AirBNB issues are just an ornament on top of the 3-tier wedding cake of today's housing price insanity.

The bottom tier serving as the foundation of this disaster cake is the idea that a house should not just be a place to live, but an investment that should appreciate over time, and thus that there should be a "property ladder." Huge fucking mistake.

Tier 2 is NIMBYs enacting zoning laws that all have the effect of restricting housing supply, which they have done successfully for decades.

And the top tier with your little AirBNB figurines perched on top is the fact that houses are still mostly hand-built one at a time like it's 1959.

And good luck fixing all this when profiting from runaway housing prices is not only big business, but also a huge fraction of voters have most of their net worth tied up in it. Never before has a speculative asset bubble sunk its claws so deep into an economy and society over such a long period of time.

are you really comparing a NATION STATE to a 5 people small business operation?

It's actually dependent on culture.

When I was in Japan I noticed appliances had a TON of buttons. The remote control for the hotel room AC was wild. It had all sorts of buttons for every function. My house AC has a MODE button that switches between modes. The japanese remote had one button for each mode (color coded even). I actually have a Daikin AC at home (japanese brand and actually the same brand that was in most hotel rooms - either Daikin or Mitsubishi). The "western" remote has fewer buttons.

If you ever visit a store like Yodobashi Camera, the number of signs is absolutely wild. There is no attempt to try to make it into a nice, organized boutique (except the Apple section of the store, of course). No. everything is just there. Things have a sign with descriptions. Signs say a LOT about the thing they're selling you.

Restaurant menus are just as crammed, most even have pictures. Every ingredient is listed.

According to some youtube video, this is because the japanese are a "high context" society. Meaning you are always fully aware of your surroundings (meaning you are aware of who you are and who you're speaking to - using the wrong honorific is not just a faux pas, it can cost you your job). So "things" in japan are super explicit about everything. Because in that culture, hiding things makes people suspicious (so to speak).

Other examples are japanese websites. They are absolutely crammed. Take a look at Yahoo jp or Rakuten.

Funfact: western media sold us Marie Kondo as some minimalism maximalist. Look at her social media for the west and for japan - the japanese one is way more crammed, the complete opposite of her image in the west.

An ICE design engineer I know (who really wants engines that turn most of their input energy directly into waste heat to not be obsolete in cars) likes switchgrass for producing ethanol in the US.

On exactly what the detector is capable of detecting. If they're looking, at any point, for radio waves, then I'd start there. Do the radio waves correspond to the absorption (and therefore emission) band for any molecule or chemical bond that is likely to arise in the ice?

This is so basic that I'm thinking that if this was remotely plausible, they'd have already thought of it. This is too junior to miss. Ergo, the detector isn't looking for radio waves (which seems the most likely, given it's a particle detector, not a radio telescope), or nothing obvious exists at that frequency (which is only a meaningful answer if, indeed, it is a radio telescope).

So, the question is, what precisely does the detector actually detect?

Pension schemes generally work like long-running intergenerational ponzi schemes that won't collapse as long as the next generation is always bigger and/or wealthier than the last. It's not a good system but trading off some "bigger" for some "wealthier" by reducing inequality could mitigate it. Inequality is also the root cause of falling births in developed societies (that the same ownership class that most wants endless population growth prefers to tiptoe around) so it would improve both issues.

so in your fantasy world you only buy a server and it will work fine without any maintenance for years to come? no updates, no parts that break, no downtime, everything will be just smooth sailing.

you're proposing that a company with 5 people can save money by running their own email system and it will be cheaper than paying Microsoft (or any other provider) 150 a month?

you nerds are always so out of touch with reality. this is why businesses need MBAs and project managers. because if it was for nerds we'd be spending half our day doing IT chores and refactoring code, and refusing to write business logic because the rules aren't simple and elegant.

get a fucking grip.

There was a survivor from the plane who described a loud bang before the plane crashed.

Maybe they triggered the fire supression on both engines rendering both useless and impossible to restart.

most games are now digital downloads so no logistics, stocking, or dead inventory overheads

but ok if you want to justify corporations go ahead.

it has plenty of room for price cuts. nintendo is actually selling the "japan only" version (a region-locked version with the menus in japanese only), for USD 100 less in Japan. it's japanese-only to avoid japan tourists (37M of them in 2024, and with 2025 going to surpass it) from buying it at the lower price in Japan.

fans knew this, they bitched about it, and here they are, buying the console like crazy.

oh and games for it are now $90.

Came here to say that the only surprising thing is that it was *sold,* I assumed it was just handed over for free since at least 9/11.

This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

Trump's abandoned The Wall, as he found that the album doesn't mention Mexico even once, although he found the marching hammers very inspiring.

Back in the days of the Rainbow series, the Orange Book required that data that was marked as secure could not be transferred to any location or user who was (a) not authorised to access it or (b) did not have the security permissions regardless of any other authorisation. There was an additional protocol, though, listed in those manuals - I don't know if it was ever applied though - which stated that data could not be transferred to any device or any network that did not enforce the same security rules or was not authorised to access that data.

Regardless, in more modern times, these protocols were all abolished.

Had they not been, and had all protocols been put in place and enforced, then you could install all the unsecured connections and unsecured servers you liked, without limit. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to actual security, because the full set of protocols would have required the system as a whole to not place sensitive data on such systems.

After the Clinton email server scandal, the Manning leaks, and the Snowden leaks, I'm astonished this wasn't done. I am dubious the Clinton scandal was actually anything like as bad as the claimants said, but it doesn't really matter. If these protocols were all in place, then it would be absolutely impossible for secure data to be transferred to unsecured devices, and absolutely impossible for secure data to be copied to machines that had no "need to know", regardless of any passwords obtained and any clearance obtained.

If people are using unsecured phones, unsecured protocols, unsecured satellite links, etc, it is not because we don't know how to enforce good policy, the documents on how to do this are old and could do with being updated but do in fact exist, as does the software that is capable of enforcing those rules. It is because a choice has been made, by some idiot or other, to consider the risks and consequences perfectly reasonable costs of doing business with companies like Microsoft, because companies like Microsoft simply aren't capable of producing systems that can achieve that kind of level of security and everyone knows it.