tal

The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.

I mean, we definitely didn't even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.

Oh, there was one point in driver's ed

an elective course

where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.

People need to work on their susceptibility to this.

I'm not saying you're wrong, and that's gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don't get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn't a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.

The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.

Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren't doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I'm not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you'd kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.

Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I'd say that that's relatively limited.

EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it's on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.

EDIT2:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/

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This one doesn't go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.

In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.

And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.

EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.

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EDIT4: One more fun chart:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/

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EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:

https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses

How does port forwarding work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_forwarding

should use it for torrents

Well, if you have an Internet-accessible host that can listen on a port and another host that it can reach but isn't directly accessible to the rest of the Internet that is running a BitTorrent client, it would allow the latter to accept incoming TCP connections.

You might have that scenario on a home network with a broadband router that's Internet accessible and a connected computer with a private IP address.

IIRC, BT can operate without the ability to accept incoming connections, but if you can let it accept incoming connections, it'll let you talk with other BT clients that can't accept incoming connections, so you may get faster downloads and uploads.

tradeoffs

Depends on what else you're considering. A dedicated Internet-accessible seedbox? Not having incoming connections?

One person

Yeah, but:

Inquirer: Piss Christ artist Andres Serrano

I'm not sure how seriously I'd take that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

the COL also varies wildly. I could move 1.5 hours away from where I live now and pay like 1/3 of what I do now for rent/mortgage.

Part of that high city housing cost is zoning and other planning constraints on building upwards. Have to increase supply if you want to bring the cost down.

I post this occasionally:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/

https://archive.ph/jRQIm

If it were possible to reduce the cost-of-living bar to letting more people move to cities, it'd be possible to increase productivity for a lot of people.

I remember the "The Rent is Too Damn High" guy running for mayor of New York City a few years back. The guy had a point.

Like, policymakers have not done a great job on that.

life is easy if you live on a budget.

vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.

While I share some frustration on the matter, I'd also point out:

• It's not as if we're taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that's it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.

• We live in an environment where the risks aren't, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.

  Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don't disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But...think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.

0.78 inches in one go causes widespread flooding there? Crazy.

More than that. From the article, that's just what they normally get in November.

the area — which receives an average of 0.78 inches in November

There will be two rounds of wet weather, with the first round expected to bring 1 to 3 inches of rain on Friday night.

The second round of rain is expected Saturday and will be more significant, potentially bringing heavy rainfall, gusty winds, small hail and isolated tornadoes.

A widespread 2 to 6 inches of rain, with higher amounts possible in some areas, is expected through Saturday across much of Southern California.

For perspective, average annual precipitation:

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-precipitation-by-city.php

Baltimore, Maryland: 45.0 inches

Los Angeles, California: 14.3 inches

So imagine a little more than tripling the numbers there to get a feel for what might be comparable in terms of percentage of rain they'd normally get. For Baltimore, it'd be like maybe 6 inches to 18 inches in under two days.

Sorry, kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubba_(fish)

Bubba (c. 1982 – August 22, 2006) was a giant grouper (Queensland grouper) that resided at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois.

Bubba was left in a bucket at the aquarium's doorstep in 1987 by an anonymous donor with a note asking for him to get a good home;[3] at the time, he was a female and about 25 cm (10 in) long. Bubba changed sex to male (being a protogynous hermaphrodite) in the mid-1990s[2] and eventually grew to 154 lb while living in the aquarium's "Wild Reef" shark exhibit. Aquarium staff started referring to him as Bubba because of his hulking appearance and manner.[3]

I can but imagine that this will be a concept explored in generative AI images in short order.

USDA did not immediately respond to a request to clarify a timeline

Uh huh. So are you going to be providing benefits in the interim or not? There are millions of people involved. I think that it's likely that it will take a long time to reprocess those people.

I mean, yeah, but in practice, the UN is structured the way it is, with the UNSC veto, to avoid creating World War III. That is, it's aimed at avoiding great power conflict.

Taiwan was functionally removed and replaced by China, but that was really a recognition that Taiwan didn't really de facto control China, which was who the seat belonged to.

Could Russia one day roll up to the UNSC and discover someone else sitting in their seat? Yeah, theoretically, but in practice, I don't think that there's a realistic chance that Russia would be removed from the UNSC seat as long as it's running around with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, absent some kind of hard counter showing up that renders that arsenal useless.

