be a good thing. Still, economics 101 seems to suggest that merely putting rental freezes in doesn't fix the problem. It just (as is already the case in Berlin), leads to excess demand. The solution is to _build houses_ , but what kind of investor is going to throw their money at Berlin, where their opportunity to make a return on their investment is severely hampered? I just don't understand this stance at all.

<comment><USER3> Freezing rents is not meant to be a solution for a lack of housing. It's a solution to the explosive increase of rents of existing ones.

There are lots of people where the rents of their current apartment have increased so much, that they had to move out. This solution is trying to fix that.

Also freezing rents doesn't mean Berlin will stop building new houses. If there is big demand for housing in a city one needs both:

1\. make sure people currently living in the city are able to do so in the future

2\. make sure new people coming to the city have available space

Freezing rents is aimed at problem one. These solutions are not exclusive.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. That is where the future of economics is, where the future of humanity in general pretty much is, and every democracy is consistently demonstrating the total inability for legislatures to sacrifice the advantage of those lucky enough to inhabit cities as they exist now for the benefit of all those who would grow the economy and future in the cities tomorrow. Largely because those in the cities have the money and influence to buy the politicians.

<comment><USER5> I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant.

Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers.

<comment><USER6> That's odd because it it's pretty much the polar opposite of what I've experienced.

Everyone wants to move to the big cities, especially Berlin, as they provide culture and a sense of freedom. You are able to meet like-minded people and are able to experience culture and infrastructure that simply does not exist in rural areas.

This of course makes makes the situation for the villages worse as many young people move away. Who's left are old people and those who are not qualified to find work or education elsewhere.

The population decline in those regions also means a decline in infrastructure, economy and cultural events, which makes those regions even more unattractive, perpetuating the cycle.

There is a slight trend of dropouts creating alternative living communities in those areas as abandoned houses & property can be had for very cheap. But their isolated nature means that often they will not last as their inhabitants move back to the city were their original peer group is.

<comment><USER7> The problem with cities is that they have really bad failure modes. Consider Baltimore. The city has been run by a single political party for decades, and run right into the ground. Notice the trend in these population stats:

[https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore- maryland](https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland)

This is a city right next to DC, in an essentially recession proof area with lots of jobs.

I've known a number of people who were big proponents of living in cities until either (a) they were robbed, or (b) they had kids and realized there was no decent school there, and (c) they had no chance of impacting the government in any way to affect change. They all ended up moving to the burbs.

<comment><USER8> Are robberies less common in the suburbs?

Are schools in the suburbs better than those in the city?

Why is it easier to affect government in suburbs?

I'm not sure if you're discussing Baltimore in particular or if you are making these points generally. I'm not sure on robberies, but I live in Sydney and I don't think there is a big gap between school quality and government participation in suburbs vs cities.

<comment> matt-attack My experience has been yes to all three of those. I've lived for decades in both Orange County (suburbs) and Los Angeles (city).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its really simple. We should tax property AND rent to the point where it becomes unprofitable to hoard it for purposes of unproductive wealth extraction. Then change all rent contracts into lease-buy contracts.

You would accumulate a good percentage of madly overpriced rentals that no one wants then they go bankrupt one by one. You get those delicious market dynamics we [apparently] crave more than any social convention. Buildings should be hot potatoes that you don't want to hold for to long. With this much demand it wont even affect housing prices but even if it did, who cares?

Gradually, (in stead of rent) people pay tax at market rates. We can keep the large scale wealth extraction and continue to force people into productivity only it would be the government doing it.

The same logic applies as with the teachers, taxi drivers, cleaners, garbage men, restaurant employees etc: If you don't like it you can just leave the city. Get some of that delicious mobility going and gtfo. They can just leave for the sake of efficiency and availability. Its that simple: Just go away.

If you have to chose between [say] 1) a corner store OR 2) a land lord it should be obvious which one to get rid of.

If they are contributing to quality of life by selling food and employing people we should consider giving the store a tax cut. One could also extend the tax cut to the people working there and have cheap stores.

Its hilariously unproductive to have a usury scheme of greedy unproductive rent seekers extracting wealth from every transaction that is some how remotely related to real estate.

I just want to pay for the ice cream, pay the people involved in making the ice cream happen. Why would I pay 80% to someone who doesn't do anything I need?

<comment><USER10> Can you clarify what problem you are trying to solve with this proposal?

No one is obligated to rent a property from someone else. You rent if you believe it's in your interest to rent, instead of buy. Why stop two consenting people from entering into rental agreements, both of whom believe it's in their interest?

