Its hard to relate to a lifetime employment 'tenure' when us in the private sector have to deal with leet code interviews and other countless indignities in the knife fight employment cycle every 1-3 years for the rest of our careers.. if we are lucky
Is this 1-3 year employment cycle due to working at startups and they're going out of business, or is this jumping ship for a pay raise?
If it's the latter, you don't have to switch jobs every 1-3 years, you can find a stable company and stick with them for the long haul. You may not get paid as well as the job hoppers, but you're probably making considerably more money then you would in academia, even tenured.
> Skip the LeetCode interviews/stop doing them and eventually they will go away
That is not an option in this environment; too many companies use that as the gatekeeper. From a company's point of view, if someone refuses to take the test, that's okay because there are hundreds of other applications who will gladly do it.
I have managed to avoid them in my 20 years in industry. I once interviewed and they wanted me to do a take home coding exercise to build a CI/CD system in Python (with a scheduler). No one does that - we use GitLab, Bamboo, Jenkins, etc.
Not a LeetCode example but my point is the coding exercises are silly.
(Plus Activision was apparently using Perforce at the time and not git)
Thanks for saying this, I did the same with expensing an 13 inch iPad Pro thinking I could use it as an extended screen when I travel. The fine print is that its a buggy mess that only works if the ipad and macbook are on the same wifi and even then at half resolution for the ipad, even when plugged in together via usb-c. All I wanted was a standard definition extra monitor that could work over usb-c and watch movies on flights, instead I ended up buying a normal travel monitor out of pocket and now leave the ipad pro at home. Its only function ended up being for my spouse to watch real housewives before bed.
When I was at Google in the bay area almost a decade ago and, unless my memory is heavily exaggerating, the executives of our org were in an offsite every three weeks for at least a year working on 'strategy'. It became a meme at the time among us lower ranks and I was amazed at the excess. There was no noticeable output from all those offsites and as an org we failed to execute on anything successful. I have had a low opinion of offsites ever since and have wondered if other people thought so as well or it was just me being cynical.
1. Intermittent fasting - I eat breakfast at 10am and last meal at 6pm. Its healthier and gives you 16 hours a day that you don't eat. Much easier to stay on budget.
2. 2 vegetable smoothies + Huel Black powder a day - I have a 400 calorie Black Huel powder smoothie at 10am and another at 1pm. This smoothie has > 40 grams of protein and I also blend it with frozen spinach (other vegetables as well on occasion) and the spinach tastes surprisingly good frozen. I also add a few bits of frozen fruit for taste. My wife does the same but adds pb2 peanut butter power for taste as well.
Benefits:
a. Protein makes you feel really full
b. Fiber from vegetables is almost zero calorie and makes you feel really full. It also has ummm.. other reliable benefits
c. Every day you are reliably at 800 calories going into dinner so you only have one meal to count calories for. If you want to lose weight, go low carb or keep dinner 600 calories or under.
d. This is essentially the same system as Jenny Craig, except the huel powder costs about $2 a meal. Its cheaper than Jenny Craigs/similar $10-$20 a meal and therefore sustainable
e. Vegetables are really healthy and you will feel better from the antioxidants
f. (Expert level) - I regularly add a fish oil capsule, and sometimes ginger or turmeric for added health benefits.
I started doing this in an effort to make a sustainable version of Tom Brady's diet as I started exercising again in my late 30's and kept getting injured. The increased vegetables actually fixed the issue and now I find I can adjust my weight with the diet at will. Interested in other opinions on it :)
At any rate, good luck! I hope you find something that works for you.
This is my current approach as well. Took me a good 3 weeks for my digestion to adjust though to liquid meals 2x a day so be prepared for that. I've managed to lose around 5lbs the last month so seems to be working. I tried fasting but it was too hard to stick with, so the huel shakes for breakfast/lunch seem like a much more sustainable approach. And you still get a nice meal every day. Only drawback I find is with being in the office again - I am sorely tempted to get a hot meal with coworkers.
It's a fair point and the powder is indeed a compromise, its reliable, stores well, I don't have to cook it and is fast. Raw egg would be great, except you would have to separate the egg whites as 2-4 yolks a smoothie every day could be problematic due to all things in the yolk.
I started with Soylent and that product really is a chemical mess. If I could just buy the brown rice/pea protein and flaxseed without all the vitamin additives it would be ideal and I do look for better powders every six months. To your point however, it can absolutely be improved and I am always looking for better ideas.
Something I have been wondering about, wouldn't a virus naturally evolve to be less deadly and more contagious over time? I.e. virus's tend to achieve a steady state like the cold and flu in the long run. If you are too deadly it hinders spread so I would expect Covid to get less deadly and more contagious over time, which kind of fits the data?
You would think – but viruses don't necessarily become less deadly.
The virus wants to maximize transmissibility, and that might require trading off further against the host's health and increasing its death rate.
An example is Myxoma virus. It was intentionally introduced to pest Australian rabbit populations (to cull them) and studied.
After ~30 years of evolution, they found the dominant strain had a 70-95% death rate and left long-lasting lesions. Other strains with higher (~99%) and lower (~50%) death rates weren't as stable & prevalent.
Once a virus is transmitted (enough), what happens to the health of its host is irrelevant.
It basically needs to be extremely contagious without symptoms that stop the spread - like killing the host.
Which in part this virus has, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic are as contagious as symptomatic. If it's enough to spread, doesn't matter much if the host dies after a few days or not.
>Infectiousness may peak before symptom onset (7). Viral loads appear to be similar between asymptomatic and symptomatic patients (8), although the implications for infectiousness are unclear. People experiencing symptoms may self-isolate or seek medical care, but those with no or mild symptoms may continue to circulate in the community. Because of this, those without severe symptoms have the potential to be “superspreaders” and may have an outsized influence on maintaining the epidemic.
Generally, yes. But also we’re a bit unlucky that it isn’t very deadly: SARS was way deadlier To start with but as a result spread several orders of magnitude less (both naturally and because humans had a stronger reaction to “shut it down at all costs“).
The H1N1 virus from the 1918 pandemic grew less deadly over time, and essentially evolved into a seasonal flu that is still affecting people around the world today. Personally, I expect COVID19 to go the same way.
The h1n1 is a bit of a strange case though because it jumps species boundary very often and mutates very quickly. COVID-19 appears to evolve much, much slower. Based on my limited understanding of virology, I think this means it's unlikely to become a seasonal problem unless the general populations immune system does not retain immunity to the same strain for a significant period of time.
