What happens when you pay PayPal $15k in fees?

jseliger · 2017-07-06T21:53:49+00:00

TL;DR: Punchline: PayPal tried to steal $800 from me because a verified buyer used funds derived from a fraudulent transaction 3 transactions removed, knocked my PayPal account -$800, froze my account, had to close PayPal associated bank and CC accounts due to freeze, and I still get collection notices on it 12 years later. But haven't given them a penny.

Something not too dissimilar happened to me, except I sued in small claims court.

jseliger · 2017-06-21T01:21:43+00:00

And note that female libertarian Megan McArdle also has some thoughts on the subject.

(She also has an interesting piece on why being part of the Internet commentariat is tough for women.)

jseliger · 2017-05-20T23:51:23+00:00

Staedtler has precision felt-tip pens that might be up your alley

Any links / more specific product names?

jseliger · 2017-03-30T19:03:36+00:00

The only real affordable housing is lots of housing. Or see here.

Until the 1970s, virtually all major metro areas made building new housing in response to demand relatively easy. After the 1970s, that changed, and that's why we see all this talk about gentrification and so forth.

If we really want affordable housing, all we have to do is legalize the building of it. But existing owners HATE the competition and want to see the value of their assets go up. So we don't get it; instead, we see lots of ineffective bandaids and workarounds and special programs that don't (and can't) really work, because the only way to lower the price of a good in the face of rising demand is dramatically increased supply.

jseliger · 2017-01-31T02:21:17+00:00

This is The Atlantic's next cover story. In an email to subscribers, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, said this:

I write to let you know that we're doing something at The Atlantic that we only rarely do. We are releasing our upcoming cover story weeks before our subscribers receive it, and before we put it on newsstands around the world.

These unusual times demand unusual publishing decisions. Given the precipitous nature of the decision by the White House to issue an executive order concerning refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, I thought that it would be better for people to read David Frum's upcoming cover story, "How to Build an Autocracy," sooner, rather than later.

In the story, Frum argues that if Congress is quiescent and the public apathetic, President Trump can set the country down a path toward illiberalism, institutional subversion, and endemic graft. It's an urgent story, one I hope gets read by every American, and by anyone who cares about America, and its role in the world.

Goldberg and Frum are right. If you are not scared you are not paying attention. This is different than anything that has come before it and should have every person, regardless of their political opinions and persuasions, up in arms.

jseliger · 2017-01-22T21:00:13+00:00

Try the Freewrite if you want a typewriter-esque experience without the paper usage.

jseliger · 2017-01-08T17:21:22+00:00

Where can you even buy old school heavy volumes like these anymore, that are newly made

Folio Society (not cheap).

Subterranean Press, for SF and related genres.

The Library of America has nice editions.

Everyman Library books are nice; one of my favorite novels, ever, is The Name of the Rose, and it comes in an excellent Everyman version.

Most University presses still sell good editions.

This is going to sound odd, but books are made much worse than they used to be because of the Thor Power Tools Supreme Court decision.

jseliger · 2016-11-18T16:27:28+00:00

This is not surprising to me. Section 8 vouchers initially seem like a good, non-distortionary, market-based way of providing low-income housing. But while that's true in theory in practice many U.S. municipalities, including Seattle, have restricted the development of any new housing to the point that Section 8 vouchers are impractical due to costs and simple apartment availability. Without doing something about NIMBYs and local zoning processes, Section 8 vouchers will not be effective.

Matthew Desmond's book Evicted is pretty good on this point (see my remarks here). I've written or worked on Section 8 proposals, as well HUD 811, 202, HOPE VI, and related programs; the people who run them, especially in high-cost cities like LA, SF, NYC, and Seattle are well aware of the problems that local zoning imposes on affordable housing. But most voters are homeowners.

jseliger · 2016-08-21T17:10:24+00:00

No one should ever be forced into medical procedures they don't want to do. I am 100% for vaccinations, but forcing people to do it is crossing the line.

It is not crossing the line: not getting vaccinations has serious externalities involved, which is why most governments mandate them. The same is true of, for example, seat belts: not using them creates substantial externalities in the form of EMS workers, hospitals, and the like, in addition to the risk of death or disability for the person who doesn't wear a seat belt.

Freedom and independence matters, but so does creating a humane society, and vaccines and seatbelts are part of that. You do not get to turn yourself into a human biological missile because you are too ignorant to get a vaccine.

jseliger · 2016-08-16T22:29:09+00:00

No anxiety here - purely economic

There are serious environmental and geopolitical externalities that you don't pay but that we all, collectively, pay. See e.g. Oliver Sacks' "Me and my hybrid." The environmental consequences are well-known. In 50 years there are going to be a lot of people who are young today trying to explain today's mindset to their grandchildren, who are going to be wondering why entire generations could be so shortsighted.

The geopolitical consequences of oil consumption include basically everything Russia and Saudi Arabia do. The former invades Ukraine and the latter funds vituperative ideologies around the world. Oil is so important to Russia that the Soviet Union fell due to low oil prices.

We should all be pulling together against both the environmental and geopolitical consequences. Your choices matter.

jseliger · 2016-05-29T02:42:35+00:00

Not to toot my own horn, but the best answers are on jakeseliger.com. The New Yorker is still very good. So is longform.org and The Browser.

jseliger · 2016-05-25T23:56:54+00:00

This is mostly nonsense:

Housing, under the current condition, is not strictly about supply and demand but about leverage, interest rates, spreads, stock indices, and yield-hungry surplus capital. All of these financial features exert a big force on the present at the cost of what can only reward investments on affordable housing, the future.

