It’s a real quote, from the 80s, published in a networking textbook.

It’s amusing, but it’s always been a serious and occasionally practical observation.

Economies of agglomeration, similar to Amazon. Having one app to order everything from is very convenient and the average person prefers that.

Hell, in a car, is other drivers.

Fahrenheit has a fairly sensible 0 - just as Celsius is the temp of ice water, Fahrenheit is the temp of salty ice water.

The US doesn’t use imperial, it uses US customary.

There’s no US customary Roman mile, ell or skeine, for example.

Chains and links are basically standard surveyors chains. They’re distinct units in their own right in the sense that a metric chain or metric link is. Should your metric chart have a metric chain on it? What about light years or parsecs?

Hands are used in measuring horses, and that’s basically it. They’re used in commonwealth countries, the US and South Africa.

I dunno, capitalist social democracies seem quite nice compared to socialist counties.

The most popular hot sauces in America are mild ones like Tabasco, Frank’s red hot, and Sriracha.

Habanero and ghost pepper based sauces aren’t very popular.

Do you really think that the average American has the same heat tolerance as the average person from Hyderabad or Chengdu?

Or that the average American restaurant will make food as spicy as the average restaurant in India?

Housing-first is a great way to deal with homelessness, because most of the problems homeless people have in rebuilding their lives are compounded by being on the street. I’m not saying we shouldn’t house homeless people.

I’m saying that comparing the vacancy rate to the homeless population is ridiculous, and isn’t evidence that there’s no housing shortage.

Partially, that’s because vacant houses aren’t all habitable, or able to be sold/rented immediately. But also, it’s because having some number of empty units on the market ready to be moved into is a good thing. You don’t want to have to find someone who wants to move out the day you want to move in. That creates a sellers market, causing high prices.

That’s one of those things that’s technically true, but quite misleading.

The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother’s house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.

The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn’t currently someone’s primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability. Very high vacancy rates are also bad, but you want there to be a decent number of vacant houses.

There’s fairly few units that people are just letting sit unused and empty.

In 2022, 23% of vacant for-rent units were vacant for less than a month. Only 26% were vacant for more than 6 months.

There’s more vacant housing “held off market”, but keep in mind that includes housing occupied by people with usual residences elsewhere, housing that’s currently held up in legal proceedings, housing currently under construction or repair, or in need of repair. The amount that’s being held off market by Blackrock to keep prices high is tiny at best.

Vacancy taxes have been tried, and their effect is generally fairly small. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re only a small part of a larger solution.

Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.

We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).

Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.

Prices are a matter of supply and demand.

Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.

We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it’s currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.

The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live “in Boston”, “in NYC”, etc, they probably don’t want to live in a new build an hour’s drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.

Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn’t the only important thing, but it’s pretty important.

Mostly.

What really matters for hyperthermia is the “wet bulb” temperature. Basically, the temperature you get when you wrap a thermometer with a wet cloth, simulating the cooling you get from sweat.

120° F with 5% relative humidity is a wet bulb temperature of about 69°.