They also got a tiny fraction of the rubber from cutting a whole tree down due to not finding a method to get all the rubber, and so cut almost all of the trees down
Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership Of corse, practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers, so its much better to use GoG if you care about this.
The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more copies
If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were correct.
>practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers
Well it makes it hard or impossible to sell your copy of the game to someone else after you are done with it like we used to be able to do with console game discs and cartridges?
Seems like a pretty big and practical difference to me.
You can also buy boxed things and have the problem. For example FL Studio, you buy the boxed edition 300 USD, and all you get is a serial number. Once it's linked to an account, it's over (and it's actually the only way).
If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
Doesn't this fly in the face of Vernor vs Autodesk and other lwgal precedent? Not that they can't change this, but legislators have a vested interest in protecting software rights
Yes but if you set up a website to do this they could sue, which I think is reasonable as many if not most people would be happy to both sell and keep a copy
But it was so much simpler when you had the disc. Whoever had the disc had access to the copy and it could be sold and resold as many times as people wanted.
I don't think people are so against DRM, because a disc like that was essentially a form of DRM. They are against an online DRM scheme which could change in the future. I know there were sone disc DRM that could like revoke the disc license, but let's go back before that was a thing to like the Xbox/360 and PS1/2/3 era style.
Lots of (most?) Steam games don't have real DRM and you can run them just fine without the Steam client. So if you want to, you can usually download the game and then back up the files yourself.
GOG giving you a standalone installer saves you some effort compared to that, but in neither case do you really "own" the game.
> Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership
Just about every commercial software license says the software is licensed, not sold.
Of course the practical difference is in whether you can trust you'll be able to keep using the product indefinitely or have to rely on the publisher's goodwill.
(Also, whether the idea that a software product is only licensed and not sold is legally valid of course depends on the jurisdiction and legal interpretation. IIRC back in the day some people tried to argue that you couldn't resell a game or other piece of software you bought on physical media because the software was only licensed to you, not sold. That argument didn't necessarily fly.)
If it's more profitable to keep your money under a mattress than to make things, provide services, or provide loans, the economy will tilt toward hoarding cash instead of more productive activities.
Gold-backed currencies, and even Bitcoin, are really good if you want your economy to be only this big, and never grow bigger. Eventually, a crisis will happen, and you'll say "actually, its now 1.3 yuan to the gram, because we need to build tanks", or "actually, did we say we had 8,000 tons of gold in reserve? we meant 9,000. Yeah we just counted, no you can't look at it, we have 9,000, here take the yuan and go build vaccines", or "its now illegal for citizens to own gold, turn it in at your nearest party headquarters" (even the US participated in that one!)
"actually, did we say we had 8,000 tons of gold in reserve? we meant 9,000. Yeah we just counted, no you can't look at it, we have 9,000, here take the yuan and go build vaccines"
I know you mean it as in governments won't return to a system that doesn't let them inflate the money supply, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing...
Yes, inflationary policy is a tax. But its better than the alternative, where the commodity cant keep up with the economy, and that money goes to the holders of the commodity instead with nobody in control
Can you rephrase that? Because I think you have it exactly backwards here unless I'm misunderstanding you.
In inflationary systems money becomes worth less, but 'things' tend to hold their value. This is precisely why the very wealthy are accumulating massive amounts of 'things' - it creates profit out of nothing thanks to inflation. So you're most incentivized to buy up as much as you possibly can, and then rent access to it. This is precisely how you get the WEF saying things like, 'You will own nothing, and be happy.'
By contrast in a deflationary system the value of things tends to decrease over time, all other things being equal. That is to say that obviously things like land can still increase in value over time if demand, in an area, significantly outpaces supply, but relative to inflationary systems - the 'natural' direction for prices is down. And so in this system there's much less motivation to hoard things. Of course in exchange there's a far greater motivation to hoard money, but at least that's fairly equitable. Right now lower classes simply can't avoid paying the inflation tax, whereas the wealthy not only avoid paying it, but directly profit off of it.
The amount of currency does not have to correlate with the size of an economy. When the economy grows while the amount of currency stays the same then your money simply becomes worth more. For the overwhelming majority of history this was taken to be a good thing. The argument for inflation is that if money become worth more over time then it would discourage investment and encourage money hoarding.
That's probably not untrue, but that critique doesn't simply make the alternative better. Money becoming worth less, inflation, creates an arguably worse scenario where now wealthy individuals are motivated to hoard things instead of currency. For instance Bill Gates is currently the largest private landowner of farmland in the US. This issue is where you get the WEF also publishing their 'You will own nothing, and be happy.' goal. I find this more unpleasant, and even dystopic, than Scrooge nosediving into his stash of ever more valuable dollars.
