I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues....
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Historically, the disaster restoration industry was made up of smaller, independent businesses handling local projects. But after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, private equity firms saw an opportunity to consolidate the market by buying up smaller companies, and some estimates value the US restoration industry as high as $200bn.
I mean, ecological cost of electrification vs burning diesel seems like a pretty clear choice. In terms of economic cost, though, the US would probably balloon that price out to $20M/km, because how else would contractors get to take the taxpayer over the coals?
Well, they’re basically in the early stages of vulture capitalization. This is where businesses just sort of coast, they stop trying to grow, and just don’t replace things as they break. I think the long term plan is to milk it for whatever they can before getting bought/bailed out by the federal government. We’ll get CONRAIL again for a few years and maybe some pretty sick Amtrak expansions as the government goes around fixing about half of the most critical rail lines, but then the cycle will start over and we’ll sell CONRAIL and our freshly repaired alignments off to some genius investor for pennies on the dollar just so they can vulture capitalize anew and talk about what a business genius they are.
There’s a confluence of factors that make infrastructure projects such a nightmare in the US, but the big ones seem to be:
-Not institutional knowledge. State DOTs don’t retain people who can plan and manage this stuff, it all gets farmed out to contractors or their people get scalped by contractors willing to pay 2-3x the wage the state will pay. So, they’re completely at the mercy of contractors.
-Overreliance on contractors and subcontractors. Nuff said. There’s a lot of shitty contractors out there whose whole game is to take the taxpayers for as big of a ride as possible, regardless of whether the work actually gets done. Because of Reagan era “reforms” (those are sarcasm quotes, to be clear), we use contractors for all kinds of stuff, and it’s easy for shitty contractors to game the system.
-Stations: the US has a hard-on for building large stations, when they’re very reliably the most expensive part of building any kind of rail infrastructure. We could substantially reduce rail project costs be re-examining our station designs and opting for more utilitarian choices. I’m not against making stations look nice, mind you, I’m not advocating for a brutalist, khaki concrete cube approach here; just saying that we can make more pragmatic choices than CAHSR’s fantasy-future ribcages.
The gist here is that not all homeschooling is equal. Yes, you have homeschooling that’s designed to facilitate raising your kid to be an idealogue and and ignoramus, but there’s also homeschool intended to be a true alternative to public school sites. I ended up homeschooling my kids for a few years because they both had really bad ADHD and both were too young to be medicated. In my first’s case, the school refused to assess for it (because it would cost money and resources (money) if she did have it) and just allowed her to flounder. Like, the teacher just got to the point of ignoring her in class. When we tried to talk about what to do, the teacher pulled her aside and said “okay, [child], I need you to focus in class from now on, can you do that?” Ah, yes, just focus. Quality education from our taxpayer funded institutions.
Anyway, homeschooling was hell for me, turns out I really don’t like being a teacher, and it was tough on everyone, but I’m confident that my first at least learned more than she would have in public school over that same time period.
The Biden administration is offering $12 billion in grants and loans for auto makers and suppliers to retrofit their plants to produce electric and other advanced vehicles, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Thursday.
Nursing homes will have to maintain minimum staffing levels under a Biden administration proposal despite furious lobbying from the industry, which says it will be too onerous amid a continuing labor shortage....
Fucking good, but not nearly far enough, IMO. I work in EMS, done it for 13 years. Almost anyone working in EMS can tell you some horror stories about almost any nursing home in their area, I know I can. They’re basically medicare farms, and the elderly and disabled are the livestock.
What Acemoglu is saying is fundamentally a Marxist argument, and I’m saying that with no value judgments attached, I’m just pointing out factually that he’s essentially saying the same thing as Marx. In summary, technology tends to disproportionately benefit the people who can afford to implement it (the owners). AI is a means of production. While it’s currently possible for anyone to download the means of production for free, no violence required, currently you’ve got several large AI companies (like OpenAI) trying to pull the ladder up behind themselves under the guise of safety and ethics concerns. They’re trying to protect themselves from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by angling to limit the pool of competitors. Indeed, much of whether a technology benefits society at large is dictated by the barriers to entry to using that technology. If they are successful, the barriers to entry will be made much higher, and it will all but guarantee that the benefits of AI stay at the top.
