skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Blocky Planet — Making Minecraft Spherical in ~comp
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Blocky Planet — Making Minecraft Spherical
7 votes -
Comment on A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it. in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI'm not saying it's necessarily worse than other solutions, but this doesn't eliminate controversy or politics. Residents can evaluate whether a proposed policy benefits them personally or not and...I'm not saying it's necessarily worse than other solutions, but this doesn't eliminate controversy or politics. Residents can evaluate whether a proposed policy benefits them personally or not and vote accordingly.
As we see with inheritance disputes, dividing up a pot of money can result in lots of contention. Also, the Surfside condo collapse is a worst-case scenario where a contributing factor was that residents were unable to agree on expensive repairs.
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Comment on A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it. in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI think it could be an improvement, but I don’t know how much the game can change? I don’t see how you avoid supply and demand imbalance in a world with increasing wealth (for some) and...I think it could be an improvement, but I don’t know how much the game can change?
I don’t see how you avoid supply and demand imbalance in a world with increasing wealth (for some) and insufficient housing. Allocating housing by how much people are willing to pay has a lot of problems, but if the price to get in is lower, there will need to be some other scheme (like a waitlist or a lottery) that determines who gets the apartment. These are alternative ways of being exclusive and a barrier to moving.
Nicer apartments will somehow be harder to get, regardless of what scheme they use to decide who gets them. A way to make this less of a problem is to have more alternatives that are also decent.
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Comment on Why do so many people think US President Donald Trump is good? in ~society
skybrian LinkDavid Brooks argues: ... It isn't an evidence-based article. He makes a lot of assertions about "people" without backing them up.David Brooks argues:
[T]he moral relativism of the 1980s and ’90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.
Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile.
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So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create.
It isn't an evidence-based article. He makes a lot of assertions about "people" without backing them up.
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Comment on What a WiFi ban cost this West Virginia school in ~society
skybrian Link... ... ...On Aug. 5, the Green Bank Observatory made a seismic announcement: WiFi would now be allowed within a 10-mile radius of the telescope. It marks a dramatic shift in policy, even if, in practice, many local homes had already installed wireless routers in defiance of the long-standing ban. The observatory cited “radio pollution” from these unauthorized signals as one reason to legalize what had become an uncontrollable situation. The other reason was educational: The school had been begging for years to get WiFi.
In many ways, Green Bank was an unintentional experiment in pedagogy. While the rest of the country rushed to bring tech into classrooms, Green Bank remained stuck in 1999. Without WiFi, the school’s 200 students couldn’t use Chromebooks or digital textbooks, or do research online. Teachers couldn’t access individualized education programs online or use Google Docs for staff meetings. Even routine tasks such as state-mandated standardized testing became challenging, with students rotating through a small, hardwired computer lab where they took the exams.
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Proposals had been floated over the years for the school to get WiFi without interfering with the observatory. One idea was to install LiFi, which emits low-range WiFi through lightbulbs, but the technology was finicky and expensive. Another thought was to pile an enormous dirt mound behind the school to prevent the WiFi from radiating toward the telescopes, but that would have destroyed the soccer fields.
While those discussions dragged on, students fell further behind in math and reading, with Green Bank consistently posting the lowest test scores in the county. “Our kids are no different than the other kids in the county,” said Principal Melissa Jordan. “The only difference, in my opinion, is their lack of access to engaging technology.”
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During the coronavirus pandemic, when schools went remote, wireless connectivity became more critical for students logging on from home. And outside of education, the increasing use of that connectivity to power everything from glucose monitors to prosthetic limbs kept adding pressure on the National Radio Quiet Zone. Something had to give.
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In a compromise, the observatory said it would permit WiFi at 2.4 GHz, but higher-frequency bands like 5 and 6 GHz would remain restricted. The observatory will enforce those boundaries more rigorously and is holding community listening sessions to guide the transition, said Sheldon Wasik, the regulatory coordinator for the quiet zone. Meanwhile, the observatory is collaborating with Starlink to provide satellite internet to much of the quiet zone, a welcome note to emergency responders from surrounding counties who have been clamoring for better wireless communication service.