We already know CoV2 rarely causes any symptoms in children. I wonder if there was a time in prehistory where common Rhinoviruses and Coronaviruses wiped out larger populations of elderly.
Even if our immune system memory doesn't last very long for these types of viruses, wouldn't young people getting exposed to it now likely reduce its impact long term?
It also seems like >95% of people who die from this are over 55 years old. When you get into your 70s~80s, aren't common colds one of the things that result in natural deaths, due to an aging immune system allowing pneumonia to set in where it wouldn't in a younger person?
Yes that probably happened several times in human history. There are four other endemic coronaviruses. Most people catch them as children and build up some immunity, so even if they're reinfected later the symptoms are usually less severe. But they can be deadly to immunocompromised patients.
There is some strong circumstantial evidence that the 1889 "Russian flu" pandemic wasn't caused by influenza at all but rather by the emergence of HCoV-OC43. It killed about a million people worldwide.
> We already know CoV2 rarely causes any symptoms in children. I wonder if there was a time in prehistory where common Rhinoviruses and Coronaviruses wiped out larger populations of elderly.
Didn't pneumonia, influenza (among small pox and others) have terrible consequences on American native Indians ?
I believe small pox was the major one, I've heard among the Incas for example, it wiped out between 60 and 90 percent of the population. The main reason the colonists were able to spread so easily in the two continents is because disease wiped out huge swaths of the native population before many settlers even arrived. It's not like muskets are all that superior to bow and arrow (if at all, due to reload speed). Much of the land was just left vacant and unoccupied, and former cities abandoned.
> A Texas Ranger, Captain Samuel Walker, wrote Colt a testimonial that read, in part:"Your pistols...[are] the most perfect weapon in the World... to keep the various warlike tribes of Indians and marauding Mexicans in subjection."
The 20th century decolonization wars showed that natives can adapt to modern weaponry fairly well.
But you need the numbers to pull this off. Sioux are not numerous enough to threaten American dominance of their territory. If they were as numerous as, say, Punjabis, that would be a different story.
It's already clear that the vaccine, when it gets released, won't be a one time thing and we'll need more in the future to counter the mutations. Unfortunately, just in anecdotally talking to friends about it, it doesn't seem that this is widely known. It will be interesting to see how things play out as more people start to realize this. I suspect a lot of anti-vaxxers will be even more emboldened by it.
I don’t think anything is “clear” - there are even indications that people exposed to the original SARS virus have their immune systems primed to more quickly respond to SARS-CoV-2.
We're unlucky in that Covid takes such a long time to kill. It's a little under a week until symptoms onset, another week until serious illness [1]. Hospital patients aren't dying of Covid until almost 2 weeks after admission [2]. So we're talking about victims dying maybe a month after exposure.
With other illnesses there's evolutionary pressure to be less deadly so that the host doesn't die before infecting others, but that's not a problem for Covid where people are most contagious before symptom onset.
Influenza isn't in a steady state, there are hundreds of strains[0] that compete with each other and recombine to form novel versions. Each year's flu vaccine targets four of them based on modeling as to which will be most prevalent in the upcoming flu season[1/2].
If you look at the death rate compared to March, it is dramatically lower, even though we're having 2x the cases. This could be because of better treatment, or because the virus itself is getting milder.
There are a lot of factors contributing, in particular the age distribution of those people getting infected.
One thing is "viral load", which has to do with how much of the virus is present at initial infection. Because immune system response takes time to ramp up, e.g. 10x more virus in the beginning means that it can do much more damage before the immune response. It's likely that social distancing and masks have reduced the average viral load at infection time.
That is mostly due to the way they are spread as a less impacted infected person would be more outgoing and spread that virus more. When somebody more impacted by a virus would be more isolated due to the impact. So the less impacting one gets more exposure and spread.
So that in itself would be a factor, however virus can mutate in various ways and it is the mutations that effect the incubation period and that window of being infectious but not showing any symptoms - that is always going to impact things and certainly a large factor in why COVID managed to spread better than expected.
But much hindsight and data analysis will play out for years and years, after all - we are still looking at the Spanish flu data and seeing different aspects to this day.
I have seen a statemen somewhere tha for viruses it goes "transimissability, mortality, stealthiness: pick two". Not sure how true it is, but looks plausible.
I keep wondering what unintended consequences our nearly-unprecedented efforts on non-pharmaceutical interventions ("lockdown", social distancing, masks, etc.) might end up having on the virus - for example, could all our isolation and distancing be accidentally selecting for strains of the virus that transmit more readily over further distances?
The mitigations are effective in slowing the spread (to varying degrees, due to a multitude of factors), which in turn slow down the rate of mutation. In any case, I would expect the dispersion of the virus to follow a pattern similar to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
However measurement of the impact of lock-downs/social distancing upon existing known virus's like colds and flu's would give an insight into that whole area.
It's not like the virus has a brain. Statistically most could become less deadly, but it doesn't mean all will follow the same pattern. In this case, the virus becomes less deadly as we know how to treat it better and most infected and tested now are younger people.
But the way viruses evolve to be less deadly is that the deadlier strains kill a bunch of people quickly, before they can spread too much. So that's not exactly reassuring for any given mutation.
What about them? Any sources on how many are crippled for life? When we are not even a year into this?
There are some articles poping there and there about some lingering health issues after covid. Not much talk about how they compare to lingering health issues after flu or other viral infections. And not high quality either (self-reported, etc.)
0.2% mortality is the rate for people under 60. 0.1% rate for flu is considering all ages. If you remove over 60, the death rate for flu is something like 0.002%. So for an equivalent age group coronavirus is 100x more deadly.
Conventional wisdom often claims that virus evolve to become less fatal - but I don't think that matches the historical record.
There's evidence for influenza virus existing thousands of years before 1918. As such, it seems to have evolved into a much more deadly strain at that point.
Reproducing more efficiently is a win for natural selection and will normally result in a dominant strain: whether that strain is more deadly or not is going to be random.
We might optimistically anticipate some regression to the mean fatality rate (where the mean is close to 0).
> There's evidence for influenza virus existing thousands of years before 1918. As such, it seems to have evolved into a much more deadly strain at that point.
Influenza refers to a class of viruses, not a single virus.
Just like SARS-CoV-2 wasn't a thing a year ago, but crossed over to humans late 2019, the 1918 Spanish flu virus did indeed only start infecting humans in 1918, independently of other viruses. 1918 just happens to be the year it (most likely) crossed over from an animal to a human.
