First, IBC has had this as code for at least 15 years.
The International Building Code (IBC) establishes minimum requirements for airborne and impact performance of multifamily buildings. The minimum code requirement is STC 50 and IIC 50. Since many factors can affect the transmission of sound in the field, including non-standardized source and receiver rooms as well as construction tolerances, a field measurement (ASTC or AIIC) of three to five points below the lab measurement is acceptable to meet code requirements.
As the understanding increased of how STC and IIC ratings correlate with occupant comfort, the International Code Council (ICC) issued ICC G2-2010, “Guideline for Acoustics,” which established two additional levels of acoustical performance:
acceptable, defined as STC 55 and IIC 55; and preferred amount of isolation as STC 60 and IIC 60
Second, all the money is most definitely not in the land. As a general ballpark, developers want the land to be under 1/4 of the total cost of the project.
Larger buildings are required to do this under IBC, and have been for many years. You can absolutely make a modern multifamily wood framed building quiet with proper design and construction.
There’s no perfect building material. Wood has issues. But concrete is terrible for the planet from a climate perspective and we’re rapidly running out of quality aggregate (especially sand) in many parts of the world. You can make a list of pros and cons about any other material, too.
Are you kidding? It filters out 90% of my inbox so I don’t have to look at it, but keeps it available for me in case I want it later. It’s one of my favorite features Gmail.
Hey ! I just broke my Pixel 4a (fp reader is dead, screen is flickering, battery health is getting really bad), and i am looking to try out Apple ecosystem. I have a budget of around 300 euros, and i have no problem looking at refurbished devices / secondhand. Here is a list i made (prices are from backmarket, a refurbished...
I used to feel the same way, but then I was standing in a (short) global entry line and I watched people breeze right by that. Found out they were just using the free CBP app. Felt a little cheated, honestly.
Haven’t been doing as much international travel since second kid was born, so we didn’t get him global entry. Last trip we did I used the app instead. It was just as fast as global entry, possibly faster.
The only real reason to get global entry again now is for tsa ore check, and there are easier and cheaper ways to get that.
There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.
As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?
Banks don’t buy properties, they foreclose on them. They will unload as fast as possible and take a write down.
Big hedge fund and other similar large investors don’t hold onto money losers, and they care about maximizing their return. If the spread between rent and sales price is this high, I’d expect some of the ones that bought a while ago to be considering selling and taking their appreciation gains vs holding onto a cash flow that is multiples lower. Plus corporate lending is a completely different animal than homeowner loans and many of these properties will soon be needing to refinance into a much higher rate. Their owners will sell rather than take a huge hit to cash flow. And many of these bought properties 5-10 years ago and did capital upgrades that are now aging. They’ll be looking to exit before the next upgrade cycle.
Smaller investors can get pretty badly burned in these markets and may not be able to hold on.
Not saying a crash is inevitable or even likely, but real estate is cyclical and we are almost certainly near the top of our current cycle.
I mean, lots of people do. Just not the ones here on lemmy. But thanks for the compliment!
I’m probably somewhat unique here inasmuch as I’m a real estate agent and landlord and I have made an attempt to get into commercial real estate. But I’ve also been homeless in my adult life and grew up with very unstable housing, so I get the angst of many people here and don’t discount it. Their feelings are completely valid.
I think the two things that people who are concerned about housing prices get wrong consistently are housing supply and the importance of financing.
Left leaning people are forever fighting against landlords and simultaneously yelling about gentrification and development. Here’s the thing. Housing was affordable when we let people build densely with relatively few restrictions. Housing today is still most affordable in places where it’s easy to build more. If that means the neighborhood character changes, oh well. Anywhere you get liberal people (and I count myself as very left wing) making rules about housing, you limit supply, prices go up. In the immortal words of pogo, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Take a look at Tokyo, the NYT did a great story about it recently, they have no problem destroying old neighborhoods to build more housing. As a result, it’s remained shockingly affordable, and has a huge percentage of small businesses because rent is cheap for small non residential spaces, too. We need to stop clinging to our old buildings and allow growth. And I say that as a man who lovingly restored a 175 year old house. It is dumb. There should be 6 families living on the plot I own, but the neighbors would never allow it.