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What a WiFi ban cost this West Virginia school
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Comment on The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and homelessness in the US in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...From the article:
Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities. Well into the 20th century, SROs were the least expensive option on the housing market, providing a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones. Over the next several decades, governments and developers gradually demolished thousands of SROs or converted them to other uses, including boutique hotels for tourists. And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide.
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A wealth of research has examined the causes of homelessness over the past two decades. These studies consistently find that the cost of housing is by far the primary driver. For example, several studies have concluded that an area’s median rent correlates far more closely with its homelessness rate than factors such as weather, poverty rate, and rates of mental illness or substance use.
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This relationship is apparent whether comparing cities or states. High-rent states such as California, Hawaii, and New York have persistently high rates of homelessness; states with low rents, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia, have low rates.
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Homelessness first became an issue on a national scale in the 1870s. Continued upheaval in the aftermath of the Civil War and industrialization pushed more people into “riding the rails” on the nation’s new railroad system in search of jobs.19 The rise of these itinerant workers, in turn, drove the development of early rooming houses and residential hotels, particularly for Americans at the lower end of the income scale. Rooms could be rented by the night, week, or month.
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Residential hotel construction peaked in the early 20th century in most cities. By the 1920s, many cheap hotels in big cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago offered a mix of private rooms; large rooms converted to tiny, cubicle-style bedrooms with partitions that did not reach the ceilings; and open-air wards with rows of cots.21 At the time, a private room might rent for 25 cents to 40 cents a night and the semiprivate cubicles and open wards for 15 cents to 25 cents a night. That’s far less than anything available in modern U.S. cities: 40 cents in 1924 is the equivalent of about $7.40 in 2025, roughly $230 a month. That would be affordable even to a person living below the federal poverty line (defined as $15,650 in income for a one-person household in 2025).
Hotels nationwide were much different than they are today. They were much more likely to host long-term occupants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One 1930 survey of hotels throughout the country found that long-term residents occupied an average of 20% of the rooms in the most expensive third of American hotels, and at least 75% of rooms in low- and mid-priced hotels.
In New York City, low-rent, single-room occupancy exploded during the Great Depression and World War II, when tens of thousands of people moved from the South and Puerto Rico to work in the city’s munitions factories and on major construction projects. By the 1950s, the city had more than 200,000 SRO units, accounting for more than 10% of the city’s rental housing stock.23 In 1986, 87,000 New Yorkers still lived in hotels, according to what was then the largest study of inexpensive hotels undertaken by a city government in the U.S. Across the five boroughs, 43% of SRO residents were under 40 years old and 32% were 40 to 60 years old; a third were Black; and a quarter were Latino.
During the same era in San Francisco, many long-term occupants of residential hotels were retired Filipino or Chinese laborers or newly arrived families from Southeast Asia. In 1977, 330 sheriff’s deputies and policemen showed up to evict 40 elderly Filipino and Chinese residents from the International Hotel, triggering outcry and concern as well as a congressional report.
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Some politicians scapegoated SRO residents, increasingly portraying them as poor, dependent on alcohol or drugs, reliant on public welfare, transient, and immoral. This image was compounded by the condition of many SRO buildings, which even in the early 1900s were often run-down and neglected. Reformers blamed crowded apartments and unsanitary shared bathroom facilities for the spread of common diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Some policymakers and activists viewed residential hotels and SROs as a public nuisance and a decaying form of housing that should be eliminated. “The SRO should not be accepted as lawful housing for any segment of our population,” an aide to New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner reportedly said in 1965. “ No community should equate such housing with the acceptable living standards of the 1960s.”
