People are living longer after retirement (over 10 years longer since the 1970s) and birth rates have fallen. Expenditure surpasses income eventually. There are other factors but that seems to be the main issue.
No, it can't come from tax in general. The whole problem is a lack of productivity per capita. So any tax high enough to pay the shortfall will be oppressive. It's not a magic money machine that beats private investment earnings.
If you invest wisely, you will make money or approximately tread water even if the economy is shrinking, because businesses operating with sufficient foresight make money on average. It might not be enough to retire on. That is a separate question. If there is not enough juice in the system to fund everyone's retirement, then neither investment nor taxation can create that productivity. There might be some in-between solutions but anything that does not involve generating enough production and profit to at least fund pensions seems guaranteed to be regrettable.
Re: Taxation, if you want to make up for the shortfall in people's pensions with an additional tax, you're assuming that someone else is making enough money to make up the difference. That is not the case. People can hardly fund their own pensions to the extent recommended, much less anybody else's. Most businesses are not profitable enough to fund extra pension contributions either, and imposing that cost will stifle them.
Given the generally high regard that the US has for service people - military, police, emergency services etc - it always puzzled me that Trump was never held to account (in a political, rather than legal sense) for the harm caused.
Is there a reason why this has been glossed over? I thought that would surely be a red line for many of his supporters.
Just bear in mind that dictatorships tend to have broad (and arbitrary) definitions of "pre-dicatatorship ruling classes" that could include you, your loved ones, your friends, etc...
True - but what dictatorship has tried to limited its purges to just the "pre-dicatatorship ruling classes"? Most of 'em go after broad groups of "harmless and useful, if only the dictatorship was rational" people, just for the evil LOL's.
Then there are all the folks who end up destitute/maimed/dead from the wars & famines & stuff...
It would result in fewer units, but you could introduce "courtyards" that would act as corridors of light. It would depend on the depth of the building. You could potentially do it over two or more stories.
Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work.
Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc
A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try.
Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.
None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building. Those spaces are currently used for elevators and utilities.
Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.
Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction.
So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability.
Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.
Right, so the core of the building is elevators, hallways, and something that doesn't require light. The first use that comes to mind is resident storage. Using space on upper floors for storage isn't how you would design a residential building, but it is a useful purpose for otherwise useless interior space.
Additional leftover interior space can be used for amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the existing space that doesn't require tearing down a building.
As long as we get the building ‘for free’ (don’t have to consider/pay for the original costs to build it), it can definitely be retrofitted for many purposes somewhat economically.
Maybe a bit like the industrial lot to condo process that happened in NYC and other places awhile ago?
It’ll be weird, but folks will adapt.
I’m not sure why folks wouldn’t just build in the ‘burbs (and work remotely) in most cases though?
When it comes to London, the 'burbs' means get into a crowded train (or wait for the next, or the one after that as they are packed in many stations) AND spend 2h per day commuting (+ the very expensive fares). As a young professional in London I would prefer to have a nice 30-40sqm (~300-400 sqf) studio in the center, close to a market/park and be 20mins door-to-door to my work.
If one of the mega-big buildings would be converted to studios, meaning they could 'slice' 20-30 studios per floor, keep one floor for gym/dry cleaners/etc. they would be making a (financial) killing.
>As long as we get the building ‘for free’ (don’t have to consider/pay for the original costs to build it), it can definitely be retrofitted for many purposes somewhat economically.
> Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.
The question is why, and what's wrong with marginal housing (sounds like a great way to reduce homelessness)
The numbers show that Americans order delivery and eat at restaurants more (and cook less) than they have in recent history.
It's intriguing because while flipping and renovating kitchens to have more space - stoves, ovens, and refrigerators is on the rise, fewer families actively use the space over the last decade. (The same can be said for colleges moving from dorms to apartment style housing)
This especially applies to marginal households, but also significantly to upper middle class -> upper class and dense housing.
You’re going to see a shift in the coming years due to inflation - more folks are already eating at home anyway.
But the answer is because sometimes you do need a kitchen, even if it’s to boil some water or whatever or reheat takeout, or because your Mom is visiting and wants to make something. Sharing a kitchen is often a nightmare if you can’t control who else is sharing it - constant fights over dirty dishes being one example. They often get tied up exactly when you want to use them too.
