ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
Reinforced concrete deteriorates when the steel reinforcement rusts and expands. But a pyramid experiences exclusively compressive loads, and therefore can be constructed from plain (unreinforced) concrete. Non-rusting rebar also is available.
Concrete's resistance to freeze–thaw cycles can be improved by adding air. Its resistance to abrasion by rain and wind can be improved by simply using stronger mixes (including harder gravel). (source)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5mo ago
High rises are cheap though, relatively speaking. Endless suburbs are not.
People like single-family homes because of privacy, yards, and other amenities, but these are reinforced by another factor: cost. Density advocates often portray multifamily housing as affordable housing, but it is only affordable because the housing units are so much smaller than single-family housing.
According to Zillow, as of March 31, 2022, the typical single-family home in the United States was worth $338,000, while the typical condominium was worth $332,000. In places that use growth boundaries or similar policies to restrict development at the urban fringe, the differences are much greater: single-family homes in the San Francisco metro area are 57 percent more expensive than condos, while in Seattle they are 63 percent more expensive.
Condos may be less expensive, but that’s because they are smaller. Zillow once published costs per square foot of single-family homes and condominiums, but no longer does so. However, data I downloaded from 2016 indicate that the average price per square foot of condominiums was 33 percent greater than the average for single-family homes.
According to California developer Nicholas Arenson, the higher cost is due to multi-story construction, which requires elevators and more concrete and structural steel. Two-story multifamily housing costs about the same, per square foot, as single-family homes. But a third story adds 30 to 50 percent, a fourth story doubles per-square-foot costs, and five or more stories are even more expensive. Since urban planners favor four- to six-story mid-rises, units have to be very small to be priced lower than single-family homes.
And:
Beyer [a promoter of densification] cited “costs of sprawl” research by Rutgers University’s Robert Burchell and Sahan Mukherji that found that “conventional development” imposed greater costs on urban service providers than “managed development.” This research was largely hypothetical and compared the costs of low-density development vs. high-density development on vacant lands.
They found that low-density development would cost $13,000 more per housing unit than high-density development. That’s a small amount compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars added to the costs of housing when urban-growth boundaries are in place.
Beyer and density-loving planners, however, aren’t talking about building dense developments on vacant lands. Instead, they want to rebuild low-density neighborhoods to higher densities. Improving the infrastructure needed to support those higher densities will be much more costly than simply building on vacant land.
A webcast audience member asked whether “low-density housing bankrupts communities through higher infrastructure, service, and transportation costs.” I know of no communities that have gone bankrupt due to low-density housing costs. I do know of cities that have defaulted on bonds they sold to support the high-density housing for which there was supposed to be a pent-up demand, but that demand didn’t materialize.
Claims that development doesn’t pay for itself simply aren’t supported by history. This nation has been developing for hundreds of years. Who paid for the urban services if not the residents and businesses that used those services? At the local level, most deficit spending and default risk today is due to generous public employee pension and health-care plans, not to the infrastructure needed to support new development.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5mo ago
What are some obscure job tasks that might make for fun video games? We all are aware of the zillions of programming, train-routing, and bridge-design games. But what about parking-lot design? Guide-rail design? Curb-ramp design? House design (as a game with targets to be met, rather than as a goal-free sandbox like The Sims)?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
Federal Register for 2023-09-19:
The Board of Tea Experts was established on March 2, 1897, by the Tea Importation Act of 1897. The Board was responsible for making recommendations to the Secretary of the Treasury to fix and establish uniform standards of purity, quality, and fitness for consumption of all kinds of teas imported into the United States. The Board was terminated by the Federal Tea Tasters Repeal Act of 1996. This document aligns FDA's list of standing advisory committees [in the Code of Federal Regulations] with existing law by removing the Board of Tea Experts.
It only took 27 years.
They think they’re smarter than everyone else, so the rules don’t apply to them.
They think they're smarter than the government. One would expect a (house-repair seems to be implied in your comment) contractor, who deals with onerous permit requirements on a daily basis, to be intimately familiar with how stupid the government is.
It also may be worth pointing out which specific parts of government schooling you object to. He may be thinking of the stereotypical religious homeschooler, who sees no fault in the government's teaching process but has disagreements with the government's curriculum, for mostly subjective reasons. You could present yourself as a more reasonable person who would more or less adhere to the government's curriculum but avoid the dysfunction of the government's teaching process, which you can demonstrate to be objectively bad.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10mo ago
Kiwi Farms thread (requires Tor, Brave, etc.)
YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)
Text of bill:
It does not apply if:
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"in reasonable medical judgment, the abortion is necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman";
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"the pregnancy is the result of rape against an adult woman, and[,] at least 48 hours prior to the abortion[,] she has obtained counseling… or… medical treatment for the rape"; or
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"the pregnancy is a result of rape… or incest against a minor, and the rape or incest has been reported… to either a government agency… or a law enforcement agency".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
Adjusting for shrinkflation is done in the "quality adjustment" step.
