domain:dynomight.net
No_one
1d ago
By 'mastodon' I mean the federated network, not 'mastodon.social' .
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
The simplest explanation is that yes, corporations can gain such scale and power that paying the CEO 100 million dollars makes sense in a free market economy. Corporate officers are merely the highest-paid employees in a corporate structure and their salaries are not fixed by a mysterious cabal. If a board of directors could pay them less, they would and could. The ability and talent to grow a firm is rare: you can't hire Steve Jobs and Elon Musks off the street, and even if you can, you have to pay them for the opportunity cost of them not going off and pursuing their own ventures.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?
Personally, costs aside, there are a lot of European cities where I would rather travel by public transport than driving a car. Driving a car in a big city is not my idea of a great time even if I do not get stuck in a traffic jam. Then there is always the problem of finding a parking spot, which can quickly eat up any time savings from being able to take the most direct route with the car.
Currently, I commute by car because my commute is 10min by car, 20min by bike, or 30min by public transport. If public transport was 15min instead, I would prefer that -- 5 minutes of being at home is not worth 15 minutes of watching videos while on public transport to me.
For people who go to the city for a drink, taking a car is not a great option, obviously.
I will grant you that once cars are fully autonomous, a lot of the downsides will disappear, as the car can keep you entertained en route and then dropping you off before searching for a parking spot. Still, the amount of people you can transport with a metro if you have a train every two minutes is rather impressive, and I do not see cars with one passenger per vehicle replacing that.
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
1d ago
I believe the larger bills were discontinued largely to inhibit illegal activities, making it more difficult to store and move large quantities of cash without tracking. As with many goverment regulations, it had the unfortunate knock-on effect of making life more difficult for law-abiding citizens.
I can remember having a $500 bill in the late eighties, having colored up a summer's worth of high school job savings. I ended up dropping that in the church collection plate as one of my last acts as a believer.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I'm not sure how to tell you this, and I'm not an architect, but I don't see how the layout you're under contract for makes sense. My admittedly amateur eye sees several problems that suggest to me that there's a reason you don't see house layouts like this:
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Starting with the front door, it's path is in conflict with the door to the utility room, since the utility room door swings outwards.
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The reason it swings outwards is because the layout of the utility room doesn't make sense. There isn't enough depth to store the washer and dryer without them sticking out into the entry path from the door. And assuming you're putting the water heater, furnace, and panel box in here, plus possibly a stationary tub, the room isn't long enough to put them far enough back to keep them out of the immediate ingress path.
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The living room-as-central-hall concept will reduce the usable space by half. My house was built in 1945 and the upstairs hallway is 36" wide, and it's narrow; newer homes have 48" hallways. I'd say three feet is the minimum clearance you'll need around the doors to have adequate movement without it being cramped. Since you have doors on both sides of the room, nearly half of the total width needs to be kept clear for ingress and egress through the area.
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The upshot of the above is that there will be very little room for furniture. The couch will have to be practically in the middle of the room. I think I see how you have a plan to mount the TV on the wall between two doors. With this TV location, you'll have to get a very small "apartment sofa" dead center in the room, and you might have room for a small end table or another chair on the wall next to the door. And that's it. That also means that the highest traffic area of the house will be directly between the couch and the television.
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Another issue with having a central hall is that the private areas of the house are exposed to the living area. If you're entertaining people will be looking in bedrooms, and will be going to the bathroom with nothing but an inch and a half of birch between them and the party.
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Why the double doors in the bathrooms? They have conflicting swing paths and seem unnecessary. Make the master bath en suite and the spare open up to the house.
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What do you need two bathrooms for? And two large bathrooms at that; a typical size for a full bath in a small house is 8' × 5'. I don't know why you'd build a house with an 800 ft² footprint and waste space on two bathrooms.
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Why no basement? I know they're more expensive, but if I understand correctly you're in the Philly/NJ area, which isn't exactly the South. Here in Pittsburgh the frost line is at 36" and while I imagine it's less over there, it couldn't be that much less. Building on a slab means sinking a footer at 36" and then building up frost walls, which is still ultimately less expensive but doesn't usually make sense considering that a basement gives you a lot of extra space. Slabs are also more difficult to heat. The only time people build on slabs around here is if there's some special consideration like they're building on an old industrial site, there are mine subsidence issues, or they're in the mountains where there's shallow bedrock. The only house I saw that was build on a slab for no reason had a lot of other puzzling decisions made by the guy who built it, who I knew and was surprised he'd build a house like that.
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Not as big a deal, but the lack of a rear door seems concerning.
If you want to look at efficient houses, look at a typical ranch or split-entry layout. They're all practically mirror images but when they were building tract houses in the '50s and 60's the builders wanted to maximize usable space while still making the house livable.
Skeletor
1d ago
I have lots of room for food in my large house. I don't even go to the store and pick it up off the shelves myself, I order it from Wal-Mart and have them stuff it in the trunk for me. I will absolutely sell out to transgender wokies, or Sharia law types, or literal fascists before I carry home my one little bag of groceries with like a stalk of celery and a baguette sticking out the top like someone living in some Old World city originally designed for donkey carts.
It's just corporate management speech in text form. It existed well before LLMs and is where their speech patterns come from and are aimed at.
It isn't artificial as much as it is a bit soulless, which I suppose might be fitting for the output of a literal machine.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
We need cars so that we can live in suburbs, and we need suburbs because all the urban cores were taken over by the black underclass after the end of segregation.
