A fresh PWA to log / improve your coffee brewing process. We use it to see what we are all drinking, find new coffees, explore new cafes, and understand what we like / don’t like.
It’s primarily used by our group of friends, so if you see a rough edge somewhere please reach out!
>> critics argue that it reduces the supply of rental apartments and creates housing shortages
I don’t follow the logic. It doesn’t destroy the property or take it out of supply, it just means someone might not purchase it specifically to rent it out. Which in turn means less demand buying houses overall, which means more opportunities for people to buy (if they want?)
In Toronto, as it has been explained to me by some banker types, in 2006 they introduced some pretty strong rent control, and developers just switched from building rentals to building condos, now Toronto has no rental units and a zillion condos that not many people can afford to buy or rent.^ Friend of mine lives in a condo and over half the units in his floor are now managed airbnbs.
^ Couple this situation with no restrictions (in fact encouragement) on foreign buyers for many many years, and you have condos sitting empty, condos rented out for amounts nobody can afford, and condos turning into airbnbs for rich tourists. From what I gather, both Toronto and Vancouver are a real mess because of this.
…and it ends up being a cascade of new regulations to try and address the unforeseen consequences of the previous regulation. Eventually you end up like San Francisco where no new housing ever gets built ever again and prices are sky-high because of it.
Yes. Most places have had unregulated property market like forever and are similary broken by speculation, collusion, price fixing and just exploitation of tenants.
The regulations actually attempts to answer this. They might not work well but atleast somebody is trying to do something.
The notion that if you got rid of the regulation and suddently situation would fix itself is suspiciously naive.
Doesn't that make it worse for people who want to rent AirBNBs?
I think the solution is to overbuild like crazy. Particularly in Canada where there is infinite land. People will be less interested in speculating as there is no supply limit. Cheap real estate is a net good for humanity.
It doesn't destroy the property or take it out of supply.
But it also strongly disincentivizes potential investors in building new rental properties. Which makes perfect sense,if you inherited 5million euro would you spend it building rent controlled apartments or put into stocks&bonds?
California. It’s the world’s fifth largest economy. I will take some regulatory risk over volatility in Texas. California vacancy rates speak for themselves, there is voracious demand for housing there vs Texas. Texas also has the nation’s 7th highest property tax rate.
You're comparing $3.9T to $2.4T, but that's still not the metric you look at. It's whether you're a landlord in a town of 5,000, a mid-sized city, or a 2M metro, and what the local economy looks like.
> California vacancy rates speak for themselves
This goes two ways. On one hand, it's an opportunity. On the other, it's an opportunity a lot of people clearly don't want to take.
> Texas also has the nation’s 7th highest property tax rate
As long as it's consistent and the regulators allow it, you just pass it on to tenants. CA's Prop 13, while making overall property taxes lower, puts you at a weird disadvantage compared to incumbent landlords.
In my experience, it is crucial to avoid human nature, and instead, simply evaluate the math. It either works or it doesn’t, no emotion. Emotion destroys risk adjusted returns, and is harmful to preserving capital.
It is called The Law of Supply and Demand. I'm sure there are zounds of articles or videos on it.
In the model, the price of a unit will change as you adjust either supply or demand. If there is lots of demand and little supply, the price is high. If there is lots of supply, the demand cannot force the price higher. Assuming the seller wants to sell, they have to compete with other sellers. The more units for sell, the less negotiating power they have because someone more desperate can sell cheaper.
I understand supply and demand... but it's a really basic theory.
My point is: prices will have to increases for supply to increase as well. Saying that increasing supply will keep prices low makes no sense if right now prices are too low for private interests to build more housing.
Supply won't keep prices "low" and certainly not lower than they are now. How would that work? How would they make profit?
1. Few new rentals are built, because it's not profitable
2. Existing rentals are converted to condominiums, because that is more profitable
If you can afford to buy a condominium, great. If not, there is always the public housing company. I hope you're not in a hurry though because the typical waiting time to get a rental in Stockholm is 7-11 years.
> there's a queue for rentals, so you register that you want to rent in Stockholm, and then you get put on a list, and then wait two years for it to be your turn
Price capping any good -- housing, fuel, food -- by definition produces a shortage.
A shortage is when there is more demand than supply at the market price.
And artificially lowering the market price increases the amount demanded and reduces the amount supplied.
It only creates a shortage in a world where you have the x-shaped supply and demand curve from econ 101, which doesn’t apply here because the shortage already exists because of zoning/planning laws limiting the construction of new housing. If there wasn’t an existing shortage then no-one would be calling for rent controls. Rent controls just change who the winners and losers are as a result of a given shortage, in Stockholm’s case, existing residents are the winners and new residents are the losers. Existing residents who benefit get to vote to maintain the status quo in municipal elections whereas the people that can’t move there because of rent controls don’t, hence the system is self-sustaining.