Assuming generously that you are right about this, why (for example) are viruses crossing over in the other direction - from humans to animals - never considered important?
We might only care about the part of viral evolution and epidemiology that we closely observe or are immediately impacted by, but that does not mean the other aspects of evolution are independent.
> Reproducing more efficiently is a win for natural selection and will normally result in a dominant strain: whether that strain is more deadly or not is going to be random.
The conventional wisdom is such because a virus that is swiftly fatal and/or has more dramatic health consequences would have less chance to propagate to other hosts. For instance, because the original host will be unable to move or will look threatening to others so they will know not to reside close to them. This should make it less than random.
Unless of course some unforeseen factor makes this reasoning untrue.
Taken to extremes, it's easy to see how a virus that is 50% fatal within 24 hours will not last long itself.
Is there really very much selection pressure between 1% and 2% fatality rates over 4 week timespans, though? Especially if immunity is conveyed by infection, I don't see any reason why a virus like that would evolve to be less fatal within the timescales that humans care about.
Generally if it's twice as fatal it'll probably makes people twice as sick so they're more likely to go out less, stay home more, and less likely to infect other people.
However if it did damage in a way that doesn't manifest for a long time this wouldn't necessarily be the case. But that would be the exception more than the rule.
I think what happened with the 1918 pandemic (and the 2019 one for that matter) is a virus hopping between species can "reset the clock" on that trend and start as very fatal for humans.
Evolution is a random and long-term process. What you're thinking of is natural selection. Even that does not guarantee things will get better. For example, there was a worse second wave of Spanish Flu. Natural selection only implies there's less chance these terrible things will last. And, to adapt an economic adage, "The disease can remain deadly longer than you can remain alive."
As far as I can tell if the team is prestigious enough, i.e. famous founders or stacked pedigrees, it can raise a few million without a single line of code. There are many examples of this that can be inferred if you look at crunchbase and linkedin start dates for various companies.
United States
Excess deaths by country or city
Deviation from expected deaths, %
Jun 6 - Jun 12 '-10%'
May 30 - Jun 5 '+1%'
May 23 - May 29 '+6%'
May 16 - May 22 '+12%'
I was surprised at these numbers and its interesting to contrast these with cases over time and tests conducted. Cases over time has under counted the general population before but to what extent is hard to know. Perhaps (since deaths are behind initial contracting of Covid by approx 28 days (Per Kinsa https://www.kinsahealth.co/kinsas-illness-signal-a-leading-i...) the population Covid numbers were actually trending down in May while tests performed were trending up.
Is part of the issue that there is just too much money has been printed and hoarded and its creating some weird effects?
The government has been printing money for a long time, to stimulate the economy, provide spending money, etc. Due to 80/20 rule, rich get richer effects, etc, a large portion of money the government prints ends up in the hands of a relatively small group who doesn't spend it but rather tries to invest it to get more money. Government prints money again trying to stimulate the economy and again most of it ends up in a few hands. At some point don't you have what we have today? A 1% that owns lots of wealth and doesn't know where to put it while the majority of the economy is still relatively broke? How does it play out? Do the 1% just buy all the assets at some point?
I am not trying to make a statement about inequality but rather curious about the result of printing money for 70 years and having that money end up with relatively few parties each round. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can speak to this.
It's not just "rich get richer". It's also that everybody bought into the "just buy the market" idea hook line and sinker. Pension funds, individual investors, everybody.
How retirement works on paper: you save the money by buying the market and get 20% more when you retire in 40 years. How retirement works in reality: younger people work to supply the old with food and medical care. The real transfer is happening now, while the financial transfer is happening over decades. I don't think this creates a healthy, sustainable dynamic.
The Conservative Party in Great Britain has been trying to make home ownership a reliable method of saving for the last century. They pretty much succeeded: house prices have been going up almost constantly since the war, and owning a house all but guarantees you'll be able to built generational wealth.
This came at high costs: once a large enough part of the population buys houses at inflated prices with the expectation of their price further increasing, the government needs to protect them from housing crashes and depreciation to inflate the bubble further and further.
Now that pretty much everyone has their money invested in the stock market, I see the same thing happening in the US. The Fed needs to keep the interest rate artificially low and guarantee policies to keep the stock market up so that people don't lose money, but also making sociery overall worse.
And we can say whatever we like about how the rich get richer, our current economic system do responds to what central banks do. Cheap money (an oversupply of low and even lower interest rate debt) helps persuade people to buy/invest/order things. It helps finance stimulus bills, and so on.
The savings are "just" an indicator. Sure, when the savings crash, the economy crashes too, but the causality is backwards. If/when the economy crashes (when industries stop, when people stop buying, when businesses let people go) savings will also become "worthless", because after all they represent future income, and if the economy tanks its productivity (income) tanks too.
The issue is two-fold - assuming that all the money comes at beginning, and forgetting about inflation, and not taking into account the shift in risk towards the later ten years, and assuming that your income stays the same. When taking into account the increase in income both absolute and in real terms after necessary expenses, you realize that a lot more than the majority of the money is invested in the latter 25 years.
But yes, it would be more than 20%, though a lot less than 130%.
"The average annual total return and compound annual growth rate of the S&P 500 index, including dividends, since inception in 1926 has been approximately 9.8%, or 6% after inflation" [0]. If you have a 40 year career, money you put in at the start would approximately be worth 10 times what you put in adjusting for inflation, and even money you put in midway would approximately be worth triple.
No, I came to my conclusion by putting away $100 every month for 40 years. $48000 is put in, $114000 is present at the end with a (historically unprecedented low) 4% overall return. Exactly the same amount of money is put away in the last 25 years as in the first 25 years.
The shift in risk should be accompanied by changes to the portfolio mix, of course.
But it's not how people save. The average person has too many expenses and not enough income at age 22 to save up as at age 45. And in those later years, the returns diminish.
Sure, if you have sufficient income to be able to save up enough for retirement just as soon as you get a job, that works. But that's not the reality for the average person. Most people don't get a high-paying job straight out of school.
I am not sure what you are arguing. Someone said that retirement works “on paper”, and you get 20% more. I pointed out that “on paper” you get more than double what you put in.
