Guy I worked with retired from the Navy as a captain and got whatever very generous pay came with that. Then used his veterans preference to get a job in my agency, did that for 20+ years, retired as a gs 14 so he gets that annuity plus his TSP savings plus social security in a few years. He’s still barely 60, so he is working as a consultant. I’m guessing he’s pulling down $200k with all the various incomes and maybe working 20 hours a week, and he’s got the Healthcare and other benefits for life. People trash talk the military and government but if you work the system right it can be worthwhile. Hell, I wish I’d joined just so I could get USAA.

That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don’t see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don’t think we Dan just wave our hands and say “corporate buyers” and explain away our housing market problems.

We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we’ve pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that’s nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that’s bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.

I’d love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say “disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock” and solve the problem, but it’s nowhere near that simple.

Larger buildings are required to do this under IBC, and have been for many years. You can absolutely make a modern multifamily wood framed building quiet with proper design and construction.

There’s no perfect building material. Wood has issues. But concrete is terrible for the planet from a climate perspective and we’re rapidly running out of quality aggregate (especially sand) in many parts of the world. You can make a list of pros and cons about any other material, too.

First, IBC has had this as code for at least 15 years.

The International Building Code (IBC) establishes minimum requirements for airborne and impact performance of multifamily buildings. The minimum code requirement is STC 50 and IIC 50. Since many factors can affect the transmission of sound in the field, including non-standardized source and receiver rooms as well as construction tolerances, a field measurement (ASTC or AIIC) of three to five points below the lab measurement is acceptable to meet code requirements.

As the understanding increased of how STC and IIC ratings correlate with occupant comfort, the International Code Council (ICC) issued ICC G2-2010, “Guideline for Acoustics,” which established two additional levels of acoustical performance:

acceptable, defined as STC 55 and IIC 55; and preferred amount of isolation as STC 60 and IIC 60

Second, all the money is most definitely not in the land. As a general ballpark, developers want the land to be under 1/4 of the total cost of the project.

Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Or as I originally heard it, “going to bed is going to work.”

Are you kidding? It filters out 90% of my inbox so I don’t have to look at it, but keeps it available for me in case I want it later. It’s one of my favorite features Gmail.

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

I miss that man

Besides the face unlock, the 12s and newer have magsafe charging and it’s a delight.

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.