• 5 Posts
  • 614 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Well, I have a plan and I’ll tell you what it is.

    This idea of a majority Jewish state, kept so through military occupation of Arab-dense territories, needs to simply go away.

    I’m a one-state solution guy. Let everyone there practice their religion in peace and access their holy sites freely, and let democracy reign.

    Israel’s big sin is that they want democracy BUT only with a majority Jewish population and an official state religion etc etc etc. It’s more than a Jewish homeland - it’s an ethnostate.

    That is what needs to end. It doesn’t go somewhere else. No one gets pushed into the sea. We just stop pretending like we can use arms to carve out the “democracy” we want, and Israelis and Palestinians all live in a state that guarantees their freedom and safety.

    Some fear that extremists will rise and take over that pluralistic society: build a constitution that prevents this. Embrace pluralism. Marshall Plan the fuck out of Gaza until the Palestinians see they have more to lose than their misery.




  • Without getting into subjective topics like what it was like to be alive in the 1960s, there’s certainly a few ways you can argue that delivering on today’s building codes is more complex than it was back in those times. Buildings are also safer now as a result. This is a simple thing and surely never took up an iota of HST’s attention, but it’s a straightforward fact about how you just get more now than you did then, even if it is something invisible like the safety of improved electrical wiring.



  • You said:

    There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.

    And my comment followed directly from this, wondering how possible it might be to achieve a past, arguably lesser, standard of living today. Attempting that would bring any wage/price gap with the past into focus by eliminating the overhead costs of modern regulatory bars, and the lifestyle creep factor that people sometimes cite. This is decidedly on-topic.


  • This might actually make sense. Borrowers can’t lose or destroy a digital copy, or bring it back late. Probably a digital copy enables more checkouts. Max of 26? Well think about he condition if the last library book you checked out that had 26 stamps on the list. Hard copies don’t last forever. Sad that they had to charge more based on these assumptions, but you can imagine some reasoning to them.




  • I’d love to try an experiment to see what it would cost to build a simple home to 1950s median norms and 1950s building codes, with no modern appurtenances like internet service and smoke detectors. One electrical outlet per room, small windows, no irrigation in the yard, just a hose. Plain telephone service to one jack. Rabbit ears for TV only. No microwave or dishwasher and only clotheslines for drying laundry. Middle of nowhere town with one store and a highway going by. How much would that actually cost?

    I’m sure it would still cost more now because of materials, and there really isn’t a way to get around building codes. But the living one could achieve with a simple job, back then, was definitely simpler than what people consider a typical life now. I don’t really have a point here - I’m just wondering how big the cost gap would really be at the exact same living standard as yesteryear.



  • Yes I did read your comment before :)

    You’re saying that accepting his offer is not necessarily a statement of low confidence in their own business. I get you.

    But we can’t separate the notion of it being a good price apart from its being a bad business. It was a great offer in part because the business was so poor. By all estimates he vastly overpaid.

    So yes, it was a good price.

    And yes, it was a bad business and yes they knew it. With no other offers on the table, they pulled out all the stops to ensure it went through. It was their and their shareholders only chance for a payday with the business as bleak as it was.

    All of these things are true.