All of these other issues you raise have nothing to do with the financial illiteracy leading to the idea that you save for retirement just to get an incremental return rather than a multiple (or two, really, depending on timing) of what you put in. Perhaps if this were more well known, people would invest more at age 22.
tl;dr we’re talking about “on paper” here, investment works as advertised (In fact, much much better than the original poster believes it advertised). All of the things you bring up here are about scenarios that aren’t “on paper” any more.
Is there any serious idea about how a fair pension scheme could/should work without just buying the market? (So in some countries the pension system is just mandated by law, managed by the government. And might be even "guaranteed by law" to track inflation. But in this case it's again exactly the same, your purchasing power of your pension income depends on the strength of the country's economy - which depends on the global market.)
Well, as I expand in the second paragraph above - the ONLY real pension scheme is having kids, and more kids. Everything else is just an obfuscation and/or securitization of this basic fact. If you don't want to work, someone else has to. And if we (jointly as a society) decide that "old" people are more deserving to not work, then, well, we need to make & have enough non-old people.
That's why to some degree I think asset-hoarding (S&P, real estate, cashflow-positive businesses etc.) is a good idea and actually my preferred plan, because I fundamentally don't trust the governments (they're all delusional with their long-term plans re: pension obligations, education, family planning & birth rates, immigration, ...), but at the same time I'm aware of the fact that while this strategy works individually (i.e. if I own more property, I'm better off than the next retiree), it doesn't quite work for the whole society. Pension as a social transfer really is the only way to go.
Printing money has recently shown to have little impact on inflation. This is likely due in part to lack of consumer spending (can't inflate prices if nobody is buying it anyway) as well as spreading the USD across billions of people in dozens of interconnected economies that base off the dollar.
The recent $5 trillion injection from the Fed (buying bad debt/assets) and Treasury (stimulus/PPP) may simply show that we could afford universal healthcare and a bunch of other programs that cost $$$. Now is the time to spend that money and, at least it appears, avoid some long term costs. I'd argue the benefits of things like expanding education, investing in mental and physical health, and doing more to support our youth will have a much greater return than potential long term inflation or other issues from the $5 trillion.
Printing money has not had much impact on consumer prices. But it seems very plausible that it is causing inflation of asset prices, including equities, and that that is a distortion of the market that could have negative long-run repercussions.
This. For years now everyone has been saying "where is the (consumer price) inflation"? Meanwhile real estate prices are rising fast (in desirable parts of the country) and the stock market has been on an epic bull run. It's obvious that the inflation is in the asset prices.
This is a dangerous trend. The rich (who tend to own those assets) get richer and and the poor (who rent/live paycheck to paycheck) get more and more desperate. If we don't find a way to reduce the inequality, this is going to mean serious trouble down the line.
> Meanwhile real estate prices are rising fast (in desirable parts of the country)
Mainly just the west coast and that's because their cities are built in valleys with a fixed amount of land, restrictive zoning on said land causing a fixed amount of housing and thus the bidding up housing prices.
For the rest of the country, inflation adjusted price per square foot hasn't really changed [0].
> the stock market has been on an epic bull run. It's obvious that the inflation is in the asset prices.
Inflation adjusted Annualized S&P 500 Returns with Dividends Reinvested for the past 15 years are 6.738% versus 7.690% for the 15 years before that [1]. Albeit, if you just started in 2009, it has been quite epic considering it was the longest bull run in US history.
Piketty tried to analyze this, and the idea is to have a minimal wealth tax. (I have no idea what's the current best evaluation/assessment of his work and this idea, but Land Value Tax is something many economists already favor, and it'd help decouple the pain of growing cities from housing as an investment.)
So similarly there is probably some sense in trying to counteract low-interest-rate inflated asset bubbles via some kind of tax or other financial structure. (A progressive capital gains tax might help, but that might just make markets less efficient by introducing a chilling effect on the high end.)
In the end this is a purely political question, because obviously the problem is not that it's unfair that some very "desirable" assets price inflates, but that the majority of the population did not have the means to buy into it before the inflation happened to reap the capital gains.
There's already serious trouble due to inequality. (The recent protests about police brutality follow a long series of other symptoms that highlight how socioeconomic inequality manifests and persists on an ethnic level.)
Exactly this. The FED and the ECB have been printing money like crazy for years, however this money did not go to the man in the street but to banks and indirectly to other financial institutions. And those don't spend their money in the grocery store but in the stock market.
The classic economical laws are not broken, they are still in full effect and we see their effect in the inflated share prices.
So who is buying equity (so stocks)? And one argument is, that "retail investors" are driving this. (So end users, the folks on the WallStreetBets subreddit, and whoever uses RobinHood, or anyone that puts money into a passive index fund: https://www.reddit.com/r/econmonitor/comments/hnohi6/us_equi... )
Also savings increased a lot, since people were not spending (they were staying at home), so where to put the money? They put it into index funds.
Meh, most of what they are buying is just our own governments debt [0]. Now, you can certainly argue investors are buying more equities now that there aren't as many treasury securities to buy, but equity returns aren't even abnormal from historical returns. Inflation adjusted Annualized S&P 500 Returns with Dividends Reinvested for the past 15 years are 6.738% versus 7.690% for the 15 years before that [1].
You're comparing one of the strongest economic expansions in US history (1991-2001, brief, small recession, then 2001-2007, stopping at 2005 of course) to a period bookended by two of the worst recessions in US history (2007, 2020). It should be concerning that equity returns don't differ very much. That means they aren't correlated with the underlying economy.
The great recessions was definitely one of the worst, but it was followed by the longest bull run in the history of the united states and it is way to early to claim this crisis as being one of the worst recessions in US history.
This is the most important and often under-looked thing in this whole thread. This will further lead to wealth gaps and difficulty for working people to "get ahead".
And that is on top of the mismanagement of PPP funds after the IG over that was fired and replaced with a loyalist. We are only starting to see where billion of tax dollars went including a large chunk to churches and millions to Kanye West and campaign donors/supporters. If one has an issue with looting by protestors, they really need to look at the looting by the wealthy. Not just PPP loan abuse but also historically low tax rates and a pass for environmental abuse too.
This is an inherent problem with need-based things -- they are ripe for abuse. If you have universal things, the abuse is part of the design ;) IOW: if instead of PPP being only for certain kinds of companies or institutions it were all of them then a) there is far less to administer b) they get more support and c) you dont have moralistic temptations or arguments. UBI vs SSI, universal healthcare vs medicare, etc etc.
Yes, this means wealthy people will get the same checks as the poor -- but that is a feature, not a bug. Sorry for the soapbox.
