We should go the asian route of increasing density and size. It's not like Barcelona is fully developed border to border.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop....
Nor does it mean this trade off for a measly 10,000 flats is worth it in such a large city.
Giving these 10k flats to locals isn't going to put a dent in the housing economy.
If this thread continues for a few more levels, I think you’ll end up justifying hiring your own private police force.
Ownership requires that a state exists to enforce your rights. There are tradeoffs with this arrangement, one of which is that the state gets to set boundaries/limits on how you can use the thing you own. Ideally, acting with the best interests of the population. This sometimes includes ensuring areas are off limits to transient inhabitants so that a society can develop.
Also, increasing density might be easy if you demolish 100 single family homes to build 10 five-stories buildings, but replacing Barcelona's 5-6 stories blocks with 10-stories ones isn't going to be economically viable. And if some brave developer tries this, then the resulting apartments won't be cheap.
This is uncharitable. What everybody wants is for the place they call home, either by inheritance or hard work, to not be harmed by overdevelopment. People will have varyingly (un)reasonable opinions on what "over" means, but even a place with zero development has new residents - people do not live in one place forever, nor do they live forever.
That's unintelligible. With that logic, every law and regulation is authoritarian.
> all the while fostering resentment and opening up increasingly authoritarian measures in the future
Here's the resentment:
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
And yes, the locals want more authoritarianism to keep away the overcrowding tourists, rich foreigners, and people who think like you. That's what the problem needs and what people like you understand.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: yikes, you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly—examples:
We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, so please stop doing this, and please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
(I suppose I should add the standard disclaimer that no, we don't care about your views. We care about your following the rules and using the site as intended, same as with any other user.)
> please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle
All the threads you referenced are filled with people using the site in a political and ideological manner. There are people who are literally doing propaganda against entire countries and people.
> no, we don't care about your views
If you don't care about the views of the users, don't care about them in an egalitarian way. So far the rules seem to be getting applied selectively.
> We have to ban accounts that keep doing this
Feel free to do so. I'll get me coat myself. No need to contribute to a platform that not only does not care about its users' views but also applies its rules selectively and in an exceptionalist manner.
The city of Barcelona quite literally is fully developed border to border. Or where are you suggesting these new developments are gonna be made?
I think this working as it should.
> the rules seem to be getting applied selectively
Every commenter with strong passions feels like the mods apply the rules selectively and must therefore be on the other side. The people you disagree with are just as sure that we're secretly on your side. I say that with confidence even though I don't remember anything about your views at this moment, nor which side any of you are on.
The reason is sample bias. Everyone notices other people breaking the rules, but which cases you notice depends on your pre-existing views. What we (I mean all of us, i.e. humans generally) notice is governed by what we dislike [1]. We assign the most meaning to the cases that feel most unfair or offensive to us. Since everyone selects these based on their own feelings, opposite feelings lead to different samples and opposite conclusions.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. Also, I'm the only moderator who responds publicly and I can only write so much—not just because I have other responsibilities to worry about, but also because if I make even a slight mistake, it can (and often has) made a situation worse. It's a little bit like writing software in, I don't know, Agda as opposed to JS or something. You can't do it as fast or as much.
Which posts I respond to vs. not is determined by two factors: (a) what has been brought to my attention by others; and (b) randomness. If you or anyone sees a post that ought to be moderated, you can bring it to our/my attention by either flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how), or in egregious cases, by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
Moderation can't be consistent in any way that would require reviewing all posts, but it can be relatively [2] consistent as long as we work with random-enough samples and handle them in a principled-enough way. That's what we aspire to. We're not perfect at it, but we do at least have years of practice.
This works well enough to signal to most of the community that (a) HN is moderated, and (b) that it's moderated reasonably fairly [3]. But it leaves many cases that don't get moderated all, which means there are plenty of data points which people can select to draw whatever conclusions they want to about HN moderation—and believe me, they do!
We've all had this experience in other contexts. Take cops and speeding tickets. There's always a "me? why me?" reaction when you get pulled over. Plenty of other cars were speeding faster! The cops must have ulterior motives for picking on me [4]. Even if my brain knows about random samples, the feelings still work this way. Another example is sports and referees. The passionate fans are the quickest to feel that the refs are making calls unfairly, and it always feels like the calls are unfair against your team.
One last point, in the unlikely event that you read this far... when I said "we don't care about your views" I did not mean to belittle your views or to imply that they're about something unimportant. On the contrary, the divisive topics are extremely important—far more important than most things that appear on HN. I just meant that we don't (or at least try our best not to) consider your views when making moderation calls. And of course by "you" I don't just mean you personally, I mean everybody.
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[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] I say 'relatively' because this is a complex problem with lots of failure modes, but they don't change the important point above.
[3] Wait, haven't I just contradicted myself, after talking about all the users who feel we're unfair? No, because the driving factor is the passions of the perceiver. The more passionately you (i.e. anyone) feels about a topic, the more this dynamic kicks in. Most of the community doesn't have strong passions on a given topic, so even when they see the same data points as you, they won't select them as evidence of unfairness. They'll also be more likely to notice cases of the mods scolding the other side as well, and to assign equal weight to those. In other words, the very things that indicate unfairness to you will feel like fairness to them. This is how the same moderation approach can both reassure the majority while at the same time convincing passionate partisans (on any side of any topic) that the system is biased against them. For a couple collections of vivid examples, see >>26148870 .
[4] And maybe they do? This argument doesn't prove there's no bias; it just shows that any system, even the most unbiased, will produce strong feelings of bias no matter what you do.