This... I wonder why isn't there a market in Tijuana, Juarez and other border towns for fixing broken electronics and similar appliances.
Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. My opinion is that governments should tax 2nd, 3rd and further housing so as to prevent people from accumulating residential buildings.
If you want to live of your rents, buy a commercial or industrial building, speculate with that. But residential construction should be protected to ensure each household is able to buy one with the average country salary.
A bad idea in isolation, because it forces people to store all their net worth into their main tax free house, causing people to squat in gigantic houses that they don't need or want. I've seen this distorted behavior in people I know.
We should reward the person who lives in a normal house below their means, and buys an apartment as an investment (which is private capital into new construction that wouldn't have happened if they didn't do it), then rents it out, which increases stock on the rental market, and decreases rental yields.
If you want to tax ALL housing the same, including people's only house, then sure, go for it. Or better yet, tax all land ownership. Just don't distort people's behavior by making a special exception for their main house.
At least in USA, since pretty much the absolute beginning, anyone with any wealth tried to gobble up the absolute most amount of land they could. Both as a form of wealth and a productive input. This has been less so in the past century though as agriculture has become smaller part of the economy.
Put a few mile ring around any city center and yes the land there is scarce. You would not want one or a small number of individuals buying up all or a lot of that land because other people want to live there too. Therefore do exponential taxation based on land they already own. Why is this confusing to you?
There are a large number of properties in big cities sitting empty due to people hoarding land/houses. Too much is anything more than your primary residence. It should be taxed exponentially with both number of secondary residences and size normalized to urban development around the property.
Why would someone want all their net worth in real estate properties rather than diversify with other investments, which if they wanted to could also still include the real estate sector?
For tax efficiency. The US, UK and many other countries have variations on this theme that the house you live in is taxed less than stocks, bonds or second properties.
This creates a distortion where people buy the biggest house they can afford, because everything else gets taxed.
From people I know: they aren’t aware of / comfortable with traditional financial instruments, so they just buy houses and have the rest in a savings account.
Their houses aren’t even “investments” to them, they’re lifestyle properties that also may increase in value.
This, 100x over. You invest 1 million USD in a house. The house loses 90% of it's value. You still own the house. You can live in it, hopefully you get some benefit from the investment, even if it has no market value.
You invest 1 million USD in the stock market. It loses 90% of it's value. You basically have nothing but a tax write off on future gains.
But at least with owning stocks, I can vote in a bunch of proxy things every so often… which will keep me busy so I don’t have to think about all the money I lost :)
I guess the housing equivalent would be an HOA, but honestly I would rather lose 90% of my money than sit through an HOA meeting…
> people to squat in gigantic houses that they don't need
In the Uk, at least, stamp duty is an obvious and infuriating driver of either buying big early or never downsizing. I did the former, parents do the latter.
Easy to solve the incentive problem yet we never will
I am against "speculation" on any sort of real estate. On other hand I am not against real estate investments. And I don't think single family housing deserves any kind of special treatment.
I see no reason why someone providing capital to build a building and then renting it out to cover cost of that capital, maintenance and building cost is unreasonable or bad thing.
Issue really is when market is manipulated to keep prices going up beyond inflation or normal changes in demand. That really ruins everything. Real estate shouldn't really appreciate at all over time beyond inflation.
Lets say a transaction has 2 parties that want to extract value (builder, buyer) if there are 3 parties now everyone needs to make money. (builder, speculator, buyer) middle mans ALWAYS increase prices and add little to no value to the actual GDP of a country. They do offer financing, but a financing value of lets say 500k vs a construction value of 500k the construction value has more weight because it is fully finanical vlaue. the 500k investment might be part of a money multiplier which puts strain on the financial system. Speculators ALWAYS drive up prices. Just look at any field Private equity has touched.
"Speculators" are not built-in middlemen, they are competing on bids with the buyer. Perhaps there could be some policy put in place to level the playing field between an owner-occupant who will bring mortgage-related red tape and an institutional investor who can make an immediate cash purchase, waive inspections, etc.
I'm going to suggest that the "buy" case actually has far more interested parties trying to extract money.