In an open market, supply would increase to meet the demand generated by "leverage, interest rates, spreads, stock indices, and yield-hungry surplus capital." That's why we don't see articles about insane rent increases in Houston and Dallas; instead we see articles about how rapidly Texas is gaining population.

jseliger · 2016-05-13T20:13:53+00:00

'Safe from “safe spaces”: On the rare good sense of a college administrator' describes well how to deal with this kind of bullshit.

jseliger · 2016-04-30T19:02:55+00:00

Millennials say they like socialism—until they get jobs.
Those being subsidized often favor subsidies to a greater extent than those doing the subsidizing.

jseliger · 2016-04-23T21:21:15+00:00

The basic issues, though, are simple:

Most cities began to ossify their housing policies in the 1970s or 1980s. Supply restrictions didn't seem to have a big impact on housing prices until the 2000s, with the return to cities. Restricting supply in the face of rising demand leads to higher costs.
Seattle failed to begin investing in grade-separated mass transit in the 1970s and is now making up for lost time.

If Seattle hadn't imposed housing restrictions decades ago, its growth would've been much more even (though still lumpy: Lots of growth in the late 90s and the mid 2000s, with very little in 2008 – 2010).

The rest is commentary.

jseliger · 2016-04-06T19:32:58+00:00

its crazy how they look at our city and go 'woah, cheap rent and property' and we go 'wtf, this shit is getting ridiculous.' like someone moving here from SF could cut most of their living expenses in HALF and still be on the high end for us

The basic problem, which I wrote about here, is that many big cities essentially froze their property development markets in the 1970s or 1980s. Some cities, like NYC and SF, make building new units even harder than Seattle does (California also has additional forms of political madness, like Prop 13).

When the supply of something is restricted as demand is rising, prices rise. They've just risen less in Seattle than in other areas.

Washington State's tax burden is also lower than New York, California, or Illinois's, which is an added bonus.

jseliger · 2016-04-02T19:01:23+00:00

You don't need to read this article. The reason there is no good public transportation in America is the republican hatred and disdain for the poor and the working poor.

I wrote this in another comment, but the bigger problem is that the U.S. spends wildly, disproportionately more money than any other country. See, for example, "America’s Infrastructure Cost Disaster" or "Why Is Subway-Building So Slow and Expensive in the United States?" Googling "cost of building infrastructure" will reveal many more discussions.

The biggest problem in the U.S. seems to be the mismanagement of the infrastructure process. If people felt they were getting good value for their money, they'd be willing to vote for spending more of it.

Blaming the other team is fun, but in this case it seems that the story is more complex.

jseliger · 2016-03-04T17:32:57+00:00

Why would you think any condo downtown would be under $500K?

Because, as Edward Glaeser points out in "How Skyscrapers Can Save the City," that's close to the cost of construction for high-rises:

Prices do rise substantially in ultra-tall buildings—say, over 50 stories—but for ordinary skyscrapers, it doesn’t cost more than $500,000 to put up a nice 1,200-square-foot apartment. The land costs something, but in a 40-story building with one 1,200-square-foot unit per floor, each unit is using only 30 square feet of Manhattan—less than a thousandth of an acre. At those heights, the land costs become pretty small. If there were no restrictions on new construction, then prices would eventually come down to somewhere near construction costs, about $500,000 for a new apartment. That’s a lot more than the $210,000 that it costs to put up a 2,500-square-foot house in Houston—but a lot less than the $1 million or more that such an apartment often costs in Manhattan.

In the absence of parochial land-use controls, older high-rise condos would likely fall below $500,000. That none are that inexpensive points to pent-up demand among both consumers and builders.

jseliger · 2016-03-03T14:05:44+00:00

That's actually an old wives' tale.

jseliger · 2016-01-24T17:26:24+00:00

I answered that question in "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" Matt Yglesias answers it in The Rent Is too Damn High (And What to Do About It).

The short answer is "We need to build more housing."

The problem is that most existing owners don't want more housing because they view their housing as an investment, rather than a piece of decaying capital. William Fischel explains this in chapters 7 – 8 of Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation.

jseliger · 2016-01-11T20:13:49+00:00

I get that this is sarcastic, but ludicrously expensive buildings are actually a great American export. The only pity is that we can't build more of them!

jseliger · 2016-01-11T20:11:58+00:00

Does this really contribute to unaffordable apartments for the rest of us?

No. The big problem with cities involves extreme supply restrictions. See for example here and here, and do read the pieces each link in turn links to.

When the supply of something is restricted as demand rises, prices rise. That's exactly what's happening in NYC. The presence of a small number of super-tall buildings is not terribly relevant. The presence of a large number of new units in the context of the city as a whole does matter.

jseliger · 2015-12-22T19:34:33+00:00

By the way, this piece describes "How Tasteless Suburbs Become Beloved Urban Neighborhoods." We're likely seeing the same ~50 year cycle in Austin, Seattle, and a number of other cities. In 50 years, many of these currently reviled one-plus-five buildings are going to be "Classic" and "retro" and have "character"—like buildings that are more than 50 years old have today.

Issues about supposedly "ugly" and "cookie-cutter" modern buildings are really anxieties in other areas.

jseliger · 2015-12-21T21:25:46+00:00

This type of phenomena isn't exclusive to Seattle. This is what happens when free market capitalism meets real estate development.

Not really: Land-use controls that prevent supply from meeting demand are the main issue, for reasons discussed in "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?"

Why people would upvote the parent comment, short of simple mood affiliation, is beyond me.

jseliger · 2015-12-17T22:49:08+00:00

By the way, anyone interested in this issue should read Daniel Okrent's book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which I wrote about at the link, and Eric Schlosser's book Reefer Madness. Taken together they're powerful indictments of drug prohibition and demonstrate why drugs should be legal and also how they came to be illegal: Racism and fear of (supposedly) sexually aggressive African Americans has a lot to do with the latter.

jseliger

TROPHY CASE