Some people prefer to rent: they don't want to be obligated to live somewhere for 10 to 30 years. They prefer to be free of commitments and loans (and/or don't have enough cash to buy). I wanted to live somewhere for a medium period of time (a few years) with no significant commitment or risk, then move on. I had just moved to the city and wasn't sure where I would ultimately want to live long-term. Landlords can also rent properties to people who have far worse credit and far fewer assets than would be required to buy the same property. I was able to rent a property much nicer than I could have afforded to buy at the time, since I had income but little wealth and credit. (The landlord in that case is taking on unsecured risk that I will default on our contract.)

Landlords also provide useful services to their tenants: they are responsible for all upkeep associated with the property. When I rented, I was glad not to have to deal with any of that. Landlord takes care of all the yard, or common spaces in an apartment, and if something breaks I just call the landlord. If you own appliances and real estate yourself, then you are potentially on the hook for significant costs if something breaks. Maybe the refrigerator breaks and you need to buy a new one: the landlord needs to budget or purchase insurance for that, while a renter does not. Landlords also assume liability for their property: if e.g. asbestos is found on the land, they may be responsible for paying for the cleanup.

Property owners are forced to tie up their assets in the real estate. Renters don't have to. Let's say that I have $1 million in cash, and I want to live somewhere. I don't necessarily want to _have_ to invest all of my cash in real estate - not even a down payment on a mortgage. Renting might be a preferable alternative so that I can use my cash for other higher-value investments or to fund a business.

Lastly, landlords assume risk. If they can't find a tenant for their property, then it sits idle and they take a loss. When you own property, you can lose a significant amount of money if the property depreciates, as happened during the last recession. When you're renting, your risk is capped - you owe the rent but that's it.

Renting isn't wealth extraction. Like staying in a hotel, it's commerce, an exchange of money (rent) for services (temporary right to occupy a property). If you want to buy a property from its current owner, instead of renting it from them in a landlord-tenant relationship, then make them an offer, and if you both agree then you can do that instead.

<comment><USER11> > No one is obligated to rent a property from someone else. You rent if you > believe it's in your interest to rent, instead of buy.

Ok, how does this work. In germany, you usually need to pay 20-30% of the full price from your own saved funds when buying property. 100% financing is rare and usually only available for people that have sufficient assets. So people that have a low income basically never have a chance to buy. They don't choose to rent. Their only alternative is living in the street.

Rents in Berlin have been rising substantially faster than wages for the last decade or so, turning this into a vicious circle that even the middle class cannot escape from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think most people with an understanding of economics would agree that more supply is needed. The problem is, zoning laws are made by the cities themselves, which means they are ultimately made by the people who already live there. People who already live there don't want their neighborhoods bulldozed for luxury high rises, which is what happens when zoning is abolished.

Then, there is the problem of the suburbs. A lot of people suggest moving to the suburbs and embracing a longer commute as the solution. The problem is, suburbs also control their own zoning laws, just like cities, and surprise - they also don't want their neighborhoods bulldozed for luxury apartments.

So the problem is essentially a power issue - who holds the power? Without the political power to make zoning changes, little new housing will be built. I don't see a solution here. So it seems that the local people embrace rent control as the best possible solution among alternatives. Viewed from that perspective, it's not so bad after all. The city's residents will feel the impacts, and if it's not working out, they will eventually repeal the law. Big deal.

<comment><USER13> I wish someone with a deeper understanding would go to Japan and study how they got this so right. Their zoning laws don't separate uses, only nuisance levels, so you often see residential in commercial areas and small shops in residential neighborhoods. It's amazingly effective at reducing how far you need to go to get places, and gives the whole city a much more organic feel. Plus, there is actually housing if there's demand for it.

Is it just Japanese cultural collectivism that made this work? How did they make this happen when we failed so badly? I have no idea.

<comment><USER14> It's actually pretty simple: housing isn't an investment vehicle like it is in many parts of the West. The social and historical reasons why this is so in Japan are complicated, but the overall circumstances are not.

You can either have affordable housing that's not an appreciating asset or let finance/real estate Capital run roughshod over everything in speculative flurries, leading to the insane state of affairs in many western cities today. You can't have both.

<comment><USER15> I read today that Fortress Investments purchased over 100,000 affordable units from the Japanese government for 60bn JPY in 2017 and plans to spend about as much on renovation. [1] Apparently firms like this usually expect an 18% return on these kinds of investments.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/fortress-becomes-japans- biggest...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/fortress-becomes-japans-biggest- private-apartment-landlord-with-1-billion-bet-11560855602)

<comment><USER14> Yes and if all of its housing tilts this way, Japan too will spiral into unaffordability. But most families still live in single family homes that depreciate in value over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a lot of factors at play here:

1.) Supply is inelastic because construction work and building approvals are limited by current capacity. It is not feasible to expect the market to react as quickly as 600,000 new inhabitants over 10 years required.

