I think this example illustrates very well how detached from reality the stock market is: Truth Social is not an important social media platform and will probably never make a profit. Nevertheless, one can make an absurd amount of money with such a bogus company - but unfortunately only if one has the right friends and belongs to their circles.
In this sense, one almost has to be grateful to Trump because he makes the functional logic of this rotten system so obvious.
To put in perspective how detached from reality Trump Media’s stock price is, the Truth Social platform’s total revenue is about the same as a single McDonald’s location.
Despite this, the company has a market cap of almost 5 billion. That is completely insane.
Sorry to say, but this one goes well beyond the current fuckery of the existing Stock Market.
This is the biggest money laundering scheme ever run in public view. The only thing propping up any price for Truth SOcial are those with a vested interest in paying off The Donald and putting the GOP in power; Saudia Arabia and Russia - with just a splash of China. Follow the money.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
The bad guys since high school and in countless tales and yet still in governments and corner suites and at pulpits: weaponizes it
You know who you are: treats it all like team sportsthinks is playeris ball
I think this is a great comment and I extend the same thinking to the bullshit/ magical thinking people engage in around science/ medicine denial-ism, new age mysticism, and conspiratorial thinking/ I’d rather believe a good story modes of thinking.
100% its a part of our political system, but as Asimov states, its in our cultural life as well, and I have no patience for it. I call it out when I see it and if that makes me the ass hole, so be it. Its a burden I’ll bear to have conversations grounded in reality or not at all.
Also an exmo. I don’t believe 67% attend weekly. That is massively overstated. I’ve read estimates from John Dehlin maybe? It’s been a while) of 33% activity rate, which means attending once a month.
So, are they lying for the Lord, or maybe the poll is flawed, or the Church reports membership differently than the poll respondents did? Could be any or all, LOL.
For the poll being flawed, it was a telephone poll, and while they’ve tried to capture more cell phone numbers, you still have to answer and be willing to engage:
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews from combined surveys conducted in 2021-2023, with an aggregate random sample of 32,445 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia
I think the flaw is that “attendance” is self reported. Mormons know they are supposed to attend, and there’s no harm is saying that they do to a pollster. There’s no way for the pollster to validate that.
Mormons only have around a 30% activity rate to what their records say or 3 out of 10. Right in line with the rest of them.
So if we assume that 55% of those don’t attend do not associate the corrupt organization known as the Mormon church on the poll. Then 67% of the remaining 45% is 30%. The 15% who associate but don’t attend are jackmo’s.
More than you’d think. Many people base their entire social lives around their church. All of their friends go to the church. They spend a lot of time doing church activities and church events.
And in this very lonely world, even though I’m an atheist, I can’t really blame them.
Yeah, the high school I went to required at least one semester of religious studies each year, but we had some very cool classes (like a class on cults that included looking at early Christianity through the lens of a cult), and the sociological aspects were massive. In fact, the journals relating to religion with the highest impact factor are all sociological based.
The social component of religion is an underappreciated factor and influential over even the beliefs usually.
All that said, I can’t fathom ever obligating myself to a pre-noon social gathering on my weekends by choice. Even Sunday ‘brunch’ was only ever attended if around 1pm.
If rewriting the rules for church anyways, let’s at least add mimosas and have it start way later than it does.
There was partly an attempt at humor in my original comment, but Mormon services and activities in particular are long, boring, and motivate with a stick at least as much as a carrot.
Adams knows it won’t be easy running as a Democrat for the House in the deep red northwestern corner of Montana. The district covers northern Lincoln County, a mecca for militia members or sympathizers and doomsday preppers. Republican Donald Trump won 74% of the county vote in the 2020 presidential race.
While Adams’ campaign may look like a fruitless undertaking, he doesn’t see it that way. For him it’s a chance to tell his own story — that of an “honest weirdo” who emerged from a traumatic childhood to find his own way in life. It’s also a chance to make the case for his own vision of how democracy and personal responsibility intertwine.
