Fried_out_Kombi

@Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.

  Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But how would they be able to live on that?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Better than a wealth tax is a land value tax. Key properties are that it doesn’t cause capital flight (you can’t move land), it’s almost impossible to evade (you can’t hide land), it’s economically efficient (it literally doesn’t even harm the economy in the slightest to implement it), it can’t be passed on to tenants (both in economic theory and in observed practice), and it’s progressive.

  Plus, it incentives denser, transit-oriented city development and disincentivizes wastage of prime real estate (which contributes to the housing crisis). All in all, a terrific policy that people aren’t talking nearly enough about imo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨unsure why we are surprised lol⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

  The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨unsure why we are surprised lol⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨unsure why we are surprised lol⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any genuine benefits to AI?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Indeed and other job sites are saturated with scams⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

  For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Software devs, I need advice⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I remember doing a pretty standard software eng internship for a cloud services company one summer back in undergrad, and I just found it so dull and uninteresting. It wasn’t even the company’s fault, as the team was great, good work-life balance, and good pay. I just realized through that internship that I truly did not want to work in cloud services or as a bog standard software eng.

  Much happier now working as a research engineer in embedded systems, as it’s a field I find genuinely interesting. When you’re young is exactly the time to try to figure out what actually interests you and try to go do that. Spending all day every day writing code to solve problems you find fundamentally uninteresting is a quick route to burnout.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing crisis: Are you prepared to wait 6 months to rent a studio in Paris? | Euronews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Then tax land. Make landlords sweat if they fail to rent out units.

  The solution to housing affordability is all about negotiation power. Currently, tenants in many cities do not have negotiating power because an overall shortage of housing and thus no credible threat of vacancy (and with no land tax, vacancy isn’t enough of a financial loss). Build more housing by making it legal and easy to build housing, tax land, and tenants will have far more negotiating power.

  A good example is my city, Montreal. Thanks to being one of the most YIMBY cities in North America, we have far more missing middle housing than any other city of this size on the continent. The result? More power to the tenants, less to the landlords. And the result of this power? Not only is my rent waaaaay cheaper for what I get compared to my sister in Boston (we pay about the same, but she has 3 roommates and lives farther out, while I have 1-br and live right next to downtown in an insanely walkable neighborhood), but I also negotiated down my rent when moving in. The reason I could negotiate down my rent was because the landlord had a credible threat of vacancy, so they’d rather lower rent by a hundred bucks than risk vacancy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing crisis: Are you prepared to wait 6 months to rent a studio in Paris? | Euronews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The urban area is what people refer to as Paris. A good comparison is Los Angeles. Lots of people say they “live in LA” but in fact live in Santa Monica or Long Beach or Pasadena or any of a million other suburbs that together form the Los Angeles urban area.

  When people say they live in Paris, 99% of the time they’re not talking about the arbitrary municipal boundaries; they’re talking about the urban area.

  When people say they live in LA, 99% of the time they’re talking about the urban area.

  When people say they live in Buenos Aires, 99% of the time they’re talking about the urban area.

  When people say they live in Tokyo, 99% of the time they’re talking about the urban area.

  “Urban area” is simply a term meant to capture what people mean when they refer to a city, unrestricted by the arbitrariness of municipal boundaries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing crisis: Are you prepared to wait 6 months to rent a studio in Paris? | Euronews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Letting the market decide the rent will not magically create more housing

  Rent control does not create new housing either. The reason economists basically all say rent control is bad policy is because it drastically reduces the amount of housing that gets built.

  If you want more housing, make it legal and easy to build new housing like Japan did. Tokyo is the most populous city in the world, and yet it’s remarkably affordable because it’s very easy and streamlined to build new housing.