2.) A lot of policy is still considering this to be a fad before cities become less popular again. Berlin's plans had for instance foreseen falling demand for schools due to demographic change and now rising birthrates (good economic situation) and influx of young people into cities are causing a trend change (for how long?).

3.) Current ECB rates are causing a housing bubble in Germany where many people are buying property for the first time. Because these properties are mostly rented when purchased but renters can't be terminated in Germany, the only way to evict is by raising rent until renters give up. Putting a rent freeze into place makes sense to prevent this and the rampant luxury renovations which don't create more supply.

4.) Berlin at its peak (1944) had still more than half a million more people and is surrounded by mostly empty countryside. It could easily grow to 10m as Paris or London.

<comment><USER17> > Berlin at its peak (1944) had still more than half a million more people.

Yes, with 2 - 3 times more flats per every floor in a building. And with whole multi-generational families living in every one of them. Don't forget sharing one bathroom between all this families and sometimes toilets just being wooden huts outside.

Try visiting Mitte Museum in Gesundbrunnen, you'd see how miserable pre-war housing was, yes even in the very centre. The area around Ackerstr. was much more dangerous than Alex or Kotti is today.

<comment><USER18> Sounds like Britain. Today.

<comment><USER19> Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that keep doing this, and have already had to ask you more than once.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Symptom: rents are too high

Cause: insufficient housing supply

Solution: disincentivize new construction?

<comment><USER21> Nope. New buildings are exempt.

<comment><USER22> So living in new buildings becomes undesirable even further because they are more expensive to live in than the rest of the city!

<comment><USER23> No, new buildings are desirable because they're new and will always find buyers, especially if built in a nice neighborhood.

<comment><USER22> Let's just thing this through:

I have the option to buy a rental property in Berlin, I can either buy an old rental property and not be allowed to increase rents for 5 years. Or I can buy a new build rental property (which already sell for above market value in most places), and can charge more rent but I will be less able to find renters as they are looking to lock in 5 years worth of zero rent increase.

I really don't get how either situation encourages me to become a landlord.

<comment><USER23> Berlin doesn't need landlords. It needs homes for people.

<comment><USER24> This.

Cities don't want or need more landlords. It needs more landOWNER residents.

<comment><USER3> What's so good about owning? Renting is way better, if it's affordable:

\- I can move out when my life circumstances change.

\- I can move out when the district changes.

\- I don't need to take a credit just for living somewhere.

\- I don't need to worry about people renting my apartments.

\- I don't need to worry about maintenance.

If you have the money to buy fine, but for most people renting is way better.

<comment><USER24> It's a completely separate argument than what I was responding to.

I personally agree with you, but thats my specific lifestyle, and I put my money into other investments. But generally, owning a house is a good place to park your assets if you live a "typical" life.

One of the biggest reasons I want more landOWNER residents? So that my neighbours actually care what's happening in the neighborhood+condo, and do something about.

I'm renting from a Chinese investor. He doesn't speak English and doesn't have a clue what's going on around here, and doesn't care to get involved with helping things run better.

I can communicate my issues with the real estate agent who handles the unit for him, but he's just going to shoot off a short email and move on with his day.

Over 50% of this building is this way. The board of directors has a huge accountability issue because of this, and residents and owners are suffering for it.

If you rent, you care what happens locally, but you have no say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> At best you'll produce consumer surplus for lucky renters, and you'll produce sad outsiders who'd be willing to to pay even more but can't get in. Everyone knows this is an issue with insufficient supply (of housing or of nice alternative places to live) but it is popular to put a ban on symptoms.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, not everyone has to live in Berlin. Better that the current citizens have reasonable living conditions than everyone paying through their nose.

Everyone knows about supply and demand, few know what the situation's like in Berlin or even care to find out before supplying us with economic platitudes for which there is little if any demand at all.

<comment><USER27> _Better that the current citizens have reasonable living conditions..._

What makes _current_ citizens more deserving than the people who _want_ to live in Berlin but won't be able to due to policies which reduce the supply of housing?

<comment><USER26> Assuming they have a home in Berlin, the fact that they already live there makes them deserving. A home is unlike any other material good and the basis of securing a livelihood, it should not be allowed to exploit tenants for profit.

AirBnB'ers and other speculators are of course not deserving at all.

<comment><USER28> People who own and live in their home in Berlin aren't affected by a rent freeze though. It is only renters, who by definition do not own where they live.

