Skip Navigation
Man fined for squirting mixture of urine and flour onto woman's dress to try to chat her up
  • This dude mixed a personal semen analogue, using his own bodily fluids (likely because real semen doesn’t stay the right consistency very long and there probably wouldn’t be enough to attack multiple women with), to squirt on women and then not talk to them, and they are framing it as an attempt to chat them up?

    He’s clearly being a sex pest. The next time he does this (and there will be since he only got a fine and some bad pr) I hope he gets some real consequences.

  • Living a radically simple permaculture life on 1/4 acre
  • The thing about the tragedy of the commons is that it’s basically bullshit. It’s been debunked as long as it’s been around. It’s privatization propaganda, nothing more.

    People have been equitably maintaining commons for literally all of human history, and they are good at doing so within their communities. Social structures to maintain commons without official regulation have been in place for generations without major issues.

    https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth

  • What missed opportunity that you can remember do you feel the worse about?
  • An older couple who wanted to retire offered to let me take over their cidery, back when I was doing a lot more homebrew.. I declined because I knew nothing about ciders, I’d have needed to relocate, and I was in my last year of college.

    Big mistake turning it down, even if I would have needed to relocate. I haven’t been properly stable since.

  • If you didn't have internet at your home, where would you use the internet the most regularly?
  • Bar down the street has free WiFi and food. So probably there. The library is all the way across town, so not a great option for me.

    Or there’s another bar close enough to my house that I could probably make an antenna and leech off that. I did that with on base housing back in the day cuz I didn’t want to pay for internet.

  • This coming from people who still support Stalin in 2024
  • You’re the only one saying she would be the same.

  • Goddamn onion
  • Trump: for now. They are my political enemies, I’m sure some of them are good people my political enemies, you know I know all the best people and only the worst are my enemies, all the best people. But for now my political enemies, very bad people, the worst people who have ever lived, ever, very bad people. My political enemies.

  • eBay Removes Listing for StingRay Cellphone Spying Tech
  • Ah alright that makes sense, thanks :)

  • I just realized all my teachers use ubuntu
  • And here I was using windows in a VM to run rstudio 😪

    Times have changed for sure. (Tho I haven’t used rstudio for many years and it may still be unsupported)

  • Also "parasite".
  • Zomg I totally missed this message, I’m sorry, so I guess this is ME checking in on YOU a couple days later ;)

    Sorry to hear the glowing didn’t work but thrilled to hear you had a good sleep anyway. That’s hard to come by sometimes :)

  • eBay Removes Listing for StingRay Cellphone Spying Tech
  • Is this one of those things like the GPS trackers they just sort of plant on your shit by trespassing, and if you find them they typically come to collect them because their cover is blown anyway and they are expensive?

    Or is this one of those things that you need to like… actively do things with? From the pics it looks like an active-use device but idk shit about 2004 tech so.. (I was an adult, but barely conscious of things)

  • What's up with all the "___punk" stuff?
  • Yes! Ok that probably helps a lot. Because I’ve seen a HUGE rise in _core (cottagecore, goblin core, Forrest core, witch core, etc. and that’s just here on Lemmy)

    I hope that takes off more and leaves Punk behind so it can fit better. :) I’m sure the distinction exists for a reason.

    And yeah steampunk is sort of the odd duck in what the other major __punk actually hit, but I did have some friends waaaaaaay back when steampunk was brand new, big into it, and they took it all the way to the social changes necessary for never evolving past the Industrial Revolution.. so I’m probably heavily biased by that (then again in highschool they had canes, waistcoats, and top hats, and basically cosplayed as English gentlemen all the time so… probably not an ideal sample!)

  • Humans will pet anything
  • Did things evolve to like to be petted because humans like to pet everything

    OR..

    Did humans evolve to like to pet everything because everything on earth responds in some way to touch?

    Touch is nice. All creatures big enough to be petted respond to touch.

    Even my fishes like being gently petted (and no I don’t do it a lot, my hands stay out of my tanks most of the time). I put my hands in the tank and they brush themselves up against my fingertips, gently waving through the water.

  • What's up with all the "___punk" stuff?
  • I probably have explored furry punk to some extent - any game/cartoon in which the main character is a non-human animal technically counts for that, I should think. Bonus if they are anthropomorphized. But it’s not called furrypunk afaik, or I’d probably throw that in too.

