masterspace

I'm not sure you're familiar with the way the industry works. Builders and investors are very rarely the same people. Builders don't care if the buyer is going to live there or rent the property.

The fact that the entire condo market is built with investor sized units would suggest otherwise (or suggest that builders build what the market demands and if the market is all investors they will build investor focused units).

This is also quite the take — it's very rare to see anyone advocate for more urban sprawl or suggest that building more housing units drives up prices.

I agree, not sure where you saw that. Was it where I said that green belt policies are "very necessary"?

Land is the only finite resource in the equation, so making less efficient use of it in the hope that prices will come down is... Well, I'll need you to explain how that math is supposed to work.

The point is that policies that combat urban sprawl have also increased financialization of the housing market, both my making housing a more limited commodity (which incentivizes investors to buy), and by making it impossible to build a house unless you're a large corporation that can afford to build a multi-tenant building.

We unquestionably need to combat urban sprawl, but we should also be addressing the effects that those corrections are having on the housing market by de-incentivizing investors and profiteering.

That release valve you speak of is unsustainable due to infrastructure and transportation costs. It only works up to some level of sprawl.

Completely agree. Greenbelt policies are necessary for environmental and infrastructure reasons, they just also cause problems from a housing affordability / market elasticity standpoint, which we haven't addressed at all.

Correct, which is why it has to be public investment. We need massive multi unit buildouts funded by new public spending. All of it durable, cheap affordable housing. This will not only act on prices via increasing supply, it will also act by bidding prices down because the prices will not be maximizing profits. Whoever wants a place to live, should be able to afford one of thes units. Let the market sort out prices and availability of more premium options.

I do generally agree with this approach, though I think that a) as long as units are up for private ownership, it will make sense for investors to buy them up and hold them, you do also need to pair this with both vacant property taxes and ban investors from buying government built housing.

And b) it also won't work if the government only builds out the bottom of the market. Like we're seeing right now with the condo market, if you just build shitty units that people don't actually want to live in, then people won't really consider them part of the same market and any effects their supply has won't spread widely. If the government actually builds out livable Habitat 67 style buildings and units that middle class people would want to live in then it will be most effective.

Supply needs to increase, but it can literally never increase enough given its current structure of investors and profiteering.

As long as houses are bought by investors (anyone with two houses), then it means that normal people will be priced out as the investors push prices up higher than they should be. If house prices drop they'll invest in building less housing. This is compounded by most new housing being multi-unit buildings that a single person cannot build on their own. When we had urban sprawl, you could still buy cheap land on the outskirts and build your own house if investors stopped building new developments, but with (very necessary) greenbelt policies, it eliminates that release valve, putting the housing market basically entirely in control of investors who'll keep it inflated to profit themselves.

So your opinion is that Amazon's leadership decisions are always perfect and they have perfect insight into their company and foresight? That leadership of a tech company has never before undervalued the importance of their engineering staff, or how willing they were to quit in the face of an RTO mandate?

We all need to demand that our governments start funds for open source software.

It's fucking ridiculous that you volunteer your time to build software that benefits millions and billions of people and the government is just like "nah not a charitable contribution to us so you can get fucked in every way".

This is pessimistic nonsense.

No, Amazon is still very dependent on their software engineers, and no, it's actually quite easy to move cloud offerings and they face stiff competition from both Azure and GCP amongst others.

Also, virtually every single internal piece of HR, management, customer service, DevOps, random internal tool to do X, is written by other software teams at Amazon. You fundamentally do not understand how big tech companies operate if you think they can afford to hemmorage engineering talent without impacting their bottom line in a multitude of ways.

And this is not even to mention the competition that Amazon faces across all its different businesses: Kobo in ebooks, Roku, Google, and Apple TV in streaming boxes; Netflix, Disney, HBO, YouTube in streaming video; Google, Apple, Spotify, Tidal, in music streaming; Shopify, PayPal, Visa, etc in payment processing; Walmart, Best Buy, Shopify, in eretail, etc. etc. etc.

Congrats then on making a bold pedantic claim that you can't actually back up and is based on nothing.

Big round of applause for yourself. I'm sure the Valve software engineers who know how profitable they are happily accept lower salaries than their counterparts at Amazon and Meta. Such wisdom.

Great! So in the context of the conversation, you then agree with me that Valve is an even worse company, that's definitely not worthy of praise since they can afford to make all their employees multimillionaires but instead keep it for themselves.

Glad we can agree on the entire fucking point of this thread: that Valve is a greedy company not worth praising or dick riding.

You're literally describing the process of learning.

Wolfire estimated that Valve had roughly 360 employees (a number likely sourced from Valve itself in 2016) and that per-employee profit was around $15 million per year.

Even if that $15 million number isn’t exactly right, Valve, in its public employee handbook, says that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.” A document from the Wolfire lawsuit revealed Valve employees discussing just how much higher — though the specific number for Valve employees is redacted.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

If you don't want to be insulted than don't blindly dick ride a corporation.

At the end of the day, what I’m trying to explain and that you keep stubbornly refusing to hear, is that: way the way industry is currently, someone other than the developer is going to get that hypothetical 15% when it comes to 99% of total sales revenue.

BECAUSE THATS HORESHIT.

Jesus fucking christ. It's literally objectively false. You are just saying that to blindly defend Valve because gamers dick ride Valve like dumbass fucking lemmings.

A game developer has a revenue sharing deal with their publisher meaning that the publisher will get X% of whatever their revenue is. If their revenue is lower because Valve takes more, then they both get less. If their revenue is higher because Valve takes less, then they both get more.

It's not fucking rocket science. Stop making up hand wavy bullshit like the money will just dissappear into the ether so let's keep making Gabe Newel richer.