tirant

It’s only a problem if those women don’t settle for the men they date. If they would, the balance would always be restored:

Top 20% of men settle with 20% of women. A new top of men takes over replacing the old one.

The main issue is that relationships don’t last. And that has to with the 20% of men not wanting to settle as they have free and abundant access to sex, which has been historically the primary reason for men to settle.

On top of that men are at their prime way longer than women: easily between 25 and 45. Women lose perceived value as sexual partners after 30/35 by many men.

Can we add to that the effects of the birth control pill? Women on the pill have a different attraction profile than without the pill. Their body thinks they’re pregnant and they settle for men with lower testosterone.

Many women report that after stopping taking the pill they no longer like the smell of their husbands.

Both can coexist. Smell/compatibility might not be noticeable until you’re already initiating the romantic relationship (kissing, intercourse, sweat smell).

You get closer, if necessary to the point your lips almost touch their face. What millions of people have done during decades. And that’s the point, yes.

Private landlords have been my worse experience. Both in Germany and out of Germany. They ignore the law, they try to avoid fixing things, or they fix them badly.

My last rental with a big company was perfect: they even skipped asking me for rent deposit, my work contract was enough. Their maintenance team was full time dedicated to maintain the same buildings, so they knew perfectly how to repair everything, they were quick and diligent. They knew if they didn’t fix it right, they would have to do the work again.

Economies of scale is what allows these big companies to offer better prices and better service than private landlords.

Do you know which big city recently solved the rental price problem? Buenos Aires, by just removing most of the rental housing regulations.

It can be solved, you just need to do it without ideology. Die Linke is not that type of party, quite the opposite.

Do you know why there was not homelessness in the DDR?

Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code.

And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.

The only reason you enjoy cheap food is because of the free market.

Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.

My cheapest and best experiences when renting have been always from big corporations due to economies of scale.

Fighting against these companies will only drive prices higher. It is stupid.

I just bought a house in Germany. It will remain unused for around 6 months due to renovation. It is naive to believe that any empty house is empty due to speculation.

My grandmother died some years ago, my family wanted to sell the house as they didn’t need it. It took 3 years to sell it because it’s in a location with no demand plus 6-12 months to arrange the inheritance legal details. You would say, the price was too high then! It was sold for €30K, a garden farmhouse with 6 bedrooms, garden and garage.

It’s inevitable that some houses are out of the market for some time due to many different reasons.

The main reason new housing is extremely expensive has to do with regulations themselves.

It costs a lot of money to build a new apartment building because land where you are allowed to build is regulated by the State. Also the State requires many regulations that increase unnecessarily the costs, and most of all in the name of the ideology.

For example, housing standards of Japan and the US, which are way cheaper and still serve two of the richest countries in the world, would never be allowed in Germany. That makes housing unaffordable and drives people into poverty.

Obviously after 36 years many people of Die Linke were not alive when the wall fell. But it’s still the same party as the SED, just a different name.

The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.

At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.

Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.

Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.

But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.

Unfortunately solving the housing crisis will remove any incentive to vote for the Left or the Socialist Party.

Remember the first incentive of any politician is to remain in power not to solve citizens problems. Sometimes there’s overlapping, fortunately.

The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.

The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.

Right. First case was performed by the executive branch of the State. Second one by the justice branch.

I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind.

Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).

Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous. It fails to address many other reasons why we are experiencing fires and creates an easy to blame enemy and a sensation that there's nothing we can do.

We should really go way deeper than just blaming everything on an increase of temperatures, which nevertheless is actually happening.

We, locals, have been warning already for decades of the increase of fires due to an accumulation of reasons, which I have actually described already in another message down below but I can summarize here.

* Forest mass has actually increased a lot during the last decades, Spain has now around 50% more forest mass than in the 1970s.

* Part of the increased mass has to do with reforestation efforts done by governments happening since last half of last century, which basically planted many forests using pine varieties which grow very quickly but also burn quickly (Pines are biologically design to burn with their flammable design and dried needles, that's their feature).

* Historical local forest were composed of many varieties of trees, including oaks, holm oaks, poplar, which grow slowly, are way less prone to burn, and regrow again after a fire. Those varieties were never used in any reforestation efforts, which has resulted in many new forests being extremely prone to burn quickly

* Population has shifted enormously towards big cities, abandoning little villages where forests were part of their style of life. Lumber was part of their economical income, which resulted in continuous care of those forests and efforts in preservation. There are still some communities like that in some areas of Spain, and their forests have the lowest rate of wildfires in the whole country.

* Many techniques like firebreaks, counter-fires, low intensity burning to clear crop stubble, dry brush, and old vegetation to regenerate fresh grass for livestock and prepare fields are now forbidden, again increasing the risk and extension of wildfires

* Forest Grazing is also nowadays completely forbidden. Sheep used to roam everywhere in the country, consuming many burning-prone vegetation, reducing also the risk of wildfires.

But even despite all of that, countries like Spain for example, have nowadays the lowest proportion of burnt forest since the last 50 years.

I come from the Mediterranean region and locally we know many explanations for that.

Many of those pine forests are relatively new. Pine trees burn frequently, around every 20-30 years. In the past they used to be mixed with many other original trees, but during the recent century reforestation, pines were planted as the single tree species, making fires more prone to happen and more easily to spread.

In the past, way more population lived next to the forests, where lumber used to be part of their income, so trees were frequently cut, forests maintained and shepherds would bring their sheep to feed from forest lower plants. All of that is gone.

In the past, locals used to be able to build firewalls, clean forests and fight fire with fire (provoking small controlled wildfires to stop the big ones). Green policies forbid those actions nowadays.

Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.

Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%.

What do you think is the underlaying motivation?

If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.

My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.

Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.

Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.

Because it’s available to everyone, including kids and elderly, and does not need high upfront payments.

I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.

If including tax breaks, New Zealand and Australia are not subsidized in total terms.

But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.

Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market.

If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.

Just before becoming suicidal some hours later.

That’s exactly what small distributors are for.

I indeed remember too the family of K6 chips and their Super Socket 7 motherboards. They were cheap and affordable, and allowed cpu upgrades to classical Socket 7 motherboards.

The peak of the Super Socket 7 performance CPUs was reached when AMD released the + versions of those chips, the K6-2+ and K6-3+. Those were initially designed for laptops with lower powerconsumption and some enhanced instruction set. But they quickly became common in typical overclockers setup.

I got myself a K6-3+ that I was able to overclock to around 600MHz, probably on an ASUS motherboard.

Back then AMD was fighting so much to get marketshare that you could order for free all types of merchandising from AMD like posters, stickers and CPU badges, and they would even ship it for free from US to Europe. I remember always bringing some to hacker meetings.

That's not at all my observation.

If you take brands like BMW, the EV counterpart is always at around the same price or cheaper.

But if you're even comparing second hand, the balance is falling even more on the EV side. Second hand EVs can be bought very cheaply.

Because they don’t care about profits, they always end up overpaying and taking way longer time than necessary.

And who pays for that? The whole society: Either the government raises taxes, gets more in debt, or they print more money driving inflation up.

The most basic commodity, food, is a great example. The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance and starving people as a consequence. Ultimately killing millions (USRR, China, Korea…)