This could be really important for areas subject to drought conditions; I hope it’s widely applicable, but I read something years back about using something similar to make desertified areas fertile again and then haven’t seen anything about it being implemented since, so I’m not sure if this is the same thing just more developed or if it’s a new thing that could be game changing.
Normally I’m not a fan of transparent background scrolling content (it’s obnoxious and a waste of space) but the little car was a cute touch. Entirely unnecessary, but cute.
If your stove can possibly be ignited when you aren’t home, don’t store combustible things on top of it, please.
Doesn’t matter what might set off the combustion - a short circuit, a dog, a small family member, a drunk family member…
Don’t store combustibles on your heat-emitting device. You’ll have a bad time.
Mine emits flame, and the only things I store atop it are metal (baking sheets and pans) or Borosilicate glass (like pyrex). But I’m looking to swap for an induction stovetop, because the gas explosion risk is enough for me to be uncomfortable!
Keep in mind that all of these could be more or less stopped if there was any real desire to do so.
But there isn’t.
Considering the super shady practices involved with plasma “donation”, and the fact that it’s used to make very expensive cancer drugs, take your text and good vibes. That’s literally the better outcome.
Most of the world won’t even buy US plasma because of the really lax collection regulations and super sus conditions of most of the plasma centers (basically the fact that it’s paid and on such short turnaround causes a lot of people to game the system, it’s dangerous, and potentially unsanitary/risky.)
This dude mixed a personal semen analogue, using his own bodily fluids (likely because real semen doesn’t stay the right consistency very long and there probably wouldn’t be enough to attack multiple women with), to squirt on women and then not talk to them, and they are framing it as an attempt to chat them up?
He’s clearly being a sex pest. The next time he does this (and there will be since he only got a fine and some bad pr) I hope he gets some real consequences.
The thing about the tragedy of the commons is that it’s basically bullshit. It’s been debunked as long as it’s been around. It’s privatization propaganda, nothing more.
People have been equitably maintaining commons for literally all of human history, and they are good at doing so within their communities. Social structures to maintain commons without official regulation have been in place for generations without major issues.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth
It isn’t paywalled for me, so here’s the text in full:
The long-bemoaned housing shortage may not exist after all. Rather, there’s a shortage of cheap rents and affordable homes, according to a new study.
The peer-reviewed study, published in April in the academic journal *Housing Policy Debate, *found that between 2000 and 2020, the U.S. had a surplus of 3.3 million homes—defying conventional wisdom that the nation is facing a housing shortage.
“We’re sort of an outlier in our analysis, and partly it’s because we’re taking this longer-term perspective,” Alex Schwartz, one of the study’s authors and chair of the master’s program in urban policy at the New School, tells *Fortune. *
The study examined how fast the housing stock grew between the first two decades of the 2000s and compared it with the number of new households formed during that time period. Schwartz and his research partner, Kirk McClure, professor emeritus of urban planning at the University of Kansas, argue that many current studies that examine housing stock—which find that there is a national shortage—don’t go back in time far enough and therefore overlook the large number of homes that were built during the housing boom that stretched from 2000 to 2007.
“The housing bubble that we experienced was a big growth in prices, but also a big growth in production,” McClure tells Fortune.
The collapse of that formerly prosperous real estate market triggered the Great Recession. The study also included the subsequent recovery from the Great Recession that lasted from 2012 to 2020, the year of the pandemic.
Capturing such a long stretch of time makes sure the research doesn’t overreact to short-term ups and downs of the market, McClure and Schwartz argue. “We massively overbuilt the number of housing units we needed, and we are still here in 2024 trying to absorb that massive overbuild in housing,” McClure said.
From 2000 to 2010 the U.S. had a surplus of 4.6 million housing units, while in the following decade there was a shortage of 1.3 million fewer units than population growth would demand. All combined, that nets out to a surplus of 3.3 million homes from 2000 to 2020.
