Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.

I’ll admit, I was on autopilot when making the first round of posts to populate this community and included this channel without thinking it through completely. As you’ve observed it’s an EDM channel, not synthwave. Despite my mistake I’m leaving the post up because 1) there’s a good amount of overlap between fans of synthwave and fans of EDM, and 2) the DJ seems to be trying hard to make good videos despite his lack of audience, and I want to direct more folks to his channel.

You might want to consider a priest for the damned lakes (which were presumably corrupted by the damned rain?)

I was really confused because last I heard, Greece had a preposterously high unemployment rate. Assuming this data I randomly pulled off of Google is correct, unemployment has been dropping like a rock from its peak: https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/unemployment-rate

However! It’s still above 10%, which in the United States at least would be considered devastatingly high. Sounds like yet another case of “nobody wants to work!”

Well, it’s extremely unfortunate then that the last half-century of zoning and building policies have put us two million homes in the hole. Where y’all plan on putting millions of surplus people, broken down RVs in the Walmart parking lot? (Except now it’s also illegal to be homeless in many places… It’s hard to pay into social security when you’ve been fired for your job after getting arrested for “loitering”!)

Archive link: https://archive.ph/7Z0VX

(The article is worth reading, IMO)

You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

All I want to know is: will this push companies to rethink infinite scroll? Like, even to make it a toggleable option.

I really appreciate that Lemmy still has distinct pages. “I’ll stop at the end of this page” is the easiest way to quit a social media session, which is why most companies have eliminated it.

Great album! Solid all the way through; I think my favorite songs were actually toward the end. Thanks for posting!

I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).

I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.

My favorite sub-genre is probably Cyberwave, but of the niche genres I’ve come across, I’ve gotta give props to Simpsonwave (which even has its own Know Your Meme page)

Make a post about it and let’s find out!

I don’t see why not

That’s a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn’t say “that cat is cute!” or “what a cute cat!” like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like “that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats,” because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?

Sure, but “fridge” is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った (“went”) is a complete sentence. You don’t need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. “He went”)

Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong “why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick” vibes. Articles? Don’t exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you’ll change the meaning of the sentence.

“Went” is a complete sentence in Japanese.

When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.

Yeah but people don’t make a big deal about “save the deer!” and then start a cattle ranch