You never truly know whether somebody would be good or not ahead of time, but I initially feel good about a person who is interested in politics who seems to actually think of themselves as “honest”.
That’s the same bit I was gonna quote. I kinda think he should run somewhere more favorable, but if he thinks he can win over people of a similar background, I support it.
You joke, but this was possibly a surprisingly smart callback to the fall of the USSR when Boris Yeltsin visited American grocery stores in 1989. Unlike Yeltsin, though, The World’s Oldest Boy-Idiot didn’t bother visiting more stores for even the mildest investigative reasons.
For a guy who is always “just asking questions,” Fucker Charlatan has absolutely zero curiosity. If this professionally competitive shit-eater ever said anything of substance, I’d be worried that his shocked and angered discovery of - checks notes - cheap groceries in an invading country could actually mean something to anyone other than the dumbest 13% of his base.
Biden ain’t winning a rematch unfortunately. Dems need to go further left or risk losing yet again. At this point I’m convinced Biden is trying to lose.
I feel like the media might actually be helping Bidens chances by broadcasting the very obvious bad things Trump plans on doing in office that he has said. Most Dems probably dont give a shit about Gaza so, while we have a problem with it, they dont.
2016 was an outlier, not the new normal. What about 2020, when Biden defeated Trump? How many people will switch from Biden to Trump? Compare that with the Hailey voters who tell pollsters their prepared to do the opposite. How many people who turned 18 since 2020 are going to vote for Trump? Compare that to the number of Trump voters who died since 2020.
Trump won in 2016 by motivating people who never voted before to turn out. Compare that to the “excitement” and novelty of his current campaign.
The national and state Republican committees are under Trump control. But they’re also broke. The big Republican pockets don’t want to donate to a party that actively attacks and excludes them as “establishment” just so that their money can pay Trump’s legal bills. There are real questions about how much of a campaign the RNC can run for Trump, much less down-ballot people.
I suppose it just goes to show you don’t really need to have a lot going on upstairs to be a firefighter. Anyone who still supports Trump at this point needs examining for lead poisoning
The uninformed and stupid and then there’s mind numbingly idiotic
Insinuating that an individual’s turn to trumpism/fascism is due to lead or stupidity completely disregards the decades of regulatory capture, dismantling of social safety nets, financial strain, alienation, and liberal capitalism that ultimately promotes fascism.
If you don’t abandon this mode of thinking quickly, you’re going to find yourself more and more confused as more people start turning fascist. The only explanation via your current framework is “well, I guess these millions of people must just be… dumb”. This is the danger of liberal thinking - it doesn’t address the cause of fascism or how to kill it. If your framework were correct, we’d see volumes of work that show how lower IQ directly correlates with fascistic tendencies: obviously we know that idea is not only ableist but also incorrect.
The marxist critique actually takes into account the economic systems and structures that lead to fascism.
We do see that. Education level is a good predictor of voting intention the higher the education level the greater the chance you are going to vote liberal. This isn’t just a thing in the United States this is the thing across the world.
The right prey on fear of the different fear of something that you don’t understand and there’s a lot more you don’t understand if you’re not well educated.
No, we don’t see “that”. You won’t be able to find me any science that shows a direct correlation between intelligence and fascistic tendencies. I think you are blurring the line between intelligence and education. Think back to the german liberal universities that, once the nazis started infiltrating, folded faster than superman doing laundry.
Strengthening education as a means to minimize fascism is not at all incompatible with the marxist viewpoint. It meshes extremely well, in fact.
It’s really hard to not think of people who consistently vote against their own best interests as not dumb. Democrats aren’t the pro-Union, pro-blue-collar champions they used to be, but they’re a damned sight better than the “trickle-down” Republicans. And Democrats have long foreseen the demise of the coal industry and other low-wage industries in the US, and while they haven’t consistently found good solutions to the issues, they’ve done more than ignore the problem and pretend it doesn’t exist.
