I've been to Vienna and I have a lot of positive things to say about the city, but trying to adapt their model 1:1 to the US is not realistic for many reasons.
You're right that public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. The government could forbid all private construction and take over home development itself, placing price caps as needed. But if you think something like that's going to work in the US when we can't even accomplish much more minor housing reform, you're dreaming. Vienna's model is certainly not that radical.
For starters, even Vienna's social housing model has income restrictions. If you and your partner both earn the average 2023 Viennese salary (about €52,000/person) then you don't quality for social housing because your combined income significantly exceeds the annual threshold (€79,490 for two people in 2023).
Even if you do qualify, you are only eligible if you have lived in Vienna for two years already. This system does nothing for new transplants. And once you do qualify, the wait time to be approved for an apartment can be in excess of 5 years. They even have a "bonus period" to move people who have been waiting for more than 5 years up in the line, because the city recognizes how frustrating that must be.
The system is easily gamed too. Vienna only checks your income once as part of the process. If your income increases later on (e.g. because you finished school and got a great job) you don't become ineligible. That part is fine by itself, but you can also transfer the apartment to a qualifying family member if you decide to move out, and they don't need to wait 5 years. This contributes to the reduced supply and long wait times because it reduces inventory and rewards those with family connections in the city.
And of course this whole system is far from free. If you make the average Viennese salary your income tax rate is 42%, whereas it's 25% for the average American worker. The average Vienna home is worth around 1 million euros and the property tax rate on such a home is a whopping 3.5%. Even in expensive coastal places like San Francisco and San Diego, property tax rates are barely above 1%. The tax burden to fund this kind of social housing (and other great things too, to be fair) is definitely heavy. It's fine to point out the positives of such a system, but the costs have to be acknowledged as well. And in the US I don't think the taxpaying population of any city is willing to bear those kinds of costs.
Vienna's system does do a great job mixing different people together, as you note. But not all of this is due to public housing. Quite a bit of it is simply how walkable the city is and how great their public transport options are. Even a moderate amount of public housing for low income individuals scattered throughout a very foot-friendly city would do a great job mixing people together.
Public housing has income restrictions associated with it. This article talks about how even people with stable, well-paying jobs struggle to find housing. Public housing isn't the solution for these people.
What we should copy from Vienna is mixed use development. A huge portion of American suburbs are zoned as single family only and you end up with a housing shortage, horrible traffic, and pollution. Mixed use development allows density to increase while reducing traffic and encouraging people to be more fit (by walking or biking more). It's such a no-brainer from a whole-system perspective.
The problem is that NIMBYs and existing regulations exist to preserve the status quo and protect the equity long-term homeowners have accumulated. In places like CA there are additional disincentives to reform like Proposition 13 that favor long term owners at the expense of new homebuyers. Obviously a tax-advantaged asset is going to have a higher price than an equivalent non-tax-advantaged asset. And significant property tax revenue that could otherwise fund public transit and additional construction isn't collected as a result.
Eventually enough boomers will die and the demographic forces will shift and create the opportunity for reform, but this will be too little too late for a whole generation. I'd love for a concerted national effort to tackle this problem and reduce barriers to building the kind of housing America needs, but it's hard to see that happening anytime soon.
It really is a currency, however. It's not a matter of perception but rather of how Bitcoin functions. The biggest difference between a commodity and currency is that a commodity is essential for some process or product. A currency is just one of many ways of funding that process/product. You can't build a computer without gold, copper, and some rare earth metals (commodities) but you can pay for it with USD, bitcoin, yuan, GBP, etc.
If your bear case is a 10-year recovery to 40 from 20 that's a CAGR of 7.18%, about the same as the long-term average CAGR of the S&P. The difference is that the S&P doesn't have bankrupty risk, whereas airlines do [1]. So on a risk-adjusted basis, that kind of trade isn't too appealing unless you'd done significant research to show that the risk of bankruptcy or a buyout by a competitor at a reduced valuation was unlikely.
