Home prices do have a demand side component to pricing…but making it easier to add supply at lower cost is by far the best way to address housing issues.
Most importantly: as a society we can either encourage homeownership as a good investment (appreciating faster than inflation) or have more affordable housing (prices decreasing or increasing less than inflation). There is no way to have both at a large scale. I believe affordability is a better goal, there are many other ways to store wealth.
For me, Opus 4.1 was so much better than Sonnet 4.0 that I used it exclusively in Claude Code and cancelled Cursor. I'm a bit skeptical that Sonnet 4.5 will be in practice better, but will test with it and see! Hopefully we get Opus 4.5 soon.
I would expect this to be correlated to not having kids as well. Anecdotally the healthiest elderly I know are deeply involved in raising grandkids/great grandkids, and those relatives without kids I've lost early.
I've heard of some efforts to pair retirement homes and preschools in some way, to benefit both, and I'd love to see that idea work in some way. I expect it to have many liability challenges but would be so good for both parties.
Fast is cool! Totally has its place. But I use Claude code in a way right now where it’s not a huge issue and quality matters more.
Opus 4.1 is by far the best right now for most tasks. It’s the first model I think will almost always pump out “good code”. I do always plan first as a separate step, and I always ask it for plans or alternatives first and always remind it to keep things simple and follow existing code patterns. Sometimes I just ask it to double check before I look at it and it makes good tweaks. This works pretty well for me.
For me, I found Sonnet 3.5 to be a clear step up in coding, I thought 3.7 was worse, 2.5 pro equivalent, and 4 sonnet equal maybe tiny better than 3.5. Opus 4.1 is the first one to me that feels like a solid step up over sonnet 3.5. This of course required me to jump to Claude code max plan, but first model to be worth that (wouldn’t pay that much for just sonnet).
This is a nice setup. I wonder how much it helps in practice? I suspect most of the problems opus has for me are more context related, and I’m not sure more models would help. Speculation on my part.
I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?
The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!
> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years.
> The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!
What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And then what? That equipment is still on earth - after it's built.
Oh, and how's he planning to get off Mars?
I would comfortably make a $100 bet that there is no chance that we have sent a manned mission to even orbit Mars by 2035, let alone are "settling" it.
> The effect of this no-abort condition is to make Mars mission design acutely risk-averse.
"Acutely risk-averse" is not SpaceX.
And being acutely risk-averse also underscores my point. If we are actually acutely risk-averse, we aren't going from "still test-flighting and developing the launch vehicle" to "manned mission" in 9.5 years.
> What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years?
Waiting to be rescued. We're not talking about sending one guy to mars for funsies, we're talking about one person left after an emergency. In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.
If you assume a team of 5 people with an intended stay of 6 months, 5 years of supplies is a factor of safety of 2. If you send enough supplies to keep the whole team alive till the next launch window, that would keep a single person alive for about 2 decades (ignoring potential storage lifetimes).
> In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.
There's a "world" of difference between the Eagle returning to Apollo 11 in low lunar orbit, and prepositioning a interplanetary vehicle capable of Mars-Earth (after getting from Earth to Mars), landing it (and without live feedback/guidance, because of roundtrip radio time, not to mention, this isn't some Rover, it's a really large rocket) well in advance of the manned mission (8 month flight time, IIRC, which means realistically it's going to be hanging out on Mars for a minimum of 6 years, even if you launch the manned mission within a couple of months of its arrival, which seems ... risky) and hoping that one solo astronaut is going to be capable of fixing any issues that arose during landing or during its ~year, untouched, and five years of his habitation.
Martian dust storms are a thing. "Smaller", continent-sized ones lasting weeks at a time, hit a few times a years. And then you have the planet-covering ones.
> Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.
So many issues. We're not solving these by 2035.
We are still at the point where unmanned, tiny craft with none of these challenges routinely fail. We're making progress, but we're not making that much progress, not that quickly.
Actually in this case it is an Eagle-like launcher meant to rendevous with a craft in orbit. I'm not sure why you are arguing this when you're completely unfamiliar with the premise being discussed.
> SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?
If Earth and Mars are on opposite ends of the sun, nobody is going anywhere within 30 days. I do not see how anything will change from the one transfer window per ~2 years for the foreseeable future
While this doesn't apply in the scenario that the person you're responding to has given there are ways to get many more transfer windows between Mars and Earth using Aldrin Cyclers.
You couldn't start launching things in 30 days, you need to wait for a launch window, which happens every ~2 years. The transit times are on top of that.
