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LanceHunter posted:Yes, the highly monopolistic, corporatized industry of *checks notes* day care centers are only raising prices because of corporate greed and not at all because of rising labor costs. Day care is also a bad comparator in general because the entire process ought to be subsidized in the first place. The economics of a child-healthy daycare do not really make sense at any scale of labor costs under the privatized US model, at least. Between caretaker-kid ratios (very important to keep low for child-healthy environments), facility rental costs, insurance costs, operational fees, etc etc, any daycare that pays its workers a good wage while providing a good location for your kids is going to be out of price for a large portion of the population. I can't find it at work, but there's a big NPR piece about the economics of scale for daycares and how it seems to fundamentally not work in the modern US economy.
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# ? May 10, 2023 19:34 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 22:28 |
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my mother has complaints about the unreasonable cost and limited availability of daycare when i was a kid decades ago, so it seems like a super entrenched problemdrk posted:The big table o' inflation is below. Eveyone's got a hot take on inflation numbers, but it appears to me that the primary driver of services inflation is increases in shelter costs (rent and owner equivalent rent). Transportation services has a higher %age increase, but a much lower weight. i remember hearing shelter costs in cpi are a lagging indicator because of how it's calculated, but i have no idea why exactly or how much that lag is. would be very on-brand for the fed to hold tight way too long due to lagging indicators and shooting way below inflation targets and over unemployment targets though.
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# ? May 10, 2023 19:43 |
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Daycare seems to be regionally adjusted to 1 month daycare = 1 month rent for a very average, middle of the road 1 bedroom apartment We paid about 1000 in north Carolina (fairly LCoLl)and we pay $2k in California (fairly HCoL) for one toddler
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# ? May 11, 2023 04:39 |
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One advantage of being at full/near-full employment: Job satisfaction is rising.Wall Street Journal posted:Workers Are Happier Than They’ve Been in Decades Highlighted the one catch in there. That said, the full survey report is here and it is worth a look. In particular, this chart is a beauty... (Also, as an aside - where are people hosting images now that imgur has hosed off? I'm just attaching things but obviously that is pretty limited.)
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# ? May 11, 2023 15:45 |
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Hadlock posted:Daycare seems to be regionally adjusted to 1 month daycare = 1 month rent for a very average, middle of the road 1 bedroom apartment That makes sense to me. At least in terms of difference, if not magnitude. Daycare cannot be off-shored to cheaper cost of living areas, or places with less regulations, like manufacturing can. So the price of daycare is set by a much smaller 'region' than the price of nuts and bolts. To me, inflation isn't going to budge until shelter costs start to drop because the US is a service economy. In manufacturing economies, factories can move so that prices can drop while productivity remains the same. Companies buy nuts and bolts from somewhere cheaper. The response to rising interest rates is off-shoring to places with cheaper labor costs. In service economies price and wages keep rising, even with interest rates going up, because there is no release of off-shoring. Services that can't be usefully moved (waiters, daycare, education, lawn care, whatever) aren't going to see a drop in price increases until the people who pay for those services stop paying for them. There has been some drop in the people who pay for those services, people who work services that can be moved (e.g. coders and consultants). Because housing is in short supply, the people on the top of the income bracket set housing prices. Thus I say that inflation isn't going to cool until housing prices drop. I'm aware I've beat this drum before in other places.
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# ? May 11, 2023 16:58 |
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:my mother has complaints about the unreasonable cost and limited availability of daycare when i was a kid decades ago, so it seems like a super entrenched problem The Federal statistics calculates rent based on all rental leases. The private statistics almost all use new rental lease agreements only. This means the fed's stats include a lot of renters who haven't updated their lease in many months, during which the new lease rate might have changed greatly. As a result, the federal numbers on shelter costs* will always lag behind the industry numbers. * CPI doesn't use mortgage payments values for homeowners. It uses owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence, so even homeowner CPI is based on rental data.
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# ? May 12, 2023 16:39 |
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I thought the Fed calculated rents by asking homeowners (who are living in the house, often for many years, and thus not professional landlords/market experts) how much they would rent their house for Maybe that's for a different inflation calculation
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# ? May 12, 2023 16:47 |
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https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-and-rent.htm Owners’ equivalent rent of residences is mostly based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey where they ask homeowners how much they would rent their house for, but there's more math and a few other things going in to smooth their estimates. The deeper you go into how they actually calculate the inflation number, the more you realize they rely on proxies, approximations, and imputed math to try to make an impossible task into a vaguely possible one.