While you might have done that kind of research, the article implies (correctly, in my view) that the typical Robinhood user did not. No surprise; that sort of research is time consuming and requires significant familiarity with the industry. Yet airlines, cruise companies, and other risky assets were preferred by Robinhood users throughout the pandemic.
> "They however do control access to the account. This means there's a point where they get all sorts of data on me, and while I personally don't mind, I must admit I felt a bit safer when I thought it was a smaller, purpose-built company managing things."
I've never really understood the appeal of account-based password managers. It was a startup and it needed a business model, sure, so from the company's perspective it makes sense. But from a customer's perspective you're accepting a new type of risk that you don't have to worry about if you use a glorified encrypted list (e.g. KeePass) to manage passwords. The payoff is convenience, but personally no amount of convenience is enough to make me comfortable with storing all of my encrypted passwords on a single server somewhere and hoping that there are no exploitable security vulnerabilities (or malicious insiders who might seek to profit from finding or introducing them). Having an offline password manager that never uploads data to a server provides defense in depth, though it's less convenient.
What failure mode would you want, if not off? Having a failed sensor+controller control temperature in any way isn't what I'd want. One could have a backup thermostat as a fallback, but I doubt their average customer wants anything that complicated.
One of the best and simplest changes I ever made was to have my phone on airplane mode by default. Originally, the change was just to maximize the life of a dying battery, but even after I replaced the battery I discovered that I was happier, more focused, and less stressed when I only checked my phone 3-4 times a day. Essentially, I treat it like I treat email.
Everyone who knows me knows that I do this and I have told them that I am not going to change. For emergencies, they know the people I usually see each day and know to call one of them.
I've discovered that when people can't expect to contact you on a whim at any time, they think ahead and let you know what their plans are in advance. Both parties can then arrange their availability in advance and use their time more efficiently.
After a year of doing this it makes you realize just how absurd and artificial the expectation of continuous availability is. My attention is a resource and I am going to control how I allocate it, not others.
> "At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them"
Yes, but how do the EU regulations in question promote this goal? Background checks still exist, as does the information about you online. These regulations only impose a small burden to finding the information (by eliminating the quickest and most convenient way of finding it). They offer the illusion of control and nothing more.
> "My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request)."
Again, you're confusing things that are related but not the same. The information cannot be deleted. If Google learned something about you from public sources, that information is in the public domain and Google doesn't own or control it (though it may offer access to it). If it gained that information because you used one or more Google services, then Google has a right to use the information for purposes specified in the EULA.
If you want to have control over your information then the only way to accomplish that is to not give it away in the first place. Neither the individual in question nor Google have any ownership over information once it's public. The only question is how easy and convenient accessing that information should be.
It only benefits those who are already powerful to make access to information difficult. For example, a company can still find out if you were charged with a crime even if Google doesn't return results related to that event, but you will have a much harder time finding out if that company pollutes the environment (do you want to dig through EPA files or review past court cases against the company?) if news articles relevant to that topic have been expunged from search engines.
"The Right to be Forgotten" is just doublespeak for censorship. Selling it as an indispensable tool for personal privacy is a sickening irony.
It's really interesting to me how most people can easily spot propaganda in other cultures and rightfully mock it, but not only fail to notice even the most blatant propaganda in their own but even defend it. I suspect many Americans will do exactly that here, despite this being an obvious piece of fear mongering using basic techniques ripped straight out of a psychology textbook.
> "As the President said in announcing recent intelligence reforms, "We have to make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves"
> "Mr. Snowden's dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it."
> "We live in a dangerous world. We continue to face grave security threats like terrorism, cyber-attacks, and nuclear proliferation that our intelligence community must have all the lawful tools it needs to address."