<comment><USER26> I used "home" in the metaphorical sense in my former comment. A roof over one's head, place where one lives, etc. One of the pillars of our lives, even in times such as these, where people move around much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While rent may freeze, what are the unintended consequences?

\- Will enough of the "right people" be able to move in to fulfill the right jobs? Keeping a barber seems great until you realize that there aren't enough doctors.

\- Will "rent" be shifted to other, less trackable metrics? Will there be large application fees to apply? Does Berlin have something similar to condo associations or HOAs that will increase?

There are consequences to every action.. are the first order ones acceptable here?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the main reason why this makes me so angry is because it's Berlin, again, doing something fiscally irresponsible that the rest of the country is going to have to finance in the long run.

How I imagine it to go down would be like this:

Today the politicians pat themselves on the back for their progressive stance on this topic.

In year 2 of the rent freeze most of the property investment will have seized, new construction is going to be mainly be occuring by entities that are forced to construct in this market, which are mostly government backed.

In year 3 the pressure on the city council will be so high that some emergency funding will be requested by the city to support the government backed property developers (degewo, GESOBAU, GEWOBAG, HOWOGE, WOGEHE, WBM) in their quest to buy expensive property from "evil" speculators to build more housing, as obviously the private markets have failed to do so.

In year 5 after two years of campaigning the funding is granted by a then black/green coalition in the Bundestag.

<comment><USER26> What do you call the chicanery that companies like Vonovia are doing except evil speculation?

Yes, heavy demand with slower increasing supply will result in higher prices, but we're talking about homes here, not iPhones. People can't afford a home any more, it's inhuman to just let them be bled dry or get kicked out in the name of real-estate profit.

Your critique's puzzling especially because this law only applies to existing buildings

<comment><USER30> >What do you call the chicanery that companies like Vonovia are doing except evil speculation?

What these companies are doing is despicable, but how do you imagine this rent-freeze will change their behavior? They will go looking for their margins via other means if the market is the way it is right now.

>Your critique's puzzling especially because this law only applies to existing buildings

Do you really think that people will Invest in a real estate market that has legislature that is this investor hostile and face the risk of being outright disowned, as also has been proposed in the run-up to this?

I wouldn't touch the Berlin real estate market with a ten-foot pole after this.

<comment><USER26> 1\. It will take away one of the ways they abuse people. Who knows, if they keep it up, maybe they'll be expropriated next :)

2\. Investors touching the Berlin real estate market right now are anyways demanding exorbitant rates just because they can. Normally, this would at some point reach an equilibrium, but so far it's going up and up with no end in sight, pricing out most people.

And I bet not all of them will scurry away. Any economic measure will not have a perfect effect, there will always be those that break ranks.

<comment><USER30> So you hope for expropriation and irrationally behaving financial investors.

I wanted to say I have a bridge to sell to you, but you already got the Airport... it just hurts that I'm paying for the punchline.

<comment><USER26> I'm not hoping for anything, but if a bad actor is playing with people's lives, I also don't have a problem that they get punished for it.

Now the _only_ issue with expropriation would be the panic it cause in the markets, because otherwise who cares whether residential property company #201f exists or not. Setting some rules around renting, like the government has been and is doing, to prevent abuse and speculation is more palatable, but still has too many people running around screaming, based on a simplistic presentation of supply and demand without keeping into account that there are other factors that would and should trump the raw economic aspects.

It's not like the government has just instituted rent control and that's it. It's a temporary measure, restricted to existing stock. They will try to build more.

In the end it's not clear at all that leaving the situation spiral even more out of control would result in a better outcome than even just rent controls without other measures. Why is it so hard to get an apartment in Berlin that people resort to bribing the landlords? Why does one have to "compete" against dozens of other people, with _zero_ ability to negotiate and having to sacrifice their financial privacy?

Last I read about it these companies had record profits and now you and others are complaining that they won't build any more because they can't get profits? How's that work, mate?

<comment><USER30> > Why is it so hard to get an apartment in Berlin that people resort to > bribing the landlords? Why does one have to "compete" against dozens of > other people, with zero ability to negotiate and having to sacrifice their > financial privacy?

Low supply. You are not fixing that with a rent-freeze, you are making it worse.

> Last I read about it these companies had record profits and now you and > others are complaining that they won't build any more because they can't get > profits? How's that work, mate?

These companies, especially Vonovia, will continue to make a profit for their shareholders, even if they take a hit because their assets in Berlin devaluate. They just will not invest further in Berlin, won't build/buy&renovate housing.

If I were a shareholder in Vonovia i'd be pretty concerned of them taking such a risk, I wouldn't want them to invest in Venezuela either.

