hotnfresh

It’s one of several factors that could mean the prices seen by the median person looking for a house are worse than that 4% median house price increase suggests.

To take it to an extreme to illustrate why this may matter, if one town gets abandoned and the houses all sell for $1 to a single family, while all the former residents move to another similar-sized town that sees prices more than double… you’d be best off ignoring or down-weighting the effect of those $1 houses if you’re trying to figure out how the housing market is looking to most people.

Though it’s possible the figures used for the analysis already account for that kind of thing, in some fashion. Are they actual sale prices, or asking prices? Do they only count sales to someone who’s intending to use the dwelling as a primary residence, or all sales? There’s a lot of room for the median experienced house price for a person just trying to buy a place to live to differ from the median on-paper, depending on how it’s handled.

The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.

Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.

I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.

(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)

Yeah, if urbanism/centralization (of where people live and also the economy) increased over the same period, the raw figures may give a misleading picture of what things are really like. There are a lot or rural towns that have been shrinking over that time span, and cheap housing in those places doesn’t meaningfully offset rising prices in growing cities.

Yeah, to be clear, I don’t mean that as a “them damned boomers!” post. They’re not to blame for circumstances conspiring to put life on (relatively) easy mode for them. If they’re guilty of anything (at least, many of them) it’s failing to appreciate how much harder it’s gotten to achieve what they’d consider a basic, unremarkable, ordinary, comfortable middle-class life.

My dad (high school diploma) blundered through his 20s with a series of gigs and barely-paying-the-bills solo businesses, had an expensive divorce (kids in the mix, too), a kid out of wedlock, then finally got his career going as he approached 35. Worked for a railroad. Started at the bottom, worked his way to upper-middle-management before the railroad sold, MBAs took over from career railroad guys in upper management, and they ruined his work-life with constant pointless meetings and having to put up with idiots who didn’t know how anything worked calling the shots, before ultimately “encouraging” him and a bunch of the other expensive career guys into somewhat-early retirement. FFS, he was literally raised in a barn—and not a nice one, and not one attached to hundreds of acres of valuable paid-off farmland or anything like that—they were a kind of poor that barely exists outside the homeless, these days.

My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.

They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.

Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.

Could’ve sworn (HBO) Max and Disney don’t work through it, either.

The big one-step-forward-five-steps-back UI redesign was before the acquisition, wasn’t it?

I clicked because I was excited to see the story of their unexpected interaction with the FCC and FAA (or local equivalents) due to putting out that much EM radiation in those spectra. But no. Still cool, though.

This is not, cannot be, and shouldn’t be math. Yes, it’s all “arbitrary”. Unhealthy impulse-items at the checkout are going to be regarded as quite unethical, by a lot of people, for really obvious reasons. The approaches you’re trying to use to “disprove” that isn’t how any of this works.

Many things are bad. Some are worse than others. Ones that are intentionally manipulative, as the impulse-buy aisle is, and greedily pushing high-margin products that are also unhealthy? Yeah, that’s an extremely shitty thing to do, no matter how common. The motivation is 100% greed, not delivering a better experience (as simply making candy and soda available in some normal aisle might). And in the Year of Our Lord 2023, every person choosing to create impulse-buy areas knows exactly what they’re doing and the effects it has.

The Starbucks bottles in the checkout aisle are, similarly, bad. The Starbucks that you have to walk over to, look at the menu with calories printed right next to each item while you choose what to buy, then stand in a second line, check out again, then wait at to get the drink, isn’t bad in the same ways. It might be bad in different ways, and to a different degree! But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.

One normal human with 24 hours in a day losing 45ish hours a week to pull median income and another 8ish per day to sleep versus multibillion dollar companies hiring behavioral psychologists and marketing experts with collectively many thousands of hours per day spent finding ways to trick people—and their efforts demonstrably work.

The advertising industry’s a rabid dog the size of Godzilla and should be put down, whether it’s targeting kids or adults.

If one course of action that does not even add more options of products to buy, just pushes them in a different way, contributes to worse health outcomes across a population, and you know it’s doing so, yes, that’s super unethical.

I’d happily pay $50/m for a streaming service with a single UI that had all the shit my piracy server does, and a guarantee that things won’t disappear (or at least a track record of that rarely happening). Hell, I might pay as much as $100/m. Maintaining the server and pirating stuff takes time, and hard drives cost real money.

It’s only the combo of money savings, higher quality (most steams are shit), unavailability of what I want (the best versions of several TV shows and movies are piracy exclusives, for one thing), and unified UI that make it worth it. Start chipping away at those, and it gets not-worth-it pretty fast. Apple tried with their unified streaming service UI on Apple TV, but several big players who hate their paying customers refused to implement it, so that’s a dud.