Imagine the kind of person that spent time making something like this. Like, it’s 2023, there’s boundless knowledge on the internet, blender is free, programming is free, there’s all kinds of wonderful and creative ways you can contribute to society, and they chose to do this. I’d press F, but they need to L3 + R3 first.
Tl;Dr, it’s not the tourists per se, it’s the shitty laws in your area. They wouldn’t be able to fuck up the housing market if there was an abundance of housing.
I mean, maybe consider channeling your ambitions for the good of everyone. Think of it this way: the tourism itself isn’t the problem, it’s how the tourism is being handled that is. There are local small businesses that depend on those tourists, whose money largely stays in your community, as compared to big corps like Wal-Mart that are much more extractive; the tourists gain an appreciation for your small town, and members of your small town get opportunities to meet new people and grew new commerce that they never would otherwise. The issue is that, because of certain factors that are true for much of the US, these tourists are being catered to in ways that are harmful for locals. The good news is that you can change these factors, they’re not set in stone, they’re just set in bad policy, often local bad policy.
For example, Airbnb has exacerbated the already existing housing shortage, but there is a housing shortage because of our insistence on almost exclusively building sprawling tracts of single family homes. The simple fact of the matter is that it’s not really realistic to house everybody in a single family home (and there’s a lot of reasons for this), and it’s really hard to build them cheap enough and in plentiful enough supply to keep competition high and keep housing affordable. This means that single family home tracts inevitably trend towards being affordable only by those who already have assets, which would be people like landlords and Airbnb operations. Building more mixed-use neighborhoods and higher density housing (where subletting is often prohibited) would at least blunt the housing affordability crisis. Unfortunately, many city councils and planning commissions (at least here in CA) throw shit fits about anything but single family housing being built, and then proceed to wonder why nobody can afford the $500,000 Mini-McMansions that have sprung up.
Directly regulating vacation rentals is tricky to do well. Many tourist areas just sort of end up converting their regulations into fee collecting operations, which doesn’t really help anyone. Other places directly limit how many properties can be vacation rentals, or even outright ban them, but enforcement is almost universally sloppy and you’re all but guaranteed to get sued by Airbnb. This is still a developing field for local governments, but I think the trick is not ending up accidentally creating black markets. One strategy that could work well is working to increase traditional and/or small business hotel availability in your area, which would naturally eat into the profit margins of vacation rentals and make them less inticing, but I don’t know how effective that would really be since those markets don’t have perfect overlap.
Edit: seeing lots of replies in this post from people whose towns have regulated this stuff, some more successfully than others. I’m glad to see that this is a concern for city leadership across the country.
The issue that lies at the heart of the vacation rental problem is that a vacation rental operator can collect in four days what they’d get from a traditional renter in a month from a property, and since property values are only going up due to the housing shortage, they’re making money on the front and back of the business, basically. This makes it so that, as a property owner trying to maximize your own outcomes, you’d be leaving money on the table by not evicting your tenants and converting your rental home into a vacation rental. You don’t even have to have a high occupancy, so as long as you rent for a few days a month, your mortgage is covered. Of course, if everyone does this, there’s nowhere left for the locals to live. I’ve seen too many small towns shoot themselves in the foot this way; the average wages stay close to entry level, but the only people who can afford to live there are the retirees. Everyone gets angry at Obama that all of the kids move away and nobody ever moves into town, but nobody wants to leave money on the table and provide an affordable place to live either. It’s a sort of tragedy of the commons.
There’s not going to be a solution that makes everyone happy. IMO, the best solution is to just start building lots and lots of (good) mixed use apartments around special public transit districts. That should, if anything, normalize prices at the entry level for the housing market, and allow people to save money by not anchoring them to a car payment, car insurance, car maintenance, tags, etc etc. At least that way, you can build lots and lots of housing quickly to try and get a grip on the cost of shelter. I’m not sure that attempts to directly regulate vacation rentals will be successful, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried.