There was oversight for PPP, but the president fired the IG over the program and replaced them with a loyalist right before the fund went live. The administration then refused to provide data on who got loans until sued. Now we know that the Sec of Transportation and husband Mitch McConnell, the new USPS head who appears to be trying to crush mail in voting internally, and many other government officials received loans for millions. If one was to condemn protesting due to looting, imaging the response to misappropriating billions in tax dollars to corporations, supporters, and corrupt officials.
This seems likely to me, lots and lots of money injected and consumer prices are stable yet art, real estate in desirable urban locations, equities, and some categories of luxury goods/experiences are soaring. Am I wrong?
Yes and no. You're right about what happened in the aftermath of 2008, though it took a while to get there. You're wrong (so far) about what's happening in 2020. Currently, the market (or at least the Dow) is down about 10% from its high.
People are chasing gains. TSLA has at a chance of succeeding at either autonomy or cheap energy storage. If that plays out it could be a 500B company in 8 years. Why not get in now with a hope of a 6% annual return?
Printing money to get through a recession vs printing money as the primary way of funding government programs are wildly different things. The mere suggestion that U.S. officials were serious about running a deficit of a large percentage of GDP could send people fleeing U.S. dollar denominated assets, and thanks to the exchange rate effects cause a spike in inflation before the programs even started.
The thing that makes a green piece of cloth valuable is the powerful government and the massive reserve bank behind it. If a dollar bill starts to look like an IOU from an entity that has no capacity to pay, it will be valued as such.
We haven't even rolled back the quantitive easing from the last recession. These financial rescues are now becoming permanent fixtures on our balance sheets. At least with health care, we would have something to show for these massive injections of money. Instead we just get inflated asset prices and growing wealth inequality.
Why is it a problem that they are still on the balance sheets? The instruments that have maturity will eventually vanish on their own, and the Fed can sell off the rest later.
It's better to do QE than "wait out" a recession, or wait for Congress. (Plus QE keeps the national debt service costs down too.)
The asset bubbles are not the real signs of inequality. After all, if every US citizen would have some savings and some of that in passive index funds, no one would complain about this. The problem is that people have no money, no disposable income, no savings, no job security, etc.
I think the comment above is suggesting that, either instead of or alongside, current Fed cash injections and distributions by the Treasury we need to push for and implement programs that leverage us out of the QE cycle. A universal healthcare system, student loan forgiveness and free or reduced cost education, a basic income over complex safety net benefits, that sort of thing. As it stands, QE is preventing a massive crash but it's not a long term solution.
I'm all for universal and single-payer healthcare, education reform, basic income (negative income tax is the best version of UBI), and so on.
But still, QE might be here to stay. It's hard to stay, I know very-very little about these things. (Even compared to - let's say - healthcare costs [see https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/ ].)
Have they been printing money? Has more USD been created, physically or virtually? This is something I don't understand, I'm hoping someone here can explain it.
I was under the impression the last 40 years of US deficit spending has been mostly financed by selling US bonds to China, Japan, etc., while counting on growth and inflation to take the edge off when they come due. And selling more bonds instead of defaulting, so the debt just keeps growing. Printing money causes inflation but not deficits or lingering debt.
I don't know though, I'm not an expert. I would appreciate any corrections or clarifications from anyone.
"The Fed can indeed create money "out of thin air." To be more precise, it does so with keystrokes on a computer. This was illustrated with its QE program, also known as open market operations. That's when the Fed buys an asset from a financial institution and pays for it with money it simply creates."
and i know this is technically fully legal. but conceptually, it seems like fraud. I mean, they're just creating money at will and buying up assets. if anyone else did that, they'd be in jail.
The Fed is playing off the same dynamics as fractional reserve banking. This has been the standard form of banking for ~2-3k years, and allows a bank operating in its own currency (Bank Notes) to create arbitrary amounts of money. This is the same process by which loans are generated.
It is wealth transfer from the people to the government; the Romans did it, until their economy collapsed from the strain of perpetual warfare and government spending [1]
but it's not anyone else, it's the central bank of the USA, as mandated by Congress.
they provide price stability (by keeping the money supply corresponding to the demand) and they try to maximize employment (by helping the economy through providing liquidity, every central bank is the "lender of last resort" but that's for emergencies, usually they operate simply by providing forward guidance and conducting open market operations to keep the interbank interest rate close to the target rate).
Most of those assets they are buying are just our own government's debt and the profits they make from it (100 billion dollars in 2015 for example) go right back to our government reducing our budget deficit. I don't understand why people get so upset about this especially considering basically every country is doing this.
Generally lowering the interest rate causes inflation only if the economy is already at capacity.
Printing money to keep up with economic growth is also an important function of central banks.
Deficit spending is ultimately simply financed by paying off the debt in the future via taxes. (And the growing economy and the stable but low inflation helps with this.)
“300 landlords who own more than 10,000 apartments”
Wow, that’s allot of concentrated wealth. Anyone have some insight on these fine folk?
If each landlord owns 100 apartments renting for $4k each(average) that’s $400k a month gross. That’s allot of potential venture capital money to capture monthly, over $20M in five years.
Something to keep in mind is that once you own a few rentals, it's easy to pull equity out for a down payment on another rental, and buy the rest with a loan. Leveraging is easy when there you are buying physical assets that retain value.
In other words, even if you own 10 rentals, you are probably wealthy, but the bank my still own a majority % of those assets.
The goal is not to own the rentals, the goal is to own the cashflow through the control of the properties (whether that's mortgages, leases, or option agreements with the owner). To your point, you want to be stripping equity whenever possible to accelerate asset acquisition. Very similar to private equity LBO operations.
If you're highly levered (as a smaller landlord), and funneling that income into retirement accounts protected from creditors (varies by state for IRAs, 401ks are federally protected), it's all upside with no downside. Heads, you walk away with appreciated real estate you eventually cash out of. Tails, you walk away from your investment properties while your retirement assets are protected with credit blemishes that are quickly forgotten by lenders. It is rare to be pursued by lenders in recourse states, as being (mostly) judgement proof and the option of bankruptcy are significant hurdles.
Home equity loans or cash out refinances. What you pick is determined by your financial models based on interest rates, origination fees, etc. Typical carrying cost math.
Once you have enough properties to bump up against Fannie or Freddie GSE underwriting guideline limits (~10 properties), you transition into commercial lending, where you build a relationship with a bank and they lend against your combined portfolio.
