Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.

Housing price issues in the US are fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing. Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all. What's needed are local zoning changes and significant revamps of permitting and approval processes to remove endless discretionary roadblocks from anyone who doesn't like medium density housing.

What's a $NET shareholder?

OP lives in Austin. If you have $1M net worth, you can probably buy a house there and live there. If you don't go do that, I think you're just punishing yourself.

A somewhat small subset of my net worth is Cloudflare, which has the ticker symbol $NET

It’s someone who owns shares in Cloudflare (their market ticker being ‘NET’), but everyone here thinks they’re a financial wonk when talking about big tech and finance so they insist on making it opaque like that. It’s a dumb and cringey trend. Just say “as a Cloudflare shareholder”, I promise you the six bytes you save won’t be missed!

No.

The global housing crisis is the result of international organised crime owning or operating most of the large construction conglomerates, using real estate as a fiat currency to wash the proceeds from all their illicit business, and (org crime infested) private equity companies cashing in on the former situation, pumping assets by buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable.

CRIME is the real reason worldwide for people not being able to afford a house.

When have increased taxes directly contributed to your take home pay?

You have $1M of net worth that isn’t a house (and is therefore likely to be liquid) and you can’t afford to buy a house? Where and how much?

It doesn’t. They’re just expressing their jealousy in a thinly veiled and highly embarrassing way.

This is absurd. Does it happen? Yes. But this is not the primary driver.

We turned housing into retirement funds. The median family's wealth is their primary residence. We cannot have these assets depreciate in nominal terms for this reason, and we actually need them to appreciate in real terms for people to have a nest egg.

It's awful, but it's the truth.

It’s not very thinly veiled

If you can't afford to buy a house, what you want is zoning reform, not increased taxation.

(I want both, but I don't want more taxes to solve the housing problem, because they won't.)

It truly is embarrassing. Imagine seeing something and thinking, "how can I get the government to forcefully take some of that for my benefit?"

I spend about $3.2k a month for a studio apartment in an HCOL area. I don’t even own a car.

It’s not for my benefit, I just want to see Stanford grads get punished. I could get more punitive but I keep that for yelling at strangers in person.

I want both too, but neither is going to happen in the next 4-12 years so I can only fantasize about punitive measures

> using real estate as a fiat currency

Even if we take your premise as a given, the entire reason real estate is so valuable is that there isn't enough housing in the first place. Real estate is, by its nature, a bad investment; it's only the scarcity of it that makes the value continue to go up exponentially.

> buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable

There isn't actually any available housing in the first place, at the point of cities even approving projects, compared to the number of people who need housing. That's the problem. The most extreme example is San Francisco, where as of this July the entire city had approved only 16 housing units [1] out of an already comically poor goal of only about 10,000 housing units per year.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-only-agreed-build-16-...

You need to move, yesterday. Yes, moving sucks. No, ideally you wouldn't have to. But at the end of the day you are just plain shooting yourself in the foot if you continue to live in a place that absurdly expensive.

Like dude, you could buy an awesome house in just about any other part of the country if you truly have $1m in liquid wealth. You have options to own a house, you just have to act on them.

Where did the Stanford thing come from? I went to the University of Minnesota.

I bought a house in Canada with a liquid net worth of $75k (admittedly, 2 years ago, but still). 15 minute drive to a major city’s downtown, 0.3 acres, 3 bed 1 bath with an attached garage. Is it the nicest house? No, but it’s a house, and I’d much rather pay a mortgage than rent.

With a net worth of a million USD, I could buy a house pretty much anywhere in this country, comfortably, and we’re known to have one of the highest costs of living in major cities in the western world. If you move almost literally anywhere from where you currently live, you can definitely afford a house.

Yes - there are insanely great houses all over Texas. $400K gets you incredible houses, depending on the area, and $1M would get you mansions beyond your (or at least my) wildest dreams.

Meanwhile, if you live in the Bay Area, I can totally see "$1M net worth but not really able to buy a house".