  In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

  www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/…/tokyo-housing.html

  Also, you appear to have a very uninformed view of who economists are and what they value. Economists, like all other social scientists, are academics and scientists. Believe it or not, economists are not a cabal of landlords wanting prices to go up; just about every economist will tell you the dangers of inflation and rent-seeking. You might be surprised to learn the surveyed beliefs of economists:

  • The majority of surveyed American economists vote for Democrats instead of Republicans
  • The majority are in favor of environmental protection regulations (EPA)
  • The majority are in favor of food and drug safety regulations (FDA)
  • The majority are in favor of occupational health and safety regulations (OSHA)

  Further, the largest-ever survey on economists’ views on the climate show an overwhelming economic consensus on climate change:

  We conducted a large-sample global survey on climate economics, which we sent to all economists who have published climate-related research in the field’s highest-ranked academic journals; 738 responded. To our knowledge, this is the largest-ever expert survey on the economics of climate change. The results show an overwhelming consensus that the costs of inaction on climate change are higher than the costs of action, and that immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing crisis: Are you prepared to wait 6 months to rent a studio in Paris? | Euronews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re comparing only the cities proper. A better comparison is urban areas, i.e., the contiguous built-up regions, as stats for cities proper are skewed by the arbitrariness of municipal boundaries and stats for metropolitan areas are skewed by often encompassing large amounts of rural areas.

  To compare urban area densities:

  • Tokyo urban area has a population of 39,105,000 and an area of 8,547 km^2^, for a density of 4,575 people per km^2^
  • Paris urban area has a population of 10,859,000 and an area of 2,854 km^2^, for a density of 3,805 people per km^2^
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing crisis: Are you prepared to wait 6 months to rent a studio in Paris? | Euronews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Tokyo is the most populous city on the planet with like 3x the population of Paris, and yet it’s remarkably affordable. Why? It’s easy af to build there. Japan has a simple, nationwide zoning code that makes it extremely easy and streamlined to build new housing.

  Clearly Tokyo has found the room. Paris has plenty of room.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing crisis: Are you prepared to wait 6 months to rent a studio in Paris? | Euronews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  !yimby@lemmy.world !justtaxland@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all know this happens everyday.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I honestly think many people don’t really know what freedom means. They think it’s a one-way street that means they can get whatever they want, but they never consider that freedom means other people can do what they want, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all know this happens everyday.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  True Freedom™ is when the government forces every single person to have identical, ugly-ass front lawns for completely arbitrary aesthetic reasons, clearly /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all know this happens everyday.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  And that’s by design. Parking minimum laws were literally written with maximum demand in mind, not typical. Like, those parking lots are going to sit half-empty for 99% of the year, and we all collectively have to pay for it every day through pricier goods in stores (parking lots and the real estate they occupy ain’t free), pricier rent (it could have been housing instead), and pricier transportation (ginormous parking lots just spread everything out, meaning we’re forced to become more dependent on gas-guzzling cars instead of being able to walk to the shop for free).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all know this happens everyday.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The crazy thing about the whole situation is it’s like the ONE time that the solution is actually deregulation and stronger property rights, but it’s also the ONE time libertarians WANT heavy regulations, weak property rights, and big daddy government interfering in your personal life.

  I feel like I’m in bizarro world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all know this happens everyday.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It certainly doesn’t help that it’s literally illegal to build enough housing across the vast majority of urban land (at least in the US and Canada). Nothing like good ol’ fashioned manufactured scarcity to guarantee line keeps on going up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honest question: what was Hamas' long-game with respect to kidnapping Israelis? Did they think Israel would just negotiate rather than retaliate?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This video by a political science professor explains it best: youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh

  In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.

  Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.

  Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don’t talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.

  All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do many folks play follow the leader even into adulthood?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do many folks play follow the leader even into adulthood?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  A great example is when you’re in elementary school and you get that one really athletic kid on your team for some team sport in gym class. You know you’re not on that level and never will be, so you tie yourself to them, knowing that them succeeding is good for you.

  Likewise, we like to attach our fortunes to a designated person, and they become greater than just a person in our mind. Like, that athletic kid is not longer simply a kid who’s good at sports; they’re the athletic kid. Our favored 19th-century political thought leader is no longer just some person who had opinions on society and wrote them down; they’re a political messiah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the equator is the hottest part of the world, why aren't the deserts there?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The type of biome you get depends largely on availability of water, not temperature.