Sure, if they own outright, rather than having borrowed money to buy the apartment complexes, and if they don't have to pay maintenance, insurance, landscaping, and so on.
It's not just free money. They're making money, sure, but considerably less than your calculation.
Not sure how much you know about the SF market. We only get glimpses, but it gives you an idea of how much wealth these landlords capture.
The building at the corner of Fillmore and Waller was bought for $1.05 million, 20 years ago. It has 6 retail storefronts and 18 apartments upstairs. Just one of the retail doors rent for $10000/month, or it did before this rent strangled the tenant:
The building is assessed for $1.4m, so the taxes are around $15000/year (which the tenants pay under NNN terms) but the gross is probably well over $50000/month. And there's no landscaping, obviously.
These people are absolutely stacking cash. They are just parasites.
They are providing a service. You arrive in a new city with no money. Where will you live? The landlord is assuming the risk of owning and maintaining the building and all you have to do it put in a deposit.
The main reason they are "parasites" is prop 13. Without that, their building would be assessed at a reasonable level, and most of their profits would be property tax payments.
If you live in California, make sure to vote yes on the two partial repeals of Prop 13 this November:
Landlords may provide services, but they primarily extract economic rent, essentially profiting from their their monopoly on that particular piece of land.
How can they profit from the unproduced value of the land when they had to buy it? It seems to me that you're assuming landlords owned the land since before high property values in SF or wherever were a thing. It seems unlikely this situation accounts for much of the real estate.
They are providing a service in the act of owning and maintaining the building.
What service are they providing in their role as a landowner? Land (in the sense of it being in a specific location) doesn't require any maintenance or risk. It's also not like they created the land.
The majority of rent in SF comes from the land value, so this is the more relevant part to consider.
The reason why land is expensive is because there is high demand for it. Landlords can't set prices arbitrarily. Every tenant has voluntarily agreed to the rent they pay.
How is this relevant except for a hypothetical person who owned land since before there was a city? That person would indeed be profiting unjustly from value created by others, but that doesn't seem like real life. What am I missing?
> Let me give you concrete scenario of where the current system breaks down. Let's say I own an apartment building on the edge of town, and the city decides to build a new transit line to the community. Rents in my apartment building will go up; let's say by $100. Renters are willing to pay an extra $100 because they value living near a transit line more than the being far from one. But why should that extra $100 go to my pockets, while the government has trouble even paying for transit system? It's not like I was the one who built transit system, it was funded by the income taxes of the people who work there, and then built by the government.
This applies to all infrastructure spending of course.
As I said in another comment, this is why there are property taxes. I don't think it's any different than income taxes. You own real estate, the society around you is a multiplier, so you owe a percentage. You make a salary, the society around you is a multiplier, so you owe a percentage.
In practice the percentage could be off, but the basic way the system works makes sense to me and I don't get the people who are sure that it's terribly wrong (whether because they are against taxes or against owning property).
If property taxes are normal (not capped like in California), some of the effect is mitigated, but the property value increase is still greater than the tax increase. Real estate investing as an industry only exists because of the existence of property gaining value.
Most infrastructure spending requires income taxes and transfers from the federal government, so clearly there is wealth transfer happening to the landlords.
Well, maybe it just isn't true that real estate is a perpetual money machine. If it was, yes, that would be a problem because it would eat the world. But people always exaggerate the permanence and universality of any bubble.
You can dismiss it as anecdotal evidence, but I live very far away from SF, in a place built in the early 90s, within city limits, and it has not increased in value faster than inflation in all these years.
Sorry, I replied too fast to see your part about raising rates. Yes, that's roughly in line with I propose. We raise the tax on the land to exactly how much rent you land derive from the land. And then you don't tax the structures on top at all, since we want to incentivize people building on top. This is the Georgist policy of a land value tax.
I don't doubt there are places where rent-seeking from land is not occurring. But we still need to address the places where it is a problem. And this will remain a problem as long as people require land to live, as long as centralization to cities keeps occurring (which we want more off, given its benefits).
My point is not that being a landlord has no risk or guarantees absurd returns. Rather, I'm saying that the returns from land do not come at all from the value that the landlord provides, so we should make sure those returns go back to the community that created them.
The land is still a scarce resource. What do you propose, that the government own all land? Let the property owners just own the buildings?
We tried that before, it was called feudalism. It's where the King owned all the land and the peasants were allowed a small piece of land to work and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
People own the land, they just pay a "user fee" of sorts to the commons.
Actually, the current situation is already like feudalism. Under feudalism, people other than the king also held land (the nobility). These landed gentry also drew the benefits of free rent, from the poor labourers.
Those with land currently can hold it indefinitely, extract a profit from it, and then pass it onto their children. That sounds a lot like the landed gentry under feudalism to me. The property tax tempers it slightly (which is why prop 13 is so bad), but it's easy to eliminate it all, while still keeping private landownership and market mechanisms for allocation (I definitely don't trust the government to own and allocate all land efficiently).
If you make anywhere near an average IT salary in the USA there are a billion or so people in the world who would feel that you were absolutely stacking cash, and are a parasite.
In the case of the salaried employee, you're earning as a direct result of you doing productive work. You can argue that the pay is too high, the but the fact you have to put in work to earn it means it is at least not parasitic.
In the case of a landowner, they need to put in no such work. They didn't create the land. All of the rent comes from the fact that they have a monopoly on a scarce good that cannot be produced further, and one that everyone needs. See Adam Smith [0] and David Ricardo analysis on rent for more on this (the Ricardo's law of rent is a really neat concept).
Now the fact that land and buildings are rented together complicates this a little bit, but this definitively applies to the rent that comes from the land.
Simply claiming two actions are equivalent because they both lead to lots of money is not a useful mental model. How you earn your money matters.
[0] - "The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give." — Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI
Comparing land to capital misses some important differences, that economists have recognized.
Land is a scarce resource with a fixed supply. If I want to rent land in SF, I don't too many options. And the demand is increasing, since everyone needs land to exist, and the population (at least in cities) is increasing. This gives the landlords a monopoly (see the law of rent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent). In the case of loans, if I don't like your rate, I can simply go to a different lender.
Secondly, can you point out what we lose if the landlords doesn't exist?
If lending doesn't exist, there's businesses that would have started, but can not anymore, since they may not have enough capital to get off the ground.
If landlords don't exists, the land is still there, and we lost nothing, since land can't be created or destroyed.
> Let me introduce you to some landlords who went bankrupt in 2008.
