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Hannibal Rex posted:Somehow John McCain returned You get runner up for folks coming back from the (almost) dead to offer terrible takes on Iran: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/28/the-west-may-now-have-no-option-but-to-attack-iran/
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Jan 3, 2024 18:09
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2024 is off to a hell of a start.
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Jan 3, 2024 21:17
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Crab Dad posted:What is the holy gently caress. Man I hope he has good people caring for him. I'm going to assume (hope) that whatever state department psychologist interviewed him after his release picked up on the laundry list of red flags.
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Jan 3, 2024 21:20
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golden bubble posted:There are always big enough deals large corporate deals to make the news, but small investors have always been the majority of housing investors, and always have done so. When it comes to total homes bought, small investors (10 or less houses) bought over ten times as much as institutional investors did (1000+ total owned houses) this year, and have consistently done so basically every year. Yeah even progressives that study land use and real estate tend to dispute the notion that institutional investors are responsible for housing prices being where they are: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-crisis-hedge-funds-private-equity-scapegoat/672839/ The uncomfortable reality is that there's no incentive for homeowners (families or institutional investors) to support policies that lower the prices of homes, including large-scale development and high-density/multi-unit buildings. Because nobody who bought a house for a certain amount (with most of it likely financed) wants to be underwater on their basis or their mortgage. It's also kind of taken as a given in the US (and UK) that home ownership is effectively a form of wealth creation/a nest egg for retirement. In countries with relatively stable housing prices, like Germany and Japan, home ownership typically isn't viewed as an investment and renters aren't second-class citizens. psydude fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 23:29
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Consumer goods are way, way cheaper. Consider a phone from the 1950s - it's enough bakelite to knock out a large mammal and would probably survive most major natural disasters. But it also cost about $500 in today's money, while the feature equivalent piece of crap polypropylene phone now is like $15. You can get a new one every year for the next quarter century and still come out ahead. Or you can get a $500 smartphone that would basically be magic back then. And if you still want to spend $500 on a basic landline phone, it's probably some bespoke thing that blows the 1950s version out of the water and has parts custom machined by an artisan worker who put their name on it. We worked with an architect a few years back for some renovations and he explained that the quality of materials and the labor category of the workers has a much bigger impact on cost and outcome than people realize. Hiring a master carpenter and plumber to install high quality finishings will obviously yield a longer lasting, nicer result, but can increase the price 2-3 times beyond what you'd pay at Home Depot and hiring cut-rate contractors that rely on day laborers. Most mass-produced housing relies on the latter, since they're looking to keep costs down as much as possible. It's also why a lot of homes built by large developers begin to fall apart after a couple of years. psydude fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 10:03
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Earlier sightings of the panel turned out to be the door of a 1976 Pinto.
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Jan 7, 2024 15:54
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Soul Dentist posted:But the oath is decades old! Which means it could be a result of Bush v Gore lol It's a McCarthy era thing that includes a stanza saying you aren't a communist. It was apparently struck down in a supreme court case and is no longer a requirement, but it's obviously a soft-ball win for candidates to show they aren't going to overthrow the government so everyone still agrees to it.
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Jan 7, 2024 18:50
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Wasabi the J posted:I feel like there's a pattern about Russia, the right wing culture wars, and brics member states that also being majorly fossil fuels dependant that I'm not smart enough to fully grasp. The BRICs aren't really to the point of operating under a general geopolitical consensus like Europe and the US/Canada are. To take your I/P example, India is squarely behind Israel (which aligns with Modi's domestic agenda of Hindu nationalism) and is contending with Iranian hostilities in the Indian ocean; China is neutral (needing to court MEA for political and economic reasons while also wanting to maintain their own campaign to crush the Uyghurs); Russia is gleefully playing both sides against each other for their benefit in both Ukraine and building economic ties within MEA; and Brazil is somewhat supporting the Palestinians. Even putting that aside, India sees China as a major threat and has formed a defense partnership with the US, Australia, and Japan. Brazil maintains close diplomatic and economic ties to the US and is taking an aggressive posture against Venezuela's attempts to annex Guyana (knowing the US will back them diplomatically and possibly militarily), which is in direct opposition to Russia's military and economic support for Maduro's regime. And the EU, US, SK, and Japan are all China's four biggest trading partners (Russia is 10th, Brazil is 11th, and India is 13th). Being in the BRICs club does allow them to benefit from bypassing western sanctions and red-tape when feasible, but it's more a marriage of economic convenience rather than a unified geopolitical bloc. psydude fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 18:38
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Crab Dad posted:Oh my bad I thought we fought a war over this. The average German farm is 150 acres, which is less than .25 square miles. We aren't talking about massive operations here. psydude fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 22:36
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Crab Dad posted:People need food to survive. We can’t stop buying food. If subsidies existing are the only way farmers can survive then I suspect your economy is on shaky ground. You may have to increase import taxes to make their produce competitive. I don't think you can really compare North American farming with European farming, both in scale and in mentality. Farming is a big industry in Germany and the local farmers have to compete with much cheaper crops from countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. The higher density of German cities also means that agricultural land is found much closer to major city centers (I lived at the end of an U-Bahn line and two buildings down from me was a literal barn that housed a tractor) and so there isn't as much of an urban/rural divide as you'd find in the US and Canada. So follows that Germans (at least the ones I knew) are very supportive of the farming industry: where I lived, most of the stores tended to source as much of their produce as possible from domestic farmers to the point where even bigger chains like Rewe and Edeke effectively only carried seasonal produce, with a few exceptions. e: Which is to say I'm not surprised that farm subsidies have more popular support in Germany than in the US. psydude fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 00:06
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Crab Dad posted:But not that supportive if the elected officials are cutting their welfare feedbag. I suspect this stems from the current budget crisis, but I might be wrong. The government tried to reallocate unused COVID funds to plug a budget deficit only to have this swatted down by the supreme court. The German constitution effectively prohibits the government from running a deficit (Germans are allergic to debt, along with noise and modern technology) and so they're having to slash and burn a lot of spending.
