When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.

Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.

Selling for a negative price is completely different from buying, because the flow of 'goods' is in the other direction.

Link is broken, correct link: https://www.salon.com/2006/11/10/guide_to_borat/

thats interesting info, the link was from an archive page.

[http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/11/10/guide_to_borat/i...]

the /ent/feature/ path is probably the culprit.

that aside, i found the reveal, of the reality warping that was inflicted on participants of the production to be interesting.

in some cases the "performance art" was not appreciated the reaction had to be managed, and the scene was not candid.

the link i submitted should be: https://web.archive.org/web/20090430191417/http://www.salon....

im guessing it was trimmed?

The physical store is not the "means of production" in urban areas, but a closer analog is the piece of paper that allows a given square foot of floorspace (for any use) the right to exist within the city for a given period of time. You could call this piece of paper a floorspace factory, since it's the limiting factor. Somehow we have decided it's best to have as few floorspace factories as possible.

Land (or in modern terms, location value) has been seen as a means of production along with labor and capital since Adam Smith.

Yes, but back then you could build largely what you wanted to on the land. Now you can’t. The pieces of paper are more limiting than the actual land.

Yeah not disputing that, just saying it's definitionally wrong to say land "is not the means of production".

Depends whether or not the city allows other neighbourhoods to exist/grow/change. If the total floorspace in the city is fixed in regulations, then ofc anything done to improve conditions will hurt people on the bottom. The people who can afford a "revitalized neighbourhood" would happily live in brand new housing built on top of land in the nearby mansion district, displacing no one, but city planners do not allow that - new apartments can only be added to the city stock by destroying old ones, new store floorspace can only be added by destroying old etc. This forces everyone to play musical chairs with too few chairs and the only winners are those who own the chairs.

I heard that in Japan, it's common for condo developers who want to buy out smaller buildings to compensate the owners with an equal amount of floorspace in the new building - not sure how common that practice actually is, but what a way to align incentives!

I think a common thing in Greece was that owners themselves would redevelop their properties much denser, retaining an apartment or two of equal floorspace to their own home, and then leasing or selling out the others to fund the redevelopment of lot.

This sort of flexibility would be really welcome in North America but SFH neighbourhoods are frozen in stone, so when the nearby high street becomes cool, all the little former working class single family homes become million dollar homes that can only be purchased by the rich, and the working class people that may have previously rented them are booted out to who knows where.

No. Individual HN readers, like me, who believe it to be off-topic, flagged it.

Since only people with a wealthy family safety net have the wherewithal to call themselves artists, these schemes just end up as a transfer from poor to rich (kids)

iirc from previous criticism I saw on this a majority of the trial recipients were retirement age adults, but all the same people much wealthier with the privilege to have time/money to spend doing art. Younger artists? Not established enough.

Deeply ironic that those who claim to support socialism are so okay with taking from the poor to give to the rich.

A story as old as time, unfortunately.

Just having the option of giving up $1 million in compensation put one far far far above meaningful worries about your well-being and the happiness of your kids.

Not really. We would have to downsize our life.

I'll have to explain it to the wife: "well, you see, we cant live in this house anymore because AI in Notepad was just too much".

I'll dial up my ethical and moral stance on software up to 11 when I see a proper social safety net in this country, with free healthcare and free education.

And if we cant all agree on having even those vital things for free, then relying on collective agreement on software issues will never work in practice so my sacrifice would be for nothing. I would just end up being the dumb idealist.

I posed my comment poorly and trollishly.

I don't think you should make any change you don't want to, I'm not arguing for collective agreement on anything, and I'm not convinced there's a big ethical case for or against AI, even in Notepad.exe. If you can make $1M, go nuts, I just think it's not a great example of dealing with ethics & tradeoffs.

I was more just reacting to your the contrast between ideas early in this thread, and your implication of a $1M comp. Early in the thread there was implication that poor/exploited/low-level workers with few other options were either being blamed for AI in notepad, or should not be blamed. Then you casually drop the $1M comp line. Maybe that's real, maybe it's not but regardless, it felt silly to compare the earlier population with people who can or have made $1M. Of course we all face challenges, and the hedonic treadmill calls for us equally at $1K/year and $1M/year, I just think people in the latter have objectively more options, even if the wife complains, than people in the former, and it's tough to take the latter seriously when they talk about lifestyle adjustments.