<comment><USER26> Yeah that's what I was hinting at (one has to read the entire paragraph): rent control or no rent control, the situation already sucks both for existing tenants and people that are looking for new apartments. Might as well protect existing tenants, since new tenants are screwed anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> the only scalable solution is to reduce demand, not increase supply. cities are already getting pretty saturated, and building more houses isn't going to solve a thing.

what is really needed is very fast public transportation from outside cities to the cities themselves, and incentives for workplaces to split into sub- branches in other nearby locations instead of endlessly expanding within the same city.

most people would prefer living outside the city for cheaper and higher quality of housing, the force pulling them back towards the city is the transportation distance to work. the force pulling workplaces into the cities is that they want to minimize transportation time for potential employees (unless the workplace has a location tied to the city), while they still need to cluster employees who have to work together.

so everything is clustered, and there's nothing to do about it.

only way that this can end, is if you reduce the force pulling everything together - by reducing transportation distance - while in the same time, you need to introduce some incentives for workplaces to split to sub branches.

<comment> toper-centage As someone who rides the S-Bahn for 30 minutes, having an express S-Bahn that takes me straight to the center would be really nice. But there are only 2 S-Bahn tracks most of the time :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good luck finding a flat if you are moving to Berlin ...

<comment><USER33> No problem: Many people sublet their rent-controlled or outright government subsidized apartments for three times the official rent.

Finding a real apartment where you cannot be kicked out any moment is hard though. The best way in Berlin to find a decent place is to be low-income for several years, get on a waiting list and then finally get one of the luxurious subsidized places.

No chance otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Paul Krugman, 2000: [https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a- rent...](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent- affair.html)

"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial."

"So now you know why economists are useless: when they actually do understand something, people don't want to hear about it."

</comment><comment><USER35> If affordable housing is an issue, then perhaps the government should provide it for its citizens, like building huge high-rises in Berlin.

I used to rent in an expensive city but bought a cheap house in the suburbs (thankfully I work remotely). Everything is cheaper out here, from gas to utilities to food. But I did experience classism from my friends and family: there is status living in a world-class city. And having wealth or a high- paying job in the city is part of this status. But many people want the status without having to pay the $$$.

<comment><USER36> > Government should provide it for its citizens

And how do you expect government to pay for that? How do you decide who lives in these houses? It's not that easy. Government isn't a magic entity.

<comment><USER37> One of the biggest costs of new rental construction is financing costs (on a 30 year loan it's often half of the cost). Given that it's cheaper for the government to borrow money than the private sector you can have the government simply build market rate housing, but wouldn't need to charge as much in rent.

In this context, the government can essentially be a magic entity.

<comment><USER36> So you'll force tax payers to pay for it? Government doesn't have free money. Why should people be forced to pay for the construction of such housing?

<comment><USER37> Tax payers wouldn't have to pay for anything, the only impact would be potentially on credit ratings of the government and possibly also certain interest rates in a minimal way. You can create market rate housing with government subsidized loans that don't come from tax coffers. Hell, the US federal reserve is technically the backer of hundreds of billions worth of mortgages.

<comment><USER36> We know how the mortgage crisis went. Government isn't a magical solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I will eagerly wait to see how this unfolds. Count me in the skeptical camp though.

From an outside perspective it looks like the Overton window in Berlin is skewed heavily because of the runaway prices. I remember just last month the huge protests against Deutsche Wohnen and people demanding the nationalization of apartments. It's no stranger in New York City that the most inattentive landlord that had the hardest time getting things done is NYCHA, the city agency. I'm skeptical of this solution, but the alternative was scarier.

</comment><comment><USER39> At the same time german tax office will give you trouble if you don't make enough profit as a landlord.

<comment><USER40> Source? Btw, landlords will be able to apply for excemptions, if it is necessary.

<comment><USER41> Here is an article about such a case from Munich (in German): [https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/zu-nett-fuer-muenchen-der- ver...](https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/zu-nett-fuer-muenchen-der-vermieter- rebell-und-das-finanzamt.862.de.html?dram:article_id=422777)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just listened to a very relevant Freakonomics podcast, "Why Rent Control Doesn't Work (Ep. 373)". [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent- control/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Very curious about this scenario - what about people who have a rent contract with "Staffelmiete" (meaning rent goes up by a "small" amount each year)? Does it mean this annual increase is now seen as invalid?

</comment><comment><USER44> Rent control is almost always a disaster. It benefits current residents at the detriment to everyone else. Look no farther than SF or NYC. I have a friend in NYC paying 2000 a month to be a roommate to a guy paying 1500 for the whole place. Yeah he's paying more than this guy's whole rent, because the apartment is rent controlled.