The Republican party have been lying rat-fucks since Reagan who dissemble and displaced the blame for blue-collar woes, which lets them come up with “solutions” that only line the pockets of special interests. And, again: yes, the Democratic party has had it’s share of weasels, failures, and terrible messaging, but comparing the two parties is like saying chocolate and shit are both brown and are therefore equivalent. And you do have to be a special kind of stupid to not see that.
That said, your point about making that the message (“Trumpers are stoopid”) is on point; it does not help the left. But god damn it, it’s true and it’s also OK to recognize that.
This is institutional investors driving up price and then pulling out. Bitcoin is propped up by absolutely nothing other than betting. It has no use outside holding a value. Someone will be a bag holder. It’s just a matter of time.
I begrudgingly hold BTC, waiting for the halving in 38 days when all my coins double.
At least Monero (which is actually private like cash - sender, receiver, and amount aren’t known to anyone viewing the blockchain) has a valuable function.
I can’t wait to see companies like Visa and Mastercard become obsolete. I think it will really help out my aunt’s family business by cutting crazy high transaction fees she has to pay as a vendor.
That’s layer 1. Read up on layer 2 options. Lightning Network is the best current example, but there are others and will be more. That’s where most of the innovation is happening now. The media never talks about it because it’s necessarily more technical and they think their readers/viewers are all idiots, so why bother.
Or does the media never talk about it because the whole thing is confusing as fuck, there are about a bajillion different coins and no one knows which one to use, and there has yet to be an advantage (and often a big hurdle) to use any of these cyrptocurrencies to do things like buy a gallon of milk.
We hear a lot about how it’s better than “fiat” currency, and yet if I want to go down to the gas station and get a soda, I can pay for that soda with exactly zero cryptocurrencies unless I convert them into dollars first.
Maybe if crypto people ever get their act together, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, this will be more than people investing in digital tulips.
But hey, the local mall here has a Bitcoin ATM. In an entrance almost no one ever uses in a corner of the food court where there are no restaurants and you wouldn’t even notice it unless you happened to walk past it and look at the front panel to see what it was (I only noticed it because my daughter is in online school and still has to do gym and we walk the perimeter of the mall in the winter). So there’s that.
I didn’t miss out at something I was never interested in to begin with.
Also, I have no interest in helping you with your tulips.
Also, Bitcoin ATMs are a massive rip-off and PITA.
Huh. Maybe this whole “fiat currency” thing isn’t the worst idea then. I can get it out of my bank’s ATM from the U.S. dollars in my checking account, they are accepted everywhere in the U.S. And the bank doesn’t charge me anything.
Also, Bitcoin ATMs are a massive rip-off and PITA.
Huh. Maybe this whole “fiat currency” thing isn’t the worst idea then. I can get it out of my bank’s ATM from the U.S. dollars in my checking account, they are accepted everywhere in the U.S. And the bank doesn’t charge me anything.
Maybe you didn’t comprehend the part where I said Bitcoin ATMs are a massive ripoff. I can buy any cryptocoin sitting on my couch at nearly 0% fees, versus the 5-10% the ATMs charge. Like the 2.5-5% fiat ATMs charge. Credit cards are also a massive rip off. Are you out here campaigning against fiat because fiat ATMs and credit cards are a massive rip off, and cash/gift card scams steal more than crypto scams?
Mass. Adoption.
The (current) lack of it is the only reason it’s such a pain to get into.
But no worries, my entire back fence is littered with tulips of every color, I don’t need any more 😉. I’ll take a picture when I get home.
I can buy any cryptocoin sitting on my couch at nearly 0% fees
Cool. How can you buy a soda at the gas station with it?
The (current) lack of it is the only reason it’s such a pain to get into.
Maybe, again, if there weren’t a bajillion different cryptocurrencies that almost no one even understands how to use, there would be mass adoption. I have no idea why you expect mass adoption of something so confusing to happen first and then it gets less confusing. That’s not how anything works.
Cool. How can you buy a soda at the gas station with it?
