• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

    In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

    This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing




    • Accidental Tech Podcast: Three dudes talking about tech and (mostly) Apple
    • The Allusionist: podcast about language and linguistics
    • The Bruenigs: Matt & Liz Bruenig talk about random stuff
    • Cortex: podcast about productivity by Myke Hurley & CGP Grey
    • Factually: Interviews with interesting people hosted by Adam Connover
    • Hello Internet (Dead): two dudes talking, GGP Grey & Brady Haran (Numberphile)
    • Intentionally Blank: Random conversations with Brandon Sanderson & Dan Wells
    • No Such Thing As a Fish: Intersting and odd facts by the team behind the British TV show QI
    • Puck Soup: Ice Hockey News and information
    • Stuff You Should Know: Funny podcast about all kinds of stuff
    • The Tennis Podcast: podcast about tennis
    • Ungeniused: brief episodes about interesting Wikipedia pages
    • The Unmade Podcast: mostly random stuff, but about pitching ideas for other podcasts
    • Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me: the NPR News quiz






  • Correct me if I’m wrong, OP, but it sounds like you’re talking about retreating to the axioms of the particular belief system, as in there is a point where reason breaks down because you get to things that you (the person whose expressing their opinion) have accepted that’s different than me.

    To me this is a bit of a Motte and Bailey fallacy as your question was whether or not you have a good argument and then someone replied to that and then moved to the set of assumptions which has nothing to do with argument.

    For me personally, the other person has to demonstrate some level of critical reasoning for me to respect their opinions, even if their assumptions are different than mine. Beliefs that are entered into using reasoning are more useful than ones without because they can be changed which is what discourse is all about




  • I think I recently saw an article about a trial of the 32-hour work week in the UK that most of the companies ended up sticking with.

    I work at a smallish company that has to be really precise with how much time is charged to specific (mainly government) programs, but there’s a lot of downtime. I think this would really help.

    John Maynard Keynes, basically the founder of modern, macroeconomic theory predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only be working 15 hours a week. Ironically, up until the 80’s in the US, average work hours per employee per week was trending down and had it continued would have gotten as low as 15 by now (I think, can’t perfectly recall the trend line)






  • No in the strictest definition of SAD, where the winter and fall depress you. I have reverse seasonal affective disorder, where the same happens to me but in the spring and summer. The sun saps all my energy away and I thrive in the cold and the dark. All of my positive emotions dull from April until around mid-October every single year. Give me snow and clouds any day over shorts and sunlight


  • Think it’s just a familiar form factor for the product given that most are used to how the former birdsite’s apps (both first and third parties) looked and operated. A few of them are even made by the same developers who had made third party apps. May eventually drift towards something else, but at least for the time being, telling people “instead of logging into this website, you log into this website” and everything else works and looks the same is an easier sell especially during the mass adoption and scaling phase of the platform