Repeal the Civil Rights Act and then we can talk about walkable cities.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
I have the same reaction, but I see it less as a left/right thing than as a "videogame turned politics streamer" thing. I just think that niche tends to run more right-wing in general. It's the product of a generation of commentators raised on 4chan shitposting rather than Walter Cronkite. Content aside, this guy gives me the same sense of revulsion I get from Hasan Piker.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
1d ago
If your grocery store is 2 minutes down the road going to it multiple times a week is not an issue. In fact it's preferable because you can get stuff when you want it and not have it clogging up space in your home.
Skeletor
1d ago
I will absolutely tear down civilization before I live in the world Europoors and "walkable cities" types want for me. If I have to visit the grocery store more than once a week you won't need to use public transit to see someone get set the hell on fire.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
In fairness to the "Elon is unique" theory, he does seem to be a locus of "I don't care what problems you encountered, we're doing sci-fi shit, so shut the fuck up and figure it out" energy. This doesn't always work out, but it appears to be a load-bearing reason for why SpaceX is SpaceX instead of "failed aerospace subsidy farm #28".
hooser
1d ago
We are talking about value an employee brings to a business, which is more straightforward to measure.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
They’ll travel, it just costs more. And really I’d expect transit to be concentrated in the same places as union halls anyways.
BlindDeafRat
1d ago
A lot of those Italian buildings are centuries old. Where as most of California's cities rose up in the last two centuries, especially the last one.
So why not compare it with China instead? They've created cities even faster than USA, and their cities are still much closer to California's design and Italy's.
This is one of those things that sounds easy in theory, but in practice, with the needs of the city you will rarely get city design of Europe unless that's the goal you want to achieve from the start. Which would probably require extremely restrictive building laws.
And speaking of roads, I know people shit on "Just one more lane" road design, but in my experience driving in Italy it has the opposite problem of roads which really do need an extra lane or two, because on a two lane road, one is full of trucks, so you're constantly stuck in traffic. And in general the quality of their roads is much worse than the surrounding countries'.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
You just unearthed repressed memories of me trying to get home from college and my pants falling down from the weight of all those damn Susan B. Anthony and Sacagwea coins from the train station.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
Honestly, I think most of them are probably sitting in desk drawers and piggy banks because people think they're uncommon enough to be cool and not worth spending over two $1 bills. I remember my parents often using $2 bills for fun little things like the tooth fairy or hiding them in easter eggs.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
I would like to selfishly use your post to get on my own personal numismatic hobby horse: we should stop putting real people on our money (I might be willing to make a singular exception with George Washington). It's monarchical and anti-American. The only people on our money should be idealized personifications of American values like Lady Liberty, Columbia, and Blind Justice, joined by other American symbols like the Bald Eagle, Buffalo, and Liberty Bell.
The quarter should be replaced with Benjamin Franklin's original "Mind Your Business" cent design, the first and best designed coin in American history.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
He means six figures, because once you make 100+ it's "triple digit" because the trailing 000 is assumed
Making 75,000 would be "double digit" I guess because it's "75"
I've never seen that before, but if a friend asked my salary I would respond with "I make 95" not "I make 95,000" so it makes sense
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
Ancient Indians seem to have had an uncanny ability to locate their sacred spaces directly on top of valuable mineral resources. Perhaps we should be hiring native shamans to do our mineral surveying for us.
phailyoor
1d ago
You posted a picture of an industrial park, which is full of factories and warehouses. Italy has those too but you didn't post a picture of that. Italy also has highways but you didn't post a picture of those either.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Great question!
This is a tic that makes me think LLM these days. Not necessarily accusing you of using one here, more commenting on the sad closing of the linguistic frontier as various phrasings become associated with "artificial" text.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, but why is it subconsciously affecting him? What's the peril the sister might be in? You haven't established that sufficiently, the set-up sounds like he would have reacted the same way even if there was no ferry with a sister on it tomorrow. "Whoops, oh crap, what do I do? Manual says get in touch with other person to do the dual key turn", not "I better sort this out now or else my sister's ferry will blow up in the middle of World War Three". I might be thinking "Huh, my sister is going to go down the town to do grocery shopping tomorrow" but that's not making me rush to do something in my job that isn't standard procedure. If there's no danger, there's no reason to be het-up and reacting irrationally.
The tiny scale manipulation seems to be "put pressure on by popping up message never encountered before", not "heh heh dumb fleshbag and his emotional attachments".
I'm asking "so why is it important the sister was going to be on a ferry?" and you're answering "it's not important, she was perfectly safe, that's why he reacted irrationally" and I'm going "whut?"
I have a family member that lives in SoCal and they've recently built higher density housing along the freeway and metrolink stop there. The result has been a massive spike in local traffic, the shopping centers nearby are so crowded that they no longer even bother going to them and generally avoid businesses near the freeway, opting to drive to grocery stores and shopping further away. Lights back up to the point that they routinely get stuck stopped at green lights waiting for the intersection in front of them to empty near these areas.
Doesn't really seem like it'd take a genius to figure this out, but it turns out that just because you live next to a metrolink or freeway or other "quality public transit" doesn't mean you will hop on one or hop on the freeway and drive 30 minutes every time you want to leave your house for basic things. Maybe some people use it to commute, but the local area is still negatively effected. Whatever small shopping centers they might build into these higher density housing can't compete with all the amenities offered by the preexisting suburban sprawl. So you basically just end up plopping a bunch more people in an area with roads and parking lots not equipped for it. Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.
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