I can’t yet unless I go to a couple smaller foreign mom and pop shops, lack of mass adoption.
Maybe, again, if there weren’t a bajillion different cryptocurrencies that almost no one even understands how to use, there would be mass adoption. I have no idea why you expect mass adoption of something so confusing to happen first and then it gets less confusing. That’s not how anything works.
A few are dominant already, one that’s been dominant from the start but isn’t the best yet although is improving. Do you worry about the value and exchange rates of every single mineral and resource, of which there are a bajillion? Or do you just follow maybe gold and silver, or do you only follow fiat, and not even invest it?
Edit: Since you down voted all of my discussion, I returned the favor.
You can use Coinbase or another similar intermediary to convert it to fiat instantly by using the card that comes with those services but still converting it to fiat isn’t quite the same as using DOGE coin or the like to buy groceries and I do hear you on that. However , man personally I have made thousands off of crypto. I do like some projects for their utility like Monero and Litecoin but a large percentage of so called “alt” coins and stuff like that don’t have any real utility beyond pumping so that’s true and I feel like a lot of what makes crypto seem like a waste of time to people. But certain coins have real inherent value and use cases that are beyond what people like me and you probably need. Those use cases are still important to the people who need them though. El Salvador is a good example everyone shit all over that dude for doing mass adoption of bitcoinand for ainute there it did seem like a rough idea but it worked out. I guess that’s the thing though everyone who has been in it from the beginning its because it keeps working out. Otherwise, everyone would be out of it and venture capitalist companies wouldn’t be buying in the billions. I mean, would you listen to people of they told you something you were up like 700% on was a bad investment?
I knew a dude back in '07 who was real into stocks. Always trying to get me into it and always about it. Checking charts all the time. He ended up losing real bad and killed himself. What is your opinion on stocks?
But stocks are a respectable trade and Crypto isn’t? I noticed you said people who make money on crypto are assholes, do you feel the same way for stockholders? Its just interesting that something you don’t like affects every aspect of your life (stocks, and the influence they have on bigger businesses to flourish and add value to our economy). Imagine your world without stocks. That new phone and computer probably wouldn’t be here, as a small example. Stocks are no different than Bitcoin other than one isn’t connected to a country. But saying neither have value isn’t telling the truth.
But stocks are a respectable trade and Crypto isn’t?
Please quote me saying that.
do you feel the same way for stockholders?
People who have their 401ks invested for them? No. People who play the stock market to get rich? Yes.
I have nothing but contempt for people whose goal it is to increase their material wealth through gambling. Especially the sort of gambling that will likely never really pay off unless you had plenty of wealth to begin with.
Material wealth as a goal is bad enough to begin with. Rich people making themselves richer by gambling their money on things like the stock market and cryptocurrency are not people I respect.
The products you consume and use on a daily basis (the proprietary chips in your phone and computer for example) only exist because they made money for shareholders. In other words if those rich people weren’t making money on the stocks, the need for innovation would have never been to the point it is at now. And as far as the quote goes that was a question but I can quote where you said that dude avoided “being an asshole” for not making money in something you didn’t like (bitcoin). Are you aware that business and free trade as a whole would be completely different without that same market that you hate? Why then call people assholes for investing in things? The venom just doesnt make sense. Also investing your 401K means requiring the services of these same rich folks you are against making money. Just doesn’t make sense.
Yes, I’ve heard all that nonsense about how capitalism and rich people are essential for humanity’s survival before.
The things I consume and use on a daily basis could be made by corporations owned by the people who work for them, not owned by people whose sole intent is to enrich themselves.