In no particular order:
- Financing company
- Realtor x 2 (both seller and buyer)
- loan servicing company (may or may not be the financing company)
- Insurance companies (multiple, depending on how financing is achieved, everything from property itself, to title, to PMI)
- Appraisers
- Home inspectors
- Closing attorneys
- County tax office
- City tax office
Basically... there's a reason that renting is the right call if you're not buying to hold for at least 5 years, ideally 10.
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There absolutely is speculation in housing markets, but at least in the markets I'm familiar with - it's not really the landlords who are renting houses that are doing the speculation. It's the folks who buy up 100+ houses in depressed/low-income neighborhoods during recessions and then sit on empty property for years.
The difference is that all those parties serve a necessary function. We could debate the tax office - arguably the function of a transaction tax is precisely to deter speculation or sales for short-term use.
Some speculators serve a necessary function but many do not. In my area it's not uncommon to see homes listed where the last sale was ~6 months ago and it's clear they just slapped some paint on it, replaced appliances in ways that are not generally to my taste, and then doubled the asking price.
Yes, and those people aren't landlords renting the property.
So I'm not certain how to tie that back to the original discussion about not needing a special case to handle people accumulating multiple residential buildings.
--
Side note - I don't see this case pretty much anywhere (and I'm literally in the process of looking at homes). I do see cases where a home sold 6 months to a year ago and the new price is ~10% higher, and I do see cases where a home sold in 2021/2022 and now the price is 2x higher.
But what I don't see any of is doubled sales price in a 6 month window with just a new coat of paint.
So I'm not certain how this is relevant at all given it's non-existent in any of the markets I'm looking at.
When you ban "speculation" on an asset class, you're just telling owners (including creators) of that asset class that they will make less money if and when they sell.
Setting aside the "I know it when I see it" definition of speculation used by most people that changes as needed during a discussion and all the negative side effects that come with that, is telling people who produce a scarce asset that they will make less money when they sell it a good idea, or a bad idea?
Why do you assume that prices increasing faster than inflation is manipulation, and what is the definition of "normal changes in demand"?
Real estate historically hasn't appreciated faster than inflation over time. Supply constraints, historically low interest rates, and a couple other factors have changed that in a number of areas in the last couple decades, but not all. The Rust Belt is a prime example, yet for some reason that isn't relevant in these discussions.
> I see no reason why someone providing capital to build a building and then renting it out to cover cost of that capital, maintenance and building cost is unreasonable or bad thing.
The problem is the scale of investment. For example, 3 companies own 19,000 houses, or 11% of the rental market, in the Atlanta, GA area[0]. The market is being "manipulated" in that investors with vast amounts of cash are outbidding folks trying to buy a primary residence, and by owning tens of thousands of homes, you exert a measure of control over the housing supply (i.e. "manipulation").
I don't believe that companies should have the ability to own so many houses, and the easiest way to curb this is to progressively tax investment property to the point that isn't financially feasible to own tens, let alone thousands, of homes.
Limiting what companies can own would lead to increased demand for rental properties thus increased rents. Making the renters who are unable or willing to buy to have to pay increasing amounts of money. I do not see how that would fix housing in anyway.
I think forcing people to buy home is worse than some party owning lot of homes.
No, the easiest way to curb this is to make it easier to build homes so that supply is closer to the level of demand, not create even more policies that will reduce supply.
Controlling 11% of the rental market is not enough to manipulate it, and that's one of the most concentrated markets in the US if I remember correctly. It's not an actual issue. If those 3 companies are in fact colluding, use the existing laws against that to prosecute them instead of inventing more counterproductive policies.
There are very few people with that many houses anyway.
These people do not affect rents in any meaningful way.
> Small investors who owned between one and five properties held 87% of the single-family homes owned by investors; those owning six to 10 properties owned another 4%
Possibly but it would also create more private equity reits that would build and operate these multi-family units. There isn’t a clean solution without making it illegal for companies to own single-family homes.
You’d have to have exceptions to that. Many new homes are built as whole subdivisions, then sold to initial residential owners. Banks won’t lend on homes they can’t foreclose on as collateral, and banks are companies. Mortgage companies are for this purpose the same as banks.
Some companies buy and update homes then resell them. They don’t all do a cheap flip with a massive markup. Neither do all of them hold them long term to charge high rents. That seems like something that should probably be regulated rather than outright banned.
Beyond single-family homes, it’s very rare for someone to build an apartment building with all of the units already sold. In fact, most are not coops or condos and are rented long term. Those rents also keep going up. A big part of that is how hard it is to get a new complex, especially a mid-rise or high-rise building, permitted to build.
Incorrect about the builders. It would force builders to hold capital instead of borrowing. It would make banks able to have an asset in collateral for the loan to the person, that they can then sell. Builders already cut corners to pocket money from loan differences, we should probably put a stop to that.
I think there’s a difference between a bank company “owning” a deed vs a PE company holding it for speculation and rent squeezing. You are right though that there has to be a system to hold inventory and we made Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac macro-economic instruments instead of those inventory stewards.
How do we feel about cottages or summer homes for people who live in poor weather climates? Is that a luxury that should be universally condemned? I woulnd't think those qualify as speculative but more like lifestyle money pits from what I have heard.
Allow me to flip that around. Should people in places like Phoenix be priced out of the market because a significant amount of people have a winter home there?
Usually when something like that is proposed seriously it isn't supposed to start from the second home already, but a bit further as there's very little social benefit in excessively taxing a flat inherited from your grandma waiting for your children to grow up either.
Just make it easier to build houses. It's like the Bitter Lesson, but for regulation-loving progressives.
Also, buying or building and operating an apartment complex isn't speculation in general, unless you consider basically any financial investment speculation.
In theory I agree with everything but I’ll point out that:
> But residential construction should be protected to ensure each household is able to buy one with the average country salary
is political suicide, because you’re giving every voter with existing property a haircut on money they believe they already have, that they’ve usually borrowed to buy, and that they’ve financially planned on appreciating. Per Jean-Claude Juncker, “ We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”
I understand, but what if you establish a 10/20 year increasing taxation scheme. Plus some decreasing tax incentive to sell residential property.
You tell people: You have 20 years to sell your second/third residential properties, even at a good tax premium. But in 20 years you MUST have sold or you Will pay lots.of.taxes.
Edit: anyhow... I dont pretend to try to solve this complex issue in a couple of HN comments. It's just a general sentiment I have that the.only way to remove speculation from residential property is by government mandate.
I'm all for this. And I am "part of the problem " as I own 2 houses in 2 different states, and rent one at a freaking high rent price, because the market in that area is crazy.
Yes, and for any unit of gov't which is funded by property taxes, there's a second edge on that razor blade. Spiraling residential home values yield spiraling property tax revenues. And there are a whole lot of beneficiaries who feel entitled to their ever-growing cuts of the resulting gov't spending.
Or unoccupancy tax. Forcing landlords to let at the price renters are willing to give will probably do some to reduce rent levels.
Same goes for commercial, but in that case, I'd even suggest forefeiture if you are not reducing requested rent within a year of vacancy. Let someone else take over if you overspent.
For homes, I don't know if there are. But I think taxes should be levied in line with incentives. If you place a wealth tax on property ownership, the only tangible thing that will happen is rents going up to offset. Since the tax applies to all landlords, it will be the closest thing to rent inflation.
What you really want to avoid is homes built but sitting empty. Whether that's a builder who can't sell at asking price, or a landlord not getting the rent they want doesn't matter. If the city sold a lot to you, they did so for improving home supply, not the developer's profits.
For commercial, my opinion was based on Louis Rossman's YouTube channel about New York. The hypothesis there is that loans are based on property value, which are tied to requested rent. Asking for a lower rent might mean they have to put up more collateral, which they can't. So they keep asking for high rates and leave it vacant.
Generally, there aren't any meaningful number of completely vacant homes in desirable areas in major cities. The caveats are there for cities like Miami where there are a significant number of second homes, cities like Detroit and Baltimore that have failed in some sense and experienced major population loss at some point, and rural areas that also have been experiencing population loss for some time.
I don't have a problem with vacation homes and most Americans don't seem to either, but if you do, okay.
The areas with declining population aren't really relevant to the discussion IMO, other than it's cheap housing that exists as a counterpoint to the people who claim no cheap housing exists.
> But I think taxes should be levied in line with incentives. If you place a wealth tax on property ownership, the only tangible thing that will happen is rents going up to offset. Since the tax applies to all landlords, it will be the closest thing to rent inflation.
I agree.
> What you really want to avoid is homes built but sitting empty. Whether that's a builder who can't sell at asking price, or a landlord not getting the rent they want doesn't matter.
Sure, but that's not a problem today. Builders aren't sitting on homes for extended periods of time, and landlords aren't leaving units empty for extended periods of time either. They are already disincentivized from doing so by existing carrying costs, so they don't.
> If the city sold a lot to you, they did so for improving home supply, not the developer's profits.
They presumably did it to generate revenue for the city, though there isn't much buildable city-owned land in most municipalities.
> For commercial, my opinion was based on Louis Rossman's YouTube channel about New York. The hypothesis there is that loans are based on property value, which are tied to requested rent. Asking for a lower rent might mean they have to put up more collateral, which they can't. So they keep asking for high rates and leave it vacant.
The commercial market is completely different than residential. Loan durations are shorter, terms are different, and there are many other factors that differ.
That analysis can't be applied to the residential market.
Your logic misses the point. To make housing a non-investment, we need to tax the investment returns on houses. This mean taxing capital gains on all houses, not just 2nd and 3rd homes.
So people who want to rent are forced to live in commercial buildings?
Some people need to rent and some will never be able to of want to buy property. This is taxing them even more.
If we do something like this it should come from financial system. Like already you need 30% deposit when you buy investment property in NZ. Perhaps we should only give rental loans to new builds only.
Speculation is not really the issue, most of the issues are around regulations limiting construction.
If you wanted to incentivize home buying for young families, then the demographic that needs the most incentives are old people whose kids moved out decades ago. Every single person I know has two aging parents living in 4 or 5 bedroom homes by themselves, my own included. I know people are sentimental about the homes they grew up in, but this is the biggest lever you could move: hike property taxes on properties with unused occupancy.
If you want to keep the home in the family, then this encourages the parents to give the home to one of their kids who actually need it because they're starting a family of their own.
no problem, main apartment will be written in my name, 2nd in my wife's name, 3rd in my son's name, 4th in my daughter's name and for others I will just set up companies
this proposition literally solves nothing
and for the record I own one real estate, which I bought without mortgage and live there with my family
Oh man... I like go because it is compiled, performant, strong and statically typed. But "fun" is not something I would say about it. The ergonomics of error handling, lack of ternary operator and other stuff that compiled 30yo languages already had ...
That sort of syntactic sugar goes against the Go philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I share your frustration, but I also see the value of consistency in their philosophy.
I'm starting to think all these languages having their own pet "philosophies" that is "totally better than X" is a shitshow and just personal preference masquerading as standards.
Idk, I'm having fun with it. The good outweighs the bad for me, and idk why people get so bristly about handling errors, it's more straightforward to debug than nested try/catches
We are experiencing what Civil Engineers experienced going from slide rules to calculators. Or electrical engineers going from manual circuit path drawing to CAD tools.
The interesting thing to me is that, Software Engineering will have to evolve. Processes and tools will have to evolve, as they had evolved through the years.
When I was finishing university in 2004, we learned about the "crisis of software " time, the Cascade development process and how new "iterative methods" were starting.
We learned about how spaghetti code gave way to Pascal/C structured prpgramming, which gave way to OOP.
Engineering methods also evolved, with UML being one infamous language, but also formal methods such as Z language for formal verification; or ABC or cyclomatic complexity measurements of software complexity.
Which brings me to Today: Now that computers are writing MOST of the code; the value of current languages and software dev processes is decreasing. Programming Languages are made for people (otherwise we would continue writing in Assembler). So now we have to change the abstractions we use to communicate our intent to the computers, and to verify that the final instructions are doing what we wanted.
I'm very interested to see these new abstractions. I even believe that, given that all the small details of coding will be fully automated, MAYBE we will finally see more Engineering (real engineering) Rigor in the Software Engineering profession. Even if there still will be coders, the same way there are non-engineers building and modifying houses (common in Mexico at least)
Calculators and CAD tools do not give you non-deterministic answers. Both of them simply automate part of the manual work for them without creating anything "new". I haven't used CAD tools but I did use some level editors such as Trenchbroom -- I think what is automated is the 3d shapes that you want to make -- e.g. back in the day of '96, when ID Software is creating Quake, there was very little pre-drawn shapes in the level editor and they have to make the blocks by themselves, thus it is very difficult and time consuming to make complex shapes such as curved walls and tunnels. Then better tools were invented and now it is much easier to create a complex shape. But you don't type "a Quake level with theme A, and blah blah" and then you get a more or less working level -- this is what AI is doing right now.
I think the right analogy to calculators and CAD tools, is IDE with Intellisense for SWE -- instead of typing code one char by one char, we can tab to automate some part of it.
But I agree with your consensus -- SWE is changing, whether we like it or not. We need to adapt, or find a niche and grit to retirement.
It doesn't make sense to get hung up on this aspect of LLMs. We prefer non deterministic so far because it tends to work slightly better even if it is completely possible to ask for a temperature=0 deterministic answer.
With more scale and research, at some point you'll get results that are both useful and deterministic, if it's not already the case.
It absolute makes sense to get "hung" up on something when it comes to planning society around it JFC. I'm with the other commentator, your understanding of these tools should be taken into question since you seem to be reading the tea leaves of statistical noise.
>Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested.
I want to rescue this snippet.
Few of us remember the "fight" and discussions that happened when Firefox first pondered the idea of allowing encrypted video on the platform. Same with Linux. This was when The powers that be forced Netflix and other video distributors to introduce that opaque tech in the web. The same thing happened with DeCSS and Linux DVD playing; but that generation was a bit more... revel.
But we as a society are indeed slowly and steadily giving away our rights of many, for the rights of few cartels.
It's been a sad journey to see for someone born in the early 80s.
> But we as a society are indeed slowly and steadily giving away our rights of many, for the rights of few cartels.
Increasing geopolitical multi-polarity may force big tech to give up ground. The EU and ASEAN in particular should be hitting Google et al. with the regulatory hammer.
When we get clearer heads back in power (Lina Khan was great, but moved much too slow), they ought to carve the tech cos into Baby Bells. Horizontally so they have to compete with themselves.
> It's been a sad journey to see for someone born in the early 80s.
The dream of the open web, privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of computing is being killed by the oligarchy. And they convinced us the progressive thing to do was to give them our labor - they hung us with it.
This takes me to the famous FizzBuzz High performance codegolf answer [1]. If we could implement optimizations like that for the inferences, maybe we could increase the speeds 10x or more.
I love scrolling and reading through this, thinking yeah of course Python is slower than Java, oh wow Rust is pretty on par I wonder what the Java devs did. Then you hit asm and your jaw drops.
Location: UTC-6 (Americas) Remote: Yes, strongly preferred.
Willing to relocate: Only for the absolutely right opportunity.
Technologies: Python, TypeScript (Nest.js for API, React for mobile or web front), Ruby, AWS (Architect, DevOps, AI/ML), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, LLMs, Scikit-learn(all MPL, SNS, pd, Data Science stack), Solidity, FinTech/Blockchain. (I've worked professionally with too many to write here and not give the feeling of "wall of text".)
Résumé/CV: baqueiro.com/static/baqueiro2025.pdf
Email: (in my resume)
Compensation Expectation: $140k and $170k USD gross yearly
Hello Hacker News! I'm a CompSci PhD (AI Multi-Agent systems... doing Agents' research back in 2004, before they were cool haha) and a passionate technologist with a warm spot for building high-impact products and teams.
For over 20 years, I've loved being a hands-on leader in FinTech, building everything from scalable crypto trading desks and AI/ML systems for fraud detection, to migrating entire platforms from monoliths to robust, cloud-native microservices. I thrive on aligning engineering with business goals and tackling complex distributed systems challenges.
Zero-to-One Success: Built foundational tech/AI/ML at a Fintech, enabling the company's Series A. Executive & Scaling Experience: CTO of a crypto trading desk; Head of Engineering, Product or AI/ML at high-growth FinTechs.