Where you choose to live in really does matter a lot. Not to say there aren't issues with property costs, but... come on.

The median family's wealth is 0.6 * {their primary residence}.

How would that even be possible? Presumably some people get a top up if they are on a tiny wage, but ‘direct contribution to take home pay’ really isn’t the point of tax. It also sounds a fairly inefficient use of money.

Have I missed something in this conversation?

It sounds more like you can afford to buy a house, just not in the area you want.

Yes you have missed something but don’t worry about it.

But then I wouldn't know how utterly badass this guy is, shooting around those sweet ticker designations that all us plebs wouldn't recognise.

> fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing

ZIRP certainly had something to do with this too! Don’t overlook ridiculous fiscal and monetary policy.

Absolutely embarrassing and a real life demonstration of a famous quote:

“I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

What’s this fixation on house ownership? It doesn’t make sense rationally. Stock markets always perform better, easily beating ownership and the hassle and associated risks of managing property.

Yep. The fact that in most places in the US it's illegal to build apartments above shops is insane. That's the norm in the UK.

To be fair OP's website explains that most of the money isn't earned income. I'm happy for them though

Any chance you have a gopher server running there then?

Because you can build things like the house we're commenting on. If that's not your thing that's totally fine, but sometimes people want to spend way their hard earned money on adapting their living situation to suit their desires.

If I'm going to sink that kind of time/money/effort into building a thing, I don't want a landlord to be able to come in and take it away from me with some legal loophole or by raising my rent.

One factor: It's an investment that you can get for 20% down, or less. You can't borrow that much to gamble in the stock market. All is well as long as the value of the house doesn't go down.

People like the idea of making money. They are used to real estate always increasing in value.

We'll see what happens as boomer demand ages out.

Your net worth is far above the median. If taxes increase, you are likely to lose wealth, not gain it.

If you’re a Cloudflare shareholder, Kenton has increased your net worth quite a bit. He is one of the few people who is so unreasonably capable he can and has changed the direction of a multibillion dollar company single handedly. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not in this particular case.

I’m also fairly convinced he didn’t capture one tenth of one percent of the value he created, so I’m not sure how anyone can argue this is ‘unfair’.

As someone that was previously bullish on Workers but now fully disillusioned with a barely positive cost basis on it right now I disagree with this - if anything I feel burned for believing and continuing to believe.

Either way, people like me aren’t going to be able to capture even a tenth of the success of joining Google in 2005 or buying a $1m house in Palo Alto ~4 years after graduating (I’m 6.5 years out of graduating) because people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house.

Some people value other things than homeownership.

Some people value living in their area (regardless of what it costs) for reasons that make moving undesirable.

It's in Germany too, but recently it's become the norm for new-rich people to buy or rent these apartments and then sue the shop and especially bar owners for noise violations.

Not allowing that kind of mixed usage in the first place completely cuts away all that crap.

Take it easy. These kind of thought won't help you. It's a rough time out there but thing change. Our ancestors survived famines and war. We should be able to manage this.

And yes, life is not fair. But don't waste it, it's finite.

Not to say there's not restaurants/bars open just as late or noisy, but fwiw I would say typically a pub in the UK would be the whole (vertical) building - rooms upstairs for staff or B&B, if not more seating for pub restaurant.

Increases to income tax generally won't lower a wealthy persons wealth, just the rate at which they can increase their wealth. They already have the money, and it will keep paying dividends and interest.

Unless you're talking about a new kind of wealth tax, but those aren't particularly popular...

"people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house"

What do you mean? People aren't human if they do not have a certain level of wealth?

Seems to imply that you may think people with less wealth aren't valuable or even human. What should people with less wealth than you feel?

And the loan is heavily subsidized by the federal government (and frequently by other governments as well).

US policy is to make real estate a fundamental part of Americans wealth. It’s worked! Since the policy started we’ve gone from hovering in the 40% homeownership rate to hovering in the mid 60s.

It’s also made housing expensive and homogeneous.