Sources of direct quality adjustment information include observable factors such as size or weight, manufacturers’ cost data, and hedonic regression models.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
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A telecom company wants to build a 150-foot cellular tower in a municipality of 6,500 people. Three of its permit applications to build a cell tower on govt. land have already been rejected, so now it's trying to build on privately-owned land—in a commercial zone, but adjacent to a residential zone.
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February 2018: The municipal govt. rejects the application because of the negative impact on the value of nearby residential properties.
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August 2019: A judge vacates and remands because the govt. did not properly assess the factors underlying its decision.
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November 2019: The govt.'s expert says that the cell tower would cause the value of nearby residential property to fall by 10 to 20 percent. The govt. accepts this testimony, and on that basis rejects the application.
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February 2021: The judge vacates and remands because the govt.'s expert did not base his estimate of 10 to 20 percent on any actual data.
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Unspecified date: The telecom company's expert testifies that, though it's anecdotally true that higher-end house buyers are "more discerning" and less likely to buy houses near cell towers, the data show that any drop in house prices near the cell tower would be less than one percent. The govt. rejects the expert's evidence-based testimony because the dataset is not representative of the site in question, but accepts his non-evidence-based anecdote about higher-end buyers, and on that basis denies the application.
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June 2022: The judge reverses the govt.'s decision and approves the application outright, with no remand. The govt.'s treatment of the testimony of the plaintiff's expert was arbitrary and capricious.
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February 2024: The appeals panel affirms the trial judge's decision in all respects.
Six years later, maybe the cellular tower can finally be built!
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8mo ago
Unverified secondhand quote seen on /r/kotakuinaction2:
So how did he lose? Looks like he won 4 out of 6, or 67%.
Ngo sued six people. One settled, three refused to put on a case and will have default judgements entered against them, and two were found not liable.
I hope that the three that refused to put on a case have the sense to stay out of the State of Oregon, since they will owe Ngo a lot of money.
The Apollo developer says that he would do that if he had three months to do it in and if the price were only half as large, but the one-month period that Reddit chose to provide is too short.
Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr ago
the official court-decision repository that I'm sure exists somewhere
The official PACER repository is paywalled (though downloading a document costs only a few cents). The links that I provided are to the unofficial RECAP repository.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
According to American Nightmare (Randal O'Toole): Six-year house loans (with down payment of 0.5 percent, no fixed payment schedule, and the possibility of refinancing at the end of the term) were popularized around year 1889, and 12-year mortgages from building-and-loan associations (with down payment of 25 percent) also were popular. Sears's famous mail-order house kits could be obtained with 15-year mortgages (with down payment of 25 percent) around 1911 (zero down payment from 1917 to 1921). Longer-term mortgages weren't mainstream until 1948, when the federal government authorized the Federal Housing Administration (created in 1934) to offer 30-year mortgages (with down payment of 5 percent, or zero for veterans).
Stopping to vote just seems like a waste of time to me.
Casting a vote takes literally half a second.
Is my behavior weird and everyone else reads a comment and then decides if it’s good or bad?
In most cases, you should be forming your opinion on the goodness or badness (or neutral status) of a comment simultaneously with your reading of that comment, not as a separate decision phase after reading it. If a comment is so profoundly thought-provoking that deciding whether it's good or bad (or not worth voting on) takes a few seconds, then you should not begrudge it that small amount of time.
But what I want to discuss is I never vote. I read and scroll.
A suitable response to this passage is an "I'm scrooling!" Wojak image.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11mo ago
There was a time that draining swamps was among the greatest achievements of the government.
Fun footnote in the court's opinion:
Leovy v. United States also reflected the law’s longstanding hostility to wetlands: “If there is any fact which may be supposed to be known by everybody, and, therefore, by courts, it is that swamps and stagnant waters are the cause of malarial and malignant fevers, and that the police power is never more legitimately exercised than in removing such nuisances.” Traditionally, the only time wetlands were the subject of federal legislation was to aid the States in draining them. Wetlands preservation only gained traction due, in large part, to advances in firearms technology that made waterfowl hunting feasible.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
This CSS should work: h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:inherit;}
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
even Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage
It's only a rumor that Mitsubishi plans to discontinue the Mirage in the US by 2025. Mitsubishi has not actually confirmed the news reports.
On Friday, the USA's National Association of Realtors agreed to settle a big lawsuit (in which it lost a jury trial late last year). Starting in mid-July, sellers' agents will be permitted to list houses on NAR-controlled multiple-listing services (the databases from which Zillow and Redfin copy their information) without being forced to make a blanket offer to split their commissions with buyers' agents. This will make it much easier for buyers to hire their agents separately (rather than the current practice of having the buyer's agent hired by the seller), leading to lower buyer's-agent commissions. Alternatively, it will be much easier for buyers to imitate the standard practice in Britain and Australia, and hire real-estate attorneys for a flat fee rather than real-estate agents for a percentage commission. See these articles (1 2 3 4) for descriptions of how house buying works in Britain and Australia.