The other thing is financing. Commercial owners have a completely different borrowing structure from owner occupied housing. They don’t have 30 year fixed rate low interest loans with low down payments and government programs to help them for x, y and z. Most commercial loans require refinancing every 5, 7, or 10 years. They also cost more than residential loans, both in up front costs and interest. So my personal residence is locked in on a 30 year note at 3%, but my rentals are in the 3.75-6% range and will require me to refinance in a few years at much higher rates. I have one that resets in 18 months. My interest rate is likely to go from 3.75 to 7.75. I owe about 100k on the house. My mortgage payments will go up $4000/year when that happens (on top of a $1000/year insurance hike last month). There’s no possible way I can raise my rent enough to cover. So I would be in the hole every month. But the bank won’t lend on a property that loses money every month. So either I come up with $100k cash or I sell the house. Sorry tenant, but you’re getting kicked out at lease expiration next year because I have to sell the house to py back the lender. If it won’t cash flow for me it won’t for anyone else, either. So the only possible buyers are home buyers who want to live in it and it needs to be vacant. Yay for a home buyer, sad for my tenant (and for me, now I am out a cash flowing property that I’d prefer to hold). The tenant will yell about greedy landlords when I tell him to get out, but I literally have no option.
Same thing with how all big developments look the same now. All driven by lenders. They won’t lend to a developer who wants to take on mom and pop businesses and quirky startups. The building is valued as a multiple of its rents, and so all the money chases national credit tenants or strong local chains that have proven they can oy high rents, and lenders all want to see recognizable name brands in those ground floor retail spaces. Developers hands are tied. Lots of developers would love to do something different but nothing different can get financed.
I could keep going but the text wall is long enough and my thumbs are tired.
I used to love Florida, but it’s doomed. Between climate change and fascism we just need to write off the state entirely and build a wall along the Georgia border. Best we can do is try to control the insanity and let those who have decided to stay down there burn themselves out. Better for you to get out than for us to come down.
Depends on how you define that. Literally none of the communities I was part of on reddit have a functioning equivalent here.
Boston? Dozens of posts a day on reddit, maybe one a week here.
Burning man? I don’t even know if there have been a dozen posts in the community here.
Geology? Don’t think I’ve seen a single post.
Communities for specific bands (I’m a jamband fan) exist here but have no are almost no content.
And so on.
I’m the kind of user who comments often but doesn’t post much. With no one here posting, there’s nothing for me to interact with.
If you want echo chamber liberal political memes, obscure open source software discussions, or endless hentai, then lemmy is great. But it has no pull for people who want to participate in niche communities like mine. Hopefully it’ll happen, especially as reddit gets shittier and shittier, but even for people like me who desperately want to leave reddit and are willing to take a chance on a new platform, this is a tough sell.
It’s going to take a few more digg type events to really get lemmy to pick up enough users to make the conversations in the small niche communities hit critical mass. Until then, lots of people will give it a try, then bounce.
A fan was ejected from a U.S. Open tennis match early Tuesday morning after German player Alexander Zverev complained the man used language from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime....
Adam set things up to automatically post to Mastodon, which is great. But I was always more of a reddit person than a twitter person, and now I am more of a lemmy person than a mastodon person. I can see his Mastodon posts in kbin, and I suppose I could comment on them there. But my comments and his posts still wouldn’t show...
I’ll take whatever wins I can get. Even $30/hour is barely livable in this city, but it’s an excellent start. Hopefully they’ll be able to get staffed up and improve service in a meaningful way by the new year.
I’m not an expert but my general understanding is that its unlikely you’d have both parents be narcissists. A true narcissist is too self absorbed to stay in a relationship with someone else who’s also that self absorbed. Narcissists tend to be in relationships with people who have opposite traits, highly empathetic and easily manipulated. Not saying it can’t happen but youtube isn’t necessarily the best diagnostic tool.
If at all possible, I recommend you see if there are any counseling resources available to you at school or through your local government. Also recommend you read some actual books on the subject, not just get info from YouTube and the internet. Hopefully you live in a place with a public library. Many libraries have a way to check out ebooks and read them on a phone app, which may easier and more discreet.
And I’d urge you to remember two things.
First, it gets better. It can be hard to believe, and it can feel like forever, but it gets better.
Second, narcissism is just another reaction to a traumatic childhood. No one is born a monster. They’re worthy of compassion, even if you can’t have a functional relationship with them.
Late 40s, from the US. My mom drove a manual so I learned on her car. Then my first car was an old VW Bug, and my next couple of cars were also manual.