So, what can you do with this? Run for city council; if you’re in a small or medium city, these races are still accessible for the average person and you’d be amazed at the amount of power that city councils have. You could also run for mayor, run for state legislature, run for county board of supervisors, or even just join an advocacy group like CA YIMBY (Yes In My BackYard, which advocates for more housing and transit oriented development to try and make housing accessible and affordable again). Besides, small towns tend to have a lot of former high school football stars in them that think they’re immune to legal consequences, so I’d be real careful about trying to interrupt their money making operations through stuff like propaganda.
The only thing holding me back from diving headlong into Linux is gaming support. I’ve been a windows user since W98. XP was the shit, 7 was rock solid, ten was pretty good, but it seems like Microsoft is dead set on speedrunning enshittification with 11.
No, I’m not big for online gaming, just heard that not all games that work on PC work on Linux, and I’m not sure about the status of various emulators that I use.
When I first started using Lemmy it seemed like such a nice place with interesting discussions. It seemed like the first group of people to join after the app exodus were being quite careful to be respectful of the existing culture....
Seen this. I commented on the lemm.ee meta discussion about considering defederating from Hexbear. I mentioned some of the things I’ve seen from Hexbear users and that I wish they’d just take a chill pill. Cue Hexbears (I assume), refusing to take chill pills.
Yeah, you know, that [checks notes] one copy of a book that the lending library was able to lend* was really eating into their profit margin. Honest to God, they probably spent more money on lawyers over this shit than they’ll ever recoup, and it just makes them look stupid, greedy, and stupidly greedy.
*I think it’s one copy per actually book that’s owned. Just like you can’t lend you friends more copies of a given book than you own.
And their roads? What about their roads? Do their highways pay for themselves? Why is it that public transit must always be budget neutral or make a profit, but it’s perfectly okay if, like in the US, the government pays $10 for every $1 a driver spends on driving?
Okay, so this kind of rationale is used a lot in the US to justify treating all kinds of professions (almost always those that exist at the action layer, where you’re doing the actual nominal work of the business) like shit. The rough format is “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the {customer}?!” Of course, this is always aimed at the people at the action layer, never ever at the administrative level. So, it might be more accurate to say “YOU need to care about the customer [because nobody else will].” It’s often very closely tied to sacrifice rhetoric in the workplace, where the employer places the onus on the employee to sacrifice, often without any bound. In other words, to accept personal loss with no expectations of recompense; they’ll take as much as they can get from the employee, and no amount of sacrifice will ever be ‘enough’, as there will always be some new crisis demanding a new sacrifice.
In teaching, this is “Won’t someone please think of the kids? What will they do if there’s no school? Remember why we’re here, it’s about the kids.” In EMS and all of healthcare, just replace the kids with the patients. It’s very common to see this in any industry where they think they can get away with paying their people in passion. It’s shitty and exploitive, and it ultimately does a disservice to the customer by creating high employee turnover, low organizational experience, organizational dysfunction (often in spite of ballooning admin costs and positions in these types of sectors) and more burned out employees.
The Dutch private system works very well, too. Unfortunately, as an American looking across the pond, it sure reads an awful lot to me like they’re just aching to get in on the absolute scam of a healthcare system we have here.
Representative democracy sweatin’ hard with this kinda logic.
Otto Von Bismark firmly believed that republics could never succeed, as they tended to rapidly deteriorate into horrible authoritarian bloodbaths whenever they were tried.
I have to agree, Strange New Worlds is, hands down, the best Trek this side of TNG. I couldn’t get into Discovery because it’s too E D G Y. Like, it feels like the showrunners discovered emo a generation too late, and the whole show should basically be a linewire music video set to Three Days Grace or Linkin Park. It’s fucking insufferable, I just can’t reconcile that with Star Trek.
Lower Decks and Prodigy are both great, but don’t feel like real entries into the Trek universe and therefore are just kinda time sinks to keep you from being alone with your thoughts and reflecting on the void.
Picard was also sort of in the same boat as Discovery in terms of Edge while also trying to be a murder mystery and also a 'Member Berries special.
Yeah, preaching to the choir there. Those are the last folks I want around my kids, because they just want to use them, and I grew up surrounded by people like that.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Representatives Barbara Lee (CA-12), Summer Lee (PA-12), Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), and Rashida Tlaib (MI-12)introduced the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (OLIGARCH) Act to tax extreme wealth, reduce inequality, and combat the threat to democracy posed by aristocracy....