There is nothing new here. From a different age, we had this observation from another power hungry man:
"The people don't want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
-Hermann Göring
The U.S. constitution contains some strong protections against this road to fascism, but many have been eroded or subverted over time. Our government's design is intentionally inefficient, its members supposed to change regularly, and our court system is insular and slow for a reason. But these protections were created prior to the era of mass media, and now fear can be used as an even more powerful tool for control than when the country was founded.
I suspect that in the long term, even stronger hedges against totalitarianism will be needed. Democratic republics work well when the voting public is informed, patient, and aware of history. If you can whip them into a fervor with fear mongering, make them forget the past, and make quick emotional decisions, then instead of a nation of citizens you have a troop of apes--far easier to control.
There was a post on HN last week where the author provided a reasonable answer (or at least I think so) to this question.
The gist is that people who are willing to pay a subscription to disable ads are exactly the people that advertisers would like to target. When a service assembles a list of such people, the value of that list to the advertiser generally exceeds the sum of the individual payments provided by the subscribers.
You can increase the subscription fee, but then you'll have less subscribers and the ones who are left will be the most valuable to advertisers (i.e. they have the most disposable income). If you decrease the subscription fee, you will have more subscribers but not a lot more, because the primary obstacle for online subscription type services for most people is not the price but the idea of paying for something they are accustomed to getting for free.
So if you get 1000 people to pay $1.00 per month for your niche Swedish grunge music streaming service and double the price, a decent number of them will not like that and some of them will unsubscribe. But if you halve the price to $0.50 per month you won't see many new customers since many people aren't willing to pay even small amounts for music streaming. Advertisers, meanwhile, don't have these mental obstacles and just try to price things as objectively as possible. And they see a narrowly targeted list of people with a highly correlated list of interests and purchasing tendencies and value it appropriately.
This might explain why services like Hulu have gradually introduced more advertising into their paid subscription services. As long as two groups of people are are paying them (customers and advertisers) one will generally be willing to pay more. Economic forces on the internet seem to result in advertisers having more purchasing power here.
Why stop with the implementors? Why not also blame the janitors that clean the office they work in? Why not blame the project managers to oversee the project? Or the politicians who approved funding for the technology? Or the voters who voted the politicians into office?
The human need to assign blame to a single source is an evolutionary remnant that we should be aware of and try to correct for, rather than embracing it. Just because something is terrible doesn't mean you can put all the blame for it on one person or group of people.
Except that shooting someone is generally illegal, whereas having an affair is not. Allocate your sympathy as you wish, but don't pretend that a person deserves to be the victim of a crime because you or anyone else find their behavior distasteful.
> "Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime."
This is a very dubious assertion. I'm not aware of any evidence that mass surveillance deters or prevents crime at all, much less is "an essential tool" for doing so.
But even if one, for the sake of argument, concedes the point that mass surveillance does significantly deter or prevent crime, you still have a system set up where the costs of that surveillance (loss of privacy, loss of accountability for abuses of power, introducing/secretly discovering backdoors, etc) are borne by the least powerful--ordinary citizens--while the benefits of mass surveillance (concentration of power, ability to bribe/extort/intimidate rivals, being seen as "doing something" about terrorism, etc) accrue only to those who are already powerful.
That is the real problem with mass surveillance. It creates a positive feedback loop that only exacerbates existing power imbalances, inevitably leading to corruption and capricious injustices by those who are most able to get away with it. Having a speedbump on the road to that inevitable destination, even a big one, is not much of a consolation if the heading is still the same.
> "Instead of writing Xi, they should really write X[i]; because Xi is ambiguous. I find that dealing with all the ambiguity in syntax can be rather frustrating."
This is a feature of math, not a bug. The potential for ambiguity is the cost that one pays to have a flexible and extensible notation which can be adapted to concepts yet undiscovered. This is generally not the case with code [1]. When you are exploring new ideas you want the ability to redefine your notation to match the nature and structure of the abstactions you are examining.