  Deserts are deserts because they have very poor availability of water most of the time. This is most often caused by simple lack of precipitation, but other factors can influence this:

  • High temperatures cause high evaporation rates, meaning to need more precipitation to achieve the same level of plant growth. This is why, for example, 10 inches (25.4 cm) of precipitation will get you desert in the tropics, subtropics, and temperate latitudes, but it’ll get you boreal forest in the colder subpolar latitudes.
  • Extremely low temperatures (such as in Antarctica) result in everything being perpetually frozen. Most of Antarctica is a desert, both because it gets very little precipitation and because all the ice on the ground isn’t available as liquid water.
  • Extremely sandy or gravelly soils which do not retain water cause poor water availability, even with abundant precipitation and a mild climate. While these aren’t typically classified as "true deserts), the plant life certainly reflects the harsh conditions and poor availability of water.

  As for why we largely don’t see desert at the equator, it’s because of precipitation. Due to the circulation of cold and warm air in the atmosphere, the equator typically sees warm air, often laden with moisture due to the oceans and the high moisture capacity of warm air, rise. As it rises, it cools, and because cool air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can, it drops a lot of that moisture as rain. This results in most of the equator getting a lot of rain.

  Once the air has risen and cooled, it cycles north and south into the subtropics, where it falls down to earth again. And in falling, it warms up again, especially as these regions still receive a ton of sunlight, particularly in the summer. But the air has already lost much of its moisture, so now it’s just a bunch of hot, dry air blasting down over the subtropics. This is why we have bands of deserts across most of the subtropics, from the Sahara to the Middle East to the desert of the SW US and northern Mexico. Same on the opposite side of the equator, with the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the Australian outback, and the Patagonian desert.

  There are other factors, too, of course, such as rain shadows from mountains and ocean currents, but the atmospheric circulation is the big one to answer your question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't forget to tip⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  With rent spikes that low, you might as well be paying your ungrateful tenants. Raise those rents even higher bro, at least $100 for each nail you hammered. You deserve it for all that thankless toil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't forget to tip⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Chin up, king. At least we can sleep each night knowing we’ve done a long day of hard and honest work, unlike these lazy leech rentoids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye biiiittttchhhh⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Last year, my sister had her driver’s license suspended because of a medical condition, but she’s still perfectly capable of riding a bike. But the problem is our societal assumption of cars-for-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not means her neighborhood street design is extremely hostile to her getting around by bike safely, and it’s way too sprawling and car-dependent to walk anywhere. There’s also no public transit within a reasonable walking distance.

  So I might ask you: Do you believe people like my sister deserve the same right to mobility as the rest of us? If so, why support a system that make life actively hostile to her and people like her? You act as if disabilities are a monolith, and that cars are only ever their saviors, as if cars are never the thing making life actively more difficult for many people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Wealth University job application process a scam?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Granted, there is a difference between a temp agency or a third-party recruiter and a “coaching” type service. The former are strictly about finding applicants, and they get paid for that service by the prospective employers. The latter are about 1-on-1 coaching, CV editing, etc., and hence they’re paid for by the prospective employee.

  That said, I’ve never used one of them nor do I really see the point, given the wealth of information available for free out there. Then again, I did benefit from speaking to career advisors at my university, which were free to me at the point of service but obviously still paid for by me via my tuition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Wealth University job application process a scam?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I am struggling to find any online testimonials from third parties. I have seen other similar deals with other legit companies, but how they usually work is you sign a contract with them to give them a certain percentage of your salary for the first year or two of any job they help get you hired for. This is important as it gives them an incentive to actually follow through and get you as good a job offer as they can. With an upfront payment like this, they have no material incentive to follow through and actually try to get you a good job. Even if they’re not a straight-up scam, it might be sufficient for them to get you one or two crappy job offers, then throw up their hands and say, “We’ve done our job; it’s on you if you don’t wanna accept these jobs.”

  I wouldn’t bother with these guys. If you really want this sort of coaching, go for a reputable one that you would sign a contract giving them a percentage of your salary. And definitely one with plenty of third-party reviews online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I was gonna make a celebration meme, but then it's not shitposting⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Me when mango, too

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨And now Bezos is trying to inserts ads everywhere⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Enshrinklification of the internet