To introduce a little nuance, this is not always true in working dogs! What you want is to avoid in those cases are AKC (American Kennel Club) certified dogs; that’s where it gets in-breedy—seriously, look up some of the requirements a dog has to meet in its breed to qualify. It’s gross.
Anyhoo, in working dogs, a ‘pedigree’ is actually quite helpful because it shows that that dog comes from a long line of dogs who have been certified to do their job, and so your new farm pup is highly likely to be able to do it too. These breeds will usually have their own organization that oversees this; in border collies it’s the ABCA (American Border Collie Association). This organization judges the dogs not on the specific dimensions of their bodies like the AKC, but on their ability to do the job a farmer needs them for.
Sorry for the ramble, I have two border collies and I think working dogs are super neat.
Yep, grew up on a farm in Australia with kelpies. They’re great dogs and really lovely.
However, I’ve seen them appearing in the city a bit and that’s just a terrible idea all round. They need much more space and stimulation than they can get off a farm.
They’re challenging for sure and I don’t recommend them to inexperienced/unprepared dog owners, but they can be amazing as pets! Very rewarding, especially once they get past the first year and a half or so. Then, if you’ve done well, you’ll almost have your own language with these dogs and they’ll understand almost everything you say to them. They’re incredible. I may honestly never have a different breed of dog.
The huge ‘BUT’ is definitely everything you just said. They need outlets for their energy (even if it’s just a hardcore game of fetch every day) and ways to engage their mind (Kong toys and smart balls do wonders for ours when it’s raining) or they can be very anxious, destructive, and generally neurotic.
This has to be fake, an accident would happen within days of installing it and then the city is liable. Ask you city government if they enjoy liability.
At least i know i would be terrified the whole time i’m sitting on it and wouldn’t actually be rested at all
The original design of that bench is an art piece protesting the commercialization of life (although it may have been implemented seriously in some place where they missed the point).
Ironically, I’d expect a person living on the street to have actual coins capable of operating the bench more often than most people.
I have also found this out, although it describes the general idea of capitalism very well. The actual architecture and street furniture solutions are not much better either, as can be seen in the other images.
I believe Canada passed medically assisted death for those with terminal illness and other reasons. There is safeguards in place and steps that need to be taken it isn’t one doctor visit and you are done.
See, they even have a better resolution image that doesn’t conveniently make it impossible to distinguish the Chinese characters the ad on the wall has:
You can tell the capitalist solution by the desire to avoid lawsuits from injuries by sticking to the least potentially hazardous solutions, such as the bench. In some states they also have metal spikes that are rounded to avoid impalement and scrapes, and the density tends to be less to decrease the risk.
The communist solution is always right, so you must be the one that’s wrong, ergo no need to worry about lawsuits. Just select the cheapest option that can justify the city’s budget to the central government, since there’s no real checks and balances on it because hey, communist government, ergo right and already represents the community, so how can you beat perfection? Plus the punishments from the central government to the city authorities are so severe, that how could that encourage a culture of deceit and suppression among them!?
They are both despicable solutions, but since OP and commenter decided to make the false comparison … Maybe I should link the videos of the collapsing buildings, since these have been built upon the same principle in China.
Same solutions are also in a lot of other countries, apart, yes, China is called Communist, but really it’s not, only one party and one leader, not selected by the people and more capitalist as other things. Hostile architecture is the solution by a failed government or system, to keep the streets ‘clean’ of the signs of its failure, simply this, and it is a global problem
It’s funny how you can tell how able citizens are able to hold the governments of those countries accountable and how much they value life by the degree of a potential health hazard their hostile architecture is. It really doesn’t indicate a failed government just having them, just one that has failing social nets for the homeless.
A failed social system is always the consequence of a lack of social policies, either due to ineptitude or disinterest, inherent to neo-liberalism, when percentages in the stock market are more important than the well-being of the population. This is where poor and homeless people are produced, instead of preventing them from reaching this condition. Having a fixed home is a vital and basic condition for social reintegration, since without an address it is impossible to get a job or to even have a bank account and with this it is also impossible to get a home. A vicious circle that you enter once you are on the street. But there are other possibilities as shown in Finland, how to reduce Homelesness and with an inversion initial, above saving money in social costs.