<comment><USER45> Agree with you about rent control, but I'm assuming that the "guy" must be breaking the law. If people in rent controlled apartments are free to sublet at market rates, that seems like a huge loop hole easily exploited.

Regulations like this tend to create incentives for corrupt practices of all kind.

<comment><USER44> They're not allowed but it's so hard to evict people from rent controlled units in NYC, and so lucrative to rent out your place, that it's extremely common. Maybe more than 50% of units. A lot of times you rent to a friend or relative so they don't rat you out. It effectively turns rent control into a $1000+ a month untaxed subsidy. I'm sure there's plenty of people that rent out more desirable rent controlled units and don't have to work a day in their lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Seems like only going to create a black market, or funnel the rent in other ways.

<comment><USER47> Probably not worse than the one that already exists. There are a lot of people illegally subletting their apartments for 2-3x their original rent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Well, at the very least, will be an interesting economic experiment.

<comment><USER49> This has been tried before in a number of different flavors. Most leave people worse off.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup- re...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup-rent-control- does-more-harm-than-good)

<comment><USER50> Thanks, I hadn't realised that obviously existing landlords might stop renting out a place, which would reduce supply of housing - that could be problematic.

It also mentions that apartments got transformed into condos. This might be a problem with my not being a native speaker, but: if one apartment is turned into multiple condos, isn't it able to house more people? (Though being "new" housing, I suppose they'd then be able to ask higher rents again?)

<comment><USER51> Since there's already some effort to confiscate property that's been empty for too long, I doubt too many landladies in Berlin will dare to go that route.

I could be wrong.

Relevant article: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-housing/berlin- ac...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-housing/berlin-activists- march-to-demand-city-seize-housing-from-landlords-idUSKCN1RI0EG)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does this mean that five years of natural price increases will just happen all at once when five years have passed?

<comment><USER53> Price increases in housing are limited in Germany and have been for a _long_ time (and tightened up in the last couple years). This specific Berlin regulation is on top of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> People are bringing in the supply-demand curve from their school economy classes. The problem is it doesn't work that way with housing. There is zero incentive to build affordable housing when you can build a luxury house. On the contrary, landlords in Berlin "renovate" all the time, to make normal apartments into luxury ones.

So without regulation, the supply for affordable housing is diminishing. To increase the supply and reduce the prices, one needs regulation. Without all efforts to reduce prices by giving landlords the opportunity to build more affordable houses will be wasted. They don't want this opportunity, they need as much money from each square meter as they can get.

I am all for building more where there is space, it just needs to come with some regulation. That is, a certain quota of social housing in each building, prohibit meaningless renovations, make it less attractive to use property as an investment.

Rent freeze does some of this. It lets people stay in their house, preventing further gentrifying districts (which would lead to further rise in prices in a kind of a positive feedback loop). And what is important, it makes property in Berlin much less attractive of an investment, because nobody knows what else to expect from the senate (even expropriations are discussed).

I don't expect it to solve the problem completely, but it will definitely slow down its progression.

<comment> fredm-de Luxury housing, too, does create supply. Prohibiting the construction of luxury apartments will just end with rich people paying luxury money for standard apartments thus raising prices and people with less financial means will be priced out.

<comment><USER54> Or will just move to a city that is willing to provide them living conditions they want (Munich, Hamburg, whatever).

Also when we consider new houses, luxury house creates less supply than a normal one by having fewer apartments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> iso-8859-1 More details on the German Wikipedia article (it can be translated): [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mietpreisbindung#Mietpreisbrem...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mietpreisbindung#Mietpreisbremse_\(2019\))

Interestingly, legislation like this was in effect from 1945-1988 in West- Berlin.

<comment><USER55> Interesting, this legislation actually was invented by the Nazis:

"On October 17, 1936, the National Socialists imposed a rent freeze and further rent authorities were established. After the end of National Socialist rule, this regulation initially continued to apply in both parts of Germany, which is why home ownership was often considered "unprofitable" as early as the 1950s, as the costs for maintenance, repairs and administration continued to rise every year.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator"

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The only way to actually solve living prices is increase in living space. Its as simply as that. Literally nothing else has worked, and the cheapest cities to live in are those that build a lot of new apparment buildings. Everything else is political snake oil that usually makes the problem worse not better. This is the most basic economics that has been shown over and over again for 100+ years.

If you want to do something useful. Do infrastructure building and make more of the surounding area accessable for large scale building programs.

Make regulations for building easier to handle when building new houses. Meaning allow to build higher and so on. I bet there are 100s of unnessary regulations that have accumelated over the last 50 years.