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# ? May 12, 2023 19:43 |
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golden bubble posted:https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-and-rent.htm lol what could go wrong with asking my old boss whose mortgage is $1,400/month for a like 1,800 SF rambler what equivalent rents are?
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# ? May 13, 2023 02:55 |
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tumblr hype man posted:lol what could go wrong with asking my old boss whose mortgage is $1,400/month for a like 1,800 SF rambler what equivalent rents are? This is reminding me of my grandfather sending my little brother to the grocery store in like 2005 with a list of groceries and a five-dollar bill.
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# ? May 13, 2023 04:07 |
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St. Louis Fed president James Bullard gave an interesting presentation on how monetary and fiscal policy affected inflation. (That link is to the press release. This is to the presentation PDF.)James Bullard posted:The Monetary-Fiscal Response This chart in particular paints a hell of a picture...
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# ? May 13, 2023 05:17 |
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San Francisco real estate has been really interesting to follow because their economy is so heavily subsidized* by the tech industry and it's willingness to embrace WFH and all that you don't need a primer on it. End result is that the real estate market was the slowest to recover in most/many cases Looking like SF might finally have bottomed out of the current price correction after the summer peak last year. Trend has been headed in that direction and finally has a positive upswing https://archive.is/Fg5SH / https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-home-values-18096248.php This first graph seems to closely mirror the graph in the post immediately above mine Does anyone have direct access to stuff like new housing starts by region and new home sales, historical house sales by week etc. I think if you're a realtor you have access to this via your local MLS but hard to find local data as a commoner. Fed tracks new housing starts nationally, I know My mother in law lives in a fairly new housing area in the bay area and I've noticed they've started construction again in earnest, and they've started grading additional land at a couple different sites near her house after a long pause *or pick your adjective,/verb/adverb I don't have an agenda
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# ? May 15, 2023 01:15 |
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https://archive.is/7t4p8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/14/mortgage-rates-housing-supply/ Standard boilerplate wind up quote:But they can’t imagine giving up their ultralow rate for a new mortgage above 6 percent on a bigger house. The more likely scenario: delay having another kid and stay put. And here's the pitch quote:sent mortgage rates surging past 7 percent last fall, and while they’ve pulled back somewhat, the 30-year fixed rate is still around 6.35 percent, according to Freddie Mac.
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# ? May 15, 2023 08:04 |
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Hadlock posted:https://archive.is/7t4p8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/14/mortgage-rates-housing-supply/ The first half of the article is the wrong premise anyway as answered by the second half, building new homes and apartment buildings is how you resolve a lack of supply. Government is actually trying to solve it but that takes time. That actually has been somewhat going up as is, in the important areas. People staying in their homes is of course going to happen. People will probably sell when more supply hits to create oversupply and thus a crash. When? https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics/starts-and-permits/housing-starts.pdf and https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics/starts-and-permits/building-permits.pdf Notice multi family homes being built, that's the stuff that corrects housing prices and we've moved positively towards that trend after correcting from single family homes. Although it's a cyclical industry, I'd hesitate to extrapolate beyond that. It *doesn't* mean houses will be cheaper at the same time though, because of demand and lumber costs. https://chicagoagentmagazine.com/2022/09/05/as-demand-for-new-homes-cools-builders-reconsider-future-plans/
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# ? May 15, 2023 13:56 |
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-15/svb-s-former-ceo-says-fed-social-media-contributed-to-collapse news: quote:The fastest pace of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in decades combined with negative social media sentiment contributed to the failure of SVB Financial Group’s Silicon Valley Bank, said Greg Becker, former chief executive officer of the company. views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgSPaXgAdzE
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# ? May 15, 2023 23:25 |
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lol, are they really complaining that some non-binding comments from the fed failed to predict the future with 100% accuracy? reminds me of this chart (and its many variations):
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# ? May 15, 2023 23:46 |
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pmchem posted:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-15/svb-s-former-ceo-says-fed-social-media-contributed-to-collapse Everyone on SA and reddit knew it wasn't transitory from the beginning so this guy is either lying his rear end off or even stupider than I expected. Probably both.
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# ? May 16, 2023 02:03 |
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its possible the extent of their risk management was consulting fed dot plots, like this one from 2021: as we all know, that's not what happened, but SVB seems to be making the argument that projections like the above were more or less a promise from the fed to have a certain monetary policy
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# ? May 16, 2023 02:23 |
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No! Guarantee.