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Jan 9, 2024 00:25
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Crab Dad posted:All this talk of Germans slash and burning and needing more land is making me nervous. I learned today that one of my German colleagues just bought a house in Poland and had to stop myself from making a Lebensraum joke.
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Jan 9, 2024 00:34
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FrozenVent posted:We just had a multiple-months long teacher strike, and people support the teachers because people understand that the teachers aren’t the problem, the problem is the provincial government treating them like poo poo. A well-advertised strike with clearly defined goals called after multiple rounds of negotiations and is a bit different than protesters suddenly shutting down an interstate highway. psydude fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 09:35
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ded posted:so you want to dictate how people are allowed to protest things? The conversation is about public perceptions of protests and their effect on public support for their cause, not what protesters should be allowed to do.
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Jan 9, 2024 11:43
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OddObserver posted:I suspect there are less guns involved, even if they are comparably out of their religion's mainstream. The Taliban probably has worse calendar game, too. Pfft. The Taliban defeated the US military. These guys couldn't even handle the cops.
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Jan 10, 2024 01:02
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Platystemon posted:How has MTG gone nearly fifty years on this Earth without realizing that having a large penis is generally considered a mark of pride? She ran a crossfit gym.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:25
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Crab Dad posted:Why do they constantly refer to him as “President” in legal filings? Maybe he had his first name legally changed to President so that he could be president for life.
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Jan 11, 2024 16:43
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MrMojok posted:Absolutely serious post here, and I ask this because I feel like I can’t trust the stories put out by either side. There's two things going on here and the right has managed to get everyone to believe they're the same. Most of the migrants are following the legal process to claim asylum in the US, which involves surrendering to a CPB officer at a port of entry, being processed in an immigration facility, receiving a court date to hear their case, and then being released to stay in the US until their case is decided. Trump deliberately hamstrung the process by under-resourcing the agencies responsible for processing asylum seekers, failing to back-fill immigration judges, and doing crazy poo poo like child separations. The Biden administration has continued some of these policies and rolled back others. It could be doing more, but the situation isn't inherently different than it was under Trump. The second thing is illegal immigration, which has always ebbed and flowed according to the season (many people immigrate illegally from Mexico to harvest crops and then return home after) and the economic strife in Latin America. Republicans want everyone to believe that ALL of the migrants are crossing the border illegally, but the rate of illegal immigration has largely held steady over time. What's also not helping is that the right wing has also managed to convince many on the left that the situation is about illegal immigration, when it's not. It's about legal immigration using the asylum system. psydude fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jan 13, 2024 |
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Jan 13, 2024 01:20
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Wasn't the treaty also supposed to guarantee Hong Kong's legislative and judicial independence for 50 years or something like that? Everyone I've ever met from Hong Kong is very adamant that they are from Hong Kong, not China.
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Jan 14, 2024 00:46
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Literally every shred of evidence since the Gulf War has borne out that most US weapon systems, though insanely expensive boondoggles, generally work extremely well. Our strategy might be terrible, our goals nonsensical, and our conduct questionable, but the weapons themselves are generally both reasonably functional and terrifyingly lethal. AEGIS certainly has a pretty stellar combat record as far as I'm aware, and has shot down every missile and/or airliner pointed at it since the '80s. It's probably just a PR stunt on the part of the Houthis to show they're still in the fight after last week's airstrikes. They haven't launched any further complex attacks since the US and UK strikes, which would indicate that their capabilities have been degraded, but they're doing this for a domestic and regional media audience who don't know or care.
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Jan 15, 2024 09:32
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Elviscat posted:hopefully insurance will take care of the property damage Unless everyone pays for comprehensive with no deductible or that guy is rich, I have bad news.
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Jan 15, 2024 10:49
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CommieGIR posted:Iowa picks losers. They picked Huckabee for president previously. And Ted Cruz. And Rick Santorum. I mean, Trump is going to win the Republican nomination, but yeah, Iowa has nothing to do with it.