Many city and state governments began crafting policies in the 1950s and 1960s that encouraged property owners to convert SRO buildings to tourist-oriented hotels or traditional apartments. Newly enacted zoning codes and building codes made creating SROs illegal or economically unviable. Researchers have noted that market forces alone would have been unlikely to decimate the stock of SROs because they were profitable to operate when allowed and declined only when new laws targeted them.
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As the nation’s least expensive source of housing disappeared, homelessness soared in major cities across the United States. In New York City, for example, the number of homeless residents increased from a barely visible population to almost 30,000 by 1987. About half of men entering homeless shelters in the city in 1980 reported they had previously lived in SROs. The sudden loss of SROs and commensurate rise in homelessness prompted an advocate in New York to remark: “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market … they aren’t anymore.”
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As early as the mid-1980s, the problem of homelessness in New York City had gotten so severe that legislators tried to reverse course on SROs. The city government passed Local Law 19 in May 1983, adding protections for SRO tenants. The city ended tax benefits for converting SROs in 1983. Eventually, the City Council banned the conversion, alteration, demolition, or warehousing (holding units vacant for years to make them eligible for conversion or demolition) of SRO units altogether. But the New York Court of Appeals ruled these bans unconstitutional because they prevented property owners from determining how their buildings could be used.53 Similarly, Chicago officials passed an SRO preservation ordinance to discourage conversions or sales of SROs in 2014, but by that time, the large majority had already been lost. The city’s zoning and building codes made it challenging to build new ones.
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Despite all of this, New York City probably still has the largest remaining stock of SRO hotels and rooming houses in the country. A paper from the Furman Center at New York University estimated that there were as many as 30,000 SRO units remaining in the city in 2014. The city regulates SROs as part of its rent stabilization program, meaning owners can raise rents by only a low amount each year and need to file documentation with the city on each unit’s rent. In 2022, the state housing agency reported 322 regulated SRO buildings with 11,051 units, of which nearly half—more than 5,300—were rent-stabilized. The median monthly allowable rent for these units was $1,018 in 2022, compared with $1,641 for a regular rental apartment in the city in 2023 (including public housing, rent-controlled housing, subsidized housing, and conventional, market-rate housing).
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The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and homelessness in the US
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Comment on A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it. in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentPeople may want to move because the location or the apartment doesn't suit them anymore. Maybe they get a new job or want to move closer to relatives? And sometimes couples break up. But I'm not...People may want to move because the location or the apartment doesn't suit them anymore. Maybe they get a new job or want to move closer to relatives? And sometimes couples break up.
But I'm not saying it's necessarily going to happen, just that it's a possible downside that I thought of.
That's a good point that they could invest the difference, assuming they have the money to invest. But I think part of the point of making it more affordable is that many people wouldn't have the money? They might save it up over time, though, due to the lower rent. Having less of your net worth in real estate can be an advantage.
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Comment on A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it. in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentOne downside that occurs to me is that when someone leaves, they get back what they put in, but that might not be enough to buy into the next place if prices are rising.One downside that occurs to me is that when someone leaves, they get back what they put in, but that might not be enough to buy into the next place if prices are rising.
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Comment on A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it. in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentIn New York 2140 by the same author, part of the story takes place in the MetLife tower, which has been converted into a co-op. When I was reading it, I assumed it was inspired by the New York...In New York 2140 by the same author, part of the story takes place in the MetLife tower, which has been converted into a co-op. When I was reading it, I assumed it was inspired by the New York version of a co-op, though.
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Comment on A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it. in ~finance
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/aOjk3 … … …Switzerland is notoriously expensive, but affordable apartments like Mr. Waelti’s can be found in cities across the country. Known as cooperatives — though distinct from American co-ops — they are built and run by nonprofit organizations and represent a kind of “third way” beyond the classic rent-or-buy choice.
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In Switzerland’s member-based cooperative housing, new residents buy shares to gain admission to the building and get one vote in the corporation regardless of how many shares they own. The co-op uses the money to maintain the building, keep rents below market rate and, often, provide communal amenities like child care.
When a resident moves out, their shares are returned at face value. There is no capital gain.
