Pipoca @ Pipoca @lemmy.world

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Remember that not every unit the census counts as vacant can have someone move into it. Their definition is honestly kinda weird. Some units are under construction or repair. Some are legally tied up in a divorce or estate sale. Some actually have people in them, such as non-dormitory student housing or housing for seasonal workers.

According to the census, 14.5% of vacant units for rent are vacant for less than a month, and 20.6% are vacant for more than one month but less than 2. The median vacancy has been on the market for 3.7 months, and less than 20% of vacancies have been on the market for more than 1 year.

Having a lot of units on the market for a month or two is a good thing; it means people can move to an area and find housing. You're not going to house homeless people by sticking them into an apartment for a month or two between paying tenants.

It's also a good thing because low vacancy rates are associated with rents going up. And the rent being too damn high increases homelessness.

What's the point of that rethoric?

It's black humor.

He's pointing out that lots of people don't seem to have a problem with homeless people dying. They just have a problem with homeless people dying visibly in the streets instead of invisibly somewhere else. Or, even worse, actually addressing the causes of homelessness like building enough housing so the rent isn't too damn high.

"won't actually fix the housing issue" - I'm curious how a lot more availability will fail to drive prices down, which will at least help the housing issue.

The housing crisis is mostly due to not enough supply of housing.

Legislating short term rentals like airBnB helps some, but the real fix is just building a lot more housing. Letting neighborhoods densify from single family homes to row houses or small condominiums. Building more missing middle housing like duplexes and triplexes. Building 5 over 1s.

If prices haven't fallen, you haven't built enough units yet.

Because the stuff you hear about there being a ton of vacant housing is mostly due to the technical governmental definition of vacant housing not lining up with the colloquial.

Sure - blame Rockefeller, Henry Ford, etc. for that. Also e.g. Robert Moses, not that he was a billionaire. But they're all dead. They've been dead.

Is America's suburban sprawl the fault of Bill Gates in particular? Or Bezos, Musk, or Dell?

The statistic that "Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions" is better understood as "Just 100 companies responsible for selling 71% of global fossil fuels". It's fundamentally saying that there's a few large coal, oil and gas companies worldwide selling us most of the supply.

If you want those companies to stop polluting, that amounts to those companies not selling fossil fuels.

Which is honestly the goal, but the only way to do that is to replace the demand for fossil fuels. Cutting the US off from fossil fuels would kill a ton of people if you didn't first make an energy grid 100% powered by renewables, got people to buy electric cars, cold climate heat pumps, etc.

Bullshit.

The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.

That is to say, if you multiply the emissions of the gasoline sold by ExxonMobil by whatever percentage of ExxonMobile that's in Bill Gate's portfolio, you get an absolutely ridiculous emissions number.

But that seems to assume that if it weren't for those dastardly billionaires investing in oil companies, we'd all be living in 10-minute cities with incredible subways connected by high speed rail, powered entirely by renewables, and heated by geothermal heat pumps. And I honestly don't beleive that.

accident. Noun. something bad that happens that is not expected or intended and that often damages something or injures someone

It's partly about it being preventable, but mostly about it being expected.

The expected outcome of drunk driving or speeding through crosswalks is hitting someone. It's preventable by not driving drunk or not speeding.

A careful driver in the Netherlands killing a cyclist in a city center on a 20mph road is unexpected and fairly surprising - that would be a true accident. A drunk driver hitting someone on an American stroad is depressingly normal. It's hard to call it an accident.

Bush was a fighter pilot, though, in the 70s.

In order to get out of fighting in Vietnam, he joined the air national guard. Never flew a mission and ended up getting grounded because he didn't complete a physical on time in 1972.

Colloquially, accidents are random events without intention or fault.

That's why there's a push to use neutral terms like "crash" that don't imply that the "accident" was just a random accidental mistake.

And fault is often a bit of a misnomer. Many crashes are the result of bad design, but the courts would never say "this pedestrian fatality here is 40% the fault of whichever insane engineer put the library parking lot across a 4-lane road from the library but refused to put a crosswalk there or implement any sort of traffic calming because that would inconvenience drivers".

It doesn't have to be on purpose. Accident implies that something was just a freak occurrence beyond anyone's control. You can't fix accidents. You can fix crashes.

If you're driving negligently - drunk driving, not paying attention, etc then it's not an accident.