I’m waiting for the government to put up or shut up on this, but I watched the hearing and some of those claims were very, very extraordinary. Just balls out claiming that we recovered ships and non-earth origin biologics on board them, planning to give Congress a list of witnesses to interview in closed sessions etc. It could all be a big lie, but I find it hard to imagine the utility of it.
Okay, but where I find a hole in this theory is that you’ve got two other guys at the hearing today who are both in the military and speaking on this. I’m curious if they’re related to Grusch in some way.
Hey everyone, thank you for your patience, and thank you to everyone who engaged constructively. It is clear based on the feedback we’ve received that a bigger discussion needs to take place, and I’m not sure my personal repository is the best place to do that - we are looking for a better forum and will update when we have...
My big concern with this and the new digital standard for images that they’re proposing is that it looks to make the internet less anonymous than even in-person interactions. To me, that’s a complete destruction of one of the most valuable features of the internet. To some extent, anonymity is a shield against tyranny; a government can’t exactly come and drag you off for re-education if they can’t tell who made the image mocking the dear leader. No matter who you are or how you identify politically, we should be able to throw our tomatoes anonymously if we do choose, without threat of Google telling the Chinese or American governments who threw them.
That’s kind of a bullshit question in that it’s easy to bullshit your way out of any possible legitimate challenge. The implication in the question is, of course, that capitalism never killed anyone, or at least a tiny fraction of those killed by communists. So, before we go any further, can I get an agreement that we’re not going to trot out the tired old “but that’s not really communism capitalism”? Because if we’re not going to allow that argument for communism just because it wasn’t the idealized, utopian version of it, then we ought not let imperfect capitalism slide.
Mind you, I’m a believer in free markets where they exist, but I also believe that it’s important to be able to be critical of the things you believe in.
As opposed to regulated capitalism, with social safety nets, privatized losses, public services and utilities, regulations, and real accountability for choices that get people hurt.
Feel like we’ve got a lot of tech savvy people here seems like a good place to ask. Basically as a dumb guy that reads the news it seems like everyone that lost their mind (and savings) on crypto just pivoted to AI. In addition to that you’ve got all these people invested in AI companies running around with flashlights under...
Brainstorming meal plans for the week given x, y, and z requirements
Brainstorming solutions to abstract problems
Helping me break down complex tasks into smaller, more achievable tasks.
Helping me brainstorm programming solutions. This is a big one, I’m a junior dev and I sometimes encounter problems that aren’t easily google-able. For example, ChatGPT helped me find the python moto library for intercepting and testing the boto AWS calls in my code. It’s also been great for debugging hand-coded JSON and generating boilerplate. I’ve also used it to streamline unit test writing and documentation.
By far it’s best utility (imo) is quickly filling in broad strokes knowledge gaps as a kind of interactive textbook. I’m using it to accelerate my Rust learning, and it’s great. I have EMT co-workers going to paramedic school that use it to practice their paramedic curriculum. A close second in terms of usefulness is that it’s like the world’s smartest regex, and it’s capable of very quickly parsing large texts or documents and providing useful output.
Yes, we’ve had the meme about eastern Europeans when westerners advocate for communism. Now we need a meme about Americans when Europeans advocate for deregulated capitalism, because I feel that every time I, an American, see the English advocating for a more American style health system.
These insurance companies that are pulling out of CA and FL have done business in those states for ever, but now they can’t afford to stay because something changed. In California, it’s that we’re having a lot more frequent and severe fires. In FL, IIRC, it’s more frequent and severe storm damage. What would have changed that would cause these things? Gosh, I feel like it’s on the tip of my tongue.
The smart(shit)ification of TVs pisses me off.
I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues....
Private equity profits from climate disaster clean-up – while investing in fossil fuels (www.theguardian.com)
Historically, the disaster restoration industry was made up of smaller, independent businesses handling local projects. But after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, private equity firms saw an opportunity to consolidate the market by buying up smaller companies, and some estimates value the US restoration industry as high as $200bn.
