> Housing is too expensive because it's illegal to build enough of it.
A lot of us are in the US, where (except for SF and handful of specific cities) housing is legal to build practically everywhere, municipalities are handing out free money for any form of development, so people do build tons of new housing all over...
...and the prices still rise anyway.
80% of the buildings within a 1 mile radius of me did not exist at all 20 years ago. There's almost 5,000 new units around. Half of the new apartment buildings are only at like 70% utilization. We barely hit 1% population growth year-over-year.
Prices are at 40 year record high prices anyway (yes, even after factoring for inflation).
> I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.
I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.
(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.
> Material conditions shape history
Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.
I get it. I agree with most of this article. But also like, nothing went away.
If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!)
If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix)
If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.
Yeah, honestly, GDPR isn't perfect legislation, but it's pretty close. You could just copy-and-paste GDPR into the US and, with actual enforcement behind it, most of the egregious violations would be fixed pretty quickly.
Yeah, but that's just because Netflix streams are ridiculiously over compressed -- they use extremely low quality encodes. It's technically a "4K" stream, sure, but at a bitrate only realistically capable of 1080p.
An actual 4K stream (one capable of expected resolution at 4K) is around 30 to 40mbps.
I think the big problem DoorDash and the like have, is they obfuscate the capacity connection between real restaurants.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
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It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
I observed the same thing around the time online ordering became more popular. It used to be that at a lunch spot, cashiers or phone operators could restrict the order flow a bit to keep the kitchen from getting overwhelmed with orders. DoorDash et al. have no interest in that, they only want to take as many orders as possible, as quickly as possible; they have an incentive to obfuscate the real wait time from customers.
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do wonder though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", if that would help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
(re: drive-thru) You're going to be waiting aorund in a really long queue for Starbucks regardless.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
Homes also generate property taxes and sales taxes (from the occupants inside of them). Cities nearly always make money selling to new homes -- low density suburbs are highly profitable for municipalities, even on utilities alone, both initially and over a 40 year time period.
Data Centers do not work like this. They don't generate any new sales taxes, they don't really generate much in the way of new jobs, and they often don't even pay property taxes at all (our biggest data center here, for example, got a sweetheart deal on a massive property tax exemption -- they literally don't have to pay any property tax at all)
Data Centers also don't pay standard price for their power -- they get 'industrial' power rates (locally here, our industrial power rate is much lower than what a home would pay for equivalent kwh usage, even after factoring in transmission differences).
If you just charged equivalent access (if industrial users had to pay to-the-penny exactly the same prices as a residential user, identical transmission fees, identical per-kwh prices, identical time-of-day usage surcharges, etc), it would go a long way to making the data center setup more fair for everyone.
> If you just charged equivalent access (if industrial users had to pay to-the-penny exactly the same prices as a residential user, identical transmission fees, identical per-kwh prices, identical time-of-day usage surcharges, etc), it would go a long way to making the data center setup more fair for everyone.
Why? An industrial feed to a data centre is the company dealing with a single customer contact, to a single location, probably bulk-buying up front. That's very different to serving 500 houses with very variable demand.
Most data centers almost certainly pay property taxes, as well. It is still a deeded plot of land, after all? I'm curious what data center you know of that doesn't have to pay any. I know incentives are common, but they are usually tied to some other growth metric.
I'd go further than common, I don't know any major data center built in the last 6 years that didn't get them. 36 out of 50 US states give away public money to privately owned data centers right now (see https://www.naiop.org/research-and-publications/magazine/202... )
It's not always property taxes (sales tax and/or use tax and/or waived utilities costs are also common). But property taxes are also waived in various cases.
> Most data centers almost certainly pay property taxes, as well. It is still a deeded plot of land, after all?
Not always -- they often waive property taxes too.
I'm told Nevada, West Virginia, and Wyoming all have waivers on property taxes for data centers specifically, and at least 12 other states (including Illinois, New York, Texas, and many others) also waive property taxes for data centers through indirect means.
Locally here, data centers get to skip out on paying 100% of their property taxes for 10 to 20 years. They do this by getting a county to label their property as a 'Renaissance Zone' (more commonly known as an 'Enterprise Zone').
Rules for that also vary. As one example, Connecticut has 'Enterprise Zone' distinction as well, but theirs is only an 80% tax abatement, and only for 5 years.
As you might imagine, this quickly becomes a race to the bottom, on which state is willing to give away the highest amount of public money to these private companies. See https://goodjobsfirst.org/enterprise-zones/ for more details.
I don't know if I can get behind rhetoric like "further than common." It is just common. Period. And you can be opposed to it, just on principle. It would help me oppose if you showed places that were not seeing benefits.
I'm reminded of places like Alabama that would do massive incentives to Mercedes to build a production plant in the state. Again, I know many that opposed on principle, but they were a touch off balance when it came to the benefits that the state was getting from the plants.
And I agree it can be a bit of a race to the bottom, as it were. As things are, there is little to no evidence that that is the case. Building any large industrial building is a large construction project that alone will generate plenty of tax revenue to justify pushing off many taxes. Would it be even better for the localities to not? Yeah, but only if they could still get the build.
doesn't really match what I'm seeing in Chelan County, WA... the county is now in a fight with the port because the port wants to create a Tax Increment Area to capture the taxes from the two data center buildouts... ~$100m over 25 years. they also estimate $150m sales tax revenue and $70m in property tax revenue for those data centers. one relevant stat is that Microsoft will become the biggest taxpayer in the county.
They're getting that rate because of the reduced cost to support their connection to the grid per kWh. It's essentially the cost of the "packaging". If this is resulting in a loss of revenue for the utility, the blame for that falls on the utility for not properly measuring costs.
Is that also factoring in demand charges? I find this gets forgotten in a lot of discussion of industrial rates, when it is often a large factor in the effective $/kwh.
> That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant
Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did.
I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