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# ? May 16, 2023 02:48 |
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FistEnergy posted:Everyone on SA and reddit knew it wasn't transitory from the beginning so this guy is either lying his rear end off or even stupider than I expected. Probably both. yeah, compare to M&T Bank's CEO in their 2021 annual letter:
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# ? May 16, 2023 03:01 |
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notwithoutmyanus posted:The first half of the article is the wrong premise anyway as answered by the second half, building new homes and apartment buildings is how you resolve a lack of supply. Government is actually trying to solve it but that takes time. That actually has been somewhat going up as is, in the important areas. People staying in their homes is of course going to happen. People will probably sell when more supply hits to create oversupply and thus a crash. When? https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics/starts-and-permits/housing-starts.pdf and https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics/starts-and-permits/building-permits.pdf "crash" is a bit strong of a word to use here. I don't think house prices are going to crash in the near or even long term, barring something truly catastrophic like a re-run of 2008. Houses take a long time to build, and I doubt we're going to see such a housing boom that it actually gluts the market and forces prices down drastically. What I do think we'll see is a stabilization of home prices, maybe after a modest correction, and they'll flatline for a while. That's assuming robust and ongoing construction, though. That said, it's almost meaningless to talk about this on a country-wide level. It's all so hyper-local that it feels weird to talk about the extremely volatile markets or even the straight up stagnant/declining ones in the same paragraph as ones that are turbo-charged by a money-flush industry or geographical constraints. No matter how much someone wants to build another huge condo development an hour and a half drive outside of Cupertino, that long-rear end drive is still going to prop up home values closer in. Same with North Virginia - whole poo poo ton of land available to build on out in Reston or Manassas, but that's not going to put too much of a dent in prices in Arlington or Alexandria, just because there are plenty of high-earners in the area who value a shorter drive to DC.
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# ? May 16, 2023 14:01 |
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lifg posted:Do dedollarization articles increase in frequency every time there’s a recession or a crisis? This was a good read, lots of supporting graphs https://www.epsilontheory.com/dedollarization-is-not-a-thing/
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# ? May 16, 2023 21:10 |
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That was a good read. Stuff like this makes me wish there was a singular tvtropes for journalism. Could have everything from “dedollarization” to “comics aren’t for kids anymore.”
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# ? May 16, 2023 23:49 |
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Hadlock posted:This was a good read, lots of supporting graphs It's good at first but then there's a doozy Make a distinction between A) the gradual erosion of fiat in favor of harder assets like BTC, gold, and real estate, Oh yeah, harder assets. Yes. I see. Suddenly the ritual nears completion. The gather acolytes chant. Fiat Fiat Fiat The demons appears Cash for Gold it roars. I mean the first 2/3rds are useful anyway.
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# ? May 17, 2023 00:14 |
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It's great how all these people are willing to trade my worthless cash for eternal gold.
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# ? May 17, 2023 01:44 |
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Yeah I don't endorse the random left turn into "gold/Bitcoin is safe place to park wealth" but the first two thirds were interesting
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# ? May 17, 2023 01:48 |
What is this group? I found the agenda for an event they're running and it looks to be some sort of eye-popping libertarian techlordery. I was half expecting to see references to roko's basilisk. https://epsilonconnect.org/ quote:Over the two and a half days of Epsilon Connect, you’ll participate – not spectate – in core curricula and electives covering the most vital issues of the day. From recognizing the narratives of modern markets to measuring media bias and nudge, from exploring GPT-4 and generative AI to considering a new vision for crypto. from debating the future of American higher education to developing new strategies to talk with each other rather than past each other, we will learn together how to be better investors, citizens and friends. edit: the backing group is the "Foundation for Applied Bio-Linguistic Exploration" which sounds like they should be depopulating the earth with a nanobot virus in a particularly bad sci fi film. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:55 on May 17, 2023 |
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# ? May 17, 2023 04:46 |
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Discendo Vox posted:
Hadlock, are you a secret agent of FABLE??
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# ? May 17, 2023 05:48 |
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I reserve the right to hold dual citizenship in both FABLE and SPECTRE Actually I found the link on hacker news, I didn't take the time to trawl through the comments section there, I'll see if I can find it Edit: not much there only 5 comments one using laundry as an analogy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962349
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# ? May 17, 2023 06:50 |
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https://archive.is/R6e2d | https://fortune.com/2023/05/17/smaller-homes-as-builders-responde-to-unaffordable-housing-market/ 5% reduction in square footage isn't much but it's a trend towards starter homes. Average size of new construction is 2480 sq ft in the US which would result in 2350 which is basically the reduction of one bedroom https://www.ahs.com/home-matters/real-estate/the-2022-american-home-size-index/ * quote:In order to address the affordability crunch, many builders are reducing home size. *I was surprised to see Texas is #11 in new home construction size at 2150sq ft, top three are Utah (2800) Colorado (2500) Idaho (2300)
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# ? May 17, 2023 17:01 |
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Utah makes sense as number 1 as they have the highest birth rate of any US state. Not sure about Colorado and Idaho, though if you asked people there, I imagine they would tell you its due to rich people moving in from California.
