Hi Tom,
I was just taking a look at your resume, and your experience at Deceased really caught my eye! I’m especially interested in your knowledge of being missed by friends and family. Did you know that complications from heart surgery is in high demand right now?
I’m a head hunter looking for dynamic individuals who are interested in positions at an exciting new startup, and I think you’d be a perfect fit!
I hope we get a chance to chat soon!
Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.
Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.
My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”
Substitute “convince by indirect and non-confrontational means” for “trick”, and you’re saying the same thing as the original post. Makes for a shit joke though.
What it shows is that inflation goes up, and the population is both growing and urbanizing all over the world.
Like where? I know towns that will offer you a plot of land for $1, so long as you promise to develop on it.
You do get high housing costs in places where populations are rising faster than housing development can keep up, or where development makes no sense (would you build an apartment block in a shrinking town?)
But like…I can point you to a bunch of cities in the US where housing prices are still quite cheap. You probably won’t want to live in those cities. That’s why they’re cheap. Supply and demand in action.
You have to be a complete moron if you think the problem isn’t enough supply.
The population of the US is growing. And the percentage of people living in cities is rising. That’s lots of people looking for housing in cities. At the same time, single-family zoning (which account for around ~80% of land in US cities–before accounting for industrial and commercial) prevents the development of more housing. Old neighborhoods are effectively full, mostly owned by the same families that bought them in the 70s through 00s. New development is waaaay out on the fringes of the city, and expensive as hell because it’s in such high demand.
There isn’t enough new housing being developed to satisfy the growing demand for housing, so prices rise. It’s that simple! The problem is exacerbated, because the rising prices attract investors (corporate and private) and AirB&B etc. But the fundamental problem is that most of our cities are seas of already-occupied single-family homes, and at the same time populations are rising. This is obvious.
But politicians love to blame foreigners, immigration, corporations, AirB&B. You know why? Because the root of the problem is middle-aged surburban majority-white families that don’t want more people (with associated traffic, noise, whatever) in their neighborhood. And that’s their core voting base. Old white people vote like clockwork, young renters reliably don’t. If politicians go on a crusade against the single-family-dwelling suburbs, they know they’ll get voted out. So they throw you these stupid bones: “it’s the Chinese who are making housing expensive, by buying 1% of units (and mostly living in them)! It’s AirB&B, with a few thousand units for rent in a city of 6 million people! It’s the corporations, doing…things nobody can quite explain, that somehow involve buying housing and then just letting it sit there unoccupied? Or something?”
You’re a sucker, believing that bullshit. It’s the voters (the ones who actually vote) who are the problem.
Zoning laws: yes, strong agree, but the bad guy there isn’t corporations, it’s NIMBYs. People with houses don’t want any development of any kind near them, and being residents they’re the ones who get to vote on it. They almost always vote no.
Foreign people buying land as assets is a thing. You know how you defeat that? Build more housing. If the value of the assets fails to rise, or even falls, then people won’t hold them as assets–and by dumping them on the market, they’ll further decrease the price.
Companies buying up houses to sell (usually after developing or refurbishing them) or rent is ECON101 in action.
If you can solve problem #1, the rest falls into place. But corner apartments overlooking the water in nice cities are still going to be expensive relative to other housing.
Well I mean…more and more people want to live in cities, and they’re not making more waterfront apartments. Lots of people want that apartment now, so the price is higher. I don’t know what you can do about that: you can’t provide a beautiful corner apartment overlooking the water in a desirable city for $700 to all the millions of people who want one.
Leaving it ambiguous activated the reader’s imagination and elevated a TIL into a shitpost.
Ahh, it’s no big deal. I know it sounds magical, but there’s probably some humdrum explanation…you’re probably just popping in and out of different universe in the multiverse whenever you observe a particle, or something mundane like that.
Huh…I can’t find it on YouTube, but it rings a bell. Was it something like “quicksand played a much smaller role in my life than I expected”?
