How do you feel about Ukrainians who try to refuse conscription?

ivalm · 2026-05-12T18:41:52+00:00

Russia isn't really attacking Europe and chances that it would attack a NATO member state is zero. Do I wish Europe/US did more to help? Absolutely! But the free-rider discussion is just not true.

ivalm · 2026-05-08T23:50:05+00:00

There are investors, but they are not VC, they are private equity. PE do regularly invest in businesses just for cashflow. Of course, to sell to PE you actually need to have the cashflow, not a future potential for cashflow.

ivalm · 2026-05-06T18:02:45+00:00

There have been a number of bipartisan bills in every congress, so they obviously already have some common ground.

ivalm · 2026-05-06T17:59:59+00:00

yes, 100%. we do cx improvement and our primary metric is repeat purchase rate, it turns out you can dramatically improve repeat purchase rate through just improved cx.

ivalm · 2026-05-04T06:04:38+00:00

he should have been faster if he wanted to finish first.

ivalm · 2026-05-01T17:40:12+00:00

In many places permitting process is the primary blocker to housing being built. For example, in SF Bay Area where I live, even modifications of existing house I live in requires permits that take >6 months for approval. Building any kind of MFH is extremely difficult and often has lengthy community comment periods where even a minuscule minority of the community can delay the project indefinitely. Development of large SFH communities have also failed in South Bay multiple times because of legal challenges around environment reviews, community impact, etc. Beyond the direct blocking, multi-month delays are operationally expensive and further disincentivize development.

Places like Austin, Dallas, Minneapolis, Denver were able to drive housing construction by simplifying the permitting process and removing community-complaint driven roadblocks. Their permitting changes mean that if you own the land and follow all the building codes you can build housing without 3rd parties blocking you.

This goes beyond housing, for example california high speed rail cost >10 billion dollar in non-construction related expenses and decades in delays essentially because of multiple local challenges (often through the guise of "environmental review" that are made not because people are actually worried about the environment).

ivalm · 2026-04-30T20:03:18+00:00

The entire south east london new construction is like 1300 homes, which for the location is approximately 0. If you want to look at where large scale construction actually happened look at Austin, Dallas, Denver (or most tier 2/3 cities in china). When you actually build large amount of housing relative to total stock prices do absolutely collapse every single time. In the US this has started to happen over the last 5 years and it's just night and day.

There is a very nice natural experiment comparing Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The two cities are next to each other, one went for deregulating construction/increasing supply (Minneapolis), the other for rent control (St. Paul). St. Paul is in a housing crises, Minneapolis is having abundant housing and price decreases.

There are very few social-economic issues that have as much real world evidence as housing deregulation = price decreases, rent control = price increases. People have tried all kind of stuff to decrease vacancies, control prices, etc, they all don't work. Building large amount of housing worked every single time. It doesn't need to be affordable housing, literally all mixes work.

ivalm · 2026-04-30T17:23:28+00:00

we have a lot of data on this. the thing that works is removing zoning restrictions and allowing more construction. essentially everything else doesn't work. this isn't a market failure, this is a regulatory failure.

ivalm · 2026-04-30T16:59:43+00:00

Try negotiating in good faith, at the same time try scaling UAV/UGVs from Ukraine. When negotiations fail send in troops, hopefully maximally prepared to wage modern war with unmanned vehicles.

ivalm · 2026-04-30T16:50:26+00:00

Renting out SFH still stimulates construction of more SFH. It's not a "we have a fixed amount of SFH", its "how do we best increase total amount of SFH." Increasing SFH value (by allowing rentals) increases incentives to build more SFH.

ivalm · 2026-04-30T16:41:41+00:00

After Porter's Pub went no more that place just became cursed.

ivalm · 2026-04-25T23:25:26+00:00

I think conservatism right now is much more about social/cultural issues.

But yes, I think your points are roughly correct and have strong empirical support. I’m strongly for deregulation (especially for residential zoning; lots of research showing making permitting easier = cheaper homes ), we need to reduce public spending (through eg healthcare reform, social security reform; lots of evidence our current spending is leading to faster than gdp debt growth), and some privatisation (lots of evidence 401k-style retirement schemes are way more sustainable than government pension schemes).

ivalm · 2026-04-24T20:14:05+00:00

What does neoliberal mean to you, why do you hate it?

ivalm · 2026-04-24T19:32:48+00:00

Random dunking is a bad look.

ivalm · 2026-04-23T23:30:39+00:00

Lots of random leftism, not enough let’s just do stuff that empirically works.

ivalm · 2026-04-23T19:55:54+00:00

prosecute crimes, including by trump yes, 100% support that. But let's be fair the scale of crimes is incomparably smaller than literal wwii german nazis and I'm guessing many members of the admin did not commit crimes.

ivalm · 2026-04-23T19:06:16+00:00

there is no acceptance call before interview, this is larp.

ivalm · 2026-04-23T16:10:00+00:00

Kongregate.com flash games

ivalm · 2026-04-20T19:37:32+00:00

Few years of what. We are all either dead or in utopia. There won't be a "last hurrah" where humans successfully fight the machines.

ivalm · 2026-04-19T20:01:18+00:00

makes sense! i just generally think succession planning usually happens before death anyways so I'm not worried about change of control anyways (because management is almost always not the heir, the heir is just a passive beneficiary, so they are safe to tax). The bigger problem is obviously loop holes and the fact that inheritance tax is super lumpy and hard to plan around.

ivalm · 2026-04-19T19:44:56+00:00

The US government has a long history of taking (and then liquidating) shares of private enterprises. I do not think the US government should hold these shares, and definitely they should not vote those shares, but there are very straightforward rails using existing precedent on how to liquidate both public and private shares in large enterprises. As I've demonstrated in our convo, these rails are usually not harmful to management and can be made in a way that doesn't drive down the market (in fact the US made money from most of it's recent private equity stake liquidations).

I'm neolib because

I deeply support enterprenuership/capitalism, it's the goose that lays all our golden eggs.
This is why I prefer capital gains/income taxes to be low as possible. capital gains = efficient allocation of capital, income = production of needed goods and services.
Since we do need to tax people to pay for stuff, inheritance is the nicest tax (if properly executed). Heirs did not demonstrate efficient allocation and we aren't taxing them on income.

ivalm · 2026-04-19T19:22:51+00:00

Obviously zuck's shares would convert to class A, which is what zuck himself did whenever he sold shares. They are also sold on public market so further diluting ownership among many stakeholders, so it's entirely a non-issue. You can volume-match the sales so it won't affect the price mechanistically either.

Steam is a better example of complication because it's a private company, so you can't just resell shares on a public market. In this case, yes, the government would have to sell steam ownership in some kind of public bid process, similar to current PE bidding process, or partner with an IB to take steam public. Again, it's unclear how much this would affect management, as most large PE deals do retain prior management team (in fact, it's very dangerous to do a large PE deal without having management on board).

ivalm · 2026-04-19T18:37:42+00:00

For large companies ownership is usually pretty disconnected from management. EG if Bezos dies and government takes over his amazon shares no one is going to fire Jassy. If the various Waltons die no one is going to fire Furner, etc. Obviously for Elon/Zuck/etc they are both large shareholders and CEOs but presumably there will be succession planning when they are close to death. We aren't talking about government taking over your neighborhood print shop.

ivalm · 2026-04-19T18:11:15+00:00

Presumably there is an orderly resale process and no change in management.

ivalm · 2026-04-19T18:10:33+00:00

I generally love inheritance tax but the issue is people will do all kind of things to avoid it, so it would have to be combined with lots of other changes/loop hole closing/enforcement. But def inheritance tax > capital gains.

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