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While most Swiss co-ops finance themselves, newer ones are often helped to their feet by the government, which offers land at cheaper rates and low-interest loans, and sometimes buys shares in return for housing for low-income residents. Rents are calculated strictly on a cost basis, meaning there’s no developer or owner seeking revenue.
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Switzerland has long been a leader of cooperative housing, said Alice Pittini, a researcher at Housing Europe, a group that represents public, cooperative and social housing federations around the continent. That may seem paradoxical given the country’s capitalist zeitgeist, but around 8 percent of dwellings in Lausanne, a city with about 140,000 residents, are co-ops. Mr. Waelti’s co-op, the city’s largest, comprises 101 apartment buildings that house a total of 5,000 tenants. There is a waiting list of 1,000 people.
Cooperatives are only one facet of Switzerland’s welfare state, which has very low rates of homelessness and strong tenant protections. (The majority of Swiss are renters, partly because home prices are so high.) Even in Zurich, Switzerland’s financial capital, nearly one in five apartments is a co-op, and the city aims to make it one in three by 2050.
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A ‘third way’ between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they’ve found it.
37 votes -
Comment on Android emulators to actually use mobile apps in day-to-day life? in ~tech
skybrian LinkMaybe keep an old phone on your desk for this sort of thing? Some people will have a personal phone and a work phone, which is sort of similar. It seems a little unusual that a bank wouldn't...Maybe keep an old phone on your desk for this sort of thing?
Some people will have a personal phone and a work phone, which is sort of similar.
It seems a little unusual that a bank wouldn't support desktop at all. Maybe switch banks?
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Comment on Six months into tariffs, US businesses have no idea how to price anything in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI imagine suppliers with pre-tariff inventory will have the advantage until they run out. The ones who don't will avoid selling at a loss by not selling some items. When they all run out, Lowes...I imagine suppliers with pre-tariff inventory will have the advantage until they run out. The ones who don't will avoid selling at a loss by not selling some items. When they all run out, Lowes will have to decide whether to carry that item at a higher price or not at all.
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Comment on Six months into tariffs, US businesses have no idea how to price anything in ~finance
skybrian LinkArchive: https://archive.is/Q2lLE …Archive: https://archive.is/Q2lLE
The impact of tariffs has been a question hanging over the economy. So far, the global trade war hasn’t caused a surge in prices. That is in large part because companies have absorbed price increases, though that might not last. Pretariff inventories are running low, forcing companies to confront difficult pricing decisions they can no longer delay.
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Repricing, though, isn’t as easy as changing a tag—in part because suppliers and big-box stores are engaged in an epic tussle over who will pay what.
Retailers, including Lowe’s and Home Depot, buy Thompson Traders’ wares and set the retail price themselves. And they have been reluctant to pay Thompson Traders more.
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Six months into tariffs, US businesses have no idea how to price anything
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Comment on US Food and Drug Administration limits approval for new coronavirus vaccines to high-risk people in ~health
skybrian Link ParentOkay, current status: I've been working on a reply to your message where I'm going through the links you sent and deciding what I believe. As part of that, I realized that I need to decide on what...Okay, current status:
I've been working on a reply to your message where I'm going through the links you sent and deciding what I believe. As part of that, I realized that I need to decide on what I would consider to count as eugenics. That's part of my process. That's not done yet and might not be for a while because real life intervened - we're in the process of buying a house.
Meanwhile, I thought Gaywallet's message raised similar issues about the definition of eugenics so I started discussing that separately, which was probably a mistake.
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Comment on US Food and Drug Administration limits approval for new coronavirus vaccines to high-risk people in ~health
skybrian Link ParentIt's because I think words should mean things. I thought I was using a rather broad definition, but apparently not broad enough for you. I didn't mean any disrespect by it, but I think you are...It's because I think words should mean things. I thought I was using a rather broad definition, but apparently not broad enough for you.
I didn't mean any disrespect by it, but I think you are showing disrespect for me.
From the article: