This is seriously puplifting News!

Men shouldn’t be allowed near children that aren’t their own. It’s rarely stated but regularly assumed.

This vastly underestimates the laziness of English speakers. No: It’ll be shortened to…

Donferget

The tower on the left is home to the Tea Wizard who uses parts of the lower floors for the nation’s biscuit reserves. The one on the right is host to a princess that’s been waiting for rescue by a prince for a very long time now.

You’re thinking that every Android device is reasonably new. This is not the case.

There’s devices running Android from >12 years ago that can’t get apps any other way than F-Droid because Google Play Services no longer work.

it’s still less work than making all new buildings

This isn’t true. Well, it’s not true about 60% of the time. Here’s why:

• Office buildings–especially old ones–were often built with toxic building materials like asbestos (e.g. pipes, not insulation). If you’re renovating an office space these things aren’t much of a problem because as long as you leave them alone they’re not going to hurt anyone and most office renovations don’t require removing such things (and office space regulations are much more lax than residential for things like that). Converting an office to a residential space though requires removing toxic stuff like that which is very expensive. In these situations it’s almost always cheaper to demolish and rebuild.
• Office building floor heights are not the same as residential. It sounds simple, “so people living there will get extra tall ceilings… Who cares?” It’s not so simple! Even basic high-rise building codes require things like minimum air exchange and the ability to seal off areas to prevent gasses/smoke from fires freely moving throughout the building. In an office you usually have acoustic tiles and then like 2-10ft (sometimes up to 20ft!) of empty space above them. That’s not a big deal for an office that keeps the entire building/floor heated/cooled with several industrial air handlers but not so efficient (or safe!) if you have to subdivide that same space into several apartments.
• Running new plumbing to dozens of new locations on every floor is expensive because it requires cutting out large spaces for the pipes. Why is that expensive? Because safely cutting huge ass holes though floors and walls made of concrete and steel requires expensive building engineers and specialized tools that you don’t normally use in enclosed spaces that could contain a lot of toxic stuff. For example, using a jackhammer on a street or even underground in a tunnel only requires so much precision. Doing it at edge of a high-rise floor, 20 stories up is an entirely different matter.

There’s actually dozens of other more technical problems with such conversions. Nothing insurmountable, of course! Just expensive. Even just hiring a pair of lawyers–one versed in commercial real estate laws and one versed in residential laws–is going to be expensive.

“So… What you’re saying is that you instituted a blanket policy across the board without feedback and without an exception process.”

I remember when the web didn’t have JavaScript.

Honestly, though it was much worse back then. I prefer the variety and features of modern browsing over (mostly) plain text.

What I wish we could do away with on the web is videos. Let’s go back to just images and text, thanks. Animations are fine though 👍

I work for a huge bank that’s investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don’t plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.

Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they’re pretty sure they’re going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It’s a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.

It’s not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, “systemic risk” but that’s a very large topic that I’m not going to cover here.

The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.

…but why now‽ Why haven’t they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they’ve been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don’t have anyone living in them.

Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).

These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They’re also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.

This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don’t need as much maintenance as they used to. They’re so much cheaper to maintain en mass.

So how do we fix this problem? There’s all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:

• Raise minimum wage and crack down on businesses hiring illegal workers doing house maintenance work (let them do construction 👍).
• Raise property taxes in general. You could try to raise them for homes without people living in them but then you just end up creating other unintended consequences/problems (which I won’t get into to stay brief)
• Force upgrades on unoccupied homes. Air conditioning system is 10 years old? You have to get a new one with improved efficiency. House has gas stoves? You have to replace those.
• Force inspections of unoccupied homes and come down hard in regards to code enforcement (every unoccupied home poses a nonzero fire risk to every neighborhood).

Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.

There’s lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It’s a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they’re straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there’s various loopholes which I won’t get into).

Go a bit extra and join the 22.5° gang!

Your dad says, “stop whining and take out the trash!”

Whoosh!

That’s the joke 🤣

If we build such a wall you’ll be sorry. It will change nothing!

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big tech’s gonna abuse it.

Actually, it’s everyone that’s going to abuse it. Big tech wants to be the exclusive “AI provider” for everyday people’s AI needs and desires but the reality is that the tech isn’t that easy to keep secret/proprietary because most of the innovations pushing AI forward come from individuals fooling around with the technology and academia. Not from big tech R&D (which lately seems to all be spent trying to improve business processes).

Big tech is spending billions on hardware and entire data centers just to do AI stuff with the expectation that it’ll give them a competitive advantage but the truth is that it’ll be the small companies and individuals that end up taking advantage of AI in ways that actually improve things for everyday people and/or make real money.

My guess is that they’re betting on acquisitions of companies using their AI processing power 🤷. Either that or it’s just wishful thinking.

Well, no, actually: The AI image model will generate bad fingers constantly it’s just become easier to fix via a secondary step (e.g. img2img) or you just tell it to generate 50 images and just pick the ones that don’t have messed up fingers 🤷

The reason why conservatives of the past seem to be more reasonable is because there’s much more evidence (and easy ways to cite it) to refute their seemingly well-reasoned arguments.

In the past a conservative might say something like, “taxes on corporations are pointless; they’re just going to be passed on to consumers” and they could make a well-reasoned argument from simplistic economic principles.

These days when someone hears that argument they can just look online and find a zillion well-researched and cited articles pointing out how it’s a flawed position based on bad assumptions. Just looking at how changes in the tax code over time (massive reductions in corporate tax rates) have impacted the economy and the price of goods. Spoiler: Reducing taxes on corporations has two effects: It reduces tax revenues (obviously) and makes the rich (owners) richer. Changes in the tax code that increased taxes on corporations also had no impact on prices. In short, the entire idea falls flat on its face even though it seems like it would make sense.

They’re the same conservatives they’ve always been; refusing to change their beliefs despite the evidence. It’s also that we now know more about their beliefs and the more we know the more extreme they seem.

Conservatism has become a political package: By “voting conservative” (making it a part of their Identity) a person is signing on to conservatism as a whole. They may not believe everything their peers do (e.g. racism, xenophobia, sexism, violence, etc) but these things they do not agree with are not game changers. They may not believe that whites are a superior race but they’re OK with those people being on their team.

I make the hand gesture to bring up the status interface and the logout option is there on the right. I know there’s faster ways but i just can’t get the hang of speaking clearly in my dreams 🤷

My work says I’m a, “security architect II”. I believe he physical world manifestation of that would be… the guy that plans where the security guards should stand? Actually, I’m “II” so I’m probably more like the guy who gets escalated to when the guys that do do that need help 🤷

Never say never. AI is generating code from your code.