The Budapest Memorandum committed the signatories not to themselves use force against Ukraine, but it was not a multi-way defensive alliance with all parties which obligated parties to fight against another party who attacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

According to the three memoranda,[9] Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively removing all Soviet nuclear weapons from their soil, and that they agreed to the following:

• Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[10]

• Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

• Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

• Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".

• Not to use nuclear weapons against any non–nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.[5]: 169–171 [11][12]

• Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[13][14]

France and China were not signatories but apparently had similar agreements, which I have not read.

The UK and the US (and I assume China and France, if their agreements had approximately the same content) have fulfilled the Budapest Memorandum commitments

Russia broke her commitment.

EDIT: Well, okay, I'm not sure what China's position has been on Ukraine at the Security Council, though de facto the issue is kind of academic for the moment. Russia holds a permanent UNSC seat, and thus has veto power on the UNSC, and regardless of what countries do there, if it's on defending Ukraine against Russia, I'd bet that Russia will veto it. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN and so wasn't present to veto US initiatives on behalf of South Korea, so the US was able to get through stuff to initiate UN authorization to use force on behalf of South Korea after North Korea invaded. But I think that it's probably safe to say that Russia isn't going to let that happen a second time. Also, that dealt with the use of nuclear weapons by an attacker, and that has not happened (and if you recall from earlier in the war, there was a discussion between the US and Russia on what would happen if Russia used nuclear weapons against Ukraine. I don't believe that the material was ever generally-released, but I did see a Polish official announcing that the response would be "conventional" (i.e. non-nuclear), and some discussion that centered around the US possibly authorizing airstrikes on Russian positions in Ukraine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_boycott_of_the_United_Nations

During the Soviet boycott, the Security Council adopted a resolution which allowed for the deployment of UN troops to the Korean war in defense of South Korea against the attacking communist North Korean forces (Resolution 83)

That being said, the US has taken a position that providing arms to a country in a conflict doesn't violate neutrality obligations (which dates back at least to early WW2, where the US was providing arms to the Allies while simultaneously claiming neutrality). Historically, providing preferential access to arms this had not generally been in line with the obligations of neutrality.

The US has also taken the position that providing intelligence to such a party, as it is with Ukraine on Russia, doesn't violate neutrality obligations. Going back to WW2 again, this was how some of the first shooting between Germany and the US started in World War II:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Greer

At 0840 that morning, Greer, carrying mail and passengers to Iceland, "was informed by a British plane of the presence of a submerged submarine about 10 miles [(16 km)] directly ahead. … Acting on the information from the British plane the Greer proceeded to search for the submarine and at 0920 she located the submarine directly ahead by her underwater sound equipment. The Greer proceeded then to trail the submarine and broadcast the submarine's position. This action, taken by the Greer, was in accordance with her orders, that is, to give out information but not to attack." The British plane continued in the vicinity of the submarine until 1032, but prior to her departure the plane dropped four depth charges in the vicinity of the submarine. The Greer maintained [its] contact until about 1248. During this period (three hours 28 minutes), the Greer manoeuvred so as to keep the submarine ahead. At 1240 the submarine changed course and closed the Greer. At 1245 an impulse bubble (indicating the discharge of a torpedo by the submarine) was sighted close aboard the Greer. At 1249 a torpedo track was sighted crossing the wake of the ship from starboard to port, distant about 100 yards [(100 m)] astern. At this time the Greer lost sound contact with the submarine. At 1300 the Greer started searching for the submarine and at 1512 … the Greer made underwater contact with a submarine. The Greer attacked immediately with depth charges.[6]

That is, the US position was that it could provide arms to the UK and could tell the British where German U-boats were without violating neutrality obligations, as long as it wasn't actually fighting Germany (with the Greer firing back on a self-defense justification after having a torpedo fired at it). Germany wasn't that enthusiastic about that interpretation at the time.

Under the UN Charter, countries are not supposed to engage in war unless (a) they're defending themselves, (b) they're defending a country with which they have a collective security agreement (a military alliance, think NATO or something like that), or (c) the UNSC has given authorization. That being said, there has been somewhat creative interpretation of (c), as with the US arguing that U.N. Resolution 1441 qualified and constituted such an authorization to intervene in Iraq in 2003, which is certainly not a universally-accepted take.