Maoo [none/use name] @ Maoo @hexbear.net

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2 yr. ago

lol there are still horse paste guys in the year of our lord 2024

Right? Nothing from their political class.

The side walls are actually very important for the structural integrity of shipping containers. If you cut holes in it, it absolutely needs to be reinforced or your new roof line is going to sag over time. They're built as cheaply as possible to accomplish their exact task, which is holding a bunch of crap and being stackable, and the side walls provide both tension to hold together the frame (basically a box) and to provide rigidity to both floor and the top. I reeeally hope y'all reinforced the areas around windows.

You can do a bunch of things to shipping containers to make them viable, but it's far more expensive in materials and time than just building with more raw materials. You can remove the toxic coating but you have to have a whole human do the labor for that and do is safely, otherwise that human is paying for that decision with their health. The materials and labor for that aren't nothing.

When you look at what is actually used from the container in order to create a house, it's really not that much. Basically just framing of questionable stability and some corrugated metal siding, possibly the cheapest and easiest part of building a house. I can personally frame up something container-sized in less than a day, easy peasy. Siding and drywall are also easy. The harder parts are everything the container doesn't provide: foundation, vapor barriers, plumbing, electrical, a good roof, any specialized need for insulation, efficient ventilation / heating / cooling, making sure safety elements are up to code.

In terms of mobility, I would not recommend moving a container home that has been substantially modified unless it's been upgraded for exactly that. They can only be safely moved using the corners to distribute the weight, hence the special container arms at shipping yards that grab the corners. If you put a custom roof on there or otherwise make it so you can't grab those corners, there's a good chance the whole thing falls apart unless you've reinforced it to be mobile using yet more investment.

Propaganda says both: first that Russia did it, then that Ukraine did it. The former is insulting stupid and the second is more subtle but still makes no logistical sense, as Ukraine lacks the specialized equipment and personnel required. The "Ukraine did it" narrative is one that's still safer for the NATO bloc group that certainly did it, as even if they acknowledge it as true (which they don't need to and have avoided doing), it's easy to brush under the rug as Good Slava Ukraini Resistance.

This is why these countries doing investigations are mum. They know neither narrative is true.

No, the problem with housing is that it is a financialized commodity that is engineered to go up in price faster than wages because it's an investment. Not just for individuals, but for real estate companies and banks that gamble with the loans. Zoning laws are a symptom of this, but even if you basically get rid of them (as happens in various places in Texas), the same trend applies.

Those construction companies (really, real estate companies) all get big loans to build those apartments and they do so with an expectation of per-unit profits, often with unrealistic targets unless property values increase even more, and often targeting richer people. When they fail to rent enough at that price point, rather than decreasing rents (which would spook their lenders), they just leave units vacant until they can hit that price point. There are half-empty "luxury apartment" buildings dotting every major city due to this.

The most anyone can point to for the impact of zoning is that prices to rent tend to go up slightly slower.

Your local government is also likely funded by property taxes that are pegged to property values, which is why they never do anything sufficient to handle this issue.

They have too many downsides. Most of them aren't actually reusing containers because they're usually too small and they're coated with toxic materials that prevent mold and pests from living in them. They look large enough at first, but this is before you have to install a floor and walls and a ceiling with insulation all around and plumbing and electrical, etc. In addition, if you want to add windows by cutting into the sides, you've just undermined the structural integrity of the thing, as it's premised on being exactly that (stackable) box. So then you have to reinforce the crap out of it if you want windows.

Putting all of that together, to safely put together a reasonably livable container home, you're basically just using it as an aesthetic piece, as you've had to buy the shell new and then spend the rest of your budget trying to make it actually work as a home. It's cheaper and better to build a small home with commodity materials unless you really, really want that aesthetic.

lol no. You've made the classic blunder of believing a propaganda narrative.

If they make casein that's pretty cool, since it's the thing that vegan cheeses suck at replicating. It's responsible for a lot of the texture that regular cheese has, including how it melts and stretches.

Their connections to Israeli companies and big agribusiness execs is gross though.

That's possibly the greatest extraction of capitalism: directing production into the pointless and harmful. Income inequality is large, war and coercion unfathomably cruel, but forcing production to be directed away from what is needed is a theft from every person that rarely gets counted. Imagine what could be done if 50% of production was actually directed for human need. Imagine the ability to be proud of your labor because you know it helps people. Imagine solving world hunger and poverty and seeing the real progress that is possible but held back by the anarchy of bourgeois production.

Given that Labour is now LibDems 2.0 and Tories are... that... there's gonna be a lot more of this austerity talk and with basically no real challenge to it. Just some kayfabe that pretends to negotiate better terms of surrender.

?

For liberals, nuance is just an excuse to avoid dealing with harsh realities. Because they subscribe to the embodiment of the political ideology of capital, this does indeed mean supporting the status quo - insofar as it's aligned with the local dominant form of capital. They will not find "nuance" when it comes to special economic zones in China where the capitalist mode of production is active. They're not defending that status quo. China is the enemy of their ideology and so it must be reduced through orientalism and being gullible about any and all propaganda leveled at them. In fact, being "nuanced" on China, to a liberal, just means picking a less ridiculous but still entirely false and simplistic criticism of it. Maybe they don't know anything about Xinjiang so they discard the US State Department talking points on it to talk about safety nets at Foxconn. Maybe they don't know anything about trade or imperialism so they discard those criticisms to pearl clutch about Taiwan.

To liberals, nuance is just a way to feel smart by saying something is complicated so they don't need to take a strong stance on it, and perish the thought of criticizing the fundamentals of their ideology.

When you present liberals with actual nuance, such as a thorough historical understanding or a rationale for critical support, they lose their shit, start calling you names, and generally act like babies. Unfortunately this is also all part of the radicalization process lol.

There is no way those tubes are balanced step away from the centrifuge

I do communist things.

The world is getting better in a lot of ways but this is despite the US, the primary state agent of death and destruction. What we can do is organize together against that while also building local class consciousness and support structures so that as that violent apparatus turns more and more inwards, our neighbors will be (1) less horrible to one another and (2) safer overall.

The kids are alright

User experience with all software is pretty shit and Linux is no exception

Che pin/sticker? on an AK

In terms of non-genetic evidence it's always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn't established as likely in the first place.

In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn't work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There's a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.

The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.

The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel's conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.

The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it's challenging to tell the difference between "the diaspora started here" vs. "the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued". From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it's also difficult to disentangle from scientists' biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it's worth.