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# ? May 17, 2023 17:33 |
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immigration/emigration from a state is probably more important than its birth rate? https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-census-estimates-show-a-tepid-rise-in-u-s-population-growth-buoyed-by-immigration/ This article is about net immigration vs. birth rate for the US as a whole, but this chart is illustrative: In many modern/"developed" countries, population growth would be negative without immigration. Countries that have not historically welcomed lots of immigrants, like Japan, face a serious demographic problem due to net population loss concentrated in the younger generations.
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# ? May 17, 2023 17:56 |
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I doubt (international) migration is a significant driver of new house sizes though. Utah, as usual, is best just explained as "mormons": the state has the number one birth rate and number one household size of all of the states.
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# ? May 17, 2023 18:12 |
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Yeah 1) Mormons and 2) Utah is pretty mountainous, but still plenty of big flat areas, it's not especially productive farm land so land value is relatively low and as a result you can build giant homes This is a wind map but has both elevation and roads well marked Also the whole state is only 3.3 million people and the SLC metro area is 1.2 million so no shortage of buildable land.
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# ? May 17, 2023 18:34 |
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Hadlock posted:5% reduction in square footage isn't much but it's a trend towards starter homes. Average size of new construction is 2480 sq ft in the US which would result in 2350 which is basically the reduction of one bedroom If I recall correctly from last time I dug through the numbers, we were down from 40% of new housing construction being in the started home size range (<1400 sq ft) to about 5% in the late 2010s. I do wonder what those numbers look like now.
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# ? May 17, 2023 19:21 |
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Hadlock posted:Yeah I don't endorse the random left turn into "gold/Bitcoin is safe place to park wealth" but the first two thirds were interesting That article definitely struck me as a broken clock being right. Similarly to how I noted in a college paper how UBI was pretty much the only place I vaguely agreed with libertarians on anything, which got a chuckle out of my professor. I think 'dedollarization' always seems to make its way into headlines for the same reason war and murder do: if it bleeds, it leads. And nothing whips up the doomsday economics crowd like the sword of Damocles about to fall squarely on American hegemony. That article more or less points out what people who spend more than 5 minutes on find out very quickly--the USD is as healthy as ever as a global reserve currency, and nothing in actual data supports the doomers, nor has it since 1945.
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# ? May 17, 2023 19:33 |
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Are condos and multifamily included in that 1400 and under number? 1400 sq ft seems like condo and duplex territory to me lifg posted:Stuff like this makes me wish there was a singular tvtropes for journalism. Could have everything from “dedollarization” to “comics aren’t for kids anymore.” This is a good idea actually
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# ? May 17, 2023 19:44 |
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Hadlock posted:Yeah 1) Mormons and 2) Utah is pretty mountainous, but still plenty of big flat areas, it's not especially productive farm land so land value is relatively low and as a result you can build giant homes Also for all their other problems Mormons generally don't tolerate anti-growth NIMBY blockades against ever building anything anywhere. The church says "we're gonna have X% population growth so we need Y thousand new homes, plus new sewer and water, roads, and schools, and an airport." Kinda like China, Utah has basically zero political freedom (the church runs everything and puts their people in every elected position outside of a few gentile and tourism enclaves) but dang they aren't fantastic at building public infrastructure. There were a few articles a couple years back about how Utah was the only state to make any kind of meaningful progress in reducing homelessness because they did the radical thing of--- get this-- building homes for homeless people to live in.
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# ? May 17, 2023 20:06 |
Warmachine posted:That article definitely struck me as a broken clock being right. Similarly to how I noted in a college paper how UBI was pretty much the only place I vaguely agreed with libertarians on anything, which got a chuckle out of my professor. I suspect the parts of the article that are appealing are a hook to bring the target audience along for the turn.
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# ? May 17, 2023 20:09 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 22:28 |
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Hadlock posted:Are condos and multifamily included in that 1400 and under number? 1400 sq ft seems like condo and duplex territory to me I think the 1,400 number may be of all inventory which includes a lot of older homes which trend way smaller.
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# ? May 17, 2023 20:30 |