I'm actively looking for a remote role, or for an absolute amazing opportunity, I would relocate. I am most comfortable as first/founding engineer, also have been head-of-tec/cto building startup's technology teams. Right now I am most interested in doing AI/LLM work, like really pushing the status quo of both the Engineering and AI/ML. (I would love to get into something like SSI).
A couple of interesting personal projects I'm working on now:
* I trained a couple of Transformers+MoE models to forecast the price of a REIT-like time series in Mexico (called FIBRA in Mexico): They observe heavy cyclical behaviours every quarter that can be isolated and used as information for forecasting. Good results, albeit not 'life changing' yet.
* I'm working on a "live weight adjustment" or "live training" framework for Transformers/MoE models to be able to use new information to modify the weights of the network slightly, without having to re-train the whole model. Kind of like LoRA/QLoRA, but making something usable for a live-running model.
* I am also experimenting with non-chat uses of text/token LLMs. LLMs are text generation machines, which leaving them "running" independently would be akin to our (people's) train of thought that starts since we are born. Having an LLM do that and finding ways give it "perceptors" for inputs (like IRQs in computers) for environment communication could yield interesting results.
Static sites are just superior and i feel like we are going to see a huge shift to SSGs once the average editors realize how much easier it is to have LLMs enter markdown maybe with a bit of html to create their blog posts/articles than to bother with a CMS.
In my view duration is not the problem, but copyright itself is. Nobody should expect to be "passively" paid for a job/effort made at a past point in time. You work 40 hours this week, you get paid 40 hours at whatever your rate.
Authors should use other ways to charge for their 40/80 hours work, and when released it should be in the public domain.
Scientists have learned to do it (by getting tenured or postdocs), im sure other can do it.
What about something you've made for fun but haven't made any money from? Should someone else be allowed to sell and profit from your work?
I'm not expecting to be "passively paid" for my hobbies. But I'm expecting that someone won't steal and profit from the things I make. Why would that be fair?
Say my hobby is statue making. I design and create a concrete statue that I failed to sell. Whether that be because I did not try or because I could not find a buyer, I could not sell it.
So I took it, and I put it in my pile of completed works: a pile of crumbling statute rubble by the roadside. In the digital case, maybe it was posted online and the pile is a timeline or portfolio.
Someone in a pick up truck drives by sees it, takes it, and sells it for half $1 million to a trust fund baby.
Was the output of my work and therefore the half $1 million stolen from me?
If there was nothing physical to take, and I had never tried to or successfully sold it to anyone and somebody else does it, was I stolen from or did I just fail to sell?
And then if I get my knickers in a twist over that sale I have to ask myself: is my hobby to be a sales person and to sell art or is my hobby to be an artist and make art?
I don't think I'm really following your analogy. Did I put it out on the side of the road because I didn't want it anymore, or did that person steal it off my property?
From what I can tell, the million dollars does not belong to me, but the person who stole my statue should be held accountable for stealing it, and they should be held accountable for selling an object that did not belong to them. Both of those things should be illegal.
Your analogy seems besides the point, though. In my original question, I specifically mentioned that the art piece was made for fun. Sometimes, as an artist, I make things just for fun, with no intention to ever sell them. Other people should not be able to take the things I make and sell them without my permission, or without some sort of deal beind struck between me and the seller. A society where it's legal to take another artist's work and sell it without their permission would be supremely unfair. A society for vultures.
Unironically, let’s get rid of patent laws while we’re at it.
The advancement of technology would take off if we did not have patent trolls telling us what you could, and could not use understand and improve.
Just imagine what Palworld could be if it didn’t have to spend the last year two years, however long spending all of their budget fighting a patent case against the biggest fucking gaming company in the world instead of paying their developers to add new features and pals.
Imagine what crazy awesome intense games could be made with the nemesis system.
Palworld ripped off another company's hard work. The IP holders poured insane amounts of time and money to market and make their work a success story. Now comes a bunch of snotty kids and try to make money off it. Nah, go fuck off. Use your head and come up with something original.
AI already gives IQ to the braindead masses. And now people want to abolish copyright, so the totally unworthy, useless nobodies could leech other's hard work and profit from it. Get a grip.
Maybe do not make games if you have zero ideas yourself. Go and mow the lawn if that's all you are capable of.
Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.
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