Not for humanity, but for the new IPhone plus max 12K whatever the fuck comes out next, yes absolutely. And a worker owned factory would have never had the same level of innovation that the stock market has brought us here. Otherwise all the “worker owned” (lol) factories and countries wouldn’t be trying to steal our shit all the time. The AI chips and all that shit would have never been, at least this soon, without making shareholders money. I hate it too dude I agree its fucked. But that plane you linked would still be a prototype in a military factory somewhere never seen by civillians if it hadn’t been in a position to make tons of money to have it available to the public. I knwo that sucks dude, but that is the truth. To deny it is to lie to yourself. I will say that stocks serve a greater function than crypto there’s no doubt to that. But to say one is a big scheme designed to fuck the little guy but the other one isn’t is just false. So why can one be celebrated and welcomed by society (otherwise people sure wouldn’t spend money on the new IPhone 12K whatever) and the other one people be called an asshole instantly if they think “man wouldn’t it have been cool to have been in on that?”
The phone thing directly affects competition in the proprietary chip market which affects the phone or laptop or other electronic device you are using to comment on here. The entire system and way of life you live is directly tied to the success of the stock market and in turn economy that system produces. And yes I am very invested in feeding my child, gotta have money to do that. I truly envy those who have never been homeless and have always had family and support to help them, maybe those people wouldn’t understand the value of money the same way because they never had to steal for their food or starve. By the way, after I made this argument Bitcoin surpassed silver to become the 8th most valuable asset in the entire world. More than Coca Cola and Pepsi COMBINED. Being upset about it or wishing it didn’t exist won’t make it go away
“Capitalism affects everything around me that I use daily” is the actual argument. And it does that through the stock market which you said yourself is like a gamble of money. But no, Bitcoin is the problem and everyone’s just an asshole if they trade it or make money on it is what you had said to that dude. But not the hedge fund worker you give your 401K to?
I don’t disagree with anything you said. Yes, it’s confusing and there’s no shortage of scammers trying to make it more confusing in order to bamboozle people.
My humble advice is to ignore “crypto”. Adopt, at least for now, the philosophy that, “it’s either Bitcoin, or shit coin.” That’ll simplify things immensely for those just getting started, and is true for at least 99.9% of other coins out there (100% if you want my honest opinion).
Maybe, in the distant future, when/if you decide to dive down the rabbit hole and really get comfortable how Bitcoin functions and what gives it value, then you’ll be in a better position to judge other coins. More likely, you won’t bother because you won’t need to.
But, mark my words, nothing is going to replace Bitcoin. Some other coins might manage to fulfill some esoteric fringe use cases that Bitcoin doesn’t, and maybe one those use cases will be beneficial to you. If so, awesome. But they’re not going to be able to replace Bitcoin.
Layer 2 protocols are tools that operate on top of the (admittedly slow and variable) Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning Network (LN) is currently the most prominent and allows secure transactions that complete in a few seconds with extremely small fees. LN addresses the “it’s too slow/unpredictable” argument against Bitcoin.
There are many other Layer 2 protocols running on top of Bitcoin in various stages of development and production addressing different issues and use cases. But, you don’t need to know about any of them, honestly. You don’t need to pick the winner (there will be many winners doing different things). When any of them catch on and go mainstream, then that will drive more demand for Bitcoin to help power that protocol.
Also they love to act as though fiat isn’t backed by anything despite the fact that fiat is actually backed by something extremely important: you are required by law to use fiat for interactions with some of the most powerful organizations in the world. I can’t pay taxes in crypto or gold or even rubles, my government accepts usd and if I don’t hand them usd every year I get in trouble. When they pay me for any reason it’s in usd. When they fine me it’s in usd. That is a backing. So long as I have to financially deal with the governments of the United States I have to have appropriate quantities of usd. And because of all of this everything around me accepts that currency, even drug dealers take cash. Why? Because it’s the local currency. And it’s reasonably stable.
And on that note, I’d never spend a wildly inflationary currency. It’s not an effective currency and because of that it winds up being entirely theoretical.
Monero (which is actually private like cash - sender, receiver, and amount aren’t known to anyone viewing the blockchain) has transaction fees of a penny or two. It works by mixing every real transaction with 16 decoy transactions. Currently there are supposedly ways to track a small percentage of transactions but it’s so secretive that only approved western government organizations are allowed access, but it doesn’t work well and it only gives a statistical probability. And it’s one of the wider used currencies current at $145 per coin.