Well, yeah, it’s a failing social system, not necessarily a failed government. I don’t disagree with you, but the reason that there’s no housing available is because it isn’t just the government, which in Finland is also a representative democracy, nor the economy, which in Finland is as capitalist as any euro.
It’s due to things like societies, cultures, and banking systems that create and foster housing and property bubbles. It’s due to things like the power dynamics between the socioeconomic disparity and the difference between the wealth of the governments entities in charge of these social systems versus the influence from business, private, and banking interests from the outside. Then there’s the laws where actually trying to help can make you more liable if you don’t provide enough aid or are held responsible for the condition of those you are helping, a fear particularly present to many people in the US and China alike.
Finland has a small socioeconomic gap between its extreme while being one of the richest per capita in the EU, but it also has much more control over who can become citizens, prioritizing wealthy neighbors over the rest of its migrants and trying to reduce it to keep it from saturating its social systems. Not every country can adopt the same solution without massive reforms and geographical shifts. It doesn’t mean that spikes in benches and under bridges are the solution.
The whole western World have a Capitalist system, but there are differences in different countries, depending on whether the left or the right governs, which is directly expressed in social rights and social support.
European capitalism is not nearly the same as that of the United States, a country where homeless people are manufactured en masse due to the total lack of social investment and labor rights. This as a final result costs the state much more money than investments in social projects and laws.
It is clear that the construction of social housing is a large investment, but it is profitable as a result, apart from creating jobs and increasing people’s general purchasing power, new income in public coffers by people who have managed to rebuild their lives. with a home, impossible when they were on the street, depending entirely on state aid without being able to contribute anything in exchange.
In Spain there are projects in this direction with the left gov, but not so much in the rest of Europe, mostly with governments on the right. The only thing missing for this is political will, nothing else.
That was a perfect correction. I didn’t want to say anything because the joke was funny, and my thought process was pedantic, but you corrected it and kept it funny. Well done.
'Local' stores were/are often ridiculously overpriced, had a very limited range, and it's not like we're talking about independent stores either. Many of those were killed by the unfair practices of large corporate chains who would sell at a loss. Before amazon killed chain mall businesses, the mall killed independent businesses on the high street.
Packages are delivered to me personally. If I'm not there, they don't deliver and are forced to try another time.
No need for a PO box, as small independent stores and grocery stores often have a side hussle as a pick-up point. You go to pick-up your parcel and buy something in their store or do your groceries.
Amazon prime is entirely unnecessary. You simply have to wait a bit longer.
You can find independent sellers on amazon, then if their product is good, you buy from them directly next time around.
Thanks to amazon, ebay, etc. it's become far easier to buy second hand products. In the past you'd have to go to a second hand market, garage sales or visit twenty vintage/antique stores to find what you needed.
Amazon is evil though. So, yeah.
But there are perfectly rational reasons to use amazon.
Same here in the US Midwest. 90% of these fabled amazing local businesses are incredibly overpriced and often run by assholes who treat you like shit, treat their employees even worse, and often don’t know their products any better than a Walmart employee. Also often incredibly right wing, which of course connects to them treating their employees like shit again.
If I’m going to support bad people and bad business I’d rather do it in a way that benefits me.
Thats not a rule, but what they do have is a process that enables dickheads to ship cheap/substandard crap for an item that used to be highly rated thanks to the original seller.
So, if I understand it correct, when you order from a third party through Amazon, the third party never gets the order but Amazon sends something else instead? That wouldn't be legal in Europe.
What’s happening is to save space Amazon stores all items of the same likeness in bulk containers. The worker who fills the order just picks up one from the container. This is why buying memory cards (micro SD and so on) is such a crapshoot these days on Amazon. They aren’t necessarily shipping you what the independent seller shipped them. They’re shipping you one from a bulk container with the contents that many independent sellers shipped them.
I’ve found a lot of times, trying to buy directly from the independent seller is still fulfilled by Amazon assuming they don’t just do all of the e-commerce through Amazon. I end up with slower, more expensive shipping and Amazon still gets a cut.
