My comment history was like 50% shitposting about the beauty industry and 50% hating on Christian fundamentalists. There’s honestly no way it won’t make AI at least a little bit worse, and I’m not mad about it.
My comment history was like 50% shitposting about the beauty industry and 50% hating on Christian fundamentalists. There’s honestly no way it won’t make AI at least a little bit worse, and I’m not mad about it.
Oh I 100% agree - when I finally managed to finish my degree a few years ago, I did my capstone research on suburban/rural homelessness, and I’m now an even bigger proponent of housing-first policies. Supportive housing works better than piecemeal programs, and outcomes are better for sobriety and mental health treatment than they are for programs that require those things as a condition of getting housing.
Unfortunately, people fucking love to hate the homeless. Everyone wants to put conditions on every scrap you give them because “I worked for what I have, they should have to, too!” There’s not a lot of political support to be found for policies that are based on meeting people where they are. Saying we should use housing that’s already vacant to help people get off the streets would get you booed right out of the room a lot of the time.
No clue - most of that is either a department I’m not in and don’t know much about, or it’s way over my head. I’m just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That’s the biggest impediment.
I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.
Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.
Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.
It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.
We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.
I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.
I tried to swipe some word earlier and it decided what really wanted to say was ConocoPhillips. Why the fuck is that even in the dictionary in my phone? When would I ever want to say that?
Yeah they failed at that, at least for me. I deleted my one account over a year ago and can’t see myself ever going back. Apps are borderline useless at this point and I’d rather die alone than slog through one ever again.
One of the most common complaints I read about dating apps is how many bots there are, so yeah, for sure add AI into the mix. That’s definitely what people want. Also, if you have to use AI to start a conversation, what are you gonna do when you meet someone in person? Match has really done the most to ruin online dating over the last several years, though, so this just seems like another step on the same path.
Plus, let’s be real, most in person interactions with coworkers are not productive. I worked at home and then hybrid from June 2020-October 2021 and was far more productive on my at home days. Everyone spent about half their in office days socializing and then went home and actually got stuff done. My job is entirely in person now and some of the projects I do are taking way longer just because there are constant distractions in the office and they put me literally in the middle of the room. I kind of don’t even care because if they want me there, those are the consequences.
This is why I’m going to drive my 2012 RAV4 until it dies or I die, whichever comes first. I’d love to switch to an EV but unless something drastically changes in the industry, I’m not paying that kind of money for a car company to spy on me. At least my phone does me the courtesy of being fairly cheap while it harvests my data.
That’s true - it bums me out that more people didn’t follow through on their threats to leave, but I did and I don’t spend hours doomscrolling every day anymore. That alone is a good outcome. I learned to embroider to keep from picking up my phone over and over during the blackout and it’s one of my favorite hobbies now. Also a good outcome. For me, the protest was a success. Reddit can make every stupid choice under the sun, and it doesn’t impact my life in the least anymore.
Great, now let’s see how they can make it terrible.
Ultron and Project Insight. It’s like the people in charge watched those movies and said, “You know, I think Hydra had the right idea!”
Are there enough of us here to give them the attention/drama they clearly crave?
Huh, his art is technically fine, but I’ve seen photorealism done better (and really, it tends to be one of the most boring genres of art imo, because it’s usually more focused on accuracy than on any kind of meaning or feeling). I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about him if I ever came across his work, but now my impression is that he’s not particularly likeable in addition to being a pretty mediocre artist. Especially since the original review was very fair - maybe nicer than he deserved. That chicken hand was rough.
I would love to cancel it. I almost never watch it and there’s nothing I do watch that I couldn’t live without. Unfortunately, my mom does watch it constantly, and she’d just sign up for her own account if I got rid of mine, so in the interest of keeping her bills down, I’m kind of stuck. At least I got her to dump Hulu’s outrageously overpriced live tv option, so I got that going for me.
A middle aged person saying, “I would rather retire young and do things that are important to me before those things are no longer possible, instead of spending another 30 years working my ass off hoping I’m financially and physically capable of doing anything at the end and that the world isn’t literally on fire” is hardly the same as a 20-something doing a bunch of drugs, but sure. Silent mediation. That’ll solve global warming and capitalism.
I’m 39, and my bucket list mostly involves traveling to historical sites and trying lots of different food, so I don’t think we’re particularly comparable.
Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.