The government hates not being able to track you.
Also BTC fees do suck but they vary. Most days they’re around $1-$1.50 which isn’t that far off from the $.50 charged (to businesses) by credit card processors.
Holy shit how are Boe Jiden’s consumer protection agencies so based all day long? Not only do we have this EXCELLENT SHIT from the CFPB, we also get the constant anti-trust lawsuits from QUEEN Lina Khan, who is making the FTC relevant again!
Antitrust has been dead for generations, and for the first time in my+grandparents lifetime we see the government trying to reign in the travesty that is American corporatism. Fuck damn I love to see it!
Also capped insulin prices and old people drugs. The man is speedrunning pothole legislation, oh yeah and he literally fucking made a national pothole fixing Bill.
Biden is definitely going down like Carter where 2 decades later everyone benefits from his presidency and are like “fuck he was actually pretty good”.
Let’s just assume for a moment, just for the sake of argument, that Hamas is so dangerous that it needs to be completely rooted out of Gaza and destroyed with a massive amount of force. Let’s even assume that every able-bodied Gazan adult is a member of Hamas.
These girls are trying to feed starving children.
Once again, we are expected to believe that children are extremely dangerous Hamas fighters.
Or, if this has anything to do with money raised by selling cookies, it could be catastrophic for GSA. The cookie money has to go toward supporting GSA’s primary charitable endeavors, educating and enriching girls in America or whatever their mission statement is. If cookie money starts being used to fund something else, the IRS can treat it the cookie money as “unrelated business income,” and start taxing it, and also the cookie enterprise would be subject to labor laws, which I think would probably be the end of GSA, given their dependence on unpaid child labor.
I thought that was cool so I read the wikipedia page you linked…and that’s not what he did.
Carnegie’s funds covered only the library buildings themselves, and Carnegie gave library buildings to cities on the condition that the cities stocked and maintained them
He built the buildings but required the cities to pay for the upkeep. We want it the other way around. The libraries already exist but someone has to pay to keep them running.
I live in GA. From what I can tell, the people that use the libraries here absolutely love them (myself included). Even in this relatively small city, the libraries in this network are fairly well funded and have the more modern awesome stuff going on that proper city libraries have.
That being said, I don’t recall a time in the last decade when I was one of more than 4 or so member of the public in there at any time. It sucks. A lot. I guess that my point here is that you’re unfortunately likely correct, but those of us that use or need our surprisingly good libraries will fight tooth and nail to keep them as well as maintain the standards they currently have.
The overall concensus in my area is that libraries are great, but nobody uses them, and the asshats in power will (and have before) see that and try to take the systems down for meaningless budget cuts.
If you haven’t considered it yourself, see if you can work with the library on a publicity campaign. The library here offers “We [heart] our library” signs for people’s lawns. They get people into a city-wide book read every year and give out free copies of the book to whoever wants them. This year, it’s The Martian. See what services your library might offer like 3D printing or even just free xeroxing and faxing and see what you can do with informing local social media groups.
My wife is a public library administrator here in Indiana and I would be happy to talk to her about more ideas if you want them.
I know that they have cheap (not free, you pay for materials) 3D printing and the ability to print from anywhere directly to the Library. They even have regular ttrpg sessions held there. I’ll see what they have as far as promotional/advicacy stuff goes. I’ll contact the library first before I bug you (and indirectly your wife) since they may already have some good stuff set up. Thanks for being willing to help!
No problem, I am very happy to help promote libraries. I think they’re one of the country’s most vital resources even if lots of people don’t take advantage of them.
They said a provision in Judge Arthur Engoron’s Feb. 16 ruling that bans Trump, his company, and co-defendants from obtaining loans from New York banks for three years would make it impossible for him to obtain a bond covering the full judgment.
So you’re not a fucking billionaire, you demented shitweasel. Got it.
