A 47 year old lawyer should be able to afford $3,600 a month without particular difficulty. I’m a software developer so I make less than most lawyers do, but I can pay about $3,400 a month for my one-bedroom in the center of a big city.
(I don’t rent. $3,400 is my mortgage plus my building fees and the building charges an additional fee to people who rent out their unit, so if I rented mine out for $3,600 then I would probably actually lose money every month. Paying my mortgage does mean that my net worth increases, but it doesn’t help me afford things now. Someone with their mortgage paid off would be in a better position to be a landlord, but they would still be getting less than 4% profit per year even if they have the perfect tenant who never costs them anything. Selling the apartment and putting the money in the stock market would be more profitable than renting it out for $3,600.)
The average yearly return of the S&P 500 over the last 30 years is almost 10% a year, so if instead of investing in the stock market, you choose to be a landlord whose yearly profit is 4%, you’re a humanitarian donating 6% of the cost of your apartment to your tenant every year.
I’m exaggerating because the average rise in real estate values is 6% so such a landlord actually gets about the same return as he would get from the stock market, as long as he never has a bad tenant and doesn’t mind his money being locked up in real estate.
Well that was in the past, but over the last 2-3 years I have lost a few thousand $ in the value of my S&P 500 index fund investments. That money would have been better off in a plain old savings account or invested in real estate (but it wasn’t really enough to buy any real estate).
You must have bought at the worst possible time. But there’s risk associated with any investment - the neighborhood you buy in could go to hell, or if you rent out your property then you could get a tenant who trashes it and takes a year to evict. I think real estate does tend to be less risky than the stock market, but it has significantly worse returns too. (Plus, the stock market lets you diversify - if you only own one property and something happens to it, you have lost everything.)
With that said, you can invest in real estate even if you don’t have enough money to buy property yourself - you can buy shares in a real estate investment trust.
IDK why your comment reminded me, but back when I was in middle school (late 90s) we had an anti drug guest speaker. One of those ones where they were former addicts trying to scare you out of trying drugs. During the Q&A, someone asked him a question and that got him onto how plastic water bottles were super bad for you and you should never drink out of plastic because you’re ingesting tiny plastic particles. I remember we were laughing at him while administration was trying to shoo him off the stage.
Now we just kinda shrug when told we’re ingesting a credit card worth of plastic every week, lol.
Okay imma need an explanation for the middle bottom and bottom right panels, what are they?
Also love the idea that magic is just science we haven’t explained yet. Most of us would be burned s as witches in the past based on our current knowledge
Suppose, we want to make an electric lamp (an oil lamp would be too easy, you just need a vessel, fuel and a wick).
Bill of materials
Generator magnet a piece of iron to be magnetized copper for wires some more iron for the armature some more scrap metal/wood/leather to make a crank and structure to house the whole thing, leather for making a pulley system for gearing Alternatively, make a lead-acid battery, or some other type of galvanic battery, depending on the available materials.
Lightbulb carbon rod for the filament (pencil lead would be ideal but I’m pretty sure charcoal will do) glass tube for the bulb itself Some copper for the connectors
Soldering Hot piece of metal or flame Pine rosin for flux Lead, tin or silver
Sprengel pump A bunch of glass tubing Mercury
Hot flame for soldering/glass blowing* Calcium carbide Water Tubing Nozzle Tin can as a reaction vessel
Equipment A forge
*no idea how I would solve the pressurized oxygen problem. Maybe instead of a tin can, use a pressure vessel for the reaction and use an old carburator (hooked up in reverse) to draw in air with the acetylene. Also, a nozzle that can take the heat… clay maybe?
Also, I just pulled this out of my ass and would probably kill myself trying to build something that wouldn’t work in the first place. So yeah, build an oil lamp, torch or candle and try not to burn everything down. It would still be a half-assed attempt at a lamp. Don’t sell yourself short.
This is also why at see inventions emerge almost at the same moment from people who don’t share knowledge.
A lot of invention is material science.
Even if I know enough to make a modern computer from raw materials, I’m not going to find the necessary industry to refine those raw materials correctly in the 1400s.
In terms of the bottom middle: that’s the demon core. Science Thor (a.k.a. Kyle Hill) does awesome videos on nuclear and radioactive stuffs which can explain it better than I could.
I have a habit of calling things ‘technological magic’ because that’s what it is in my mind. The fact that the universal laws and logic exist in such a way to allow things like computers or the huge complexity of living things and AI matrixies is nothing short of miraculous when you think about it.