We don’t have many “local” stores where I am, except for the hardware store which is a franchise. The local stores are all owned by a large out of state corporation. I still try to support them since they employ people in the community. We have multiple Amazon warehouses in the area too, between that and the delivery stuff they employ a lot more people than the local stores do and many products have same day delivery, so even there the math isn’t simple. The options are usually how much do I want to pay and which corporation do I want to give money to.
It really is funny. The only reason I went to reddit is that my phone app for news at the time (2011) took a shit and someone recommended reddit. I downloaded an app and that was the only way I interacted with reddit for over a decade. Then he killed that app and I figured if I’m going to have to adjust to a new app, I’m going elsewhere. What a dumbass.
I hate how when there is any picture of Soviet blocks it’s always shot in autumn or winter when it’s overcast. I live in an ex Soviet country and when these bad boys are maintained they can outperform new apartments, be it in functionality, amenities or price.
Building trades have been severely negatively impacted by a housing boom that created milions upon milliions of subcontractors who have no idea what happens before or after their specific trade. Everyone is just covering others’ mistakes. 50 years ago one company did all aspects of the building; 35 years ago that stopped.
Standards have improved 10 fold, I moved from a house built 70 years ago to a new build. It is completely different, air tight, less moisture, more efficient heating, permanent hot water, triple glazed windows. Literally everything is more secure and improved. There is nothing an old house can do a new one can’t.
Those are all accessories. The only build difference would be whether or not a moisture barrier was applied to the framing, either on the inside when insulated or outside with Tyvek.
Heating is an accessory? The new tech associated with central heating compared to 50 years ago is night and day. The building materials have changed, the regulations have changed. Houses have better insulation, soundproofing, fire guarding, plumbing, electrical circuitry like how is this even a discussion.
Heating is a thing applied to a home. Many homes have none (like mine). Yes, it is an accessory. That accessory has improved, but it has nothing to do with the building itself.
It’s a discussion because I am a builder and have been all my life and I have worked in most of those trades individually for three to five years each and I know what I’m talking about.
And yet, it isn’t. It’s an accessory applied to homes in zones that need heating and AC. You can retrofit different brands after the fact. You can remove and replace parts. It’s no more part of the house than an electric range is.
Again, I live in a $1.5M Mediterranean style 4BR 4.5 bath house. There is ZERO heating or AC anywhere in it. It is an unnecessary accessory.
I’m very happy for you in your made up home, but central heating and plumbing and requirements for construction where I live.
It is definitely more a part of the house than an appliance in that it is built into the house during it’s construction by the builders. Ranges are not the same as indoor plumbing, are you sure you’re a builder? You can add and remove walls after the fact too but it doesn’t make them an accessory in the sense that you are trying to claim.
My “made up home” is in a place of perpetual summer. Those places exist. I’m gonna stop arguing with you here because you truly have no idea what you’re talking about, much like the Facebook redneck who is an epidemiology expert when he’s not cooking at Waffle House.
I don’t understand what you’re saying. Perhaps if you ran around in circles in your living room screaming at me through the screen, I could better understand.
Lemme let you in on another secret: modern housing has inferior framing compared to 50 years ago. The reason for this is that the housing boom that started in the 80s and into the 90s demanded more lumber than the supply could keeo up with so trees were hybridized to grow faster with a more erratic Heartwood grain and have spent less time in the kiln so they haven’t dried properly. The high moisture content left in this inferior grain wood has caused lots of buckling, or bowing, excessive settling, and other associated issues. When a 2x4 is ripped on a table saw it does not turn into two equal pieces, it’s springs apart into two twisted and bowed pieces. This is the behavior of an inferior product.
I believe it was in 1992 or possibly 93 that the CEOs of weyerhauser, Georgia Pacific, and one other manufacturer of masonite siding we’re convicted of fraud and sent to prison because they had been changing out the test samples of masonite siding in Dade county Florida in order to justify selling masonite as a building code compliant siding material. Masonite was then banned in favor of cementitious siding board. Masonite also led to a vinyl siding boom…fake plastic to cover up the problem and give insects a new home. So we at least have an improvement in siding materials now, but not over brick or stone.
