Overzeetop

It's not decorating. This is a 215SF studio in Brooklyn - that's the "parking included" feature of the listing. And he's paying an extra $1200 a month for the privilege.

Yes. Yes, they are.

Maybe stupid is the wrong word? Willfully, negligently, and/or belligerently ignorant might be more accurate, I guess. These people get pretty angry when told they can't build on "their land" because it s uninsurable and it is within the (statistical) flood plane. These are the same people you see crying on TV and angry at the government for not paying to rebuild their house, or for letting them build there at all, after a flood. They conveniently forget how they were told that it would flood and they intentionally ignored the warnings. I don't know; in my book that's pretty stupid.

"the country’s flood zones — areas that are deliberately flooded to absorb excess water — were built. But such areas are no longer as sparsely populated as they once were. Local governments have allowed towns in designated flood zones to grow, despite regulations meant to control the number of residents living there."

"“Is it the government’s fault or is it the people’s fault for moving back to these places?” said Wang Weiluo, an engineer and expert on China’s water system who is based in Germany. “It’s the government’s. All those people were given approvals to build their homes there. They’re the government’s rules and they didn’t enforce them.”

Yeah, so, I happen to work in this field (or adjacent to it) in the US. At least here, everybody knows where the flood zones are - published maps, disclosures when you buy property, disclosures/regulations when you build. And you know what? The dumb motherfuckers I work for will do everything they can to skirt the regulations because they haven't seen in flood in a long time, and the government is just over-regulating. And in the rural counties where there is little to no regulation enforcement, they just build there without permits - or even with permits that have been issued without due diligence on the part of the building official.

I have no doubt that there are a bunch of stupid fucking hicks in China, and stupid fucking hick government officials, and greedy fucking land sellers and builders who have the same attitude. I feel bad for the people who got flooded out and lost everything, because that's a terrible fate - especially if you didn't realize what you bought. But this is the result of human stupidity.

Life is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid.

By "removing" I presume this means they changed the definition...just read; yes. The definition has been changed from being near streams, oceans, rivers and lakes to those with direct connects to the aforementioned. If we had a competent congress this could be fixed last April. But we don't. So clean water regs don't apply to anything that is near-but-not-touching those waterways.

It's worth remembering that plastic doesn't start out as plastic - they start out has hydrocarbons which are linked together to form long chain molecules we know as "plastic". This, if the article is correct, implies that the polyethylene they are working with is broken down from the molecular chains into the C2H4 basic ethylene, or into short chains which can be stabilized into a surfactant which naturally decomposes into plain ethylene and might be used for the normal industrial synthesis of ethylene based compounds (like detergents and antifreeze, among others). The plastic, as a macro(/micro/nano) particle, would be gone and replaced with the target chemical (again, if the process is as they describe and complete). Whether the resulting surfactant is degradable is not addressed. Again, it's hydrogen and carbon...there's a lot of ways that can go - good and bad.

TeamLead: Alright, I think that wraps up this zoom. I'll check in with each of you later.
Co-worker 1: Thanks
Co-worker 2: Bye
Co-worker 3: See you all later
Me (already working on something else): Love you; bye.

Storage isn't cheap, but storage and transmission are not free. I would have dismissed this as a significant cost, too, except that a frind of mine is part of IT at major US university (~35k undergrads) and a couple of years ago they were actually negotiating with Netflix to potentially colocoate a server on campus to reduce the total external data rates. Standing up a server and maintaining it may be small cost compared to the revenue of Netflix, but there are easily 100 campuses as large is this one in the US, and doubtless many other high density areas. Caching even a couple hundred TB of additional content spread over n data centers will eventually start adding up.

My guess is still that it's a fixed-fee cost for licensing (say, $2M/yr plus $0.0005 per streamed minute) that is pushing long-tail series off the platform. If profitability is at $0.001 per minute and the hypothetical above streams less than a billion minutes a year, the net cost pops over $0.001 and it gets dropped (or whatever the math is).

Yes, but the Democrats are not in control of the Senate. They hold the leadership role, but there are only 48 Democrats. There are three independents which caucus with them, and only two of those are liberal. The lynchpin is still Manchin who, while a Democrat by party affiliation, is a moderate Republican in nearly all facets of belief. That leaves just 49 votes likely to be counted on in a party-line vote, which is not enough to allow Harris to cast a 50-50 tie-breaker. Add in that California's Feinstein is so addled that she doesn't realize she is actively harming the party and her constituents by being an absentee lawmaker - mentally, even when (rarely) physically present - and the control available to advance rule changes are non-existent. If it weren't for Manchin and Sinema in 2021, they could have added both DC and PR as he 51st and 52nd states (both have formally requested admission by vote in the past, iirc), pushing the number of D senators into a solid majority. Those two would not allow that because it would have eliminated their power over the Senate leaders.

So Trump sold his building to a shell corporation, owned by Don Jr., and the funding for this would be via an investment made by the hedge fund which is managed by Don Jr. And, of course, a primary ($2B+) investor in that hedge fund is the MBS of the Saud family. Seems on the up and up.

49.3% say it refers to meeting financial obligations and having some money left over each month. About 54.2% define it as living debt-free, and 46.2% believe it means never having to worry about money.

I'm going to ignore that pesky 100% thing for the moment. Apparently we can't even agree on what "Financial Freedom" means. Defining the metric you're polling seems pretty critical if you want a consistent or useful answer. "Over half" is still burying the lede, though - less than one in ten fall into their personal version of that 150% noted above. Aside from the "American families are financially fucked" though, I'm not sure there's any hard data to extract from this.

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"Peter don't ya call me cause I just can't go; I owe my soul to the company store."