Like latex gloves, wooden tongue depressors, and Ozium? Can’t say that I agree. To me it tastes like Cherry Coke with the essence of cherry removed, leaving behind just the rest of the stuff that makes up a cherry.
It’s worth noting that the Times released this tool a decade ago. IIRC, around 2015 there was also a push for better colorblind friendly color palettes, especially on the heat map space (I remember watching a matplotlib demo, maybe, with viridis support). While there’s many visualization practices we do better at now, and while this could be due for a redux, I still think it"s one of the best interactives to date. It’s an OG for sure.
That’s fun, and it’s a much better use of heatmap since it’s just a binary scale (least-most similar). When we’re showing discrete options rather than a continuous “similarity” we don’t want to use heatmaps because they cause undesirable blurring.
Really what the OP is trying to do is show which areas use which phrases. A heatmap could have been used where we have multiple visualizations - one for each phrase - using “Popularity” to show smooth distribution. I assume that the source data is not by county level and instead aggregated so the choropleth never would have worked great.
Idk If voyager is still PWA, but they also autoplay on Liftoff,… on Connect it shows full image at least and you can tap to play it, Summit also shows the image with a play arrow. So it can be done… I have no clue how… But I had been trying like 6 lemmy apps before Sync and handling of previews, thumbnails, YT, links etc is a total mixed bag… There is at least one app that does each of the previews well, but there is no one app that does them all well 😂
Hey! I am an HVAC+R tech, commercial/residential scope. I can honestly tell you nobody’s HVAC will fail during regular hours. Most furnaces fail on the first -18°C night, and A/C always fail on the hotest days of the year (even if it was “fixed” last cooling season). And one certainty I have found in this industry, if the weather is insane (storms, +30° heatwave, -40° cold snap) I’ll be outside on a rooftop, fully exposed to the elements, fixing something that should have been addressed months ago. Regular maintenance & repairs can avoid 80% of failures, but industry needs to step up their quality of manufacture for equipment. Residential systems need to be built to spec, code, & SMACNA/ASHRAE standards. Not built to budget, and please dear god we need “builder spec” to get up to speed with modern equipment & standards! Rule of thumb is going the way of the Dodo bird.
There’s at least a grain of truth in that book. Try starting a business or producing something.
Look at domestic attempts to mine lithium or building semiconductor plants. Try building anything here.
“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”
Eniment domain doesn’t appear to be the problem here lmao
It’s more like
Try making a railroad when the industry has been captured by regulations written by the big players whose purpose is to erect barriers to entry for any new railroad companies that might want to start up, and reduce costs by reducing safety. Also, you need angel investors to give you billions and anyone with the means to do that is already in bed with the big boys so they’re not going to give you shit.
It is abundantly clear that we’re not talking about the details of the book anymore. We are talking about that one passage and how it relates to our current society.
The protagonist being in a privileged position due to government seisuze of private property is certainly an excellent point. I just feel the state exercising power in the other direction, against productive ventures instead of property owners, may be a little too in vogue these days.
What parts of her philosophy do you find to be lunacy?
“A man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions… He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer–because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement.”
Almost forgot:
“In this world, either you’re virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.”
The premise that some people are just better than everyone else is not intelligent. Valuing a person’s worth as a human by measuring their productivity is genocidal.
Some people are just better in terms of being productive. I don’t see how that’s debatable. The question is just if you let those people keep they’re outsized earnings or you forcibly redistribute them.
Productivity is difficult to measure or define. Intelligence is similar. Regardless, neither of these things define value in a human life. Some people love to cook, some are great at reading comic books. One might be really good at watching TV. In the end, your preference for what is seen as valuable comes to your preference. There’s nothing objective about it. More concretely, in many engineering jobs great engineers are promoted into management positions for which they are ill suited. They make more money, are they not definitionally more productive? Yet the company and team is worse off.
As for your question, Rand is not subtle about her thoughts.
Valuing a person’s worth as a human by measuring their productivity is genocidal.
Of course you don’t value people based on their productivity! That’s downright anti-American “from each according to his ability” commie talk! You value people based on their net worth! One Dollar, One Vote, that’s what I always say.
The same can be said about basically anything, that’s why you have a brain to evaluate what parts are grounded in the truth and what is a conclusion drawn from truth that serves the specific needs of whoever is spinning the narrative.
I’ve read all of Rand and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But not for the right reasons.
Coming from a background myself of community art > touring performance artist > clown/circus school > comedy and improv… I found things like “I’ma write a book where a character delivers a speech on capitalism longer than the communist manifesto” to be quite funny.