You're so close ... (jlai.lu)
Carmakers are failing the privacy test. Owners have little to no control of the data they hand over (www.ctvnews.ca)
Homeschool rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
18+ JBP has got u bro (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
US offers $12 billion to auto makers, suppliers for advanced vehicles (www.reuters.com)
The Biden administration is offering $12 billion in grants and loans for auto makers and suppliers to retrofit their plants to produce electric and other advanced vehicles, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Thursday.
Nursing Homes Must Boost Staffing Under First-Ever National Standards (www.wsj.com)
Nursing homes will have to maintain minimum staffing levels under a Biden administration proposal despite furious lobbying from the industry, which says it will be too onerous amid a continuing labor shortage....
MIT Economist Daron Acemoğlu Takes on Big Tech: "Our Future Will Be Very Dystopian" (www.spiegel.de)
‘They would not listen to us’: inside Biden’s troubled $53bn chip plant (www.theguardian.com)
Taiwanese microchip manufacturer TSMC blames struggle to build Phoenix plant on skilled labor shortage but workers cite disorganization and safety concerns...
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[Opinion] Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron (arstechnica.com)
Has the Reddit exodus killed the former Lemmy culture?
When I first started using Lemmy it seemed like such a nice place with interesting discussions. It seemed like the first group of people to join after the app exodus were being quite careful to be respectful of the existing culture....
Blocking is going to be deleted from Twitter (lemmy.world)
Get out, now.
The American civil war wasn’t about slavery. (lemmy.ca)
The Internet Archive might reach a deal with the publishers to remove THEIR books from the lending library (www.reuters.com)
From: …courtlistener.com/…/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.214…...
Dutch rail still not on track to financial health, figures show - DutchNews.nl (www.dutchnews.nl)
Nothing infuriates me quite like anti working class propaganda being pushed by the eilte (lemmy.world)
Michigan meat processor ordered to pay fines after teen lost hand in grinder (www.cbsnews.com)
The owner of a meat business in western Michigan has been ordered to pay nearly $1,200 after a 17-year-old worker lost his hand in a grinder.
Anthony Fauci’s Deceptions (www.thefp.com)
7 things every kid needs to hear (suppo.fi)
A Gen Xer's Thoughts on Strange New Worlds
My Dear Gen X,...
Canada’s Far-Right is Planning a Convoy to Toronto to ‘Save the Children’. It’s Already Spinning Out of Control. (pressprogress.ca)
The ‘Save the Children Convoy’ is struggling as organizers accuse one another of being ‘undercover cops’ or planning ‘violence’ and ‘terrorism’
[Press Release] Introducing the OLIGARCH Act to Tax Extreme Wealth and Combat Aristocracy - Reps. Barbara Lee, Summer Lee, Jamaal Bowman, and Rashida Tlaib (lee.house.gov)
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Representatives Barbara Lee (CA-12), Summer Lee (PA-12), Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), and Rashida Tlaib (MI-12)introduced the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (OLIGARCH) Act to tax extreme wealth, reduce inequality, and combat the threat to democracy posed by aristocracy....
Watch Live: UFO hearing underway as House panel pushes for more transparency (www.cbsnews.com)
Google employee responds to all the negative feedback WEI, (google drm the web) (github.com)
Hey everyone, thank you for your patience, and thank you to everyone who engaged constructively. It is clear based on the feedback we’ve received that a bigger discussion needs to take place, and I’m not sure my personal repository is the best place to do that - we are looking for a better forum and will update when we have...
problems are stacking up (lemmy.world) French
rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Is there anything actually useful or novel about "AI"?
Feel like we’ve got a lot of tech savvy people here seems like a good place to ask. Basically as a dumb guy that reads the news it seems like everyone that lost their mind (and savings) on crypto just pivoted to AI. In addition to that you’ve got all these people invested in AI companies running around with flashlights under...
More states want to let kids work as bartenders | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, Blames 'Wokeness' for Fragile Insurance Market (gizmodo.com)
a community for discussing bugs and features for lemmy
I feel like this is a really obvious one, but I can’t find it. Is there a community for requesting features and reporting bugs in Lemmy?
Rag & Bone- A community for spooky stories, real and otherwise
!rag_and_bone...