Hell, I in-fact still pay for like five streaming services despite all the above. I’d gladly pay one higher bill if it let me stop fussing with this crap.

Lots of the genre TV shows these days—like the Netflix Marvel stuff, or most of the Star Wars or Disney Marvel tv shows—can only be saved by fan edits because of the absurdly slow plotting, used to stretch a bit over a movie of plot to fill three or more movies worth of time. The scripts and editing are beyond flabby, they’re morbidly obese. Even if you’re paying for the service, the best version of the product’s usually coming from pirates.

The ethical distance between this and littering is about as large as the one between littering and murder, though.

If it’s unethical, it’s somewhere around running a stoplight that’s plainly not registering your presence and hasn’t turned for ten full minutes, with perfect straight mile-long views either way and not a car or person in sight. Not really unethical at all.

My primary use of Docker is as an isolated-installation package manager that’s portable cross-distro and cross-distro-version with exceptionally well-documented and easy-to-test config locations and data storage paths (so much easier to be sure you’ve backed up everything you need to).

Docker minus the giant well-populated well-maintained image library would be almost useless to me.

[edit] one daemon improved immeasurably by Docker is Samba, of all things. The invocations are a little arcane, but once you’ve got them figured out it’s one extra option line to add a user, one line to add a share, repeat as needed. So very much better than relying on distro-magic to make it work, or, god forbid, trying to configure it manually with some config file that ends up inexplicably having no portability, or is silently ignored despite the claims of the docs, or doesn’t work at all because there’s some option commented out by default that definitely shouldn’t be. Docker forced them to finally make the “I just want to share a damn directory, to these users, either read only or read-write” use case, which is probably the vast majority of use of Samba, straightforward, concise, and reliable to configure.

Well—T-shirts did start out as underwear.

My favorite thing about Go is that I can read a dependency’s source and there’s a very low probability that the author favors some totally different 30% of the language than I’m accustomed to, so I find it illegible without great effort. Or has imported libraries to add so many language features that it looks totally alien (fucking JavaScript—it’s getting better these days, to be fair, but there was a decade-plus when you just had no clue what you’d see when you opened up an unfamiliar codebase)

If the startup’s too small or too distributed, may not be available. 50 employees within 75 miles or it doesn’t apply.

Yep, that’s the one

A lot like Melancholia.

Or that one short story about discovering the light of another star was about to reach us… and getting the predictions of its intensity very wrong.

Great to have two “work trees” when you’re often called in to troubleshoot or help with other branches. Sometimes handy during merges, too.

What’s… the EM there to do?

One of the episodes of Stranger Things took like a one-minute break to do a soda ad. Probably the most jarring and disruptive “produce placement” (but really, it was more of an embedded ad) that I’ve seen.

You can check out multiple branches in different directories from a single git repo. This saves me a lot of what used to be stashing.

It appears to be in a browser, which really shouldn’t be providing enough info to make this possible. I take it as a commentary on how information-leaky browsers are, though I’m not sure that’s the intent.

We got accustomed to it, but it never stopped feeling super weird, I think, somewhere deep in our heads.

A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.

I did a little work with one of the Big 3 management consulting firms about… oh, four or five years back, well after everyone cool and most non-cool had adopted Zoom or some other video chat for work calls. They favored actual dial-in conference calls. At first I thought they were dinosaurs, but the more I considered it the more I thought they had the right idea. Nothing to download or permissions to allow. Doesn’t tie up your laptop. Don’t need a laptop out at all, in fact. Phone number and code digits are all you need, can record that on a napkin.

Mass video chat’s so weird that I’m not sure the video’s adding value anyway, if you’re not screen sharing.

Had to download it again just yesterday because I needed a certain plugin for piracy reasons. Couldn’t browse at all until I disabled ipv6 via flag in about:config. Other browsers on same system need no such fiddling.

Still bloated with a bad UI and offering little I can’t get in almost any other browser, all of which qualities are sharply contrary to the ones that made me start using it in the first place. They’ve changed none of what made me stop liking it.

By that standard, Search is also a diversification from ads.

I switched when it was Phoenix.

I stopped liking it some time around v2. Maybe late 1.x series, don’t remember.

I left over a decade ago.

A career in the military (and, to a lesser extent, shorter stints) is in several ways a route to access European-like social services.

- Guaranteed housing—including for your spouse and kids.

- Healthcare for same.

- Free college education.

The pay sucks, but the benefits are pretty damn good. I do think universal healthcare and free public university would take a big bite out of military recruitment rates.