I don't want the world, sounds like people would start bothering me all the time. I'd never get a moment to relax. But if I had the world, I'd do better with it than what we got.
so, basically, anthropic is rolling their own version of whatever secret models the military is working with. and they're licensing it to network security firms?
If a kid lives on their own but their mom buys them groceries once per month and their dad swings by on thursdays with pizza and beer, that kid's still pretty darn self sufficient.
Similarly, if a country can use 80% less oil or imported fuel than they would have without renewable energy, I think they're pretty self-sufficient. They don't have to be isolated from trade, it's okay to import some things and export others. Energy sources can be one of those things. But if they rely on energy imports, then when something disrupts their supply then they are in trouble. However if they get 80% of their energy from renewable sources, then they have significantly less of a problem.
They have significantly less of a problem with regards to their balance of trade, but any meaningful dependency on imports means that electricity prices will still be entirely dependent on the price of whatever is imported, at any point in time imports are happening. Still not great, and I wouldn't call that sovereignty!
Also, highly depending on what metric we mean by "80% self-sufficient" (peak capacity? long-time average?), there might either be a lot of work left, or this might be "effective sovereignty".
It could be an issue of discoverability too. Maybe they just haven't found the to-do app that does what they want, and it's easier to just... make one from scratch.
I'd pay you 10€ for a TODO app that improved my life meaningfully. It would obviously need to have great UX and be stable. Those are table stakes.
I don't have the time to look at all these apps though. If somebody tells me they made a great TODO app, I'm already mentally filtering them out. There's just too much noise here.
Does your TODO app solve any meaningful problem beyond the bare minimum? Does it solve your procrastination? Does it remind you at the right time?
If it doesn't answer this in the first 2 seconds of your pitch you're out.
There is the problem. Todo apps are easy to make. However making one that is actually useful for tracking todo items it hard. Getting the todo into the app is harder than writing it on paper. Getting reminders at a useful time is hard (now is not a great time to fix that broken widget - it needs parts not in the budget, I'm at work, it needs a couple hours of dedicated time and I have something else coming up...). I've tried a few different ones, most are a combination of too complex and not complex enough at the same time.
Exactly, you would probably also pay for a good one. I tried maybe 10 and gave up. I now carry a small booklet where you can rip off the pages, for notes and todos. Still way better than the phone apps
This logic assumes that 35% of Americans WANT to rent their home. Which seems odd to me, if only for financial reasons - why would you pay 1400$ for a 1 bedroom apartment when you could pay 700$ in a mortgage for that same apartment if you could have bought it?
> why would you pay 1400$ for a 1 bedroom apartment when you could pay 700$ in a mortgage for that same apartment if you could have bought it
Because the down payment you put into your purchased home could've been put into the stock market and grown faster than property values (this is historically true).
Because you don't want the headache of home maintenance.
Because in the 21st century, job stability doesn't exist so it's a big risk to buy a home fifteen minutes from your current job that might be an hour from your new job after you get fired so a CEO can get more golden parachutes.
Because you might have to change cities a year from now.
My wife and I rented for a long time because it was better than owning for us.
Agreed. It’s a classic fallacy to compare rent vs mortgage on a numbers to numbers basis. It’s classic example of not accounting for the total cost of ownership.
Maybe not half, but it’s pretty common around here (generic midwestern city) for renting to be more expensive than a comparable mortgage.
Many landlords seem to expect to pay their mortgage and property taxes and maintenance with the rental income, and still net a profit, if r/landlord is to be believed.
The profit is compensation for the risk. The mortgage and property taxes and maintenance are due no matter what - can't find a tenant, tenant doesn't pay, tenant flushes paper towels down the toilets every day etc etc.
If there was no profit there would be no landlords. Some might say that's great. But it would be a world with less flexibility, with fewer choices. Don't like your job and want to move? Split up with your partner and need someplace to live? Moved to a new city and don't know where you want to put down roots yet? At college for 4 years? Don't want to deal with house maintenance? "F** you, buy a house anyway". That's what we'd have if there was no rental housing.
The actual numbers might be more like rent $1400 vs mortgage $1000. After property taxes, insurance, and maintenance there might be $50 left. A handsome 3.5% profit, rising to maybe 6-7% if you include principal paydown. This is hardly a money-printing machine. It's a steady return for taking on some risk.
> Substituting your numbers in for theirs doesn’t change much
You can buy a boat for $10 or rent one for $9. Assuming you really want a boat, would you buy or rent? Do my numbers reflect reality? Do they have a bearing on the choice you make?
It changes a TON whether you pay 2x for renting or whether you pay 1.05x.
Renting has annoyances but it also has flexibility. A flat "more expensive" is staring at one tree and missing the whole forest of tradeoffs. Way more people would choose to spend $50/month for that flexibility versus $700/month.
?? How in the world is it splitting hairs to point out that those numbers don't make sense. It is directly relevant to the question of how many Americans want to rent. You don't need to be like this :(
> renting to be more expensive than a comparable mortgage.
that doesn't sound plausible. May be for a select few properties that are in some unique circumstance (e.g., the seller of the property would sell underpriced because they needed quick sale).