There was a podcast episode years back about how large quicksand loomed in popular culture for a whole generation, before vanishing as a concept almost completely.
And sure enough, I remember as a kid in the 80s worrying about stumbling into quicksand while wandering around the bushes in rural Canada.
Then I forgot about it as a concept until I heard it on that one episode, and I haven’t heard it since.
FWIW, I’m running NixOS but gave up on running the Lemmy module. I gave up when I realized that Lemmy seems to need superuser access to the Postgresql server, to install plugins or whatever.
So instead, I used Arion to make a docker-compose image, running in podman. Works great so far.
There was a similar kid in my school who had a thing for pooping right on center court in the gym. He’d try to escape his supervisors to do it. One time was in the middle of my gym class during a floor hockey game. It was…something.
Same kid used to have seizures: he’d go stiff and fall over. Sometimes he landed head first. The sound of a human head hitting a concrete floor with no attempt to soften the blow haunts me to this day. You could hear it halfway across the school…
The first federated application I ever saw was Diaspora, which was basically federated Facebook. It predates Mastodon by 5+ years.
Thing is…it seems like it’s harder to launch federated Facebook. With Twitter or Reddit, as long as there’s enough activity on the new platform, it can act as a drop-in replacement for the original. There might be friends or favorite subscriptions who make the jump, and you might miss them, but they’re not critical to the experience.
But with Facebook…the whole point is that the people you’re interacting with are real-world friends and family. You need to convince them to migrate to the new platform. If they don’t do it, the platform is kinda pointless. And…generally speaking, one’s real-world friends and family usually aren’t a bunch of enthusiastic early-adopters.
I created an instance in the early days, and convinced like 3-4 people to give it a try. None of us knew anybody on other instances. It’s not designed to find new friends easily. So it just quietly died.
Of course, this was pre-2016, pre-evil-Facebook, back before large-scale skepticism about social networks, when people stared at you blankly when you talked about “federated alternatives”. But I still don’t think I could get my family to transition, because they’d be losing all their contacts with the specific, real-world friends they have on Facebook (not to mention, say, the Facebook Marketplace, which is apparently a big deal…)
I’m…not sure you’re really in sync with a lot of the people here. I’m 100% in favor of all of that, which I would just call healthy capitalism.
I guess I’m reacting to other conversations I’ve had today. A lot of people with Mao banners and Che Guevara profile pics, calling for the total overthrow of capitalism.
If people are just talking about capitalism with accountability, hell, sign me up.
Fair enough. I know Achilles’ and Patroclus’ affair has been discussed for more than a century.
I subbed to Reddit’s community on this topic (SapphoAndHerRoommate?) out of curiosity, and it struck me at some point that none of the examples posted were historians denying the possibility of historical figures being gay. So at some point I actually went through like 3 pages of the top stories…like 50+% were tweets saying basically “Boy, those historians sure do like to pretend gay people don’t exist! Imagine them pretending Achilles and Patroclus were just buds lol!” Seriously most of them were specifically about A&P.
Then another 30% or so were religious fundamentalists posting complaints about how people were trying to queer up history.
There were a handful of historians saying “hey guys, gender roles were different back then, it may not be accurate to label a history figure ‘gay’ even if they did have male lovers”
Then there were like 3-4 quotes from popular biographies from the 1800s that used funny language about “never married” and “lifelong friends”.
And finally there was one article from the BBC about two dudes from the Roman period in Britain who were buried in an embrace, and it was like “What could their relationship have been? We can only speculate…maybe they were both apprentices?” or something. It was pretty egregious. Maybe a historian was involved in that.
Anyway, that was one example in the 60 or so top stories. It seems like a meme that just keeps on going even though it’s been obsolete for a century.
Yeah. And it’d be pretty stupid to say of most adults "You don’t agree with me? Must be because you never read a book before.
It’s Google devouring Google Search!