Can you believe the nerve? “Judge, I know part of the reason I’m in hot water is because I lied through my fucking teeth to banks to get them to give me loans, but now that I can’t get loans anymore, I’m outta money, and that’s totes unfair, so can I pretty please get loans again?”
Yeah, if you have billions in assets, you can liquidate some of them to pay up. The only way you are unable to pay is if your assets are not actually worth enough.
Yup and we already see more colon cancer in young adults which makes sense if we’re eating microplastics. Obviously there’s a lot more that goes into it, but microplastics surely aren’t helping
Is there actual data saying that it increases cancer risk? Everything I’m finding says that we have no studies (or enough data) to say what the health impacts actually are.
Edit: I see some of the sources listed further down. Going through them.
One thing I did find while searching - plastics in bottled water are 20x higher than tap water. Yet another reason to quit buying so many damn plastic bottles
And ipads in every kids hand, given by inattentive parents, actively robbing them of “developing literacy” time.
Kids are supposed to be able to read prior to coming to elementary school. It’s expected, with minimal classroom time, by 1st grade, they’re reading full blown books. That’s fallen by the wayside.
At its root, this is a social problem. When people make barely enough money to subsist they don’t really rate “developing literacy time” very high on their hierarchy of needs.
It’s more than just telling parents “work less and read to your child,” especially if there’s nothing to fall back on to pay for child care that’s impossible to find for even those unburdened by poverty, or paying half of every check to rent, or the enormous rising cost of groceries.
When it comes down to the most brass of tacks, any parent would find it patronizing as fuck to be told they are failing their children because they have to work themselves to death instead of having the luxury of free time. And, of course, they understand that.
Strong social safety nets and support are what we need anyway, whether or not we’re parents.
“Kids are dumb because iPads, they should be reading instead.”
Ah yes, sorry I forgot you cannot read anything on an iPad. Ever since Apple outlawed reading back in 1997, we’ve been on a downhill slide to unga bunga caveman times.
I see your point, an iPad is a tool like any other, but FWIW, I ain’t never seen a little kid read on an iPad for fun. Arguably a parenting problem, but also kids games are juiced to the max.
Can’t blame the technology itself for the lack of oversight from parents. Put a lock on the games, limit play time, or better yet give your kids a monthly allowance for an e-reader app. Make them excited to read.
Why can’t you blame the technology as well? It’s quite literally designed to be a trivial but addicting experience. Good parents can obviously circumvent the issue, but on a societal level it’s inevitable that millions of kids end up glued to electronic devices at a critical time when they should be developing other skills.
Car tires are a major source of microplastics, making up 28% of the microplastics found in the ocean.
So yeah, cars fucking us over again. It seems to correlate to cancer and IBS, so not as much making us in to boomers more just killing us and making our lives less pleasant. Thanks again auto industry.
This seems like the worst of both worlds — we still get massive suburban sprawl that prevents walkable cities and the density needed for good public transport, but without the perks of a larger house.
Having read this the other day, it seems the lots for them are smaller so it’s still better than typical suburban sprawl, but yeah not by very much. It’s like duplexes, just without the shared walls.
At the same time, I totally understand the logic of the buyers. Condos and apartments really aren’t the same as having your own property that nobody really has say over but you. You can’t make big changes to a condo without approval of the building owner or whatever even though you “own it”, you share walls, and have no yard.
It’s just one more piece to the puzzle, it’s not meant to be -the-solution, just one of many.
Condos and apartments really aren’t the same as having your own property that nobody really has say over but you.
For a normal-sized lot, I agree — but based on the photo in the article, the lot is basically nonexistent. There’s barely enough room for a lawn chair. This feels more like wanting the outward trappings of a detached house without any of the tangible benefits.
If they had gone for proper rowhouses, they could’ve increased the size of the homes and kept the back yards, all for the price of sharing a wall with your neighbors’ houses. Or maybe not even that, as there are rowhouses that have individual walls separated by a few inches while all sharing the same foundation.