The way people spoke to each other, the ridiculous melodrama from the perspective of a soy bean stuck on a train, a community made from pure gold inside a hologram inside a volcano, how people can only have sex if they bite each other, the amazing lazzi (sketch) of the rich man accidentally giving a homeless man $100 bill instead of $1 and the homeless man not caring because it was an accident, the guy putting out a steel furnace in meltdown while naked with his bare hands…
I thought it was very funny. I chortled all the way through. a perfect 7/10.
It seems to me this passage speaks against the bankers, intellectual property owners, monopolists, land owners and the like. All gate keepers of resources.
Perhaps Atlas is actually someone else than Rand thought.
It speaks against a system where political favour dictates your success as a producer over your ability to compete. If you feel land owners and intellectual property owners are gate keepers in a society where your can have your own ideas and buy your own property I don’t know what to say.
The permits, policies, regulation and political apparatuses which Rand so despises are legal fictions which allow a small group of people control, who gets to use what resources and how.
Currencies, fractional reserve banking, patents and land ownership are similar legal fiction, which allow a small group to control who gets to use what resources and how.
If I want to sell razor blades to a Gillette razor, I will get sued for patent infringement. Is their gatekeepping somehow more morally valid than the politician’s who gives a tax break to Gillette’s competitor since their production line is in his city?
I was trying to humorously point out, that the quoted part of Rand’s text could be read almost as a socialist opinion, where the value created arises from the worker and not the owners.
I guess the difference being the people in control of permits and policies produce nothing of value. If a capitalist fails to produce he no longer holds the property or patents. Someone else gets them to try to compete.
The reason capitalism is moral is that the people who get the scarce resources need to be effective in providing for everyone else by creating or they lose them. Under a central planning system this is not the case. Scarce resources are held by connected people … The state bails them out if they really fuck up.
Nothing is stopping you from creating an improved Gillette razor and competing without blatenly copying their patent… Property is expensive but available (problem created by government with interest rate manipulation and making land one of the only viable hard assets) you can hire people for your factory. They’ll cost 10x what they do overseas though… So you’d probably just go there.
Man you won’t find me defending fractional reserve banking or fiat currency. Those are also things created by politicians and bankers. They’re just means of stealing value. You also can’t have socialism without fiat currency. The myth that you can rob the 1% to pay for the needs of everyone… Well do the math … Liquidate the 10 richest people and it funds the state for maybe a month or something.
Ah I didn’t get the joke I guess lol. I’m not really much of a fan of socialism. If companies can’t build without permits and tax breaks then you dont really have a level playing field anymore and you no longer have functional creative destruction. Old inefficient well connected incombants strangle the new razor corp in the crib and you’re stuck paying 35 dollars for blades :)
Yes the world would be a better place if people looking to profit in the world didn’t have to ensure that their products were safe, regulated, and taxed appropriately. Business owners should just be able to make their own rules.
Nah man I’d say that shit it stupid too. It’s difficult to build a lithium mine in the United States for pretty good reasons, especially surrounding regulation and safety.
Like most things it’s balance … No one wants the ecological damage of the 60s again. I’d say the vast majority of the things people are buying are imported from less regulated markets… Lead in the kids toys am I right? If things are produced here at least you can take those companies to court when they do harm.
Good reasons being ? I’ve seen projects cancelled due to a few arrow heads and tool parts being found … Massive overruns due to turtle eggs. Private companies just don’t build here if they can avoid it. Building and producing things is never perfectly safe and will always cause some ecological damage. The things we consume are actually built overseas in the most destructive and unregulated way possible mostly … Are they not?
It’s cheaper to mine lithium in other countries because the labor is cheaper, the labor is cheaper because we live in a country with a more advanced economy, that same economy became more advanced under more stringent regulations. Who gives a shit if they don’t mine lithium here when we designed the machines that mine lithium all over the world. There’s a reason people are beating down the doors to come here.
Some environmental impact is unavoidable. I think people are maybe a bit more aware and if I knew a company was being unnecessarily wreckless I’d personally not give them a dime. Also this is what lawsuits are for. These companies should be sued into nonexistence.
Why are domestic companies forced to compete on an uneven playing field like that? Why are companies able to just go abroad and import at very favourable rates. That’s profoundly unfair … But have you thought about what would happen to the cost of goods if there was an equal playing field? All the worst things are still done they just happen elsewhere.
I work in municipal development. You want to open a new business, build a house, or develop land in my city, you need my signature to do it.
I’m one of those officious pricks. I’m “the man” holding people down.