The findings contrast with a plethora of research that points to a widespread shortage of new homes being constructed. Earlier this month, the housing website Zillow published an analysis that showed in 2022 there was a housing deficit of 4.5 million new homes. While a more recent survey from Realtor.com estimated that from 2012 to 2023 there was a shortage of 2.5 million homes.
However, these studies prefer to measure the construction of new homes, while McClure and Schwartz look at vacant homes. That on its own is a complicating factor. As the two cite in their paper, the physical condition of the vacant homes isn’t fully known. Some apartments may be sitting empty because a stubborn landlord refuses to lower the rent; others because they serve as a vacation home for an affluent family, while some may be entirely dilapidated and therefore uninhabitable—doing little to solve the housing crisis.
But the new finding about overall housing supply levels, which Schwartz says was a surprise, offers some nuance to one of the major problems in the housing market.
“The issue is not so much about aggregate shortfall of housing units, but rather a mismatch between the cost of housing and the incomes of households,” Schwartz said. “Most especially among the lowest-income households, where there really is a mismatch between what they can afford and the number of units that are affordable.”
After this study, economists might debate the level of housing supply available in the U.S., but the core issue appears to remain the same: affordability.
The researchers found a shortage of housing that low- and very low-income families could afford. Low-income families were defined as those with incomes between 30% and 60% of the median in a given market, while very low-income families were those making less than 30% of the median—roughly equivalent to the poverty line, according to the paper.
McClure tries to distinguish between households making around $45,000 a year, which might be on a tight budget, and those making less than $22,000, which are the poorest in the U.S. When assessing the rental markets in 381 metropolitan areas and 526 small towns, the research found that there was an average shortage of about 7,700 units that the very poorest households, making under $22,000, could afford, according to the study.
For those households, which require government assistance to find housing, the absolute highest they could afford to pay for rent is $550. Building new homes and apartment buildings can’t address the shortage for the absolute poorest. McClure explains that no private developer can build a new home or apartment that would be within the price range for the poorest of the poor. “Even if you could build the unit for $0, there is absolutely no way a private developer can build a unit at that [$550] price and survive,” McClure says. “Just the property taxes, insurance, and utility costs are north of that number.”
So the answer is to help them afford the housing that is available. McClure and Schwartz recommend offering more Section 8 housing choice vouchers that subsidize rent payments.
“In many circumstances, it is best to make use of existing stock rather than pay the very large sums needed to add stock to an already ample market,” the paper reads. “Helping low-income households rent existing units is much less costly than building deeply subsidized units with rents affordable to low-income households.”
But that’s not to say McClure and Schwartz are against building new housing. Cities and towns should look to build “a wider array of housing types,” according to Schwartz, such as smaller units or higher density housing.
The reason new housing inventory will need to be built, even during a surplus, is because rents and home prices can’t be expected to come down on their own. “It’s very unlikely to think that existing households on their own would just reduce their sales price unless they were required to for some reason,” Schwartz said.
Building more housing is also seen as an effective way to lower rents. A seminal piece of research from NYU’s Furman Center found that building more homes actually lowers rents.
New housing developments often raise the fears of gentrification; that existing residents will get priced out of ritzy new apartments in formerly affordable neighborhoods. The Furman Center research contends that the law of supply and demand holds true in the housing market as well.
A widely cited example from 2016 in Auckland, New Zealand, found that when about three-quarters of the city was rezoned to allow for denser housing construction, housing supply increased 4%. Meanwhile, rents for three-bedroom apartments dropped 26% to 33% compared with similar areas, according to a working paper from May 2023.
Other studies have found the effect of new housing isn’t usually as stark as the Auckland example. More often than not, overall rents do still rise when new housing is built, but not as quickly as they would have otherwise.
McClure doesn’t disagree with that research, but notes that it doesn’t address the poorest of the poor. “Alex and I are not looking to lower $2,000 rents to $1,800—that little difference is not enough,” McClure says. “We are truly trying to find ways to rent apartments to people who cannot afford more than $500 a month.”