Now that I live in a city with soul crushing traffic and a completely broken public transit system, I drive an automatic. Driving a manual in stop and go traffic is just not fun. Plus, it’s gotten hard to even find a manual transmission anymore. But when we went on vacation to Costa Rica a few years ago they gave us a car with a stick shift and I had a blast bombing that thing around.
I love YouTube music. I get all the same songs as the other big services, plus free YouTube premium. Between my jam and habit and my quixotic quest to teach myself woodworking, I watch a LOT of YouTube videos.
My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it
That’s a swamp cooler and is very commonly used in dry environments. It will help a lot in Arizona (well, maybe not that tiny thing, but a properly sized one) and not at all in Miami, due to the difference in ambient humidity.
This is the kind of post we used to have stickied answers for and a wiki when I was still a redditor at /r/boston. I’m not sure if those things are even an option on Lemmy.
There’s an entire science to answering this question and I don’t have the bandwidth to type it all out from scratch. But as briefly as I can state it, here’s what you need to know about finding an apartment in Greater Boston.
Our public transit is quite literally on fire most days and cannot be relied on. Stay as close to your job as you can.
Our traffic is abysmal and parking is a full contact sport. Try not to own a car if don’t have to.
Our building stock is old and filled with lead paint, which is hazardous to young children.
landlords in Mass are legally required to de-lead a unit with a child under age 5 in it. They are not legally allowed to discriminate against families. However, it can cost $15-20k to de-lead a unit and there is no return on that investment in the form of a higher rent. So although discrimination against families with children is prohibited, in practice with the highly competitive market here it is easy for landlords simply to pick another applicant or find a non-prohibited reason to deny your application.
Most of our old housing stock is in 2-3 unit buildings (aka 2-families or 3-families) without elevators and with small shared yards.
A “garden” in the US is an area where food or flowers are grown, if you just want a patch of grass it is a yard.
Our rental market revolves around leases that start September first, with most landlords trying to get leases signed in the late spring and early summer. So if you show up next month, you will have very little to look at.
The market is incredibly competitive, and bidding wars on apartments are not unheard of.
You will almost certainly end up working with a rental agent.
Rental agents are universally disliked.
You can expect to pay 4x rent to move in: first month, last month, one month security, and a 1 month fee to the agent. These are the only fees allowed by law (the law does allow a small fee for a new lock).
Most apartments listed by agents are listed on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service). Apartments listed by private owners are not.
MLS listings can be found on a wide variety of websites but for some reason Coldwell Banker seems to have all of them for Boston rentals so you might as well use that
Non-MLS listings can be found on craigslist, facebook marketplace, etc.
Apartments.com has both.
On the plus side, your budget is realistic and will get you a nicely updated unit, we have excellent local parks and playgrounds (better on the Boston side of the Charles river, but still pretty good up north) so you may not need a private yard, and in Cambridge and Somerville it is practical to live without a car, especially if you’re willing to commute by bike.
I’m a real estate agent. I don’t do rentals and am not here soliciting a commission. I drew a map of areas I’d suggest you look at and put in the following criteria for my search (consumers cannot do a search like this, this is using a tool for professional agents only): 2+ bedrooms, 900+ sf, certified deleaded or lead paint flagged as “none” (because of a gut renovation or construction after 1978, the year lead paint was banned), price ceiling $4000. That returned only 31 hits. It will also include older buildings that have been completely renovated. Remove the bit about lead and you get almost 200 hits.
It gives you a sort of heat map of where the apartments are, and all of those places are neighborhoods/cities I’d say you should consider.
Here are several units I would recommend taking a look at if you were on the market today. No affiliation with Coldwell Banker or any other firm, I work for myself and don’t have a website so these are just the first hits that pop up when I search the MLS numbers:
www.coldwellbankerhomes.com/ma/…/pid_54506667/ (typical of our housing stock, larger unit in older condition, excellent location a 2 minute walk to a phenomenal park with multiple playgrounds and within 15 minutes walk to many good restaurants, groceries, etc.
www.coldwellbankerhomes.com/ma/…/pid_54517037/ A bit farther out from your job and near a very busy section of road, but very close to the Fresh Pond which has acres of walking trails and parks, and also very convenient to groceries, coffee, etc.
www.coldwellbankerhomes.com/ma/…/pid_54634067/ Another great location, about a 3 minute walk from Sennott Park which is small but has a playground, and some other small playgrounds within easy walking distance.
www.coldwellbankerhomes.com/ma/…/pid_53662391/ now you are getting a bit farther from your job in a more family-oriented town. Probably 15-20 minute drive to work, or a manageable bike ride. Older full service elevator building with a large common green space and close to quite a few parks, etc., at an attractive price.