Another major issue here is that lower classes are the most unable to deal with inflation. They can squirrel away some money, but in an inflationary system that's the last thing you want to do. For instance stuff like bank CDs are basically just exploiting economically illiterate individuals. Nobody wants money in an inflationary system, but lower classes need immediate access to their money for the next time e.g. their car breaks down, and they are extremely risk averse. The net result of this is a system that not only perpetuates but directly drives ever greater extremes of wealth inequality.
If you want to see how much a deflationary currency fails as a currency, just look at bitcoin. The wild value swings are caused by more people hoarding it than using it as a currency, which is caused by it being deflationary. Now look at monero, which is inflationary, is largely used for day to day purchases (of mostly illegal items) and has a much more stable value, which is one of the key attributes of a good currency.
The USD was metal based, in one way or another, from 1792-1971, with two brief interludes after the Civil War and Great Depression. That's a really good pedigree.
So our current inflationary system only really kicked off in 1971 and is already looking somewhat clearly unsustainable. But what makes this particularly relevant is that 1971 was also right when major breakthroughs in computing were about to unlock a huge economic leap. That helped briefly enable the infinite exponential growth that this inflationary system requires. Without that, I doubt this system would have seen its 50th birthday.
On the topic of stability, the Fed worked to calculate inflation levels from 1800 onward here. [1] You'll notice that from 1800 to 1950 prices never shifted by more than 50% relative to the initial baseline of 51. That's pretty wild if you think about it because it includes the Civil War, both world wars, Great Depression, Spanish Flu, and all of these sort of things. Then in just the relatively calm ~50 years from 1971 to to today, prices increased around 800%.
for much of that time you could not actually receive any metal from the US, notably after the great depression domestically. The entire issue is that the US economy grew far faster than the supply of gold so could not physically purchase the required amount of gold as it did not exist.
There were ~10 years after the great depression where convertibility was suspended. One decade out of nearly two centuries is not "much."
The amount of currency need not, and arguably should not, scale with the size of the economy. Everything is relative in an economy. When the amount of 'stuff' in an economy grows faster than the amount of currency, then prices decrease - your money becomes worth more - deflation. Vice versa, if the amount of currency in an economy grows faster than the amount of stuff in that economy, then prices increase - inflation.
Inflation is undesirable, but it's in a constant tug-of-war with governments and fiat currency. When governments give themselves the power to print infinite money, they end up doing exactly that, often to the point of destroying their own economy. This is precisely why the Founding Fathers chose the US currency to be coins made of precious metals. It limits the government's ability to damage the country through reckless monetary policy.
Think about how fragile everything is already seeming being glued together by massive fed involvement, quantitative easing, and ever more archaic economic ideas like zero or even negative interest rates. And we're only 50 years into this experiment which, on the scale of something like a broad monetary concept, is barely a blink, and it's starting to come apart at the seams. And this is all during extremely stable years compared to the World Wars and other such events that we overcame in the past.
The main issue with going after airbnb is that its a true bandaid fix: the gains in supply are often offset by just a few years or months progression of the underbuilding of supply
If there is a high-demand tourist location (like many parts of Spain) and tourists are more wealthy than locals (like many parts of Spain) then new housing stock will also be soaked up by AirBnBs. In this situation the "just build" argument means you have to build enough housing to house every single wealthy tourist that wants to come before you start seeing any relief to local housing issues. Not only does that mean locals have to wait thought, say, 10 years of construction before their issues are addressed, but in the mean time the tourism sector will have dominated the economy, which is not healty either.
The tourists do not have to be particularly wealthy. All they need is to afford a per-night/week fee that is a bit higher than average equivalent local long-term rent.
At 100€ per night, at 70% occupancy the equivalent monthly rent is ~2000€.
If the economics work out for landlords, a city can lose a lot of apartments to short term rentals way faster than it could increase supply. Especially in central districts where significant new construction is barely possible.
Sure, but the article is specifically about that subject, while the government been working and continues to work on many other fixes too. Limiting rent increases, among other things, is constantly being talked and enacted right now, so at least it's going in the right direction.
Airbnb is one of many problems, and all of them require something done about it. But one does not exclude the other, if you look up the "Spain" tag on your favorite international news source I'm sure you can dig out the other measures being taken currently.
How does limiting rent increases help the issue? all that does is reduce the incentive to build more housing. It’s also a bandaid fix that sounds good today but in the end makes things worse.
Because now people aren't priced out of their current place where they live simply because the landlord wants more money each month, now it's limited to increases by an index. And landlords can also not just kick out a tenant, raise the rent price and find someone else.
Again, many small streams make a big river. Not one single action or new law will instantly fix the issue, you patch what you can and incrementally work towards something better.
But it ruins the future market. People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good. Thus turnover never happens, which is why most programs have a waiting lists easily more than a decade.
Like it helps those who have one at a greater expense to renters without one
When I first moved to NYC, my neighbor was a 70 year old single man who absolutely hated living in NY at that point in his life, but couldn't leave because his rent was so cheap(I was paying $1500 for a studio and he was paying $300 for a 1BR) - he literally could not afford to move even to a cheap area. It certainly would have been better for him if he could just swap apartments with someone living outside the city who wanted to move in, but that would be illegal.
