As an inside joke, the officers decided to have the cake decorated in police-blue ribbons and sugared bees (for a “sting”).
The band, led by a city police officer, announced themselves as a weed-loving group named S.P.O.C, which stood for ‘Somebody Protect Our Crops.’ In actuality, it was just COPS spelled backwards.
They played the song ‘I Fought The Law (and the Law Won)’ as a signal to begin the bust.
“Let’s have some fun,” an officer shouted. “Everybody here that’s a cop, stand up! Okay! All the rest of you motherfuckers put your hands on the table, because you’re under arrest! This is a bust!”
This is so the æsthetic. Whoever these cops are, their features shall be considered rather redeemed by the brilliance of this audacity. If you absolutely must criminalize drug dealing, this is how it needs to be enforced.
How many of these rationalist activities do you participate in more than three (3) times a week? Check all that apply.
* Cuddle puddle with rationalists
* CFAR orgy
* Swimming around in a giant pile of money like Scrooge McDuck
* Secret world government meeting with all-you-can-eat snack bar
How many of your current romantic partners did you meet through LessWrong?
* 6 or fewer
* 7-10
* 11-25
* 26-100
* More than 100
* Not sure/too many to count
Approximately how much do you donate each year to GiveWell’s recommended charities? Please state your answer in tens of millions of dollars.
My actual answers:
How many of these rationalist activities do you participate in more than three (3) times a week?
>Cuddle puddle with rationalists
How many of your current romantic partners did you meet through LessWrong?
>7-10
Approximately how much do you donate each year to GiveWell’s recommended charities? (Please state your answer in tens of millions of dollars.)
>Just you wait. Just you wait…
LessWrong surveys be like
Provides quick definitions and links to Wikipedia for terms like ‘Feminism’ or ‘Conservative’.
Does not provide a definition or a link for the term ‘epsilon’.
LessWrong surveys be like
Where are you from?
* Big Anglosphere * Old Anglosphere * Cold Anglosphere * Opposite Anglosphere * Finland * Somewhere else
What is your IQ?
* +4σ or more * between +3σ and +4σ * between +2σ and +3σ
Traditionally we have been perceived as being over 90% male, but recent evidence has forced us to reconsider whether there actually are any men at all among us. Please select which of the following matches you:
* I’m a trans woman * I’m nonbinary * I’m a man but I’d rather be a woman and I’m just scared of being trans * People think I’m a man but I don’t think I’m a man * I think I’m a man because everyone else thinks I’m a man and I think that’s what being a man means, right? * I think I’m a man because my biological features are commonly associated with men but nothing else matches and I just haven’t thought that deeply about the implications * I’m just a twitchy, ambitious, ambiguously badbrains Silicon Valley nerd * I’m AFAB
19. I don’t recall what I got when I read Coming Apart (and took the quiz there); I noticed that they updated the movies and the TV shows, as is appropriate.
9.
I guess I picked up a few points eating at Waffle House and Outback when I go visit my family. :) But I had to guess for that part because it’s not like I know the exact numbers.
13, which is funny because I work with and for a lot of people who do all these things, just not me or my family and friends.
4.
Unsettling.
20 when adjusted for immigration and nonetheless I’m feeling like my past is characterized by an uncomfortably extreme exposure to the not!bubble. Also this generalizes between countries astonishingly well; a cultural translation is needed to make it comparable but everything was obviously “yes, I know what they’re talking about”
Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.
When I worked at a game story, there were plenty of popular games by private companies that were impossible to get in stock (or get enough in stock to meet demand).
That’s why abandonware needs to be pushed into the public domain, or at least have mandatory licensing or something. Original maker not supplying the demand? Get out of the way and let someone else do it. The only reason a board game shouldn’t be manufactured is if nobody is willing to pay the printing costs, otherwise it’s just artificial scarcity.
(It would probably also help if scaling up production was more flexible, but at least private companies have a direct incentive to meet the demand. Aesthetically my brain thinks all games’ rules and basic data should be available on the internet for free and the price would be paid for the physical product, but that’s probably not enough to make it an imperative “should” even if it would be awesome and very post-scarcityish.)
I mean, I agree with you regarding copyright being an interference with the free market, and that being at least part of the problem.
I wasn’t talking about abandonware games, though; often enough popular games (especially if they’re new and unexpectedly popular, but not always even that) were unavailable even if when they’re nominally in print.
Also worth noting, Kolejka/Queue apparently does have the rules posted on online. This does happen for privately produced games sometimes, but I’d say it’s the exception rather than the rule.
