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Notably in both model animals (nematode worms and mice) they specifically fed them ketone esters, meaning that if the mechanism also works in humans (which seems likely) then this could be used as a drug if people don't want to commit to fasting or keto diets.


You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you save up an emergency fund instead of paying a downpayment then you're spending money on rent that you could have in retirement, and it's not like rent is consistently cheaper than mortgage payments anyway so if you can save up when renting you can save up when owning.

So the gamble is, do you spend 2 years saving up for 6 months of income as a buffer and send tens of thousands of dollars down the drain in the meantime, or do you roll the dice and hope nothing bad happens in the next 5 or so years? The people who end up in the best position will be those who take the second option, and most of the time it will work out.


The problem is that many people view home ownership as a cultural / political statement beyond all else. They desperately need to stop being a rentoid and become a landchad. The reality is that renting is often a better financial decision than buying, especially short term. Plus, in this economy there is no guarantee that you're going to be employed in one city your whole life.


Sure. but what isn't cultural? Being cultural does not mean it is irrational. It would probably be a better financial decision if people lived cells and ate nutrient paste.


The goal is to maximize your happiness. Putting yourself into a precarious and stressful financial situation because of memes is irrational. Buying a sleeping pod might be rational for some, not for others. Those aren't cultural though, they're personal.


I dont really understand the distinction you are drawing between cultural and personal. Personal opinions are shaped by culture and memes.


Your personal preferences are influenced by culture, but they include your material realities. If you're making decisions about your finances/housing without considering your material reality, you've been meme'd into a decision. A lot of people have been influenced into believing that being an owner is always better than being a renter, so they make stupid decisions.


Im not going to argue against the idea that stupid decisions are stupid or that some people make them.

My point is rather that preferences, including the material reality that you seek, are almost entirely cultural. There is no culture vs reality, but rather some cultural values vs other cultural values


You're entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter if wanting to buy or live in a pod is cultural. What matters is how happy you are at the end.


Maybe. It's very situational. Beyond the spreadsheets for a given location, there are times in your life when you want to be able to pickup and move fairly easily and there are times when you want to be able to put down roots and be in a pretty stable situation that lets you tailor things.


"Putting down roots" is the wrong way to look at it. You have to ask yourself if you're certain that you will be in one area for a long time. Everyone wants roots in LA or NYC, many of them wash out.


For a majority of people, buying a house has a large emotional component that is hard to ignore.


The short answer is probably everything in moderation if you're reasonably young. Maybe don't put every penny you can get your hands on into a down payment on a house, especially if you're also a bit uncertain about future income streams and life situation. But maybe you also don't really need a year or two comfortable emergency fund.

At some point, it probably makes sense to buy a place if you can if only for the stability as you get older.


Discriminated unions is probably the last "must have" feature I've been waiting for in C#. Better pattern matching would be nice to have but honestly not as much of a gamechanger.


The C# team for several reasons decided "rock solid" pattern matching was a higher priority than discriminated unions because good discriminated union code needs good pattern matching. In the last few versions of C# I think pattern matching has gotten really good. List Patterns finally exist now, and that influenced the new iterable collection initializers, which are also pretty good now. Last I checked, the C# team was still debating Dictionary/Hash key lookup Patterns and Dictionary/Key-Value initializers, and that's maybe my last big request in pattern matching other than native discriminated unions, of course.


And if you got that JSON back in Python, how would you do anything with it? This API is essentially useless. You can deserisalise it, sure, but then what?


I can get parsing job easily done without mental gymnastics.


Right but what do you do with the parsed object? An array of random objects is used for what, exactly?


More than the drone for sure, and you'd run out of old heli engines pretty fast.


Ah well you see, you recover the busted engines from all your shot down helicopters. /s


Right, the system is self correcting but even so it can take literally decades sometimes for the corrections to happen, and in the meantime someone may have tried to build a career on what turned out to be a lie. There really needs to be at least one organization out there putting as much effort as possible into verifying high impact papers. I've had the thought before that if I was a Billionaire this would be my pet project.



> I've had the thought before that if I was a Billionaire this would be my pet project.

That would be a worthwhile endeavour.



I guess the question is do we think twice as many tornadoes a year and billions of dollars in coastal property lost is a fair trade off for a small percentage of people getting to live in the sticks.

Seems easy if you're not the one paying for the cleanup I guess, except if you're a taxpayer then ultimately you will be.


Automobiles, especially if they’re electric contribute relatively little to overall climate change (6-9% currently for ICE vehicles). Your proposed justification is a ridiculous reason to force people to live in coops.


A walkable city and a coop are not the same thing, but anyway here are some more justifications.

Even if you discount CO2, cars still produce a lot of plastic waste in the form of tyre wear, estimated as about 9% of that currently produced (https://www.systemiq.earth/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Breaki...). EVs actually produce _more_ of this because of their weight.

