Do you drink wine? The best analogy for the difference between Moutai vs Moutai Prince is the difference between a $100+ bottle of fruit forward Napa Cab vs a supermarket red that tastes like it had sugar injected into it. A beginner might call both a “sweet” wine, but the depth of the flavor is night and day for anyone who’s had any experience. Or the difference between a structured Bordeaux vs an astringent mess of a red blend. Both would taste acidic to a new wine drinker.
The expensive vs cheap baijius are the same way. Try some Wuliangye or Fenjiu for a couple of different taste categories to see what you like. Avoid the cheap stuff as your subconscious will tell you it’s terrible even if you’re not tasting the difference upfront.
As is true for many hard alcohols, you typically get what you pay for when it comes to Baijiu. Moutai Prince is terrible compared to Moutai but the difference is not in the immediate flavor. It’s mostly in the after taste.
Baijiu has many different taste categories. Moutai and the like are known as “Jiang Xiang” which roughly translates to Soy flavor. That’s the umami you’re referring to and it’s an acquired taste.
I find Wuliangye to be more approachable to beginners because it sits in the “Nong Xiang” category and tastes more floral. It’s not cheap but that’s where I recommend newer Baijiu drinkers to start.
We can build housing very well. It’s a matter of cost. Labor is not cheap. Have you tried to price out construction recently? You don’t need to take it from a random comment on HN. Price the market and see what it tells you. If you happen upon a magical reserve of cheap labor though, please share with the group, as we’d love nothing more than to pitch in and make our housing problems melt away for everyone.
Since this comment has been downvoted, I’ll add more math.
Building housing takes anywhere from 3 to 4 years for any significant development that can make a dent. When the average investor can get 7% with minimal risk in the S&P500, you’re looking at rewarding investors a lot more than that in returns over this time period. People would rather invest elsewhere.
Once you factor that in, you’re looking at a large % required return factoring risks like lawsuits, construction mishaps, etc.
There is a reason every new development looks like luxury housing or luxury apartments. The economics don’t favor Levittown style massive buildouts anymore.
The market will reward those who can bring efficiency to something that’s clearly an opportunity to be more efficient. That’s not where we are with housing right now.
this ignores the basic economics which is that it’s too expensive to build housing. Labor is expensive, materials are expensive, and permitting is expensive.
Tangential to the topic: articles like this one often talk about “waiting lists” for luxury items like Hermes bags and Rolex watches. To be clear, there is no waiting list, or at least not the type that is counted down with wall clock time.
Your ability to buy the item is solely a function of spend on buying the less popular items. If you’re a big spender, sometimes the “rare” item magically appears the same day for purchase.
I’ve recently started research construction costs due to a desire to build a custom house. Not sure what it’s like in other areas of the country, but in California, everything is negligible compared to labor costs. You would figure that means we get to use all sorts of cool materials and techniques here because the costs of materials are marginal, but no, in fact it’s the other way around. Unless you’re willing to put up with the cheapest and lowest common denominator combination of materials and techniques, people look at you funny and assume you’re okay with your costs blowing up by 10x because now the labor involved is not standard. With the million dollar (and easily higher) house construction costs, instead of the best, we get the absolute worst. That includes using the bare minimum amount of concrete in our shallow foundations that would be a laughing stock anywhere else in the world.
It would be like if every programmer only does 90s style PHP because software developers are expensive enough already and you asking for the latest Python or JavaScript is a desire to pay space rocket numbers.
I suspect what is happening is that the affordability crunch is causing a noticeable drop in demand in the HCOL areas (hence the pronounced decrease in prices in the Bay Area I noted in the original comment).
The availability of remote work and the retreat of the HCOL population to other areas in the US is likely causing an increase in demand elsewhere, as we have seen as a macro trend since the beginning of the pandemic. This demand will keep supplies low in LCOL areas.
Housing prices are dropping, as would be expected with the interest rate hikes.