I consider drastic inability to supply the demand to be “effectively abandonware”; I don’t really see a reason why such popular games shouldn’t be licensed for production by other manufacturers, at least temporarily while production is scaled up, to satisfy the customers. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sold somewhere, if it’s realistically unavailable for most.
As long as the forcibly licensed versions note clearly that they aren’t made by the original manufacturer and there is a reasonable time for the OM to react to surprise demand (for example something like 6 months to a year; short delays make sense but having something chronically unavailable is a market failure) I think it might be close to strictly superior, even if copyrights aren’t abolished altogether.
Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.
When I worked at a game story, there were plenty of popular games by private companies that were impossible to get in stock (or get enough in stock to meet demand).
That’s why abandonware needs to be pushed into the public domain, or at least have mandatory licensing or something. Original maker not supplying the demand? Get out of the way and let someone else do it. The only reason a board game shouldn’t be manufactured is if nobody is willing to pay the printing costs, otherwise it’s just artificial scarcity.
(It would probably also help if scaling up production was more flexible, but at least private companies have a direct incentive to meet the demand. Aesthetically my brain thinks all games’ rules and basic data should be available on the internet for free and the price would be paid for the physical product, but that’s probably not enough to make it an imperative “should” even if it would be awesome and very post-scarcityish.)
Founder of Glass Bottom Games comments on LEGO Universe’s failure
If kids occasionally seeing a penis or two is enough to get your multiuser environment sued out of existence, then I don’t understand how the city of San Francisco is still a thing.
@endecision But we legit saw a dong lying in the streets of San Fran, tho.
In Finland we have this thing called the sauna, ensuring that by the age of 18 a sufficient majority of the population is conditioned to not be shocked over the possibility of kids seeing penises, by themselves having seen enough penises to consider it a perfectly normal feature of human morphological diversity. Melanin, on the other hand, is what they get quite perturbed by.
… I feel like, given the last sentence of your comment, that wouldn’t turn out quite the way you wanted it…
My brain thinks Europe is basically good with some tragic flaws, and individual countries are basically evil with some redeeming features (except Iceland, which is cool). Europe means high-speed rail, dense cities, bicycles and trams, wine in grocery stores, social liberalism, a reasonable attitude towards sex and nudity, legal drugs, open borders etc.; while Finland is a bureaucratic corporatist shithole, Germany wants to build a fourth reich for its banks, and Sweden pretends to be left-liberal while hating drug users, sex workers, and other marginalized people.
Thus, when something good happens on the western peninsula of the Eurasian continent, it’s a european thing, while bad things are national. In the US it’s the opposite: San Francisco is basically good, but America is basically evil. Ingroup-outgroup mechanics are weird.
Weird, San Francisco and is mostly just a lawful-evil-government-reigning-over-people-of-a-mix-of-alignments thing to me. (99% because of zoning laws and not-in-my-backyard-issues. My brain labels most categories of SF residents–gay people, techie entrepreneurs, both the populations who are getting gentrified and the ones who are doing the gentrifying (because really, neither one of them is at fault for conflicts over neighborhoods) as neutral good.) America in general, on the other hand, is something I view somewhat positively.
Maybe it’s because I live closer to San Francisco, so I have more room to view it as a multifaceted place? My views of most European countries are not very complex (there’s the “tourist view,” “politics and economics view,” and “people I know who come from there view,” and I use the 3rd one much more often than either of the first 2.)
Also, we have wine in grocery stores in the US too. I’m not sure how you got under the impression that it’s a Europe thing, but it’s not. I’m sure the wine in European grocery stores is better though, because everything in your grocery stores is better.
Well, the government is definitely lawful evil, but the culture and society aren’t. The government is usually Outgroup anyway to me.
I should elaborate more on the tribal mechanisms later, but basically Europe as an idea is U-tribe while America feels like R-tribe. (I’m using U and R for a pattern of archetypes that seems to occur very consistently; in the US they roughly correspond to “blue” and “red” as known in the diaspora, while in Finland they’re called “red-green” and “blue-white”) The R-tribers around here are usually anti-european-integration nationalists whom I associate with their respective countries, while eurofederalists are extremely U. San Francisco is the most U-tribey place I’ve been to, and I’m very U-tribey so it’s Ingroup. Federal flags are rare and seem timid, as if apologizing for their existence, and national flags are R-tribe. U-tribers in Europe feel united across national borders; Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin etc. are closer to each other than they are to the areas inhabited by nationalistic conservative R-tribers in their respective countries.