Now, there ARE ways to make the modern home superior in construction by using steel studs, heated concrete slabs, on-demand water heaters combined with solar tanks, blown foam insulated walls, and condensation-capture cooling tubes, but it is very expensive and requires a very talented labor pool.
Oh we don’t have timber framed housing here, my house is concrete and the 50 year old house I was in, probably closer 100, was a stone cottage.
The new house has exactly those things you listed. I’m fairly certain they have to be in all new builds where I am. Though the solar is optional, we have a heat pump instead.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies… more in line with today’s standards and have seen results more in line with today’s standards.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies… more in line with today’s standards and have seen results more in line with today’s standards.
Right yeah well said, very little of any substance. What is modernising? Switching to underfloor heating? Because that is not essential maintenance it is large scale construction work.
Yeah i was recently looking for someone to work on windows and finding someone who does work in the traditional way is not easy. They’re still out there, but for every one of them there’s ten hack shops using minimum wage labor for everything. Even then, the real good techniques just seem like lost technology. They didn’t get passed down to our generation.
It gets frustrating for me also because I’d like to do high caliber work but there’s not enough of a market to keep myself busy with it. There are other factors involved as well, but I have moved away from artisanal work to utilitarian stuff between kitchen and bath remodels.
It’s less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It’s not like people didn’t know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.
Asbestos has some pretty insane properties, though. Just a shame it causes cancer when disturbed and inhaled.
As a building material? What’s even better than asbestos in terms of the trifecta of sound/heat isolation, bulk, melting point, and structural soundness? Aerogel?
Even communism aside, this is actually not uncommon. One of the advances we’ve made in construction is knowing how to save even more money, making the right sacrifices and meeting the minimum bars of code compliance, to maximize our margins.
I don’t know how you say this unironically as criticism. That’s arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources. It’s not a good thing to waste manpower and resources for no real gain.
What gain? More profits for the ultra rich? A dying planet?
People living in comfortable apartments is no real gain in capitalism because it means less ROI. But it is a huge gain to everyone’s quality of life if they can live comfortably.
Market mechanisms are very powerful in optimising resource allocation - but they aren’t optimising for maximum quality of life, they’re optimising for maximum ROI. Which lands in the pockets of the ultra rich, which then allocate the accumulated capital in only those endeavours providing maximum ROI, and the cycle goes on and on until so much wealth is extracted from society that the middle class collapses and the planet dies - and the ultra rich with them, for they depend upon the plebes to work for them in order to have an ultra rich lifestyle in the first place.
I mean if we were trying to house people we should be aiming for inexpensive and non-wasteful building choices, shouldn’t we? When we’re handling basic human needs we send boats full of rice and beans, not a bunch of badass chefs.
I mean it’s kind of a scarcity thing. Resources aren’t infinite. I have no problem with letting people have nice things and would certainly want minimums to be pretty decent, but when you’re getting people off the street or something then efficiency means lives saved.
Did you know that in the USA more buildings are vacant than there are homeless people? So the amount of housing that needs to be built is exactly zero. It’ s not an amount of resources problem, it’s an allocation of resources problem.
It is still a resource problem. There’s a reason NIMBYs exist. Homeless populations have substance, legal and mental issues. The property is pretty much a write off the moment you hand it over.
This is probably where we’ll disagree: I believe that all people living in a humane way is more important than investors’ real estate portfolio valuation.
I wasn’t even talking about investors or the homeowners you’d plan to confiscate from. I was talking about turning neighborhoods into slums overnight. Pest infestation and drug use.
Again, there are more vacant homes than homeless. It’s not taking away people’s homes. Homes where people actually live in, I mean. Most real estate investments, the owner hasn’t visited once in years.
And you’d be surprised at how much people improve once they have stable housing. Finland has had a “housing first, no conditions” programme for a while now with very impressive results.
Obviously people will initially be afraid of “bad people” coming to their neighbourhood. I understand this. But I believe their feelings of discomfort are less important than the immense suffering of the homeless.
Would you seriously place property valuations as more important than humanity and human dignity?