    Beyond that I have no idea what those things even would be. Tho the current state of the US is very meat based so I think you’d have to go vegpunk on that one, at least where I’m at, for it to be an alternative option.

  • What's up with all the "___punk" stuff?
  • I tend to agree with that sentiment. Hence the confusion over everything being __punk.

  • What's up with all the "___punk" stuff?
  • I’m probably equally old so yeah that’s sort of how I envision it as well.

    That helps, actually, more than one might expect.

  • What's up with all the "___punk" stuff?
  • When I think of __punk, I think about it having a whole -way of life- change, not just an aesthetic change. Cyberpunk incorporates all of the dystopia of deeply embedded tech and stuff. Solarpunk is the whole “living with nature” ideal, even steampunk had to reimagine how things would work (tho admittedly that’s way more of an aesthetic than the other two imho).

    So it’s basically a meaningless term then? That’s disappointing. I really want to explore other… hypothetical options I suppose.

  • What's up with all the "___punk" stuff?

    I’m probably just out of the loop, but what the hell is up with slapping “Punk” after some random word and trying to pass it off as a thing?

    I know cyberpunk, I know steampunk, I know solarpunk, and those I can accept as “more than an aesthetic”, tho steampunk is mostly an aesthetic… but then you have for example frostpunk (a game I know nothing about), cypherpunk, silkpunk, etc. (I don’t really know how to find other bastardizations for examples, but I know I’ve come across other random nouns followed by “punk” and I find it super weird and confusing)

    Is it just capitalizing on the cyberpunk/steampunk fad for naming, or do these other “punk” things actually have a legitimate claim of being punk? Is all this ___punk watering down the meaning or am I old man yells at cloud meme here?

    53
    Believe it or not, there’s a housing surplus—but not for people who can’t afford a home, study finds
  • It isn’t paywalled for me, so here’s the text in full:

    The long-bemoaned housing shortage may not exist after all. Rather, there’s a shortage of cheap rents and affordable homes, according to a new study.

    The peer-reviewed study, published in April in the academic journal *Housing Policy Debate, *found that between 2000 and 2020, the U.S. had a surplus of 3.3 million homes—defying conventional wisdom that the nation is facing a housing shortage.

    “We’re sort of an outlier in our analysis, and partly it’s because we’re taking this longer-term perspective,” Alex Schwartz, one of the study’s authors and chair of the master’s program in urban policy at the New School, tells *Fortune. *

    The study examined how fast the housing stock grew between the first two decades of the 2000s and compared it with the number of new households formed during that time period. Schwartz and his research partner, Kirk McClure, professor emeritus of urban planning at the University of Kansas, argue that many current studies that examine housing stock—which find that there is a national shortage—don’t go back in time far enough and therefore overlook the large number of homes that were built during the housing boom that stretched from 2000 to 2007.

    “The housing bubble that we experienced was a big growth in prices, but also a big growth in production,” McClure tells Fortune.

    The collapse of that formerly prosperous real estate market triggered the Great Recession. The study also included the subsequent recovery from the Great Recession that lasted from 2012 to 2020, the year of the pandemic.

    Capturing such a long stretch of time makes sure the research doesn’t overreact to short-term ups and downs of the market, McClure and Schwartz argue. “We massively overbuilt the number of housing units we needed, and we are still here in 2024 trying to absorb that massive overbuild in housing,” McClure said.

    From 2000 to 2010 the U.S. had a surplus of 4.6 million housing units, while in the following decade there was a shortage of 1.3 million fewer units than population growth would demand. All combined, that nets out to a surplus of 3.3 million homes from 2000 to 2020.

    The findings contrast with a plethora of research that points to a widespread shortage of new homes being constructed. Earlier this month, the housing website Zillow published an analysis that showed in 2022 there was a housing deficit of 4.5 million new homes. While a more recent survey from Realtor.com estimated that from 2012 to 2023 there was a shortage of 2.5 million homes.

    However, these studies prefer to measure the construction of new homes, while McClure and Schwartz look at vacant homes. That on its own is a complicating factor. As the two cite in their paper, the physical condition of the vacant homes isn’t fully known. Some apartments may be sitting empty because a stubborn landlord refuses to lower the rent; others because they serve as a vacation home for an affluent family, while some may be entirely dilapidated and therefore uninhabitable—doing little to solve the housing crisis.

    A housing surplus that still prices out many

    But the new finding about overall housing supply levels, which Schwartz says was a surprise, offers some nuance to one of the major problems in the housing market.