Wine in grocery stores happens in the US as well as the civilized countries of continental europe, but it doesn’t happen in Finland, so it feels like a european thing.
Cognitively I’m in favor of many american ideals, like immigration, “land of actually existing opportunity for people like me”, somali refugees not being a thoroughly marginalized underclass, and not having the government regulate the opening hours of grocery stores; but as U-associated ideas they emotionally feel like “europe done right” (that’s why my brain currently thinks SF is Best Europe and the border between the continents is somewhere north of San Mateo) while the US is very strongly R-associated (surveillance, violent policing, racism, wars) because the european media reports on those things instead of the weird feeling of liberation I get from being in SF. And cognitively european institutions are very problematic, but in Finland the typically presented choice of narratives is that one is either a nationalist or a eurofederalist, and the ideals of the latter are ones I support even if their implementation has often been shitty.
It’s not rational, but I can’t pretend I’d be immune to ingrouping things that way in such an environment.
(Seriously, our media is whataboutist as fuck and the US is extremely unfairly maligned and the only people who challenge that tend to be obnoxious crony capitalists who effectively discredit the US by association. Like, our muslim population is marginalized in many of the same ways african-americans are, but “islam is not a race” so Europe is not racist amirite. French banlieues are very much like Ferguson, but when muslims get shot by cops for dubious-to-unjustifiable reasons the ensuing riots are treated as barbarians looting while BLM has at least managed to draw attention to the actual problems. It’s very curious to notice oneself falling into the “expatriate falling in love with SF, which is legally located within, and under the jurisdiction of, USA, and explaining to everyone how some things are way better over there” archetype and I can see that it exists for a reason.)
Freddie deBoer writes a white paper supporting standardized testing in colleges.
His position is that private colleges need to be held accountable and
we need proof that online courses don’t work, but American Interest points out
that it might break the power of education-industrial complex if people
who go to less prestigious institutions have an objective way to prove
they’re just as good as people who went to more prestigious ones. And I
will add that it might incentivize colleges to admit based on something
vaguely resembling merit if they want higher test scores. Overall this
would be amazing it it happened.
Um, but… We already have this in the Caribbean? Because we’re halfway civilised? Do you mean to tell me Americans are barbarians who let random colleges do whatever? If you don’t test your colleges, what are they even for? How can you know how a student at one college compares to one at another? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS???
I think I’ve determined the main trade-off between the Caribbean and the US: Sure, we’re poor; but when we design an institution, it isn’t fucking stupid.
I know I’m biased as someone who is, I think, reasonably smart and capable and does v poorly on standardized tests, but the idea that more standardized tests will force institutions to admit based on merit is ridiculous ime. Like with subject GREs, it will give schools an easy but inaccurate metric so they can avoid actually judging merit or potential.
As someone who does well on standardized tests, I also think that they are pointless as actual assessments. IMO the things that may make me successful in academics are exactly the things I had to learn to suppress to pass standardized exams. Logic, analytical skills, creativity. I think @quasitree is just not as good at suppressing her brilliance / perhaps her brilliance surpasses mine (the latter has always been my theory).
…Are your standardised tests really really different to mine? Like, as far as I can tell, logic, analytical skills, creativity, and depth of knowledge of the subject area are what I’ve been tested on?
Like, typical chem question would be something like: “You run a laboratory and have been given samples X, Y, and Z to identify. Their characteristics are [description]. Your budget is limited, so you can only devise one testing regimen to apply to all the samples. You can use some or all of [list of apparatus]. Design and justify an identification process with explanations of the principles behind each stage of chemical testing, cost effectiveness, the trade off between accuracy and efficiency, and the level of confidence you can expect for your identification.”
[cue me furiously writing four pages while cursing several deities]
I mean, if building and justifying your own experiments from scratch isn’t evidence of understanding chemistry, is their literally any observation you could make that would give you information about someone’s chemistry proficiency? If not, I still have to wonder what colleges are for because, for all we know, they aren’t teaching shit and no one can tell.
This response is based on one year of high-school chem with an above-average teacher in a 30-person classroom, and one semester of college-level intro chem in a 350-seat lecture hall (twice-weekly lectures, with a corresponding twice-weekly 30-seat ‘recitation’ period to explain the lecture and a once-weekly 30-seat lab period). This is also drawing on years of PSAT and SAT tests, and on the AP Calculus AB test.
In my experience, in the US, standardized tests are designed to make the jobs easy for the graders.