House prices are set at the margins, just like any asset. Even if the folks with 3% mortgage rates sit tight and don’t sell, there will still be downward pressure on prices because prices are not determined by non-transactions. There are plenty of listings for those who need to exit the market and liquidate, driving inventory up.
Just a quick glance at Zillow and Redfin will show that Bay Area prices have already retreated 10-15% and in some cases back to 2019 levels. Every other listing has 100k+ price cuts or more.
There’s a lot of negativity towards capitalism here in this thread which is hard for me to understand when the average Hacker News user is upper middle class chatting away on social media in the middle of a work day. It seems like capitalism has done exactly a great job in lifting people out of poverty and continues to do so.
A lot of the negativity simply comes from being detached from real problems, in my opinion.
There are 2 things happening at once that seem to be causing a rift in online discussions:
1. It seems like people are severely underrating the flu and always have been. Remember when we closed all restaurants and bars and suspended all sports events when the flu killed an estimated 1 million people in 1968-1969? No you don’t because society seemed to have shrugged that one off. Ditto for many years when the flu kills upwards of 600k worldwide [1]
2. The reported CFR (Case Fatality Rates) across different countries is all over the place causing a lot of panic and overstated mortality rates. Countries like Italy report almost 7% whereas in Germany and South Korea, the CFR makes Covid-19 look like no big deal (Closer to 0.1%). I suspect that’s because Italy is well under counting the true denominator, while countries like SK have tested thousands of people per day making their data much more comprehensive.
There’s something unique about this year’s outbreak that seems to resonate deeply with more people. Ultimately it’s definitely not “just the flu” but it’s closer to that then a guaranteed death sentence.
We may see more damage from the secondary effects (people losing jobs, runs on medicine and supplies causing people to die) than from the virus itself.
I know a lot of folks are walking away from the puzzling aesthetic but I think that’s the point. Existing Tesla owners with a taste for existing design cues won’t push Tesla sales any further. They’ve got to expand the demographic and this design has a chance to do this.
Think of all the wrangler, hummer, truck buyers who want a militaristic, rough, unpolished steel look and this is that flavor taken to an extreme.
Other buyers still have the S3XYs to choose from so we can all have our favorite toys from the same company. No cannibalization.
This doesn’t include the fact that all foreign enterprises in China are actually 51% owned domestically. Tariffs, while severe, are no where close to this extreme protectionism.
The US finally decided to bring a knife to a gun fight.
The real problem is that there hasn’t been any attempt at policy changes to correct this. In order to do so, society needs to chip away at the problem in steps.
Right now, real estate is simply a good investment regardless of everything else because of the tax benefits of transferring properties to heirs. Depreciation and tax bases are reset, essentially making real estate a double whammy of tax benefits for the current owners as well as their heirs. Depreciation means tens of thousands of dollars saved in taxes per year per property. Transfer benefits means never having to pay that back due to generational reset. Take away the transfer and estate benefits first.
Once that first dent is made, the wealthy/NIMBYs will naturally vote for the next correct move, which is to take away policies that make housing unaffordable to their own children. As the law is right now, there is no incentive for land owners to be altruistic to society because their children are sheltered from affordability problems due to transfer benefits.
My wager is that all it would take is removing transfer benefits on commercial properties (e.g. like kind exchange, or enforcing depreciation recapture upon transfers, including 1031) to see the first domino fall on the way to an eventual partial rollback of laws like prop 13 and more property development due to fewer NIMBY incentives. That’s a very small bite to chew that leads to much greater changes down the road because it realigns incentives tremendously.
I say this as someone who has Bay Area real-estate. The strategy to reverse things doesn’t exist at the moment.
Random Conjecture: the most efficient way to build a new intelligent entity is through the process that we’ve been familiar with all this time — natural birth.
Intuition: to truly achieve all of the functions of the human brain and neurons, the most efficient structure is one that is biological or simulates our biological composition. There is likely no process (energy and material-wise) to produce human cells at the same fidelity as simply having sex and giving birth.