It is a hard problem. Any “human” based filtering will inevitably introduce bias, and some bias (fact vs fiction masquerading as fact) is desirable. The problem is: human determination of what is fact vs what is opinion is… flawed.

They don’t have decent filters on what they fed the first generation of AI, and they haven’t really improved the filtering much since then, because: on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital.

They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program

All historical evidence to the contrary… it’s a nice theory.

Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.

Have they? Really punished those politicians who threatened to slash the benefits? Because I’ve seen lots of threats of slashing and no punished politicians yet. I do hope we get to that phase in the next election, but the threats of slashing were made loud and clear before November 2024.

popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less.

What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?

They are one in the same. The anonymous market is an estimate of what an individual will be willing and able to pay, the true value is cash in hand after surrender of title.

You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.

Where has a “wholesale rate” ever existed for titled real-estate? You might buy a piece of land and sub-divide it, but each transaction is its own negotiation of value between seller and buyer.

You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up

With what? Second class citizens who can’t get what they really want?

surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.

We’ve got oodles of surplus housing, what we lack is a rational distribution of wealth.

“Primary accumulation” as you call it was pretty well finished many generations ago in most of the world.

Since then, written records of ownership, payment of property taxes, etc. have established title which is transferred legally in exchange for “good and valuable consideration” - usually money.

But acquiring that political capital is the challenge

Not just acquiring, but maintaining that political capital. Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital. The majority of people seem not to vote in their own best interests, so here we are.

maintaining property at-cost.

As soon as you set “cost” for properties, popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less. If the cost of acquisition of these properties doesn’t approximate the market value, you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.

Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

Your world, maybe. Not the one I want me or my children to live in.

But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.

But what is the cost of housing?

Where do the materials come from to build the housing? Are those suppliers allowed to make a profit? And their suppliers?

Where does the labor come from to build the housing? Are the laborers paid by the job or by the hour?

And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market? Anybody price gouging there, or taking kickbacks?

Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay. If the land was downtown, on high bluff riverfront, “at cost” for free via eminent domain, one would assume that housing will become quite a bit more valuable than it cost to build the moment it is made available to the open market. How do we protect this housing as “at cost”? Is it first come, first served? Life estates? Transferred to children, spouses, designated heirs?

And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world. At least let’s try to be minimizing:

extortion, cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices

there’s far too much of that already.

Except credit changes the math on that significantly. You aren’t constrained by your income, but by your risk of default (and even then… glances 2008-ward) Then you can afford to buy more by paying a higher interest rate.

That has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay, it is everything about what someone is able to pay. Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.

“Willingly” is doing a lot of lifting, given the degree to which fraud, extortion, and price gouging play a roll in the national economy.

Fraud is all about deceiving the mark into willingly handing over assets. Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.

Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment. You ask a dying person: are you willing to mortgage your children’s assets in order to maybe live a little longer? The answer is all too often: yes, and the children often willingly sign up out of sympathy for their dying parents.

Is that extortion? Sort of, but they always have the option to just let MeeMaw suffer in pain and die, instead of paying the hospital $300K to make her more comfortable.

Promotion (and deception and intimidation) drives sales. They create the illusion of scarcity and transform luxury into necessity.

I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity. I mean, in Real Estate it’s not an illusion, there is only one property in the entire Universe like the one under consideration… High pressure sales is often driving the “don’t think, act now, close the deal ASAP” aspect of things. But most promotion for things like Coca Cola, or new cars, provides the marketing aspect of “easy to obtain, just go to your local dealer and pick one up, TODAY!”

They add perceived value among the unwitting and create implicit value through absence of harm.

Yes, and that perceived value is what provides willing consumers anxious to exchange their fungible currency for the goods. Evaluation of “actual value” is an impossible thing, it is like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. For some, an $800 T-shirt is a “great value” because of how it makes them feel to wear it, others’ perception of them wearing it, etc. That T-shirt might only wash once before falling to rags, but for those who are spending $800 on a T-shirt, they probably don’t care - they can buy more different ones at any time. Does that make them unwitting, or just obscenely wealthy in comparison to most people?

But suckering someone doesn’t increase the utility of what you sold them.

No, but what someone is willing to pay is the sum total of what a business gets income from. Whether a business is delivering tangible value (say: food) or nothing of substance (say: Bitcoin) the viability of a business, it’s ability to survive and thrive in the capitalist marketplace, is 100% correlated to income willingly given vs cost of obtaining that income, and 0% correlated to “actual value delivered.”

What shocks me about much of the U.S. economy is how much is spent on marketing, promotion, advertising, and sales. 0% value derived from such activity, but frequently over half the cost of things that are purchased in the U.S. is sunk in promotion.

Try appraising real estate for a while, it’s a strong lesson in: something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Can be higher than cost, can be lower than cost, but the willing buyer is the key to the whole valuation equation.

cost != value

Now I know why they’re trying to push corporate users off of Linux, again.

This is the right way, but holding it in their hands will be the way so many clever rebels do it at first.

Thanks Microsoft, I’m investing in cell-phone tripods today.

Jerb security.

Oh, no, AI Recall has “special privileges” - just you lusers don’t.

Laughs at all the cell phone camera captures that will start showing up…

The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.

Absolutely, based on the information we have today.

That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that’s coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don’t know about that one.

The thing about our probabilities of events that haven’t happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven’t been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we’re learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don’t lower the probability of occurrence…

A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us.

That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don’t know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.