Your “typical chem question” would be the end-of-test essay question, and would be preceded by 25 to 50 multiple-choice questions requiring you to regurgitate facts about various compounds and their properties. Then, there would be around 25 multiple-choice questions where you would solve chemistry-related math or balance chemical equations. These two sections would all answered by filling in the bubbles on scantrons. If there is a short-form free response series of questions, (if!) then there will probably be no more than 5 of the free-form response questions, and your answer must fit within the designated area on the form. Your final answer (if it is a math problem) must have a box drawn around it: This is a standardized test. Priority is placed on the graders’ ability to grade your test.
Finally, there is the longer essay, which is again limited by space. When I took the SAT, the writing space available for the essay question on the writing section was about equal to one and a half single-sided pages of college-ruled paper. It was not a lot of space to write a 1-3-1 essay, and if your response wasn’t in the 1-3-1 format, if you were taking space to explain your arguments and to back them up with knowledge not included in the test form (this practice is encouraged), then you are more likely to run out of paper. If you write large, you’re more likely to run out of paper.
In the AP Calc AB exam, there was still a lot of bubble-filling. But there were more free-form responses, and at the end were six word problems, of which you were allowed to choose three. Each response was allowed to take up half a page of the printed workbook. You could use scrap paper to work, but all logic required for your response needed to be in the workbook.
The chem course I took in college was the not-remedial intro-to-chem course. You were expected to have memorized the speed of light, and you were expected to use 300,000,000 m/s as an acceptable substitute, because it would simplify your calculations and allow you to finish the test faster.
About half the class did not finish the average exam. The average exam grade was 75% correct, a ‘C’. ‘C’ is a grade in the middle of the scale from the top scores, marked ‘A’, to any failing grade, marked ‘F’. ('E’ is skipped for legacy reasons, except where 'E’ is used in place of 'F’ because 'F’ hurts children’s feelings. I’m not kidding.) (Letter grades are still tabulated from point scores in order to convert point scores to GPA scores, which are a 0-4 scale that is used in college admissions, in inter-school comparisons, and in entry-level job placement.
That chem course was explicitly designed as a weed-out course, to deflect people from the Chemistry department’s majors.
In comparison, my high school: with ~65 people taking the course in three sections, the (delightfully sadistic) teacher didn’t use scantrons. (It would not be cost-effective at this scale.) There might be 10 multiple-choice or true-false questions at the start of the text or exam, but the remainder of the test was all short-answer or essay questions, where you were expected to explain your reasoning. If there was an extra credit question, you were expected to be creative in your response.*
This teacher’s methods would not work in standardized testing, because this teacher’s methods required effort on the part of the grader. The grader would need to understand the question, the solution, the student’s answer and the student’s reasoning behind their answer.
Your “typical chem question” can’t be scaled up to deal with ~10 million students per year.
And thus, why standardized tests suck.
* One Intro to Engineering final exam was one question, whose prompt was as follows**: You awaken to find yourself in a locked room the size of this classroom (25 feet by 75 feet). There is a door in one corner. At the opposite end of the room is a weighty metal desk. On the desk is a cardboard file box containing one (1) fully-disassembled AK-47 and one round of ammunition. Next to the box is the AK-47 user manual, printed in Swahili. In 15 minutes, a hungry Bengal tiger will be introduced to the room through the door. Explain how you will survive the tiger and escape the room.
** If you recognize this teacher, go say hi! He likes hearing stories of our adventures.
For college-level standardised tests in the Caribbean, there would be two separate papers per subject area, plus a portfolio.
For the first paper, which receives lower weight in your grade, you would have to answer 60 multiple choice questions. If this is chem, they’ll be split between chem math and “what would you expect to happen if [chem thing] were done?” type of stuff. This is generally ~25% of your grade. It’s not thought too highly of and mostly exists as a check on the other bits. If you do really well on one type of assessment while flunking the others, someone calls your school and asks what’s going on.
Paper II would have 2-3 questions of the type I described, plus 20-30 (depending on subject) short-answer questions that would definitely require creativity to figure out. This would be ~35% of your grade.
Finally, there’s the School Based Assessment. This is a portfolio of projects that the Caribbean Examinations Council required you to do as part of your class during the year. In the hard sciences, this is mostly a write up of labs (some of which you design). In the social sciences, a research paper. In Computer Science, code. This was the final ~40%.
Then, at the end of the year, your school ships all this stuff to CXC head quarters. Additionally, since this is the summer vacation, some of your professors will also get shipped to CXC head quarters. There begins the super labour-intensive multi-week process of grading every exam paper and portfolio.