There is a finite number of symbols in the set of all human languages, and thus far we know of no reason that there should be a finite set of concepts in mathematics. Enforcing a one-to-one mapping from a given sequence of symbols to a given concept forces you to either limit the space of concepts you can consider or to eventually deal with impractically large sequences of symbols for relatively simple concepts.
[1] Yes, Lisp and DSLs are a thing, but you still have to define what a given sequence of symbols means. In an interpreted language, the interpreter computes the meaning using inputs and any necessary state. In math, the meaning is necessarily dependent on context as well.
Nobody wants to see abusive speech being used. The question is whether or not the law should "protect" people from it. I'm not talking about making credible threats, because the crime of assault already covers that.
If a society decides that abusive speech is a special case that must not be tolerated, it also has to define what "abusive speech" is. This requires, by its very nature, a subjective and often emotional interpretation. That society must also determine whether unintentionally abusive speech is a crime.
If the law is charged with protecting people against abusive or potentially abusive speech, it has to have powers necessary to do so. This requires the power to censor, the power to silence dissenting voices, and the power to (re)interpret the words of others based on the emotional reaction of anyone who hears those words (which may not be the intended audience).
Those powers undermine the use of speech for all purposes, not just ones that society deems appropriate.
I don't understand why people seem to think that any kind of distinction here can be enforced without undermining free speech as a whole. By way of example, you have property rights and if, by exercising them, you erect a hideous statue on your property which your neighbor finds offensive, your neighbor has no right to have the statue torn down simply because he finds it distasteful.
Freedom of speech is only really valuable when you're saying something that someone might want to censor. Nobody cares if you're saying something everyone already agrees with.
I think it's relatively easy to distinguish "speech" from "speech plus other action," such as protesting. Even someone who supported free speech and a person's right to protest wouldn't likely support them protesting on their front lawn because other rights besides freedom of speech exist (such as property rights).
I don't think it's controversial in Western societies that freedom of expression, especially in spoken or written form, is one of the most important rights of a free society, and as such is worthy of protection. Other actions associated with that speech may not be protected, so we need to distinguish between them.
You're right that public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. The government could forbid all private construction and take over home development itself, placing price caps as needed. But if you think something like that's going to work in the US when we can't even accomplish much more minor housing reform, you're dreaming. Vienna's model is certainly not that radical.
For starters, even Vienna's social housing model has income restrictions. If you and your partner both earn the average 2023 Viennese salary (about €52,000/person) then you don't quality for social housing because your combined income significantly exceeds the annual threshold (€79,490 for two people in 2023).
Even if you do qualify, you are only eligible if you have lived in Vienna for two years already. This system does nothing for new transplants. And once you do qualify, the wait time to be approved for an apartment can be in excess of 5 years. They even have a "bonus period" to move people who have been waiting for more than 5 years up in the line, because the city recognizes how frustrating that must be.
The system is easily gamed too. Vienna only checks your income once as part of the process. If your income increases later on (e.g. because you finished school and got a great job) you don't become ineligible. That part is fine by itself, but you can also transfer the apartment to a qualifying family member if you decide to move out, and they don't need to wait 5 years. This contributes to the reduced supply and long wait times because it reduces inventory and rewards those with family connections in the city.
And of course this whole system is far from free. If you make the average Viennese salary your income tax rate is 42%, whereas it's 25% for the average American worker. The average Vienna home is worth around 1 million euros and the property tax rate on such a home is a whopping 3.5%. Even in expensive coastal places like San Francisco and San Diego, property tax rates are barely above 1%. The tax burden to fund this kind of social housing (and other great things too, to be fair) is definitely heavy. It's fine to point out the positives of such a system, but the costs have to be acknowledged as well. And in the US I don't think the taxpaying population of any city is willing to bear those kinds of costs.
Vienna's system does do a great job mixing different people together, as you note. But not all of this is due to public housing. Quite a bit of it is simply how walkable the city is and how great their public transport options are. Even a moderate amount of public housing for low income individuals scattered throughout a very foot-friendly city would do a great job mixing people together.