This is not the lab-grown meat I was promised… the whole point is -not- having a face and emotions…
Doesn’t the moon have a “nobody allowed to claim it” pact thing going on? We can just send them there and let them be impotent all they like. They can have their one dumb-ass dome colony of religious nutters, and we can watch them struggle without capable maintainers.
Hell, we could fund the whole thing by making it a reality show.
I don’t really use steam and I have this problem too. I buy discs used, and I don’t always look up gameplay videos… so yeah, often not my cup of tea turns out. But resellable if I want down the line, at least.
Just the other day I bought a Wii super monkeyball game that uses the balance board. I have everything I need to play it, but the chances of actually doing that are pretty slim, tbh. A lot of the older games (anything under $10 for consoles more than a decade old, really) I buy are like that. “Might be fun, might never get played, but in an emergency, can be sold”.
I miss playing mmos, but none of them have hit like vanilla wow on a pve server, and now I hate people too much to bother. If I could spin up a server of my own and just play by myself or with a few people I know, sure, but most games don’t allow that. So single player it is.
Jokes on them, I don’t have family and don’t really listen to music.
Checkmate, AI-theists!
Did you not use popup and redirect blockers and AV/AM programs, though? Sort of the same problem, just evolved to be embedded.
All those toolbars and “helpers”, man.
I’m enjoying the idea of someone looking at the picture, looking at their cords, looking at the plugs, and then working this out as a solution rather than sending a picture of the plug end and port and asking for clarification.
Like this person probably felt really stupid needing to sort out what’s going on, because it was just unclear, and I enjoy where they ended up all the same. It’s totally wrong, but it’s creative problem solving for sure.
Yeah that’s fair.
I’m a small person with proportionally small hands (I’m actually closer to child-size than average-adult-size) and the ps5 controllers are probably the worst I’ve ever used (I haven’t used anything past 360 for Xbox; those controllers are also big). I can’t even imagine an actual child without the dexterity and musculature using one properly.
Nothing like the controllers back in the day… sure they had cords but they were light and pretty small. Even when they were early wireless, they were light.
And there is a huge market for off brand controllers for the size issue. I’ve bought a lot of 3rd party ones because they felt nicer. It’s be nice if they were OEM tho.
Disclaimer: I did read it.
Is it just most players of these games that use guides or like all games? If it’s all games, I find that fascinating.
I absolutely hate needing to look anything up, and I get super upset with myself when I don’t think of the convoluted solution or discover the hidden quest on my own. I shouldn’t, sure, but always have. Since getting stuck in the vine forest in illusions of Gaia on SNES (think of the korok forest in breath of the wild, or the woods to Canada in the South Park games -wrong turn reset), and needing my older sister, who didn’t game, to navigate it for me, I’ve always wanted to solve it myself.
I mean I look stuff up if I really get stuck, or if I’m not sure the game has “missable” stuff (which I absolutely hate, because I’m not gunna play a game through again in most cases to make different choices; too many games I haven’t played for that to be desirable), but I hate doing it and don’t internally understand why you’d want to, I suppose.
Like I’m not judging anyone who does, those guides totally exist for a reason… I just have never understood the print guide or super detailed walkthrough thing, because it’s the opposite of how I like games. I always wondered who they were made for.
I like the adaptive triggers, but the controllers themselves are huge and heavy, and I can’t use them comfortably for any substantial period of time (about 20 min is as long as I can stand). Maybe it’s fine for people with big hands, idk, but I don’t like them, and rarely use them as a result.
The ps4 controllers were a much better size and weight imho, and the adaptive triggers aren’t enough of a feature to make up the difference for me.
There’s a paper mill near me, on a river, and the one and only interesting thing about it is that it discharges water that is cleaner than it takes out.
Now, this isn’t because they just care so much, or try so hard… it’s actually because the river is so horribly polluted from other shit upstream, even after decades of cleanup projects, that doing the bare minimum is actually a net positive…
What a shitty world we live in. It could have been so much better.
My favorite bit is in the second pic, blurry as it is, you can tell they are cracking up.
I would too, honestly.
This is really catchy and upbeat :)