The papers are divided up and distributed among the graders. Physics professors get the physics papers; lit profs get lit; etc. Everything is broken up into pieces and assigned a serial code so you don’t know whose paper you’re grading.
If you are confused by an answer or find it ambiguous or think it doesn’t fit the rubric, you flag it as such and a panel of other professors in your field will look it over and come to a consensus grade. A couple of the grades you give will also be randomly submitted for review to make sure you aren’t grading too far out of line with the rubric.
After all this is done, the grades are distributed to the colleges. Then the colleges hand grade slips to the students. Then the professors are allowed to go home. I have been told that, if the review panels think you’ve been marking unfairly, they drown you in the caves in Barbados and you never see your family again. However, I’m sure that’s just a myth…
And this, of course, can only be done because the body that tests every college has been officially elevated as the Education Tsar by each Caricom government. This is one of those areas where I am kind of doubtful about a private corporation being able to do it. No one but the government is allowed to exile all the professors each year and drown them in the caves if they fail. The only rule of survival is don’t go into the caves academia.
Accred Inc. starts with a significant capital investment. It devises this kind of a testing regime, offers it for a four-digit price per student, and conducts a lot of studies on how the test scores predict things like “will this person actually know how to do their job”. The testing regime is optimized for predictive power. Accred pays good money for people from the academical precariat to get sufficient expertise for the review process.
Blind review is utilized, and a lot of ~statistics~ is run on the answers to see if people can eg. recognize the characteristic style of some institutions, or the race or gender of the person answering, or any other irrelevant characteristic, because it can introduce biases. The aim is to have the answers be completely statistically indistinguishable when controlled for quality, so that the reviewers can’t cause conscious or unconscious favoritism. Reviewers are scored on their adherence to the consensus and those who deviate are dropped like uber drivers; reviewer scores might also be automatically adjusted so that if #526 tends to give everyone half a point less than the consensus the system gives it back if doing so improves the predictive power of the standardized testing.
Now, everyone who cares about work performance has an incentive to use Accred. Employers can hire equally skilled workers from less prestigious institutions; a cheap college + Accred fees saves students money compared to an expensive college; and expensive colleges need to prove they are worth the money.
Accred can use the fuckload of money it starts with to prove the superiority of objective standards in the media, it hires some really smart people who figure out how to spin it into a social justice issue (protip: it should hire me) of evil rich people pushing down competent poor people while simultaneously presenting it as “hey businesses, here’s a way to get free money by hiring smarter than the competitors” in a clever left-right pincer movement.
It clashes with the established education-industrial complex but thanks to ~free market magic~ it inevitably comes out as the winner because ~incentives are aligned~ (read: the VCs funding it pull some strings behind the scenes with their buddies) and it can use data to discredit any cheaper competitors who try to use less stringent standards for easier grading, and becomes a precarious monopoly which is profitable but must keep up with the demonstrable objectivity so that someone else doesn’t figure out how to do better than it.
One issue I can immediately perceive is that if Accred is cartelled out by prestigious professors and institutions and gets a reputation as a second-rate service for second-rate students, but even then a brutal focus on predictive power could show that even less prestigious graders can do a good job, and prestigious students could be offered money to defect and get tested and show that their credentials are less important than their score.
The biggest problem might be if the ~cathedral~ declares Accred evil and racist (~completely unlike~ the big name schools with their legacy admissions for incompetent whites and affirmative action aka. asian quotas) because black people score worse on average, and it gets regulated away like IQ testing. To pre-empt this, Accred needs to play the SJ card in its opening salvo, “we didn’t cause black people to test worse, the System is failing them but we developed a method to measure it so that now we can find out what actually helps with the achievement gap”, and put the establishment on defense. (protip: hire me to help with it) Furthermore, sufficiently reliable blind testing could reduce biases in employment when test scores can be given more weight than subjective evaluations. Self-taught people could test against those with degrees, and credentials could lose their importance in favor of measurable competence.
I totally see how it could possibly be done as a private enterprise, as long as it starts with enough money to afford the initial investment in proving its effectiveness with data. Anyone got Peter Thiel’s phone number?
Founder of Glass Bottom Games comments on LEGO Universe’s failure
If kids occasionally seeing a penis or two is enough to get your multiuser environment sued out of existence, then I don’t understand how the city of San Francisco is still a thing.
@endecision But we legit saw a dong lying in the streets of San Fran, tho.