</comment><comment> 08-15 Isn't it amazing how short politicians' memories are?

It's been only 30 years since the GDR (German "Democratic" Republic, aka East Germany) collapsed. In the GDR, _all_ rent was regulated to a "fair" level. The result was a universal scarcity of housing, and existing houses were decaying, because nobody would invest any amount of money into maintenance. The best housing available in the 1980s were those ugly and uncomfortable apartment buildings made from mass produced concrete slabs, which everyone just remembers as socialist architecture. And "available" meant you had to wait for many years. Still, the alternative was to live in a house built in 1910-1930 and not maintained since 1950.

There is no place in the world that could document this failed policy better than Berlin: the contrast between East Berlin (ugly ruins) and West Berlin (nice houses) is striking, even today. But the Berlin senate decides to go with socialist thinking again. However, that was to be expected after the Berliners voted the old Socialist Unified Party (renamed twice, but otherwise unchanged) into the senate.

</comment><comment><USER57> This means that who gets a place to live and who doesn't will be decided by factors other than willingness or ability to pay. I imagine renter selection will come down to criteria that are no better and possibly borderline discriminatory -- how do you choose which renter to go with when you have 100 to choose from all paying the same? Should we make regulation for renter selection also?

</comment><comment><USER58> This will prevent the referendum to expropriate major german housing companies to gain traction. So in this way this could actually be considered as a pro- market law when considering the political alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm so ashamed of german politics of late. We're becoming the country where Homeopathy is GAINING popularity, where policy is increasingly symbolic in the good case, outright ideological in the worst case.

It's really at the point where I don't want my kids growing up here anymore, problem is, where else?

<comment><USER59> > Homeopathy is GAINING popularity

Citation please.

<comment><USER30> [1] [https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/homoeopathie- in-d...](https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/homoeopathie-in- deutschland-absatz-steigt-auf-670-millionen-euro-im-jahr-2018-a-1256101.html) [2] [https://www.bah- bonn.de/bah/?type=565&file=redakteur_filesys...](https://www.bah- bonn.de/bah/?type=565&file=redakteur_filesystem/public/Ergebnisse_Allensbach_deSombre.pdf)

Sorry for the german sources.

<comment><USER59> Thanks and yikes! I am positive that the growing critique will lead to an improvement on that front though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I think the only solution to high rents and home prices is to build more and more supply. But strangely there is opposition to this from both sides of the political spectrum. Left opposes it in the name of "preserving neighborhoods", conservative wealthy home owners dont want new inventory to reduce their real estate valuations, and developers oppose it because it will eat into their profits.

<comment><USER61> Agreed except for last part. Devs want to build homes, as that's what they do.

<comment><USER62> Nah. Build too much and your margin gets slimmer and slimmer. Build less and get same profit with less work while keeping the market hungry for the future.

<comment><USER61> > Build too much…

Thankfully, that's not a problem anywhere in places with skyrocketing rents.

<comment><USER60> It actually is, otherwise you would have seen Manhattan skyline reach the end of earth but it does not. Premium condos demand such high prices that developers dont have incentive to over supply the market.

<comment><USER61> The housing shortage is real, discussion of niche exceptions is not a great use of time.

<comment><USER62> The problem is that there's no economic incentive to solve that shortage. Numbers just don't add up.

Existing city residents wouldn't be that happy if their municipality started building shitload of public buildings using their tax money. Those money would be redirected from other issues that are important to current inhabitants, their real estate value would plummet and they get much densier city that comes with all the associated problems. On top of that, cheap rents would make the city more interesting for more people. So rents would start raising again and we're at step #1... But with more crowded public services.

<comment><USER61> Doesn't need to be public investment, there are incentives for some but not others, and yes the situation is complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Why does the national government allow the city of Berlin to implement such short sighted and destructive policies? There should be some guidelines set by the national government about what you can and can't do in terms of housing supply.

<comment><USER53> Because Germany is a federal republic. There's stuff the federal government just has nothing to say about.

I mean, in case of Berlin, they could help by moving back to Bonn. Lots of real estate, both office and residential, would free up immediately.

<comment> iso-8859-1 There is fresh federal legislation on this subject: Mietrechtsanpassungsgesetz (MietAnpG). Here is an overview: [https://www.etl- rechtsanwaelte.de/aktuelles/mietrechtsanpass...](https://www.etl- rechtsanwaelte.de/aktuelles/mietrechtsanpassungsgesetz-2019-ein-kurzer- ueberblick-fuer-eigentuemer-vermieter-und-potentielle-immobilieninvestoren)

<comment><USER53> Contract law (as changed by MietAnpG) is part of the BGB ("civil code"), which is federal law, while the rent cap is built on top of housing law ("Wohnungsrecht"), which is - mostly - state law (e.g. [https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article226212113/Mietendeck...](https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article226212113/Mietendeckel- in-Berlin-Mieten-duerfen-fuenf-Jahre-nicht-steigen.html)).