You’ll generally find an agent and let them show you around. The only places that work with preferred agents are the really big properties with dozens or hundreds of units. Even then you can work with your own agent, but if you go for new luxury towers that are working on getting leased up they’ll often cover the fee.
…how many of you will stay? Personally, I wiped my Reddit history and deleted my account, so I’m definitely here to stay. I can see, however, that a number of people see Lemmy more as a distraction until the blackout is over. I wonder what that number would be.
I would really like to stay here, but I mostly used reddit on my phone and I’ve found the mobile experience so underwhelming that I have already given up on it. The MLem app crashes on me after ~60 seconds every time I try to use it, too.
If we could entice the developer of Apollo or RIF or Sync or any of the big platforms to make a really slick app for Lemmy, I might never go back to Reddit.
Have you been able to get it to work? It crashes on me after about 60 seconds every time I open it. I definitely am feeling the loss of Apollo. Lemmy from the desktop isn’t bad, but the mobile experience is atrocious.
I was there 2+ hours and didn’t think it was enough time. I can’t fathom doing it in under an hour and actually looking at everything and reading about it. I am planning to go back to see what I missed the first time.
What could my upstairs neighbor possibly be doing to make this much noise?
Their foot steps sound like they just have 2 pegs for feet… they hit so hard....
Every night (startrek.website)
Google is putting ads in gmail. WTF? (sh.itjust.works)
Why would anyone use this over Proton Mail or the gazillion alternatives if it treats people like shit.
Privacy = no free speech (lemmy.ml)
What's the best "cheap" iPhone i could get ?
Hey ! I just broke my Pixel 4a (fp reader is dead, screen is flickering, battery health is getting really bad), and i am looking to try out Apple ecosystem. I have a budget of around 300 euros, and i have no problem looking at refurbished devices / secondhand. Here is a list i made (prices are from backmarket, a refurbished...
What was your best purchase?
Reddit is removing ability to opt out of ad personalization based on your activity on the platform (techcrunch.com)
The price gap between renting and buying has hit the widest point since 2000 (www.marketwatch.com)
What's the most expensive lesson you've learned?
Neo-Nazis Gloat as Florida Becomes a Magnet for Hate (www.rollingstone.com)
As white supremacists from as far as Canada revel in intimidating Sunshine State residents, critics blast DeSantis for his silence
Lemmy is losing users (programming.dev)
How can we make it more popular?
Fan ejected from US Open match after German player said the man used language from Hitler's regime (apnews.com)
A fan was ejected from a U.S. Open tennis match early Tuesday morning after German player Alexander Zverev complained the man used language from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime....
Why is there so much hentai on Lemmy?
Seriously though.
Is there a way to get UHub posts to autopost here?
Adam set things up to automatically post to Mastodon, which is great. But I was always more of a reddit person than a twitter person, and now I am more of a lemmy person than a mastodon person. I can see his Mastodon posts in kbin, and I suppose I could comment on them there. But my comments and his posts still wouldn’t show...
The MBTA has raised starting wages for bus drivers, creating a surge of applications (mass.streetsblog.org)
deleted_by_author
Can you drive a manual transmission?
And where are you from? And how old? Not “do you” but just if you know how....
White noise podcasts are costing Spotify $38m per year, and record labels are not happy about it (www.bloomberg.com)
Desktop A/C unit. This can't possibly work! Prove me wrong? (lemmy.world)
Prove me wrong, please?...
Advice on where to live
Hi there,...
So where are we all supposed to go now? (www.theverge.com)
Is anyone else having trouble posting to this community?
I have tried several posts and they have all failed.
After the blackout...
…how many of you will stay? Personally, I wiped my Reddit history and deleted my account, so I’m definitely here to stay. I can see, however, that a number of people see Lemmy more as a distraction until the blackout is over. I wonder what that number would be.
What are everyone's summer plans?
I need ideas :)
anyone else go to the Hokusai exhibit at the MFA? (lemmy.world)