Feels a little like an Eldritch corporation that doesn’t totally understand humanity, but produces simple guides to existence in a an effort to ease the suffering of our poor squalid souls.

Yeah, I could see the financial value dropping, with businesses less willing to pay as much for harvested data, but I don’t see a point in time where they don’t attempt harvest every last piece of data on the off chance somebody wants it though. Advertisers paid insane amounts of money for targeted information, but even Google’s seen a huge contraction in their advertising revenue.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t frantically trying to harvest data more aggressively (just recently tried to bake it into the internet itself), just that our data is getting cheaper.

US military bases usually count as US territory subject to our laws, the difference between UCMJ charges for K2 possession/trafficking and South Korea’s is enormous. Normally this would have been handled in house.

Yeah, I thought it was really neat at first, but it became pretty concerning once they started playing whack-a-mole with the compounds. Probably one of the few situations I also agree with the DEA, though, that’s partially contingent on legalizing marijuana instead so there’s no reason to deal with all these loopholes for people that just wanna get high. Just let them do it safely.

I mean, sure, but raiding two military bases and facing 5 years to life for having some vape juice and a couple ounces of synthetic marijuana spread across twenty some people is absurd. Especially when places are steadily legalizing marijuana.

Well, it’s a cluster of synthetic cannabinoids, but it was officially banned by the DEA after they finally skipped past the banning specific molecules and banned the entire family of cannabinoids, so it’s no longer the molecule of the month special.

Still not ideal though.

For real, I knew a guy that kept an ounce as his daily supply. As in, he’d set aside an ounce each day for casual smoking with friends. This whole four month raid was over three days of heavy college smoking. The demonization of marijuana is such a ridiculous waste, and leads to weird stuff like selling K2, which is a shittier version of weed, with actual risks as you can overdose on K2.

God gave us four fingers and a thumb, so we can properly hold mice by their fluffy little tum.

… Why does Saddam Hussein have an enormous erection?

Y2K: Passed ✅

2038: “Wanna see me do it again?”

Ha ha, well I have absolutely no faith that we will collectively solve that unless 32 bit systems stop working on their own before then. If Y2K happened again today, there’d be a handful of companies handed billions of dollars to fix everything, and it’d wind up half done with demands for more money.

Bro.

The first set were, in order, a deep dive on an investment firm and their impact on residential property, the impact of private equity on multi-family residential property, the broad spectrum impact of investors on the residential market, another article on investors driving up home prices, homebuilders drawing down production and waiting out customers at the same price, and the last is a global perspective on the housing crisis by the World Economic Forum.

If you actually read them, you’d recognize literally everything I’ve said. I get skipping the article on Blackstone, because it’s an actual research article, but it details how Blackstone and Invitation Home would buy entire neighborhoods and then use that foundation to manipulate home and rent prices in the entire area, further improving their return on profits.

The one in the last comment was “Capitalism just working” during the pandemic lol. Which is half a joke, but to not see the relevance of the others is just wilful ignorance.

By selling what they’ve built? They don’t make any money while building. I don’t expect you to read all of the links I offered, but at least skim them lol. Slowing completions and reducing starts keeps per unit profits high, as the alternative, cutting prices and accelerating completions and increasing starts boosts revenue but reduces per-unit profits. Small construction outfits have no choice other than continuing to work, but the larger ones can just slow expenses and refuse to move on price until they’re purchased.

Capitalism just tries to make as much money as possible. That’s only a benefit when human well-being and profit are aligned, and otherwise just inevitably results in monopolies if we let it.

Have another source https://archive.is/tosob

Sure lol, the builders definitely aren’t profit driven organizations that operate based on market forces. It’s not some insidious thing, just a natural function of capitalism.

But yeah, we can at least agree on the YIMBYism. Out of everything, it at least provides a path forward that people can affect.

*gasp*

But that would cost money! Think of the investors!