Higher energy transfers can widen the launch windows, but their frequency remains unchanged. The frequency is due to the synodic period of Earth and Mars. It doesn't matter how fast you can get to a point in Mars' orbit if Mars doesn't happen to be there when you arrive. Any given trajectory will only work when the planets are in one specific configuration relative to one another; having more delta-V to play with means you can choose from a broader range of possible trajectories.
In the limit, there are hyperbolic trajectories that would basically give you such wide launch windows that you could launch whenever, but you're not doing that with chemical rockets.
I think this comment highlights how bad the state of “medical ethics” is. Barring informed people from getting treatments they want is unethical in my book. Full stop. The entire apparatus is built on shoddy backwards ethics.
I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
I don't know how anyone can read her and not feel the overt reader manipulation. Her skill, if any, is to break the 3rd wall without seeming to acknowledge that 3rd wall and constantly tell the reader they are one of these special people that are borne better than others.
Rand is a clear intellectual trap for lazy thinkers. If you like her, you're not thinking.
I think reading philosophical arguments masquerading as novels, or any sort of fiction, is an intellectual trap in general. Anything can be made to work in a fictional work simply by saying that it works. It means nothing.
"Genghis Khan the 73rd, who got high on some really weird drugs in the fifth year of his reign, decided that everybody in his empire should be tortured for at least 73 minutes every day. And everybody loved it and completely voluntarily sang his praises and said it was the best thing that ever happened to society and there were just all sorts of benefits and you should totally organize your society this way too because look how well it is working for this one."
> I think reading philosophical arguments masquerading as novels, or any sort of fiction, is an intellectual trap in general. Anything can be made to work in a fictional work simply by saying that it works. It means nothing.
Only if you take the work as-given. Whenever I read a fiction book I take it as a starting point for thinking about things. The book provides a what-if. It's up to the reader to figure out if that what-if makes any sense, and if the conclusions in the book follow from that.
The parent comment has more nuanced opinion than yours. They also substantiate it by raising a point of value in reviewing contrary viewpoint, whereas your comment is devoid of any arguments.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Literally every person I have any respect for as an intellectual has described Ayn Rand as slop.
I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.
Both Rand and William McGonagall are widely regarded as are uniquely fascinating.
In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.
Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:
I am too kind to you and to [McGonagall's] memory to reproduce the entire poem'
(The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within [NY: Gotham, 2007], p. 153), and further:
Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse.
His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it.
It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.
(p. 154, as above)
Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.
I tried the water based approach before and didn't work, but this may be a good one. What does work for me is a CO2 based trap. I have 4 neighbors on the street using them now. Mosquitos follow CO2 to find their targets, and get sucked into the bucket. Its kind of expensive (upfront cost of about $200 then about $60 in CO2 per summer, but I have a large bag full of mosquitos regularly so i know it works. And I can tell when the CO2 runs out because mosquiotos are back.
CO2 seems to be extremely effective in general, but what I really want is for someone to create a commercial version of something I saw DIY'd on Reddit. They used safely-contained smoldering coals placed behind a high-speed outdoor fan, with mosquito netting secured loosely (but with no gaps) to the front of the fan.
The fan intakes CO2 from the coals... and blows it out into the neighborhood (I think he claimed it was detectable at 60 or 80 feet?) to essentially advertise. When mosquitos approach, they're sucked into the fan intake, and can't get out past the blades and netting. Most are dead by morning, and the rest you spray down before removal. IIRC he said he only needed to do it one night every few weeks to keep the population unnoticeable, and he'd wake up to thousands in the netting the next morning.
I'm sketched-out by the CO2 mechanism, so I've never tried it, but figuring out an extremely slow release mechanism from a small tank seems doable. Maybe one day I'll get around to tinkering with it. My neighborhood started spraying, so it hasn't been bad enough to put much effort into.
I don't have a mosquito trapping solution, but wanted to also offer help to anyone harassed by mosquitos: Despite being a magnet for mosquitos, I've found a coconut-based moisturiser to be more effective than even "tropical-strength" repellants. I used to use various repellants and still get bitten, but this moisturiser is hilariously effective. (Brand is Palmers but others might work too.)
The company has always made it as a typical moisturiser/lotion but then started hearing from RV/caravan/campers that it was keeping mosquitoes away.
Most importantly: as a society we can either encourage homeownership as a good investment (appreciating faster than inflation) or have more affordable housing (prices decreasing or increasing less than inflation). There is no way to have both at a large scale. I believe affordability is a better goal, there are many other ways to store wealth.