We have all the money in the world. We have more than enough homes to house people, right now. We have an abundance of housing, of resources to build more housing, of everything. What we do not have is a distribution that allows people who need housing to get it. Instead we have a literal Spiders Georg situation where a tiny fraction of the country each own hundreds of homes they don’t live in or even have any intention of living in. This situation is deranged.
Alright, then show the numbers. Let’s ignore that seizing all that property will go super well. I know, you want people that own more than one house dead, so even include it as double the free housing. Figure out how much it costs to upkeep rental properties. Double it, maybe more, for people that literally don’t give a fuck about it. Add costs for policing the shit.
The math has already been done. I’m not your high school teacher. Go look up, ex, housing co-ops for a relatively inoffensive example.
I’m not of the opinion that people with more than one house should be killed, but people who own a thousand? People who own houses they will never live in and have no intention of ever living in? Those people are parasites.
And you can talk about upkeep all you like but who’s paying for they upkeep now? Not the landlords, that’s for sure. Oh don’t get me wrong, they’re managing the upkeep and it’s coming out of their account but all that money? The money is all coming from the tenants. The people living there are already paying the upkeep.
It’s also an absolute joke to try to characterize landlords as being interested in maintaining property any more than is absolutely necessary when they’re, as a class of person, categorically infamous for being cheap bastards who refuse to make any improvements or even do basic maintenance because it would cost them money. “Sure the heat may be out and the place may be drafty and the freezer may not freeze and the whole place may be infested with vermin but if we didn’t keep paying the landlords for all this decadence the poor people would ruin it!”
An apartment complex went up outside my work and it’s made of wood. That’s against fire safety code but they found some creative work arounds to convince the inspectors it was legal. (And of course the inspections are all toadies who have been put in place to rubber stamp developer plans.) Very efficient until it burns down and kills everyone inside.
Tons of large buildings are older than you’d think. Hell, a lot of large buildings don’t even get serious structural inspections until they’re 40+ years old!
It was one of many contributing factors to the Champlain Towers South building collapsing in the US in Florida. No communism or Soviet corner cutting. Just good ol’ fashioned American ineptitude. That building was undergoing some work so they could raise prices. It wasn’t a low class building nor did many people think it was too old to invest in.
What OP said is extremely likely to be true: Those buildings are competative.
Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m^2^ (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m^2^ (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)
Tom Scott (with his characteristic enthusiasm): “Hello, lovely internet denizens! Today, we find ourselves in a comment thread, delightfully jesting about my propensity to dive into the oddest corners of knowledge. From the physics of shoelaces to the mysteries of quantum buttered toast, we’ve covered it all!”
[SMILE AND NOD]
Tom Scott: “Now, I can already predict a few of the replies that might pop up here. ‘Tom, why not delve into the intricacies of a potato chip next?’ Well, who knows, that might just be on the horizon! And yes, someone will undoubtedly ask about the physics of a cat’s purr. It’s been on the list for a while, folks!”
[CONFIDENT NOD]
Tom Scott: “But you know what they say, the quest for knowledge knows no bounds! So, let’s keep the laughter rolling and the curiosity burning. What’s next, you ask? Well, that’s anyone’s guess! Stay tuned, stay curious, and let’s keep this adventure going!”
[OUTRO]
Tom Scott (looking bemusedly at his busily buzzing phone): “Well, it seems the replies are pouring in already! I might be here for a while trying to keep up with all your brilliant comments. But hey, that’s the joy of it, isn’t it? The learning never stops! Keep those questions and suggestions coming, and I’ll do my best to tackle them in the videos to come.”
“Mange tror at internetdiskussioner er sunde. Det er et indtryk vi har arbejdet mange år på at kultivere så vi kan påvirke folks meninger uden at blive opdaget i det. Vi fik blandt andet Tom til at lave denne video blot for at få mig med i den!”
Wow, I’m actually pretty sure I’m wrong on this. I’m just now checking on my lunch break but I can’t find it. I know I saw a video about this (or a very similar) community following specifically one man who has a hanger house. Swore it was Tom Scott but, I just can’t find it… Don’t tell me I hallucinated it lol
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