I have, and I’m not making absurd claims. Zoning issues (including NIMBY) are directly tied to housing values, with the restrictions on construction intended to prevent home values from dropping. They do this by reducing the development of supply in the area. Home builders reduce the number of housing starts and completions take longer when housing prices dip, this constrains supply until demand boils over and purchases new housing. Investment groups buy, rent, and occasionally sell residential properties and the wealth they control allows them to influence market rates and lobby against market reforms.

This isn’t some conspiracy theory about how it’s a massive organized anti-consumer effort, because it’s not. What it is, is a series of natural market forces that all come together to sustain the problem because it’s incredibly profitable, and any solution would immediately cut into that profitability. There’s no direction to go that doesn’t “harm” either builders, investors, or owners, which is why it remains deadlocked and the only government efforts attempted are toothless. Somebody’s gonna have to lose potential profits, and there’s not a lot of political will to make that happen.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00961442211029601 https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-becomes-your-landlord https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q4-2021/ https://archive.is/8umYO https://www.housingwire.com/articles/homebuilders-are-pushing-through-inventory-backlog/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/affordable-housing-development-nimby/

Probably would have been worth clarifying that distinction earlier, but I’m not attacking families looking to pay for a home to be built. Construction companies that build new homes en masse are doing so to make money, not to address the housing shortage.

Much like Nissan being pleasantly surprised at making more money by discontinuing production of their cheaper models, larger construction companies aren’t at some sad loss to meet demand. they acquire building permits based on how many months of completed housing supply they have waiting to be purchased. When it passes a certain level, apparently 6 months of supply, they slow down completions and reduce the number of new permits until the supply is sold at the prices they want.

Otherwise it would be less profitable. I’m not saying there aren’t other issues, and smaller home building outfits struggle with local permitting, keeping employees, and rising prices for materials and appliances. But a huge issue with the industry is that it’s fundamentally against their best interest to solve the housing shortage. There’s a happy little feedback loop between builders and investors that keeps pumping home prices up, which lets new ones be sold for more, which pumps home prices up. Which restricts more and more of the housing market to investors, until the dystopian future where everyone rents except for the lucky souls that inherit the family property.

Yes, though you did just call them good investments. An investment being good solely because the market is an anti-consumer purgatory isn’t a good investment. The moment the housing market is fixed the investment collapses back to being driven by property location instead of the simple fact that its exists. Not to mention concerns about another housing market crash or recession waiting in the wings.

Homes should depreciate in value, similar to cars, and imagine what would happen if car manufacturers decided they liked the Covid price points and supply constriction, and started treating them like the housing market? There’s more money to be made in ensuring there isn’t enough supply than there is in meeting demand.

The worst part is some of the coolest moments of the trilogy happened in Episode 8. It could’ve been so good.

At any rate, Episode 9 may have been a letdown (more disappointing for what it could have been, than bad), but it’s worth watching just to cap off the run. Solo was a pretty fun heist movie. I’d expected it to be terrible with the way it was being talked about and it turned out to be a solid popcorn flick. Not as good as Rogue One, but Rogue One was amazing.

At least they’re taking a few years to to square things up before trying to release any more movies. Though, the strikes are probably gonna delay things even further.

That’s… A truly remarkable perspective lol. I just told you that the supply is artificially constricted to inflate prices and gouge profit, and your response is “that’s what makes it good.”

What’s next, investment groups buying up a significant percentage of non-perishable foods if it’ll make “good investments because supply is too low”? Basic necessities of life shouldn’t be investments because supply and demand aren’t really relevant when you need something. It’s just extortion with extra steps.

A huge portion of the population is choosing not to have kids because houses are too expensive, and even if they manage to get one, raising a family on top of that is too expensive. When investments are negatively impacting the entire population of a country, that’s a bad thing.

Oh my god.

I could have so many tabs.

It seems like a simple enough fix, though also setting a weird precedent. Instead of directly fixing things, just keep adding layers of machine learning to produce improved outputs.

The future of AI isn’t spaghetti code, but spaghetti AI chains lol. Probably why people much smarter than me are the ones working on machine learning.