BubbleMonkey

Dunno what to tell you man, that’s what comes up here on the bk website. There’s a whole 2 locations within an hour of me. I don’t eat fast food and I’m not about to install their app just for this conversation, so but hey, let’s even say the $16.70 is a whole 20% higher than the actual price… that’s still like $14 for the large meal, which still puts it squarely within the $30/2 range.

But that really isn’t true either because fast food has gotten quite out of control here as well.

A large whopper meal at the closest place is almost $17. So you could easily hit $30 for 2.

That depends very much where you live. Around me, 8-15 is a pretty standard range for decent sit-down places. You can pay more, but most places hit that range pretty squarely. Depending where you go, you can get burgers and the like for under $4, much better quality than fast food, but not sit down places.

Wages here are pretty damned low, though, so they really can’t charge a lot and actually have business.

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.”

If you play hyrule warriors age of calamity, you get to play around with her in combat, and they explored her as a mage (don’t really recall in the first one how she played, tbh, I feel like she was melee for that one)

It’s kinda wonky AE stuff, basically AE versions of all link’s sheika abilities in botw, since the slate is literally her weapon, but it’s a warriors crossover game so that’s pretty par for the course on the wonkiness.

Idk how this wand thing or the abilities from it compare to that (I don’t watch trailers, they spoil things), but I think they’ve had it on their mind for a while now.

Child’s Play gave me nightmares as a kid. I was way too young to watch it when my parents rented it, but it had a dolly so of course I watched it anyway, I was a stupid kid.

I know this isn’t the same thing, but they chose a really really bad name for this is what I’m saying.

I have every version of SC2. For the special characters ofc.

So fun!

It’s mind blowing to learn that AI/neural nets and the like have been in the works since the 80s… it wasn’t what we know now, but like deep blue, the computer program that won at chess, started development in 1985 and won in 1997 against the world champion (Gary Kasperov). Watson, the jeopardy-playing program, was in the early 2000s.

It’s taken a long time to get from there to the mess we have now, and now it’s all super rush rush… like chill, slow down and do it right.

The vpn doesn’t block ads or do really anything, it just routes all my traffic back to my home network so I’m using my pihole for DNS.

I’m not about to install even more crap to do a half-ass job when I could just renew my certificate and pass it along for config, and be done with it and never get ads in any app, home or not.

I’m just lazy, and it doesn’t really come up all that often.

I usually have a private vpn. It’s just isn’t always up. And I can’t be bothered to have it maintained most times because I’m not in control.

I’m considering setting it up through my router which has a built in option, so I don’t have to rely on my third party, but honestly I almost never leave pihole protected networks. So not a priority.

As long as the ads don’t federate in an un-blockable way, they can do as they like. I wouldn’t make an account there, I’d rather donate actual money than have a degraded experience (which for sure works out better for everyone), but I get the drive to monetize.

And they should absolutely -not- be allowed to federate ads, for any reason, since it goes against the vibe. But inevitably there will be “sponsored posts” (probably already are), and I think those instances/users will see themselves fade to oblivion, as long as new users are brought to understand that they could just chip in $2 and never see an ad.

It’s so weird, I don’t even notice the lack of ads most of the time (pihole, never leave home, so it’s roughly the same experience I’m used to)

But when I go out? Oh man fediverse is the only site I’ll use because I know it’s safe from ads. The other privacy/user-focus stuff is just a bonus.

(I don’t have any friends around here, so just sort of go out to be out, and usually for food)

Bet those sovcits would be cits real quick in that situation ;)

Fittingly, the term romance originally meant “to derive from a romantic language”, meaning mostly Latin which was spoken in the Roman Empire.

The texts in reference were largely about chivalry and such. Hence the modern connotations.

So like, romance refers to a time before the world was fully known. :)

https://www.etymonline.com/word/romance#etymonline_v_15175

This definitely does not look like something that would, or should, be sweet.

All the same I’m kinda intrigued.

You forgot that they also have more than one rock model!

(https://www.gamesradar.com/halo-3-player-discovers-every-single-rock-in-one-of-the-games-most-memorable-levels-is-the-same-rock-i-cant-keep-this-knowledge-to-myself-anymore/)

If you need to get out of bed to game, and getting out of bed is an achievement, you are doing your life wrong. Play from bed.

I grow stuff (mostly peppers and tomatoes for a while now, but I’m adding squash to hand pollinate and strawberries this year) in deep water culture hydro, which involves a 5 gallon bucket of nutrient water and an air pump creating bubbles. Super basic setup geared toward “permanent” plants that keep producing indefinitely, or big plants like weed. Works well since complex and long-term don’t mix well for me. Way way back in the day on the forum I used to frequent, dwc setups were called bubble buckets.

And I like monkeys, I relate to them.

However doing a quick internet search shows that apparently there’s an anonymous recreational drug information page under the same name (among numerous other things) so that’s a bit awkward… I’ve got nothing against drugs, but nothing to do with that site either.