I think rent control advocates focus on people who might be lucky enough to get a rent controlled apartment, but it is much harder to think about what happens to all the people who want to move to a city but can't because no housing stock is available.
The rest of the market was allowed to maximally increase rent to the point this person can't afford rent anywhere except for where they live, and the problem is rent control (which NYC has relatively little of)?
Why not complain about the high-rises full of empty apartments bought by oligarchs for money laundering? Why not complain about the tens of thousands of airbnb units?
NYC is actually quite good in terms of building supply, but the demand is also extremely high. Some of that demand is completely artificial due to money laundering and short-term rentals, and without fixing those issues, how can we expect people to live without limiting maximally increasing rents?
The problem is he has such a sweet deal, he needs to use the apartment even though he would rather someone else have the apartment. I don't think the goal of rent control is to trap people in a city so they can't leave.
There aren't really that many high rises full of empty apartments bought by oligarchs for money laundering in NY. And even when there are - how much land does it actually take up? At the Central Park Tower for example, 180 oligarchs can launder their money in a 200'x200' plot of land. You'll walk by it in less than a minute without really clocking it.
> 180 oligarchs can launder their money in a 200'x200'
The vertical size of that, however, could be used to house at least a thousand (or more) people.
This is mostly a manhattan problem, but there's a quite large volume of the market there (due to the valuations) that are ultra-high-end, which tends to be vacant units used for money laundering. Same issue in a lot of the larger cities.
Luxury taxes (on both the sale, and ongoing yearly costs) can help reduce the problem as well as provide tax income for the cities. It's easily a win/win.
Limiting rent increase does not mean "Rent can never change", it just means the rate of change is limited. Owners can still raise the prices each year, it's just limited based on a lot of factors, the main one being a local index. But renovating the property for example lets owners raise the rent higher, as just one exception.
> People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good.
... What do you mean "when they should"? If they don't want to leave because the rent is OK and they like living there, why should they move?
I guess one fundamental difference with Spain VS US or probably many other countries, is that here in Spain we have "the right to housing" enshrined in our constitution. This makes it so it's more important for residents and citizens to be able to find housing, than it is for owners to be able to make profits on owning properties/land.
The laws in the country should reflect this, and thankfully, they're starting to, albeit slowly.
People with high incomes living alone in multi bedroom units objectively should leave.
The “right to housing” is a joke when the US essentially makes it illegal to build new units in most areas.
Because of that restriction, rent control causes the small number of limited units to be subsided by everyone else paying more, as basic supply and demand dictates
It is possible to change multiple laws if we want to. We made them up at a certain point, and we we can make them up differently at another.
You are applying a viewpoint which is not universally applicable, nor is it static where it does apply.
If you accept that housing is not market in which all parties have equal leverage to bargain, then you should also accept that regulating it to be more fair is not bad by definition.
We happened to regulate it in ways that were counterproductive previously, but the regulation itself is not guaranteed to always be counterproductive, unless you believe that discrepancies in leverage cannot be mitigated by regulation while the lack of leverage itself is being created partially by other regulation.
Easy solution is to apply same rent controls to all units. That is everything has limited rent rises.
And this is not unreasonable. If math originally works out, then it will continue to work out. System really should not rely on property price appreciation or arbitrary rent bumps.
> People with high incomes living alone in multi bedroom units objectively should leave.
Who cares how high their income is or how big the property is? If they pay the rent and want to continue living there, they should be able to continue living there. Taking someone's home away from them because "now you earn more money" or "now you're less people" sounds very inhumane, and I'm glad Spain wouldn't allow such discrimination.
I don't know why you bring up US laws, utterly irrelevant in this submission.
The "problem" is that a rent controlled apartment is some weird chimera of ownership and renting.
You could take the difference between the market rent and contract rent to calculate a subsidy. Then you could calculate the net present value of the future subsidy payments. This is often a very significant amount of money that you just lose if you move.
Another way of looking at it. Let's say you need 40sqm of space. You rent an apartment of 100sqm. These square meters don't bring you any joy of quality of life at all. If you owned you would move. If you rented at market rate you would move. But if you rent it at a controlled rent you must hold onto it for dear life because maybe you will need it when you start a family in the far future. Getting another contract this good could be very uncertain.
in this case tourist-driven demand is a completely different beast than local housing needs, and no city can (or should) build enough to satisfy global tourism. Regulation may be the only realistic lever
Revenue has almost no relation to the ability to pay. There are plenty of businesses making 1 or 2% profit, often because they have high pass through, like distributors of all forms, including supermarkets and stores.
We don't have to match the quantum state since the brain still produces an valid output regardless of what each random quantum probability ended up as. And we can include random entropy in a LLM too.
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