> If there wasn’t an existing shortage then no-one would be calling for rent controls
False, rent controls isn't about shortage it is about land lords raising rents for people who already live there and since it is so much work to move people will stay and pay overpriced rent.
Then that rent control easily leads to the shortage and extremely high prices for new entrants, but that was never the original goal.
That's why the willingness of a software developer to drop everything to work with you might not necessarily signal anything wrong with your vision.
If you can't find a single software developer who believes in your plan for better APIs or project management tools or consumer internet apps, it's a pretty good heuristic that your vision or ability to sell it sucks, or that you add less value than the dozen other people that talked to them about chatbots for X this week. Any prospective technical co-founder has a huge amount of insight into those markets. On the other hand, unwillingness of software developers to believe that the dullest sounding CRUD app going will be very exciting to grey suited men controlling a little known niche (probably precisely because hardly anyone's writing software for it) doesn't actually mean there isn't a market there.
Your product could be boring and useless except to a niche audience, but still a great business opportunity. In that case, people will only work on it for the money, and that is fine. Some ideas are simply harder to sell to potential employees:
“We’re making the world a better place through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.”
“We’re making the world a better place though software defined data centers for cloud computing.”
“We’re making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between end points.”
“We’re making the world a better place through scalable, fault tolerant distributed databases with acid transactions.”
Yeah, I think the big difference is that devs might actually [be the only people to] think those sound like interesting problems to work on, whereas making the world a better place through [equivalent jargon in niche logistics/tax/pensions etc] only excites a small number of people who aren't devs, especially if it's not that much of a technical challenge and the hypothetical moat is just sales and business logic. Which leaves money, and unless the founder with the business model hires rather than looking for tech cofounders, it's really only a possibility of future money for working unpaid on something they don't understand on offer...
I don't think it's about the audience, but the company type. If someone is starting (random example) a food company based on their superior hot-sauce recipe and existing retail relationships, they probably don't need a technical co-founder. If someone is starting a company that "uses AI" to craft and target hot sauce recommendations, but doens't really know what that means and assumes they can get a shop to code them an app, that's going to be a problem. I think the latter case is what this is usually about. Many (most) business owners don't have technical co-founders and are fine, not so in tech.
In your first hot-sauce recipe example, that person IS the technical founder. Just technical in the field relevant to the business, which happens to not be tech.
The scenario in tech is more often comparable to some dude saying "I want to make a business selling the greatest hot sauce ever" and then having to go looking for someone who actually knows anything about hot sauce.
I think the idea that the person with the specialised knowledge of how to make hot sauce is the technical founder is an interesting point, but I think in YC/HN contexts it's usually considered to mean "engineer"; even in cases like accounting software where the founder who doesn't write software's specialised knowledge of the field is at least as critical as their partner's ability to convert that to code, the latter founder is the only "technical" one. Although tbh I don't think accountants or lawyers get offended by the insinuation they're the "non-technical founder".
Well in some cases the gain is mutual especially for things like seasonal agriculture work where demand for labour periodically peaks and the labour is utterly miserable. I've seen seasonal labour wages spike to twice the minimum wage, and still seen fruit rot on the field and people continue working their minimum wage jobs at Tim Hortons. This is an area where the poor of the nation arguably benefit from the underclass by driving down the cost of fresh produce and not having to do this back breaking labour.
For other things, like the aforementioned jobs at Tim Hortons, hiring temporary foreign worker is nothing but a wage suppression scheme meant to solve the "problem" of Tim Horton's being unprofitable and locations shutting down in a low unemployment environment, and the whole "temporary" thing is something to be worked around.
The previous government got in a world of shit for doing the latter and eventually stopped and banned much of the wage suppression aspect of this program. A few years back the incumbent government figured enough people aren't paying attention and re-legalised the fast food underclass again to suppress wages to address the "labour shortage" because fast food workers were faint making more than minimum wage and shudder taking a greater share of the profits of the fast food business.
There's no government system that has been proposed that can not be captured. The only option that has proven to work so far, is to limit the government, so that regulatory capture doesn't matter that much.
Agree - I’ve been using a set of Eve (from memory) power plugs that are thread enabled - my understanding is it doesn’t connect directly to the internet (ie you don’t connect it to your wifi) but you connect to a border hub (ie an Apple TV, or maybe now an iPhone 15.)
So I guess if you trust apple, you can sorta trust these devices as their access to the outside world would be through an apple device.
A fresh PWA to log / improve your coffee brewing process. We use it to see what we are all drinking, find new coffees, explore new cafes, and understand what we like / don’t like.
It’s primarily used by our group of friends, so if you see a rough edge somewhere please reach out!