Cars are also the primary source of noise pollution (again, even EVs) and are responsible for a considerably number of deaths (number 1 cause of deaths outside of disease). Road maintainance is also one of the highest financial burdens on towns, to the extent that towns actually are unable to pay for their own road maintainance at all and taxes from people living in cities needs to make up the shortfall. A massive reduction in driving would constitute an enormous cost reduction for the federal government, allowing taxes to be allocated to other sectors.

Maybe none of these seem particularly compelling by itself, but taken together it adds up to a lot of reasons to reduce car reliance to whatever extent we can.


The ecological impact of the transitive hull of car infrastructure is far greater. Consider sand and lithium extraction, noise and particulate pollution.


That's not really realistic though, you shouldn't need to use "mechanical movement" _every day_ but that's a far cry from never needing it at all. At the very least if you ever want to go somewhere else you're going to need a way to get to an airport (or I guess in this ideal utopia a train station).


Why is it not realistic? If you feel the need to leave, is it really the ideal city? It seems that you're hung up on imagining the shitty cities of today, except without cars, not anything resembling an ideal city.


Sorry but this take is just ridiculous. A city is not "ideal" if you never want to leave? What about visiting friends, or traveling, or seeing family?


Why wouldn't your friends and family also live in the ideal city?

What is the ideal city lacking that sees you need to travel for other reasons?

Don't get hung up imagining the shitty cities of today, except without cars, actually think about an ideal city.


What if I want to go climb a mountain? Or go skiing? What if my family can't afford to move, or have good reasons not to move to the ideal city?

There are plenty of reasons you might want to leave somewhere even if it is quite literally perfect.


Exceptions can always be made, this seems disingenuous.


Technically. What would be the point of said exception, though? If personal vehicle use is exchanged for taxis, you will still have more or less the same number of cars on the road, doing nothing to solve the apparent problem.

I mean, you could grant taxi use only under certain circumstances (e.g. medical need), but then the taxi isn't really an option for general use. And in that case, you could apply the same restrictions on personal vehicles, rendering the exception for taxis alone to be rather pointless (unless you are trying to subsidize your taxi operator friends, I suppose).


Let's actually approach this from good faith, shall we?

The point is to try to remove car travel as much as is possible, even if that isn't 100%. You can build a city where everything you need on a day to day basis is within walking or cycling distance, and nearly everything else can be got to easily with public transport. There will almost certainly be some edge cases though. Replacing everyones commute with walking or cycling or public transport gets rid of something like 50% of cars on the road. Doing the same with shopping trips is probably another 80% of what remains, so just doing that is already a significant improvement (numbers pulled out of my ass but they seem realistic). If you only need to use a car once a _month_ then suddenly the economy of owning one yourself becomes very questionable next to just getting a taxi on those rare occasions, or hiring one if you need to drive somewhere not so ideal.

So there would still be cars on the road, but it would be very far from the same number of cars.


Sure, let us know when you are ready.

None of this explains the car ban. Yeah, make cites more walkable. That's just logical. These wannabe rural areas we call cities today are hilariously nonsensical. But you don't need to ban cars to get there. And if we hypothetically assume for the sake of discussion that you do need to ban cars to get there, then exempting taxis won't help as people will simply replace their personal vehicle use with taxis, negating the hypothetical pressure to change.

If someone wants to own a car for their once a month trip, who cares? It is not cars in a garage that is bothersome with respect to the topic at hand.


So there are two solutions to the noise problem, better sound isolation or putting dwellings further apart. Why have you decided that one solution is an obvious winner over the other? I really think you need to inspect your own assumptions.


The examples they gave really can't be mitigated with insulation, unless you want to turn all these apartments into isolated bubbles, completely cut off from the environment. I mean you could probably do that, no balconies, no windows. I think you would be surprised at how far sound can travel through steel and concrete.

As for putting dwelling further apart, that's why we have the suburbs.


You are conveniently ignoring the parts of my post that have no solution in sound insulation at all: fresh air in both window and balcony and smell (which in my example isn't just fish smell like in sibling posts but actually carcinogenic as well).

Look I don't mind if you want to live with those things. No issues at all. If you love it, go for it.

Just don't make me do it.

And yes I've lived in properly built concrete apartments where I did not hear my neighbors at all and I had no balcony and I was able to open my windows without issue. Not in NA and I had one of the very luckily located apartments out of like 100 in that building.

I've also lived in concrete apartments with a balcony and all the problems I described earlier. Never again as long as I can help it.


Why have you decided that the other is the winner?

When Boeing or Airbus announce a new airplane, they come up with all sorts of luxurious concepts that would make air travel less miserable if not enjoyable. We all know damn well that the airlines aren't going to do any of that except maybe for first class. Housing is the same. Cheap out on everything, pack 'em in, profit. Then when there's a big fire or it all falls down, close up and start again under a different name.


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