Because if I don’t then all these rich fucks pave over everything, flood their neighbor’s land, block traffic, poison their customers, and sell houses that’ll collapse 10 minutes after The warranty expires.
So yeah, people have to get our permission to do things that affect the community.
Because if I don’t then all these rich fucks pave over everything, flood their neighbor’s land, block traffic, poison their customers, and sell houses that’ll collapse 10 minutes after The warranty expires.
That already happened and continues to happen. Because corporations bribe the government to allow it. They call it lobbying. And you know this. The feigned ignorance is comical. Why do ISPs own the rights to public telephone poles and prevent municipal internet? Because people like you gave the ISPs those rights.
There’s a huge difference between a politician and a municipal employee. Our planners and engineers don’t take lobbying money, and our engineering criteria and building codes are based on physical reality, not policy.
In our city and many others, Council cannot force us to allow a particular development. They can sign all the agreements they want to waive use restrictions and fees, but the engineer and building official are still the final authority on whether or not something can be built, and their reviews do not consider politics.
Where I live approval on average takes a year or more. Permits alone can cost like 50k for a house. All of those things you’ve mentioned would result in court cases and awards …
Honestly even residential houses that are to code are sort of trash aren’t they? Like laminated wood chips and saw dust more and more every year.
How many other approvals are required above you to build? How long and at what cost ? Mostly curious. Here its pretty bad IMO. Here being Canada.
All of those things you’ve mentioned would result in court cases and awards …
For one, not necessarily, and two, small comfort if it happens after the fact when it could be avoided with some reasonable oversight. For example, screwing up erosion is something likely to be overlooked by parties involved and is at high risk of not being noticed naturally until after damage is difficult or impossible to undo. Besides, I think folks like it when matters like that are settled before they might incur liability.
Another example, I had some HVAC work done. The county inspectors highlighted a fire hazard after they were done, that I never would have realized unless the house caught fire.
Now where I live, permits aren’t overly expensive and are fairly expedient as are inspections. I can understand frustrations if there’s no effort at reasonable efficiencies, but then again some projects require community fair chance to become aware and provide feedback, and those sorts of projects can really drag out the time since it’s mostly waiting to give a chance for it to be noticed.
Like you say avoiding liability is in everyone’s interest. In a utopian libertarian society maybe an inspector someone you’d want to pay electively like an engineer.
Someone who could coordinate consultations with surrounding properties and engage others who are experts with say surface water etc.
The other option might be your insurance company would require inspection for you to receive coverage… In the event of say an HVAC electrical fire. Then the cost is certifying the build is covered by a private company instead of being a state operated service which is free from the pressures of competition. Also then delays in permitting could also incur liability :)
In reality if permitting is quick, affordable and isn’t weilded like a political weapon Im mostly fine with it. The federal government is using it to pretty much shut down oil and gas development in Canada. Municipal permitting is partly why we have a massive housing crisis.
Houses are largely built by shell companies that exist to build the neighborhood then dissolve. When the house fails in 5 years there’s nobody to sue for damages.
So instead we require developers to permit and build shit right before we allow the houses to be occupied. The streets have to be built right, the increased impervious cover has to be accounted for to prevent flooding of the next property over, and inspections have to be performed.
Then, we make them pay a maintenance bond and the City takes over maintenance of the road, using the bond to pay for repairs in the first 10 years. If they build them right, the bonds don’t get used, and we give the money back.
But to get the money back they have to keep the company alive, so there’s someone to sue.
And the permit to build a house is about $3,500 here. I ran the numbers for our budget cycle, and we actually lose money on single family houses. We make it up some with commercial buildings, but overall our department loses money, and people building houses are being subsidized by the existing tax payers while bitching about the fees.
I am an engineer. I love making things. I work in a heavily regulated industry (Med device), and it is a huge pain in the ass. I have to fill out obscene amounts of paperwork for everything I do. I live in the woods with a well and a septic system. I am hoping to disconnect from the electric grid in a few years.
I bought into rugged individualism when I was younger, but I have come to realize it is a farce. I am really glad there is the structure and oversight for these things that can harm people. Complex systems require diverse areas of expertise and multiple layers of oversight and protection.
The sentiment that it is some great burden to “obtain permission from men who do nothing” is a blatant strawman for what the processes actually are.
It’s a dump truck full of truthful sand. Cities can’t build municipal fiber internet because Spectrum owns the fucking pole. The assertion that this is an “environmental protection” is so insulting that my comment would be deleted if I told you what I really think about you.
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