When health insurance is 10x cheaper because of it.

What do you mean by “isn’t earned income” ?

If you have 1m in liquid assets, you could outright buy 2 houses within easy drive of Austin, or a (smaller) high rise condo right in the middle of downtown.

My perspective on that one is broadly "screw 'em". If you buy property over a bar or restaurant that was there before you I don't think you should then be allowed to turn around and act surprised that there's a bar or restaurant downstairs.

> Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all.

Mmm... if you introduced higher taxes for anyone who owns multiple houses and has rental income for one or more of those homes and you eliminated from the current tax code their ability to claim deductions, it would definitely move the needle on housing prices and availability.

The anti-capitalists have this crazy idea that investment income isn’t “earned” in the same way that labor income is. Of course that’s absurdly anti-capitalist and completely ignores the point of capitalism and the function of risk taking incentivized by potential rewards. Failing to make a coherent argument against active investment income, for instance entrepreneurs, they will then revert to criticism of passive investors and their eventual complaint will come to arguing S&P index investors should be taxed on “unrealized” gains.

Remember it’s all illogical nonsense motivated by Envy which they masquerade as Empathy.

My net worth is temporary, theirs and their status is not.

Even with subsidies taken into account, the ROI is still higher with stocks and the risks a lot higher with properties. 401k is also subsidized. See studies.

I understand that there may be arguments individually for the decision and emotional safety is one, but it should be based on fact, not myth and misunderstanding.

Well this person is complaining about not being a homeowner so...

Working for a company that pays you in stock and then selling those stocks is in fact earned.

It's motivated by the ideology of wanting a meritocracy - the idea that if you work hard you can reap rewards. Having some people in society that can sit at home and watch the S&P increase while some have to work 50-hour weeks to make ends meet is seen as problematic.

> the ideology of wanting a meritocracy - the idea that if you work hard you can reap rewards.

and of those hard earned rewards investing them and then sitting at home and watching the S&P increase you mean?

oh wait that’s problematic … let’s take those rewards away for “fairness” .. opps no incentives no meritocracy no prosperity

The problem is, it's not that easy. In the end the law matters - it was just that no one cared for decades, even though the noise from the bars was far above the limits. The old occupants just paid shit in rent, the new ones pay through their nose and expect something for that amount.

> Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all.

Henry George begs to differ. He would say that you start with The One Tax and the resulting pressure on zoning will be unbearable. Good reading: "Land is a Big Deal" by Lars Doucet.

I thought "earned income" was an actual accounting term (to define a type of taxable income as opposed to passive income):

https://itap1.for.irs.gov/owda/0/resource/Commentary_Files_R...

" Earned income is money received as payment for work, including wages, salaries, bonuses, commissions, tips, and net earnings from self-employment. For tax purposes, it can also include long-term disability payments, union strike benefits, and, in some cases, payments from certain deferred retirement compensation arrangements.

Income such as investment profits and Social Security payments is considered unearned income, also known as passive income."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnedincome.asp

It wasn't a judgement remark, "earned income" is what you call that which is not passive income

>Real estate is, by its nature, a bad investment; it's only the scarcity of it that makes the value continue to go up exponentially.

It's very nature is it's scarcity though. Land is the one thing they don't make more of.

Even you don't care about owning, just the idea that you can afford 10x space for less money than a crappy studio in a HCOL area.

That’s all accurate and I was assuming you were referring to passive income exactly as you have clarified.

That doesn’t change any of my observations as your comments imply unearned income deserves higher taxation than current is applied, which is what I object to.

What does the “to be fair” part of your sentence mean then?

And your influence, merit and worth are what you're paid in salary. That sounds sane.

TIL that stocks can have a "$" in their code.

But land is something we have an absolute shit ton of on Earth.

They don't. The symbol is NET. But I think Twitter lets you use $ as an alternative to # (hashtag), and people use it specifically in front of stock symbols, and now it's becoming customary to prefix stock symbols with $ everywhere.

I see this as a goal in life, not a problem