The states are rather peculiar about the federal government trying to infringe on their right to set laws, so even if most other states agree that the rent cap is a bad idea (not a given), it's uncertain that they would support anything that uses federal powers (in the Bundesrat, which would be hard to avoid) to stop it in Berlin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can they use Airbnb and the likes to bypass this?

</comment><comment><USER64> Berlin will be the Lisbon of the 90ies. Well deserved

<comment><USER65> What happened to Lisbon in the 90s?

<comment> iso-8859-1 Translated from the German Wikipedia article:

In 1947, António de Oliveira Salazar initiated a rent freeze for Lisbon and Porto, which remained in force for over 40 years and ensured that for some old-style apartments in the late 1980s, <5 euros/month had to be paid. After the freeze, rent increases remained limited to inflation until 2006, so that rents remained very low. Many homeowners let their old apartments become derelict because the money was missing for renovations. Sanitary facilities with shower and toilet were missing in many buildings. In the center of Lisbon, about 20 houses per year collapsed at the end of the 1990s due to poor condition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This seems like it could be dangerous as it creates incentives for slumlords. If the landlords need to raise rent but they can't, then the only way for them to turn a profit is to cut their expenses.

<comment><USER67> Or just sell up and find a more respectable way of making money, increasing supply in the buyer occupier market, lowering prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> As a person born and raised in Soviet Union, I strongly believe that whoever thinks that a proper economic response to raising prices is literally _to order them to stop raising_ , is a lunatic.

<comment><USER21> Genuinely curious: what do you think would be a better response?

<comment><USER68> Raising prices = Demand > Supply. You can either try to curb the demand (by e.g. creating incentives for companies to build offices elsewhere, move government bureaucracy somewhere else, etc.) or improve the supply by facilitating new construction, which in most places on earth is limited by, again, local government restrictions.

edits: grammar

<comment><USER69> What's wrong with legally limiting artificial price hikes to prevent people from abusing Demand > Supply for the sake of their greed?

[Edit] To clarify, they seem to be "artificial" price hikes because they don't in any way _necessary_ to cover costs. People realize they can charge more and get more money, _so they simply do._ That's inherently avaricious and unethical. Sure, maybe prices work themselves out, so that price goes down when supply goes up, but this seems to _only be because suppliers can no longer get away with a higher price,_ because their competition is now selling it at a lower price. So I think it's far more ethical for a government to limit those kind of price hikes, which mainly just hurt the consumer, than to allow these abuses to continue in the name of "freedom".

<comment><USER68> You are using emotionally charged words ("artificial", "abuse", "greed"), which makes a bit hard to have a constructive argument, but let me try :).

One way to think about prices is as a _signal_. When greedy landlords raise prices, they send two signals: (1) To other landlords and wanna-be-landlords, saying it's an attractive market which would justify new construction or cleaning up your spare bedroom and putting it on the market, both increasing supply, and (2) to current and future renters, making it more economical for them to move elsewhere and thus save on their rent, thus reducing demand.

<comment><USER69> I just edited the comment to clarify what I meant by those words. And they should be used because they are accurate in this context. Although I did convert "greed" to "avarice" in my clarification since I think it's more accurate here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why stop at price controls on housing? Why not just go bravely into the full- blown confiscation and redistribution of private property.

<comment><USER71> It's a running joke that the country and Berlin in particular is turning into GDR2.0. Which is why there's lots of dissent especially among the former East- Germans who feel reminded of something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> the West is being murdered by populists

<comment><USER19> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> And in other news: "That can't be graphite on the ground"

</comment><comment><USER74> This is totally wrong!

The government should never intervene market!

<comment><USER3> Nope, because the market doesn't care about you. It doesn't care if you have a place to live, if you are healthy, if you are safe…

Not restricting "the market" at all leads to a worse life for humans.</comment></comment>


Highly Scalable LDAP, Alternatives - <AUTHOR>

Folks, Any experience related to implementing a highly scalable (let's say directory has billion records), high performance( in terms of read latency) LDAP server? What other alternatives should I be thinking of? <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I do not have a use case as such. I have used LDAP years ago and was curious if there are any better products now in the market and what the challenges with LDAP servers are.

</comment><comment><USER2> What's the use case? Why LDAP? And really, a billion records?</comment>