I’d definitely prefer that, personally, but I think that would be a tough sell in most of the US at this particular point in society. Especially when most construction of new homes isn’t really urban so people don’t feel the space confinement the way they would in a more urban setting (they just look past the row homes and go “well that field could be housing so I don’t want this”), and with the sprawling layout of suburbs, they would feel super out of place to the point where I bet NIMBY mentality would prevent it.
Perhaps if that was a more normal option here, but it’s pretty uncommon for now.
I agree, but I was surprised to see on the Wikipedia article for townhouses/rowhouses examples of what are apparently recent suburb developments of townhouses in the US. Things might finally be shifting back to some semblance of logic. Though, developments like the one in the article are valid evidence to the contrary…
That would be great! I’d love to be wrong about this one.
I really dislike the “shove them in smaller boxes” idea this seems to have to it, similar to the tiny house “movement” (which actively makes me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons), but in areas that don’t have basements or whatever, where it’s a house on a slab no matter how big, where people just have this “must have freestanding structure to fully own it” mentality (which in a lot of cases is legit, but if we planned for it could easily be handled). This is an option.
Just my own curiosity, and you seem fun to talk to; where you are from, are your foundations accessible spaces, or are you in a slab foundation swampy area? I ask because I’m from a “has basements” area, where the foundation of the house actually adds space to it. I assume most row houses have basement spaces, because you tend to find them in densely populated areas that existed before modern conveniences like refrigeration and roads. So maybe you’d need a basement to store preserved goods. I doubt there’s space on average to have that in the main space right? (Legit asking, idk, maybe space isn’t right, but root cellars have different conditions, cooler.)
But I lived down in Texas for a while and a lot of their land you can’t build basements on because it’s really flood prone, so it’s literally just floating concrete slabs on land with houses atop. Honestly if you are going to put houses on that, you might as well do it this way and maximize the space between them with native shade plants to use up the moisture.
I’m in Massachusetts, and we kinda have a mix of everything. I live in a condo on a concrete slab that was built in the 70s as a neighborhood of duplexes rather than what people think of today when they think of condos, while my parents’ house has an unfinished, root cellar style basement in a flood zone, and a friend of mine recently moved back into his mom’s furnished basement a stone’s throw from where I live. There’s a house near my parents that even had to put their front lawn up several feet with a concrete foundation so that they could put in the septic system above the aquifer.
As for rowhouses, I don’t know much about them, but I assume that they’re usually on a slab with no basement because they usually have 2 households in them with 2 separate entrances for them. The more fancy townhouses you see, like the brownstones in NYC or the ones in Boston, might have basements since they were built for the wealthy and are single family homes that even had servant’s quarters, but I’ve never been in one to see. There’s a cool section of Boston with townhouses that was originally built to attract the wealthy, and there’s streets behind the buildings simply named Alley #1, Alley #2, etc. because they were only built to allow the servants to move out of sight of the wealthy.
Understandable, but they could’ve built detached rowhouses and got like 50% more space by getting rid of those gates to the backyard and building up to the edge of the lots. And if developers didn’t cheap out on the construction (asking for a lot, I know), it wouldn’t be an issue anyways. I live in a condo that’s a duplex built in the 70s and I hear people out on the street, noise from a nearby construction yard, and gunfire at the range a quarter mile from here far more often than I hear my neighbor.
These are some of the kinds of things your neighbor can do that will affect your life or your property when you share a wall. Even 6 feet or a couple of meters separation between houses can save you from every single one of the things I listed above.
Yes, except these have none of the advantages of townhouses (higher density, lower construction cost) and to make up for the cost of those shortcomings they are far smaller than a typical townhouse. These houses are the residential version of Elon’s Hyperloop — something that looks cool at fist glance but gets increasingly nonsensical the more you think about it.
Zoning laws aren’t the only thing holding back these things. Their just a tool used to create literal divisions between classes. Areas can remove our change zoning until the cows come home. But without the political and financial will to create environmentally sound, affordable, and community focused housing all you’ll get is the exact opposite of your original goal.
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