And often, in arguments like these, the rent is the rent, but the mortgage is purely the interest on the loan, and doesn't count the maintenance cost, and doesn't count the deposit required (which has a cost, ala the cost of capital). If you added up all these costs, it exceeds rent.
I fundamentally agree on statement that rents are more expensive than mortgages. As capital is involved and landlords want premium on capital.
Still, things can go either way. And well renting is lot more flexible and less risky. So there is really nothing wrong with that option existing. And many times it is the better pick of the two.
> And well renting is lot more flexible and less risky
Sure if you don't count the cost of risk for the tenant (of needing to move due to job loss, unexpected maintenance bills) then renting is more expensive.
You do know that the posters on r/landlord are often selling services to landlords and thus have a financial incentive to make being a landlord seem attractive. Its a pretty safe assumption that reality isn't that rosy.
That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s.
What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave.
They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros.
Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty.
The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished.
We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere.
The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve.
Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land.
Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
> good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives
It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it.
But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.
My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.
Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county.
What is a better faith interpretation of downplaying gentrification like this? Like what do we talk about when we talk about gentrification if not this? Gp is not even, like, denying the concept, and literally saying that it is good (in a sarcastic way).
It's not "better faith" to construct an entire alternative world for the user's comment to remove it from the actually existing implications of their point. I am not sure what that it is, but it certainly isn't a healthy exchange of ideas.
"I think we should burn down all the forests"; "Oh geeze that sounds like a terrible idea.."; "um it's actually pretty bad faith for you to assume they were talking about forests on Earth and not some bad evil forests that could hypothetically exist somewhere else..." taps the guidelines sign
I don't want to throw the dictionary at yeah but gentrification is the word we generally use to talk about a downside to maybe a more general effort in urban development. This is really really weird hill to die on.. Just pick another word, I don't think you'd lose the nuance you are trying to inject here. As it stands its just needlessly provocative, a Twitter-hot-take vibe that is generally frowned upon around here.
Also (imo) don't link to yourself like this! Especially when its to just another short comment in the same thread! Why do that??
There’s nothing good faith to be interpreted from a pithy comment that denies real suffering experienced by real people. If OP wanted to be interpreted in good faith they should’ve written more substance to their comment.
Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.
This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even.
If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.
Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree.
Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on.
Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good).
The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.
Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today.
When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.
Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in.
Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
> increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives
That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out.
> it's now a more pleasant area to live in.
For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed.
> Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.
The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky.
That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.
When people in NYC are driven out of their neighborhoods because of gentrification, they generally move down south. There isn’t some magical part of town that they can afford with their “current budget”
Economic theory says some things are theoretically impossible, no literally, but economic theory wouldn't say that here:
The local housing market is much more complex than supply and demand, with larger economic factors (e.g., interest rates), very imperfect information (affecting everyone from buyers, to sellers, real estate agents, lenders, etc.), coordination by landlords (e.g., RealPage), non-economic factors such as prejudice (or just a co-op board!), government actions, larger trends, temporary inefficiencies, etc.
Economic theory is useful, but it does not predict or circumscribe the immediate reality of individuals. Life is much more complicated than that.
First, I didn't say there is no supply effect; I said it's far from impossible for the effect to make a difference.
Second, many factors are involved in a complex market; you and I don't know how much effect the supply had in this case. That you are interested in that input isn't evidence of its effect.
I think it'd be neat if you could zoom? The reason I'd use this over a tiling window manager is to fit more terminals on a screen at once. I think if there was a capability like the Strategic Zoom in Supreme Commander (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hJY7exr9KU) it would be much easier to manage many terminals at once, and take advantage of the infinite canvas.
Thanks for letting me know about the settings/minimap overlap, I’ll fix that. And yes, zoom is on the list! I’ll implement it tomorrow. Just wanted to get the core working first without hogging the CPU.
SupCom Zoom was the single greatest UX improvement to strategy games, and it's sad that nothing outside of the TA family picked it up. BAR and TA Escalation of course have it, and are among my favorites across the entire genre.
The children of soldiers are not legitimate military targets.
> ... in my opinion, the school was deliberately targeted because the students studying there were mostly the children of Iranian military officials. ...
Your opinion is wrong. There is no possibility of that being the justification for choosing a target. The American armed forces are too professional to do such a thing. Terror is not in our toolbox.
Americans and Europeans are in general, good people. But their political leaders, not so much. And this war is being run by a genocidal regime in Israel and the Trump administration. Moral values are the least of their concern ... (Also, I suspect the Israel regime of being the brains behind this attack. Hegeseth, the current Secretary of "war" is also a known muslim-hater, who wouldn't have been hard to persuade.).
plastic is not free, there will never be more of it. I think that resolves the equation.
(this is an oversimplification obviously but I wanted to reframe it from "how much of our current resources does this action use" to "how much of our TOTAL resources does this action use")
Plastic is just hydrocarbos basically - hydrogen and carbon. You can totally synthetise it. Might just not be as cheap an convenient like making it from mined oil, at least initially.
water is not entirely free. it has to be cleaned, which costs energy. energy is free, but access is still limited. likewise cotton also requires effort to produce.
exactly, i mean water after use. using water to create or clean diapers pollutes it, and because overall we use and pollute water faster than nature recycles it through rain we have to add our own cleaning mechanisms to keep up. that's fine, but it makes the water not totally free.
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