If it's due to bad road design, then it's not an accident.

It's not that it's far-fetched. It's just impractical. Solar panels don't really generate that much power per square foot. Charging a car with just the roof can take days.

One model of solar roofed electric car on the market recharges ~20 miles per day with the roof.

Charging stations are a way better idea for road trips in electric cars, as is plugging the car in overnight. This is great for a remote hermit, but more interesting for the hack value than a practical option.

Better yet, STAR voting or 3-2-1.

Yes. Children do not literally worship their nation-state with literal religious reverence. No rabbi would tell you that the ten commandments are about prohibiting metaphorical sacrifices to metaphorical religions.

No rabbi would say that saying that someone "worships money" turns their wallet into an alter and their job into idol worship. Religiously, it's just a metaphorical turn of phrase.

Maimonides, probably the most influential rabbi of the middle ages, explicitly called Christians idolaters. The trinity isn't precisely considered polytheistic; the Hebrew term is shituf.

Can you find a single rabbi who would call volunteering to join a military and dying at war halachically prohibited human sacrifice to the nation-as-god or flag-as-idol?

And where exactly did I call myself a religious nationalist? I'm just saying that your argument that the term is an oxymoron is idiotic and betrays a deep ignorance of the religion. I mean, you couldn't even quote the right commandment - in Judaism, the first item on the ten commandants is "I am the lord your God", which makes your argument a complete non sequitur.

Nations aren't considered gods, and flags aren't idols of those non-gods. You don't sacrifice goats to the flag, or burn incense for it.

Judaism has historically looked at Christian beliefs and practices with way, way more suspicion of polytheism and idolatry than it's ever looked at national flags.

The teacher here is unhinged, but you clearly don't really know very much about the ten commandments, especially from a Jewish context.

Netanyahu's popularity tanked after October 7th.

70% of Israelis want him to resign. But only 25% want him to resign now - most want him to wait until the current war settles down. Which unfortunately gives him and Ben Gvir some perverse incentives, because there's no way they remain in power after the dust settles.

You'd have to be budget conscious, but it's doable if you're not eating anywhere sit-down, don't drink soda, and don't get snacks. But yeah, the average person is probably spending $100+.

For example, at Hollywood studios, the oats at the star wars location are $7. A chicken club and fries for lunch at ABC commissary are $18. A pizza for dinner is $12. That's $37; not sure what it would come to with tax.

The US parties are weird.

Because there's no PR, anyone who wants to be effective has to join one of the parties. Because of that, diversity in each party is way higher than you see in places that use party list PR.

For example, the Democrats have both Alrxandria Ocasio Cortez, who describes herself as a democratic socialist, and Joe Manchin, a fairly conservative former coal exec from West Virginia.

The real interesting bit of American elections tends to be the primaries, where all the voters registered with a party vote on who their candidate should be. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez got elected because she defeated the incumbent Democrat in the primary.

In 2020, everyone from Bernie Sanders to billionaire Michael Bloomberg ran in the Democratic primary. There was some real choice there until Biden won and it became just Trump vs Biden.

I mean, to make that argument about the holocaust you'd need to lie about the numbers.

There were 17 million Jews worldwide in 1939, but only 11 million in 1945. In Europe, the population went from 9 million Jews just before the holocaust to only 3 million Jews continent-wide after it - even counting those in allied and neutral countries.

Poland, before the holocaust, had over three million Jews; 90% of them were murdered by the Nazis. Those people didn't just evaporate.

Meanwhile - did I lie about the numbers? Keep in mind, 2 million is the current number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage.

What exactly is the map going to tell you?

There's almost two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. In 1952, Israel gave citizenship to the ~160k Palestinians living in Israeli territory who hadn't fled during the 1948 war; they lived under martial law until 1966.

No one is displacing Palestinians in Israel; Israeli settlers are displacing Palestinians in Palestine.

Climbing harnesses are usually sitting harnesses that are more padded around the legs and back than work harnesses are.

The bigger thing, though, is that suspension trauma typically happens when you're purely hanging. The amount of time you can hang in a void in a work harness is way, way shorter than the amount of time you can bounce off a wall in a work harness, particularly if you're able to support much of your weight with your feet.

For climbers, the main worry would be hanging around if you're somehow incapacitated from a heart attack or having been knocked out somehow, because workers are a lot more likely to be suspended over a void than climbers.