Questions to Which the Answer is "No!"

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If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'. [11] Studies [ edit ] Bear in mind that, by design, the areas where the Mietpreisbremse applies are areas where demand exceeds supply. There will be more than one applicant per flat, and if you are one of them, you will want to impress your potential future landlord. Emphasising what a tidy, reliable and responsible person you are might be a good idea. Asking inquisitive questions about how the rent had been worked out, and whether it is definitely Mietpreisbremse-compliant, not so much. Bloch, Arthur (1991). The Complete Murphy's Law: A Definitive Collection (reviseded.). Los Angeles, California: Price Stern Sloan. ISBN 9780843129687. The first empirical assessment of the Mietpreisbremse, from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), is now out. The authors compare the evolution of rental markets in places subject to the Mietpreisbremse to otherwise similar rental markets not subject to it. The good news is that the Mietpreisbremse has not, as one might have expected, led to a drop in property development. Battistella, Edwin L (2009). Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody's Famous Language School. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195367126.

A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr's suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles: No. This isn’t a redundancy situation, it is about performance. So let’s deal with it appropriately even if that is more difficult.The Swedish Union of Tenants defends the Swedish rent control system as ‘not a rent control system at all, but a negotiated collective bargaining system that is half way between the free market and rent control’. Apparently, because the decision on what the rent increase should be isn’t made by government officials, it isn’t a control. O'Keefe, Kevin (2013). "The press and the politics of neutrality". A Thousand Deadlines: The New York City Press and American Neutrality, 1914–17. Springer. ISBN 9789401576086. Maybe that’s true. There are certainly some eye-watering examples of online idiocy around, the most brazen of which are acronyms. Acronyms are the holiday reps of internet speak, grinding on you in hotpants, offering you neon drinks, making you feel old. STBY! they holler in your face, but DILLIGAS! Is it possible to stay abreast of internet acronyms? QTWTAIN. (In point of linguistic technicality, most of the above are not actually acronyms, because they’re not pronou- SORRY, TL;DR.) Betteridge, Ian (23 February 2009). "TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism". Technovia.co.uk. Archived from the original on 26 February 2009 . Retrieved 12 May 2019.

So here’s the crux: if you want to make rent controls more fine-grained and flexible, you inevitably increase their complexity, and create uncertainty. Under those conditions, rent controls cannot be automatically enforced: you need proactive tenants, who insist on their enforcement. In areas where demand exceeds supply, tenants are not in a position to behave in that way. They might, in markets which are more skewed in the tenant’s favour, but of course, in such markets, you don’t need rent controls in the first place. Berner, R. Thomas (2007). Fundamentals of Journalism: Reporting, Writing and Editing. Marquette Books. ISBN 9780922993765. More and more, firms use algorithms to spot market trends and predict consumer behaviour. 21st-century consumers constantly interact with such algorithms. Information is not knowledge. Take away the market that produces economic data, and governments would be flying blind. What to produce? How much should be produced? What production processes should be used? Who should be employed in production? Eliminate the freedom of individuals to choose, and central planners would have no way to answer these questions despite possessing mountains of past information on their hard drives. Such knowledge simply can’t be generated otherwise than by the market process. All the data in the world can’t change that.It is worth reading up on the Swedish system. Their rent control system does not cap rents or freeze them but controls them by controlling the increases in rents through collective bargaining between landlords and tenants unions. Rises are almost always above CPI/Inflation. The resulting increase is then ‘distributed’ across the different properties according to the ‘use value’ system. Betteridge's name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?" ( Schonfeld 2009): It is only from market transactions that prices emerge. Consumer behaviour is only conceivable when consumers have the freedom to choose between products. Profits and losses reflect the performance of actual firms and market participants engaged in rivalrous competition. Not quite. The reason why the Mietpreisbremse has not had any discernible negative effects is simply that it has not had any discernible effects at all. Rents in controlled areas have shown the same trend as rents in otherwise similar, but uncontrolled areas, so it has not been much of a Bremse (=brake) at all. Why not?