Bonus: Starting on page 106 of this PDF is the testimony of the plaintiffs' star witness, economist Craig Schulman. The meat is on pages 196–211. (Unfortunately, it seems that RECAP isn't set up to process trial transcripts.)
Rising Sun Victorious (edited by Peter Tsouras) is a collection of brief scenarios presented in a nonfiction, history-book style. In the book's first story, Hokushin (written by Tsouras himself):
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In March 1941, when Japanese diplomat Matsuoka Yousuke visits Germany, Hitler requests (more frankly and formally than in OTL) that Japan attack the USSR. This settles Japan's "hokushin or nanshin" debate in favor of a northern attack in cooperation with Operation Barbarossa.
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The Soviet spies in Japan and the codebreaking Americans warn Stalin of the impending attack, but he ignores the warnings in the east just as he does in the west. In April 1941 (rather than in October as in OTL), the head Soviet spy in Japan, Richard Sorge, is discovered, and (rather than being exposed and executed as in OTL) is forced to feed to the Soviets false information that Japan is not planning to attack. After Germany attacks in June, this false information leads Stalin to move most of the Soviet troops in Siberia from the east to the west.
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In August (6.5 weeks after Operation Barbarossa), Yamashita Tomoyuki's 1.3 million Japanese troops invade the USSR. Iosif Apanasenko's skeleton garrison of conscripts and gulag prisoners is beaten without too much trouble. Voroshilov (now Ussuriysk) surrenders in September, after four weeks of battle. With the forces that were transferred from Siberia exhausted in the first battles rather than being kept in reserve, in October Germany takes Moscow and Stalin flees to Kuybyshev (now Samara) along with the rest of the Soviet government. In December, the Soviet government collapses (with Stalin disappearing mysteriously), and Khabarovsk falls, but Apanasenko continues to defend against Japan from Blagoveshchensk.
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In March 1942, the reconstituted Russian Eurasian Federation signs the Treaty of Manila (mediated by the United States), ceding to Japan "the Maritime Province", over which Genrikh Lyushkov serves as governor (until he is executed for treasonously trying to reunite it with Russia). The Allies agree to let Japan (1) conquer the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina and (2) freely import tin and rubber from British Malaya, as long as Japan refrains from attacking Malaya and the American Philippines. Britain repels Operation Sea Lion in the summer of 1942.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5mo ago
I guess the question is who here (1) doesn’t use his phone as his alarm, (2) lives in a jurisdiction that dealt with this last night, (3) forgot to make the change manually on his clock, and (4) sets an alarm to wake up on Sunday morning? Probably just me then.
FTFY
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
It’s a simulationist approach which is largely absent from the modern game.
There's always GURPS. Third Edition Basic Set:
Roll three [six-sided] dice for each of the four basic attributes—ST, DX, IQ, and HT. If you wish, you may discard any one of the four rolls and try again—but you must keep the new roll, whatever it is!
(This rule technically is missing from the Fourth Edition Basic Set, but it obviously works just as well in Fourth Edition.)
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures can be used for hexcrawls. GURPS Boardroom and Curia has rules for creating an organization, such as a troop of bandits seeking to set you up as a new baron. GURPS Low-Tech Companions 2 and 3 have (rough) rules for building fortifications. GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 and articles in Pyramid vol. 3 issues 33 and 52 have (rough) rules for handling the economics of farming. GURPS Mass Combat has rules for large-scale war. Et cetera.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
They were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars via pirating/unauthorized sharing.
It appears that no such evidence was offered in this particular lawsuit.
Fourteen years have elapsed since Defendant first began posting Plaintiffs’ standards. And four years have elapsed since Plaintiffs’ expert opined that Defendant’s activities “would” threaten the market for Plaintiffs’ products. Now, aided by the passage of time, the court is less deferential to conclusory opinions that market harm “is real” but “difficult to measure”. One can reasonably expect that if over the last four years market harm was occurring, or was likely to occur, Plaintiffs could provide economic data and analysis showing that to be the case. For example, Plaintiffs could have offered a side-by-side comparison of sales figures for standards that have and have not been reposted on Defendant’s site to demonstrate the market impact of Defendant’s postings. They could have provided testimony from former customers who stopped purchasing Plaintiffs’ standards because they are available for download on Defendant’s website. The fact that they do not provide any quantifiable evidence, and instead rely on conclusory assertions and speculation long after Defendant first began posting the standards, is telling.
Ultimately, the court finds that “the evidence is such that a reasonable jury could not return a verdict for” Plaintiffs that Defendant’s actions have caused, or likely will cause, market harm with regards to the specific standards at issue. Accordingly, this factor supports Defendant’s fair use defense for each of the 217 standards at issue.
I think he's referring to the official Dragon Ball Z Kai series.
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