My point is not that being a landlord has no risk. Rather, I'm saying that the returns from land do not come at all from the value that the landlord provides, which is not the case for lending, or other productive activities.
If landlords don't exists, the land is still there, and we lost nothing, since land can't be created or destroyed.
If landlords don't exist, people couldn't have a place to live unless they could purchase themselves. I think landlords are great - I can get a nice place to live and have none of the risk the landlord does. Property prices go down? I don't care. House burns down? I don't care. If I want to pick up and leave in a year? Great, here's notice. No real estate fees, paperwork, etc.
You're conflating land rents and building rents. The "landlord", in their position as the building owner clearly provides a valuable service: the upfront capital/labour to construct the building and the maintenance. I'm not saying this shouldn't exists; it definitely should. They should capture all the profits that come from the rent you pay because of the building. My point is simply that they shouldn't be able to profit from the landownership itself.
> people couldn't have a place to live unless they could purchase themselves.
> Property prices go down? I don't care.
The only reason land has a purchase cost in the first place is because you can extract a rent from it indefinitely. If land did not allow you to extract a rent from it in perpetuity [0], the purchase price would go to zero.
[0] - we can achieve this through a land value tax equal to the rent you could extract from the land.
Some people buy land to live on indefinitely, with no plans to rent or resell. How would you decide who gets to live in North Beach and who has to commute from San Bruno, if not price?
The idea is that we charge a land value tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax) equal to market rent value of the land. So you're free to own the land if you pay the tax.
This tax would obviously be higher in desirable areas, so there would still be a price mechanism to ensure that the land is allocated effectively. If I bought a parcel of land in North Beach, but then didn't use it productively, I probably wouldn't be able to pay the tax and I would have to get rid of it. Additionally, since the market value of land reflects its most productive use, it would incentivize using the land in the efficient use (ie. densely in a high value area, since that lets you split the tax over more people).
You don't seem to understand what the term rent means. It's the act of giving someone temporary access to something and charging based on the amount of time it has been used. That's a pretty useful service if you don't have enough money to outright own your house or apartment.
Do you really think I don't understand what rent means? I pay rent every month, I better go figure out what it is I'm actually paying...
I'm not proposing we do away with rent as a concept. In the current situation, when you pay rent, you're really paying two rents combined.
The first rent corresponds to renting the land the building is on. This rent is why an equivalent apartment has a higher rent in SF than it does in Detroit or Houston.
The second rent corresponds to renting the building/unit itself. This rent is why a 2 bedroom apartment has a higher rent than a 1 bedroom apartment.
Now, the first rent is entirely uncorrelated with the value the landlord provides. It is essentially paid due to the landlord owning a monopoly on scarce good, which is only valuable due the community and government putting the effort to make the area valuable. Someone who owns land in downtown NYC didn't make it valuable, it became valuable because the government built the infrastructure to make the city livable, and the other residents made the city into a place where people want to live. Therefore, it's only fair that this rent goes to the commons rather than the landowner, where it can then be used to fund the government, rather than through other taxes.
What I propose is a land value tax equal to this land rent, so it is returned to the commons. The owner is still free to keep the rent from the building. This ideology is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism, and is pretty well supported from both an economic and fairness perspective.
Awfully convenient reasoning for engineers. Making half a million dollars a year optimizing the invasion of people’s privacy, for a company that dodges taxes, after four years of government subsidized education is real work and if you get rich in a liquidity event you earned it; assembling $1 million twenty years ago when people were fleeing SF, spending two decades maintaining marketing renting servicing paying taxes on and chasing rents on the property in the meantime, keeping up with and complying with city and state regulations — that’s always just parasitism and if the city you chose turns into a boomtown it’s good luck you have not earned.
Not a fan of landlords as a rule but you are slicing your analyses of privilege way too thin.
> spending two decades maintaining marketing renting servicing paying taxes on and chasing rents on the property in the meantime, keeping up with and complying with city and state regulation
Literally none of that matters in deciding who profits from land and who doesn't, and that's my entire point. The landowners in SF who didn't put this work in were still able to capture the rising value, and those in Detroit who did put all these effort in, didn't get anything to show for it.
Land doesn't rise in value because the landowner put in effort to raise the land value. The community and the government increased the value through building a city people wanted to move to (through building public transit, art scenes etc.). Why should the landowner capture that wealth?
Also, your tax point is moot, because California caps property taxes at essentially the level you bought the property at, so all the gains are free.
> the city you chose turns into a boomtown it’s good luck you have not earned
Yes, this is exactly my point.
Let me give you concrete scenario of where the current system breaks down. Let's say I own an apartment building on the edge of town, and the city decides to build a new transit line to the community. Rents in my apartment building will go up; let's say by $100. Renters are willing to pay an extra $100 because they value living near a transit line more than the being far from one. But why should that extra $100 go to my pockets, while the government has trouble even paying for transit system? It's not like I was the one who built transit system, it was funded by the income taxes of the people who work there, and then built by the government.
I guess my question to you is, why are we so attached to this system? As I pointed out, almost all economists agree that land rents "not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land". So why do we want to push forward a system where the reward is completely uncorrelated by the value you provide? Isn't that antithetical to capitalism?
Edit: To address your points about engineers, I'm not claiming that engineers do "real work" or "if you get rich in a liquidity event you earned it". I'm simply stating the reality of the fact that engineers actually produce something (code), while landlords don't (what could they even produce, more land???). If my landlord didn't buy the land I live 20 years ago, it would still be there, no worse for wear.
>Land doesn't rise in value because the landowner put in effort to raise the land value
Let's have some perspective - that's why there are property taxes. Now, maybe the property taxes are too low, but the fundamental issue is recognized by society and the mechanism exists to balance things.
I don't get the impression that the issue is completely recognized by society though. We see articles all the time in the news about how the real estate market is going up. Clearly, most landowners currently have an expectation that they should get some return on their land ownership.
That's why so many advocate for restrictions on building in their communities.
People expect the stock market to always go up too. I don't think that is possible.
I'm not saying it can't be a local, situational problem, I'm saying it's not a universal fundamental wrongness in the way society is structured.
It's like, a certain number of heart attacks happen each year. We may see a trend in heart disease over time. There could be some environmental reason for it. But extrapolating the current trend indefinitely and drawing the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong about the human heart's workings that requires a new mechanism is probably excessive.
If they owned it before it started increasing in value at the beginning of time, but how can you make money by buying something that is increasing in value in a perfectly predictable manner? Isn't the seller going to charge you enough to balance out the potential profits, on average?
