LESSWRONG
LW

All of sooh's Comments + Replies

Universal Basic Income and Poverty
sooh10

I'm simply paraphrasing Ricardo's law of rent. It's pretty straightforward microeconomics.

Worst rent free location just refers to the next-best-alternative, so yes, homelessness, or subsistence farming in a marginal location, etc.

Both demand and supply straightforwardly affect housing rent; it is not just "productivity" that determines what the cost of physically residing in a certain area will be. For example, if a different city close by suddenly becomes much more attractive, demand will (at least in the short-term) slightly go down in the initial city,

... (read more)
Reply
1[anonymous]
Rentiers may benefit, but they need not be the only ones who benefit. That was the essence of my comment above, and why I objected to the statements above that "all UBI" is sucked up by rent and that "UBI is simply a handout to rentiers." The nominal incomes of non-rentiers indeed increase, and I claim that for some of them, the real income increases as well. I'm not sure if there is any leftover disagreement here?
Universal Basic Income and Poverty
sooh10

The income and substitution effects can't fully negate all increases in income, otherwise billionaires couldn't exist, and everyone would live paycheck to paycheck. 

Reply
Universal Basic Income and Poverty
sooh1-1

Housing supply is elastic, land supply is not. Rent from "house-owner" to renter may have a functioning supply curve, but ground rent sucks up all UBI due to its perfectly inelastic supply curve.

QoL has of course risen despite this, because rent can only demand the different between the worst available rent-free location and the location at hand -- as technology improves, the productivity at the worst rent-free location (the margin of production) rises, and what people get to keep post-rent rises. 

UBI is simply a handout to rentiers.  Progress that improves the margin of production raises the floor of poverty. 

Reply
1[anonymous]
Your comment is very confusing to me, as it reads like a sort of "productivity theory of value" that doesn't align either with basic microeconomic theory or with empirical data that has been gathered on this question.  Both demand and supply straightforwardly affect housing rent; it is not just "productivity" that determines what the cost of physically residing in a certain area will be. For example, if a different city close by suddenly becomes much more attractive, demand will (at least in the short-term) slightly go down in the initial city, which will push rent down a bit, even though the productivity in this city has stayed the same. It's the reverse of Baumol's cost disease: instead of wages in fields that haven't experienced increased productivity nonetheless going up because competing jobs are getting more enticing and well-paid (and thus employers need to increase wages to induce marginal workers to stay instead of moving over to those fields), you have a situation where the rent in a city goes down despite nothing happening in the city itself, because landlords have to compete to some extent not only with other landlords in the city but also with other, nearby cities. Even in a hypothetical word that looked like ours except there was no technological improvement, rents would still change over time because of demand & supply factors, governmental regulation and deregulation, etc.  I also don't understand what "worst rent-free location" refers to? Do you mean homelessness here, or what? For most people, there is no way to obtain a house in a rent-free manner (given that mortgage payments, for all useful purposes here, can be modeled as equivalent to monthly rent). (Emphasis mine) I'm not sure what you mean by this, honestly.  If we give all renters in a city $10k (say, by a tax cut, which is mostly functionally equivalent to UBI anyway, at least for our purposes here), are you predicting that this will not actually result in them retaining more dollars
A new option for building lumenators
sooh10

These listings don't clearly list fresnel lens as a feature / component, did you order yourself to confirm? And can you advise on the best search terms?

Reply
My Model of Gender Identity
sooh20

This was truly elucidating for a cis male with evidently low openness. I've long experienced cognitive dissonance between my purported liberalism wrt what people do to their own bodies and the offense I took toward gender identity and early medical/surgical interventions. Due to the cognitive dissonance, I've avoided honest deep dives into the topic, and this was a great introduction to a thesis that I could actually swallow. 

Reply
Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it
sooh-10

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Here's a 4 time board certified MD's primer on light that mentions the paper (and related research): 

Other highlights:

  • Sun exposure decreases all cause mortality, including from melanoma
  • Sun exposure has beneficial effect on brain volume in multiple sclerosis, independent of consequent vit D
Reply
Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it
sooh20

As your background is in optics, can I get your opinion on this paper on the intersection of indoor lighting, optics and our responses to light wavelengths, and public health: https://www.melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/19

To me it's on the knife's edge separating woo and legitimate niche research, I would like an educated opinion.

Reply
1Richard Korzekwa
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I don't think I'd take the paper itself seriously. Melatonin Research doesn't seem to be a real journal and the paper looks very unprofessional. One of the paper's authors is a lighting engineer who I think is trying to get people to use indoor lighting with more NIR, while the other seems to be a late-career melatonin guy who probably did some good research at some point. This isn't to say that we should dismiss things unless they're written by Credentialed Scientists® in a Serious Journal® and formatted in The Right Way®. But peer review does provide some protection from nonsense and we should be cautious about stuff that's trying to look like it's part of the academic peer-review system when it's not. As for the content, I'm not able to say much about the biology. I didn't notice anything while skimming it that I know to be wrong, but I know very little biology, so that's not surprising. The optics is suspect. I'm pretty dubious about the thing with a "light guide" and the idea that the structure of a persons head/brain is supposed to distribute NIR in some way. I almost dismissed the stuff about NIR and the brain out of hand, but it turns out a human skull/scalp can diffusely transmit something like a few percent 830nm light, at least according to this paper with a simple but reasonably compelling experiment. I'll admit that paper does leave me wondering if longer wavelengths do matter somehow. It looks like a person standing in sunlight or next to a campfire probably does get some non-negligible NIR illumination through a substantial portion of their body. But I wouldn't take that paper as strong evidence for or against much of anything.