And having your own bathroom (the two are highly correlated as both require ‘wet walls’, and custom plumbing) is great when you want some privacy, are sick, etc. or have some safety concerns.
It can get even more gross and disturbing to share those when you can’t control who you’re sharing with. It’s a common friction point to share a bathroom even with room mates. A lot of people (especially women) flat out avoid public bathrooms due to safety and ‘ick’ concerns.
Imagine if the only toilet you could use if you woke up at 2am and needed to pee was a public toilet.
There is nothing wrong per-se with marginal housing, except they tend to attract ‘marginal people’ that bring with them trouble that others don’t want to deal with if they can avoid it. It does help with homelessness and the like - but it tends to self filter into dangerous territory, because who is going to want to stay at a place where homeless people stay unless they are homeless themselves?
Sharing them is always a step down in experience. It is always cheaper though, as the kitchen and the bathroom are usually the two highest maintenance and ‘most expensive’ rooms.
Most folks stuck in those situations move out ASAP - think dorm rooms and barracks. Or homeless shelters.
Singapore is extremely far along in the ‘eat out at restaurants’ side (it used to be, most Singaporeans ate out at least a couple meals a day), and even they have kitchens and private bathrooms in all the subsidized flats.
Marginal housing was basically outlawed because of abuses, but there are various ways around it if the demand/desire is there (hotels are marginal, for example).
>None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building.
This is addressed in TFA. There was one building the profiled architect designed where they spent the $$ to turn the elevator core into a courtyard. He was able to add back the "lost" square footage as additional floors, which made the project profitable enough to build out.
Addressed in the article! Apartment buildings need less elevators than offices since residents tolerate longer waits. There's still elevators, just less.
Agree. Most office plates have plumbing for the equivalent of four bathrooms, max, all centered near stairs, etc. Figure you would need to 4x the existing number of toilets to make a floor residential and also link to existing central sewage lines. I don't even know what building code even looks like for that in most states.
Commercial is more expensive because it is designed for higher wear, longer tenancy times, dramatically higher utilization, and more customization.
It’s common to run wiring in conduit, use hung ceiling (with space for running lots of extra services), construct the framing out of steel and concrete (instead of wood and stucco), and electrical and HVAC demands are dramatically higher. Networking needs to be more reliable and easier to manage at scale. Electrical needs are often orders of magnitude higher. Everything from locks, to outlets, to flooring needs to be sturdier to handle the increased traffic and wear.
Even a dentists office or hair dresser will need to mount heavy chairs sturdily, pull lots of extra power, and have to worry about weird chemicals or x-rays and the like hurting other tenants.
Additionally, they’re zoned to have access to high volume transit and/or parking.
It’s not a surprise why commercial is more expensive. It’s made for a different use case.
It still is only going to be ‘good enough’ most of the time. And by ‘good enough’, that means tenants pay. Anything else is usually ‘lipstick on a pig’ as it were.
London has several "co-living" [1] housing units at this point, that are basically upscale house-shares for people willing to pay extra to not have to deal with the hassle of house-shares.
Yout get a self-contained flat, but kitchens etc. will be tiny, and then on top there are shared spaces like co-working facilities, lounges, cinemas, gyms, and staff arranging social events etc.
I'd imagine former office buildings could work well for many of the amenities for projects like that.
Kotlin supports nullability on the level of the type system, it is similar to TypeScript in this respect.
The problem with nullability annotations in Java is that they are not enforced, and there is no commonly adopted standard. There are like ten competing libraries with similar annotations. There was JSR 305 ("Annotations for Software Defect Detection"), but it has been dormant. When you import a third party library, you never know what kind of nullability annotations it uses and if it uses them at all.
> Tech companies are still performing mass lay-offs, even with a tech bubble in full force.
> Many organisations are also resorting to employee-hostile strategies to increase employee churn, such as forced Return-To-Office policies.
Would generally agree and it’s been discussed a lot but apart from “because they can” I haven’t heard a really compelling reason why. I’m not convinced by the claims about AI taking jobs (yet). So what’s going on?