>>They didn't create the land. All of the rent comes from the fact that they have a monopoly on a scarce good that cannot be produced further, and one that everyone needs.
If we go by your logic, we must also ban reading books, exercise, good relationships etc.
Pretty much any investment including things like education work very similar to land investments. There are only fixed college seats, is it fair to everyone?
Firstly start with understanding you can't give any thing to any one they don't want to earn. At the same time you can't stop people from going after these things and earning them.
How could the building you describe be assessed at only 1.4 million? In my city, a single condo that rents for $4k/mo would be assessed higher than that.
I'm so glad you asked. In 1978 Californians passes Proposition 13, written for and sponsored by the Los Angeles Apartment Owners' Association, which says that property assessments may not increase by more than 2% per year or CPI, whichever is less. Property tax rates may not exceed 1% of assessed value. So the max theoretical assessment of a building bought for 1.05 million twenty years ago is 1.56 million.
I don't understand how you can call providing dense housing being a parasite. The parasites are people with frozen property taxes who refuse to sell their land so that it can be used to build denser housing. After all the problem with the housing market is that there are not enough units for everyone so only the highest bidders can successfully rent an apartment.
Rule of thumb estimate for operating expenses for multi family is 50% (doesn’t include mortgage), and that doesn’t differ much just because rents are high. That means almost everything on your expenses column is more expensive as well.
Don’t get me wrong, real estate is a great investment, just not quite that great.
You tax all the rent they earn due to holding the land [0], since all the reasons rent is high in SF are not due to contributions by the landowner (ie. the community put in effort to make SF desirable, yet the landowner gets all that value).
Singapore owns all the land, and then they lease it out at 99-year terms. So an individual can own property for their whole lifetime (and then a little bit more, perhaps to pass onto their children), but the can't pass it forever.
The problem they recognized was if they had indefinite landownership, and they could pass it onto their descendants, given that they're a small island nation, within a few years, all the land would be owned.
After that, future generations would have no more land to buy, and those who are lucky enough to be born to landed family would be able to charge rent those who didn't have the privilege to be born to a family with property.
Some would, yes. But the land value would be high enough that most people trying to enter the market wouldn't be able to afford the costs of buying property. Under this approach, the government can sell property at a subsidized rate to new buyers once it reverts back to them.
I think the government also wants to allow property owners to be able to profit somewhat from the growth of the value of their property, since 80% of the population owns property in Singapore.
Now, I agree that these 2 goals are in conflict, and tax policy would be the better fix. But I guess their approach does at least fix the problem somewhat.
@neilparikh's comment was not what I was referring to.
Singapore has government substantiated condos that are quite good. You have to be a citizen to get the benefits, but if you can benefit from it, someone working min wage can buy a decent place to live.
I'm pretty sure the building is worth much more than $2m. With 18 apartments, it has to be at least $5m.
Heck, the crappy apartment complex I lived in in the peninsula that was built in the 1960s was worth close to $9m and it only had like 8 small apartments.
I'm pretty sure the building is worth much more than $2m.
Assuming all the units are under rent control, it might not be worth much more than $2M.
A good example is my place in SF. 3 unit building in a very desirable neighborhood. If the place was empty? It would likely fetch $5M based on square footage.
With 3 tenants who have been there 10 years and have rent control? My realtor tells me they base it on cap rate and with only $7000 in rent being collected, the landlord would be lucky to $1.5M for it.
Rent control saved me $300,000 over 7 years. If I wanted to stay in SF for the rest of my life, you think I’d move out for $500,000? The lifetime value of rent control is more than $500,000.
Anecdotal experience: I rented an apartment where the bathroom was literally rotting away on itself. The landlord would do cosmetic fixes only as the walls sagged and warped.
The incentive wasn't there for her to make a large capital expenditure on maintenance because the land appreciation was what she was banking on and rental demand was such that she could always rent the apartment.
While this example is extreme I've seen similar deferred maintenance behaviors repeated over and over again by the most successful (read: largest portfolio holding) landlords.
The costs you mentioned are associated with the building itself. However, in a city like SF, much of the rent is driven by land value, which has no such holding costs [0]. So they still have a lot of "free" income coming in, as owners of a government granted monopoly in perpetuity (sounds a lot like feudalism...).
[0] - Except property taxes, but CA caps their increase, so if you've owned the property for a while now, the tax isn't in line with the rent you can charge.
How do people not know this? Commercial landlords seriously have no risk. Taxes and insurance are passed straight through to tenants and the bank is carrying the capital risk.
Their risk is when they can't find a tenant or a tenant quits mid-lease. Then they owe the bank from their pocket. Commercial real estate is much more susceptible to the economy. Bad economy or good, people need a place to live. But in a bad economy, businesses just close up, declare bankruptcy, and leave.
When "they" owe the bank in a bad economy, "they" is a disposable corporate entity, not a normal person who might have to suffer consequences for their reckless behavior with debt. The actual people involved spent the last decade stuffing their pockets with rents and setting up asset protection strategies.
That's nothing. A single individual owns Raj Properties and Everest Properties which together own more than 1000 apartments in the much smaller city of Berkeley.
Technically it's different individuals who own each, because the owner of Raj properties had to turn them over to his family when he went to jail for sex trafficking and slavery.
But when he got out only eight years later, his family "loaned" him a bunch of money to start up Everest properties.
But yes, in reality, he is probably still in control of both.
The whole story is just amazing. I find it sad that our system of justice doesn't have a way to force the disgorgement of gains made from, seriously, enslaving teenage migrants. It's like sure we got our seed capital from sex slavery but the rest of these gains are totally above board. Makes no sense.
Part of the fascination for me is that the Reddy headquarters is this absurdly tacky mansion[1] in Kings County, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded (at arm's length) by abject poverty. Supposedly a branch of the family is the most successful vascular surgeon in Hanford (this makes ~zero economic sense) but the giveaway is that according to public records all of the Raj tax bills are mailed here. So it's really the seat of their weird real estate empire.
Honest question, wouldn’t the 80/20 rule in these cases still imply large majority owners in most cases? Wealth concentration figures I have seen (0.1% own 20% of the nations wealth for example) seem to support this view?
You realize "landlords" are not all individuals? I've lived in a run-down multistory building owned by a stereotypical slumlord, but also in apartment complexes where the people I dealt with were employees of a company that managed it, and other similar places.