    “The issue is not so much about aggregate shortfall of housing units, but rather a mismatch between the cost of housing and the incomes of households,” Schwartz said. “Most especially among the lowest-income households, where there really is a mismatch between what they can afford and the number of units that are affordable.”

    After this study, economists might debate the level of housing supply available in the U.S., but the core issue appears to remain the same: affordability.

    The researchers found a shortage of housing that low- and very low-income families could afford. Low-income families were defined as those with incomes between 30% and 60% of the median in a given market, while very low-income families were those making less than 30% of the median—roughly equivalent to the poverty line, according to the paper.

    McClure tries to distinguish between households making around $45,000 a year, which might be on a tight budget, and those making less than $22,000, which are the poorest in the U.S. When assessing the rental markets in 381 metropolitan areas and 526 small towns, the research found that there was an average shortage of about 7,700 units that the very poorest households, making under $22,000, could afford, according to the study.

    For those households, which require government assistance to find housing, the absolute highest they could afford to pay for rent is $550. Building new homes and apartment buildings can’t address the shortage for the absolute poorest. McClure explains that no private developer can build a new home or apartment that would be within the price range for the poorest of the poor. “Even if you could build the unit for $0, there is absolutely no way a private developer can build a unit at that [$550] price and survive,” McClure says. “Just the property taxes, insurance, and utility costs are north of that number.”

    So the answer is to help them afford the housing that is available. McClure and Schwartz recommend offering more Section 8 housing choice vouchers that subsidize rent payments.

    “In many circumstances, it is best to make use of existing stock rather than pay the very large sums needed to add stock to an already ample market,” the paper reads. “Helping low-income households rent existing units is much less costly than building deeply subsidized units with rents affordable to low-income households.”

    Building new homes can reduce prices in the long term

    But that’s not to say McClure and Schwartz are against building new housing. Cities and towns should look to build “a wider array of housing types,” according to Schwartz, such as smaller units or higher density housing.

    The reason new housing inventory will need to be built, even during a surplus, is because rents and home prices can’t be expected to come down on their own. “It’s very unlikely to think that existing households on their own would just reduce their sales price unless they were required to for some reason,” Schwartz said.

    Building more housing is also seen as an effective way to lower rents. A seminal piece of research from NYU’s Furman Center found that building more homes actually lowers rents.

    New housing developments often raise the fears of gentrification; that existing residents will get priced out of ritzy new apartments in formerly affordable neighborhoods. The Furman Center research contends that the law of supply and demand holds true in the housing market as well.

    A widely cited example from 2016 in Auckland, New Zealand, found that when about three-quarters of the city was rezoned to allow for denser housing construction, housing supply increased 4%. Meanwhile, rents for three-bedroom apartments dropped 26% to 33% compared with similar areas, according to a working paper from May 2023.

    Other studies have found the effect of new housing isn’t usually as stark as the Auckland example. More often than not, overall rents do still rise when new housing is built, but not as quickly as they would have otherwise.

    McClure doesn’t disagree with that research, but notes that it doesn’t address the poorest of the poor. “Alex and I are not looking to lower $2,000 rents to $1,800—that little difference is not enough,” McClure says. “We are truly trying to find ways to rent apartments to people who cannot afford more than $500 a month.”

  • Looks like paradise
  • 🎶outdoor… Wisconsin 🎶🎶

    https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_11733

  • Creature comforts
  • Hell yeah. You I like.

  • Also "parasite".
  • Aww that’s super nice of you :) even my friends struggle to…. Not dislike me :) I struggle with it myself but you made it a bit easier today, being very open to things.

    It won’t be tonight but I do hope to run into you again. I… can’t reach out to you, it just isn’t a thing I can do at this point (always goes horribly) but if you do want to keep touch, please do feel free to dm me, or whatever that looks like on Lemmy/fediverse..?

    Honestly it has not happened, and irl people who give me their contact info tend to do so with zero expectation of follow-up (I have learned through failed attempts to follow up), so idk how to do it or what it looks like.. but I would like to keep contact if you’d be into it.

    But if not o hope you have a great night all the same :) no pressure or whatever :) but do think of that mountain stream, maybe throw in glowing trees if you feel adventuresome! I have a whole dream town and it’s so fun to have a place to explore. Give yourself a glowing woods while you can ;)

  • BubbleMonkey BubbleMonkey @slrpnk.net
    Posts 1
    Comments 321