Companies that are not launching successful products and don't have competition pushing for innovations on their current products are firing R&D people.
I'm really tempted to add an ironic "News at 11!" at the end, by the way. But in case you are one of the large majority that didn't notice, currently the software market has a problem. And we can expect more bad consequences of it.
I think you’re seriously downplaying the seriousness of these acts and the kind of person who does something like this:
“Hawkes was already a registered sex offender after he was given a community order last year for exposure and sexual activity with a child under 16. That registration ran until November 2033.”
Growing up, my parents didn't have encouragement or patience in their emotional toolkit. You were expected to do everything perfectly - homework, writing a letter, any kind of planning, even sweeping the floor or washing dishes - and if you struggled in any way you were berated at length.
Many decades later even mundane things can be a battle - ringing a doctor to ask for an appointment, or a provider to query a bill, filling in forms and so on. Most of my procrastination stems from my experiences back them. It is easier in my mind to defer action than to risk the imagined verbal abuse. I'd imagine a fair share of non-ADHD related organisational issues can be traced to similar experiences.
Just like you can't out-train a bad diet, you can't out-live a shitty childhood.
Really sorry you went through this. Your experience reminds me of mine, which left me to contend with a lifetime of challenges.
> Just like you can't out-train a bad diet, you can't out-live a shitty childhood.
I think I’d challenge this slightly. Out training a bad diet probably doesn’t work, but is better than a bad diet with no training. And when you fix your diet, the training can start working wonders.
My childhood left deep and unhealthy imprints, but I’m no longer in that environment. I think you can out-live a shitty childhood, by changing your diet so to speak. This is grueling work, painful, slow, and often frustrating. But replacing old patterns can really transform living in the same way changing a bad diet can transform the process of training.
Over time I’ve come to believe strongly that the only thing harder than dealing with the past is not dealing with it. And over time, this gradually transforms the present. I very much prefer the late 30s version of me to all of the preceding iterations.
Best of luck on your own journey. Send me an email if you ever want to chat. (Not selling anything, just someone who cares about this topic a lot).
That sums up a lot of workplace disfunction. Proactively pushing new ideas and then getting blamed for failure, not applauded for them attempt. It’s why corporates can’t innovate internally.
The book "Learned Optimism" was a life changing read for me coming from this kind of background. It includes exercises that start to rewire your brain. Highly recommended.
But with the upside that it is technically unknown whether or not you actually could have pulled it off if you tried, and if every once in a while you manage to perform the impossible, that covers for 100 failures.
People who don't care about their children don't care about this, of course. You have failed them simply by being a child.
"Why didn't you just have better parents you stupid little brat, didn't anybody teach you anything you absolute dumbass lazy #%!£ moron?"
It did mess up with my ego heavily. Because once in a while I would actually manage to push through anxiety and do something, and I'd succeed.
Unfortunately it made me quite narcistic, as I ended up with belief that I could always succeed, if only I gave in some effort - but as I never tried to do that in practice, I ended up at the top of Dunning-Kruger curve. High ego, no skills.
Excelling at school & career at an early age, while being absolutely trashed at home/family time, gave me the anxt from sticking my head out of the room. But, at the same time, while out and about, already working on something, subconcious power trip in most interactions.
Like, when I am already on a roll, I have this vivid vision of the tasks to take & tools to use. I am quick to decide and to come up with solutions and at the same time very loud about it.
But every time I wake up, I feel worthless, scared that I am not enough, that one step into the world, means step between thousands of angry faces that want to hold my face against a gutter.
One option is standalone CarPlay and Android Auto head units - search for carpuride or Atoto for examples.
There’s other manufacturers as well.
I recall seeing model specific replacement head units for the pop up type display you describe but can’t find them now
> One option is standalone CarPlay and Android Auto head units - search for carpuride or Atoto for examples.
What GP complained about was that the factory-installed head units have very non-standard shapes for everything but the screen, and even then it'd be glued into some molded piece of plastic trim which has a non-regular shape in the dashboard.
You'd literally have to cut out the trim with a saw and refinish it in order to use the din/double-din standard sizes.