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Jan 16, 2024 14:41
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M_Gargantua posted:That just makes their incompetency and failure to invest their lucrative public-private partnership money and tax incentives into maintaining critical infrastructure sound even worse. US power utilities are incentivized to spend on big CAPEX upgrades instead of maintenance because they're allowed to embed the costs in rate increases. And most of the IRA's money was also aimed at expanding renewable capacity without providing much for maintenance for distribution or transmission companies. Other than tax deductions for certain maintenance costs (like replacing existing parts), there's no structural or programmatic incentive for utilities to spend a lot on it. Which is unfortunate. psydude fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 16:58
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Arrath posted:Maybe I'm naive but it seems wild that "continued ability to deliver the product they exist sell" isn't incentive enough to pay for maintaining their infrastructure. What about levying punitive penalties when systemic lapses in maintenance lead to service outages or town ravaging wildfires? NERC (or the regional reliability corporation) can impose sanctions and fines if they're found to have failed to properly implement or follow their standards, but that only applies to interstate transmission operators (BTW this is why Texas isn't connected to the north american power grid). Otherwise it's up to state power commissions to enforce compliance for local power distribution. And of course those entities are stretched thin and unable to cover everything, so operators make out in the end even if they occasionally get slapped with a fine.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:14
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Quackles posted:Why are there so many small wars popping up right now?? They're almost all connected to Iran in some way. Their most recent strikes in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan have ostensibly been retaliation for the funeral bombing a few weeks back (among some other smaller attacks on police checkpoints and government buildings), but they're also facing prolonged domestic strife as well as a lack of a clear heir to Khameini that's probably forcing them to try to save face. It's also not entirely clear that they even control their own proxy forces anymore - their strategy is typically to try and isolate adversaries (Israel, Saudi Arabia, the US, the Kurds). The Houthis attacking shipping in the Red Sea has done the opposite of that: it's generated a multi-national effort to contain the problem while also keeping Russia and China on the sidelines.
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Jan 18, 2024 11:02
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lightpole posted:He did this and it was struck down. This is rather telling in how even the good stuff he has tried or even gotten through is largely forgotten, poo poo'd for not going far enough, or just flat out ignored. I know someone who keeps complaining that Biden didn't do anything on student loans. They maintain this even when confronted with all of the evidence to the contrary. In his view, because he didn't personally benefit from it, it amounts to a broken promise.
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Jan 24, 2024 20:41
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ded posted:the area i live is a giant planned community full of houses. there are some low income apartments as well as "regular" priced ones along side vast tracks of single family homes and schools that go from kindergarten to community college. Wouldn't building more apartments, particularly mixed income apartments, help address the waiting list issue you mentioned? The area you described sounds a lot like either Reston, VA or Columbia, MD. Both have struggled to handle the massive demand for housing in recent years. Columbia has approved more high density housing in the emerging downtown area, but Reston seems to have paused it.
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Jan 24, 2024 21:23
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ded posted:cant build more in an area that is covered in housing already. this whole area has no open land that can be built on anymore. Brownfield development is still an option. As the poster above me mentioned, it's usually a zoning issue. In most places, if you want to build or modify to more than a duplex or triplex, you have to get a variance for multi-family housing unless it was already zoned in certain ways (even most residential zoning doesn't permit multi-family) and a lot of land that's ideal for brownfield development is zoned for light industrial or commercial instead of residential/mixed use. And as you can imagine, there's a million ways for people to stop this or delay it to the point of oblivion. psydude fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Jan 24, 2024 21:34
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OddObserver posted:Ideally you would want lots of both public and private housing (edit: UK was doing well when it had both, while Soviet Union could never keep up with public construction only even though it's one of the areas where they actually put in an effort).... but public housing costs $$$. Whether getting support for that or for breaking down the broken system where we artificially limit supply to enrich existing home owners would be easier is a subject for debate. The UK still has public housing and does a decent job of keeping it refurbished. The problem here is that restrictive planning practices make it impossible to build anything, public or private.
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Jan 25, 2024 08:37
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CBJSprague24 posted:https://twitter.com/RollingStone/status/1750231508525236286 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK7kjl_gHds&t=27s
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Jan 25, 2024 17:56
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Discussion Quorum posted:Suddenly remembering that brief period of time when Fox News tried to replace "suicide bomber" with "homicide bomber" in the common parlance. Seems like a square/rectangle thing.
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Jan 28, 2024 23:49
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I got prescribed Percocet and all it did was make me irritable.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:44
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Wasabi the J posted:Musk testified during the compensation trial in November 2022 that the money would be used to finance interplanetary travel. Pfft. That's only half of what the space race cost (adjusted for inflation). You ain't getting to another planet for probably less than a cool $200bn.
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Jan 31, 2024 00:11
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Baconroll posted:Yep about that, According to that article, the UK government told the US to fly her out. Soooo. quote:On 14 September, Foreign Office diplomat Neil Holland texted a US official that "It's obviously not us approving of their departure", but that, since the US was not waiving immunity, "I think you should feel able to put them on the next flight out". On 16 September, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) informed the police that the waiver had been declined and that Sacoolas had left the UK on a US Air Force aircraft. The Telegraph reported that Sacoolas left the country on a 'private' flight which likely took off from the US airbase at Mildenhall.
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Feb 1, 2024 09:22
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