In Finland we have this thing called the sauna, ensuring that by the age of 18 a sufficient majority of the population is conditioned to not be shocked over the possibility of kids seeing penises, by themselves having seen enough penises to consider it a perfectly normal feature of human morphological diversity. Melanin, on the other hand, is what they get quite perturbed by.
… I feel like, given the last sentence of your comment, that wouldn’t turn out quite the way you wanted it…
My brain thinks Europe is basically good with some tragic flaws, and individual countries are basically evil with some redeeming features (except Iceland, which is cool). Europe means high-speed rail, dense cities, bicycles and trams, wine in grocery stores, social liberalism, a reasonable attitude towards sex and nudity, legal drugs, open borders etc.; while Finland is a bureaucratic corporatist shithole, Germany wants to build a fourth reich for its banks, and Sweden pretends to be left-liberal while hating drug users, sex workers, and other marginalized people.
Thus, when something good happens on the western peninsula of the Eurasian continent, it’s a european thing, while bad things are national. In the US it’s the opposite: San Francisco is basically good, but America is basically evil. Ingroup-outgroup mechanics are weird.
horrifying fun fact of the day: so greenwich village, which is the neighborhood in nyc where the stonewall riots took place and which was a v important gay center from like the 50s-80s, is now super swanky and full of touristy boutiques and expensive apartments and stuff. st vincent’s, the local hospital which had the first aids ward on the east coast, closed a couple years ago and is being replaced with luxury condos. all of this is sad enough, BUT i just found out that one of the reasons it’s so gentrified now is that the aids crisis was really awesome for real estate. ppl were dying in thousands and leaving empty apartments behind, which their landlords would then rent at higher prices until only rich ppl could afford to live there :)
elaphaia said: also during the aids crisis landlords would shut their heat off in the winter knowing it would kill ppl so they could then rent 4 higher :-)
Reminder that the cishet dominated government didn’t just ignore the effects of HIV/AIDS because of how concentrated the deaths were in other communities because they hate us, but also because they materially benefited from it - because they owned most of the buildings, because our partners and other kin had no legal right to our possessions, and because they commodified and monopolized antiretrovirals to bilk us.
In “rent control leads to weird results” …
(Obviously, if people are purposely messing with the heat system, that’s horrible, but “people pay lots of money to rent apartments in nice regions” doesn’t seem like a giant problem.)
Like, I don’t think areas magically become gentrified as soon as you get rid of rent control. There almost certainly isn’t rent control in, say, Alison’s hometown, and yet it has not been gentrified. All gentrification seems to mean in areas that used to have more rent control is that space goes to whoever has the most money instead of whoever showed up first and has the most bureaucracymancy?
This. Rent control doesn’t prevent gentrification, it just sucks. Stockholm has total rent control, meaning that pensioners who can wait 20 years to get an apartment can have 60 m² in the most prestigious areas for 700€/month, and businesses move out and economic growth fails to happen because high-skilled workers can’t live anywhere. Helsinki has market rate rents so the equivalent might cost 1500€/mo but at least it’s available.
My favorite solution would be to recognize that existing rent control has de facto created property for the tenants, and formalize it as a bostadsrätt entitlement lasting, say, 10 years. Bostadsrätt basically means “whoever owns this may rent the apartment for the below-market rate specified here” and most importantly, it can be bought and sold. Now evicting BMR tenants without compensation is theft, but they can be bought out for a fair price and don’t need to desperately stick to the one place they found for really cheap.
For example, if someone is renting an apartment for $1000 but the market would pay $2000, their 10-year bostadsrätt is worth roughly $100 000. The landlord could buy it from them, effectively destroying it, and rent the place to someone paying the market rate, resulting in a fair transaction for all, instead of trying to find a sneaky way to evict them. This would be a huge windfall from landlords to rent-controlled tenats but landlords can easily take it because they themselves have reaped huge windfalls from the rise in rents. Plus opening the markets for new development would benefit the property owners as well, so basically the only ones who would really lose are those who can’t do the sneaky eviction tricks any more (it’s one thing to fight a court case against a poor family, and completely another thing to fight a court case against a poor family you’ve obviously stolen six digits of currency from).
In a twisted logic, assuming basic economic rationality, this might be enough to break the political coalition of property owners and rent-controlled tenants, eliminating the latter’s incentives to be hostile towards new development, and aligning them with the market rate tenants and tech industry instead. Result: rent markets become healthy, new development becomes possible, and instead of suffering unfair sneaky evictions rent controlled tenants get a lot of money and can choose between living in pricey areas or moving to less expensive ones and using the difference for something else.
