The problem with outdated, obsolete technology is maintenance. Nothing lasts forever, and a 25-year-old PC computer is going to fail at some point. Then you're not going to be able to find working replacement components, though you might be able to get by for a while by replacing capacitors or something. But at some point you're going to have a lot of trouble finding people willing and able to work on this stuff and keep it going. And yes, the prices end up going through the roof because you have to find specialists to do this stuff, and they charge a fortune. A highly skilled electronics tech could probably get an old PC like that working again, but his hourly cost isn't going to be cheap; you could buy an all-new server-grade PC for less that it'd cost to get him to diagnose and repair a component failure.
Win3.1's UI is clunky and horrible and very low-resolution.
But it's still orders of magnitude better than the atrocity that is Windows 10's Metro UI. Anything is better than that turd. I'd rather just go back to DOS than use that.
Oh, and they are tracking your cell phones. Always.
And, yes, your xBox One and PS are spying on you, as well as Windows 10.
Well luckily I don't have an Xbox One, PS, or Windows 10. What kind of idiot would willingly use any of those?
The cellphone one isn't so easy to avoid however; it's pretty hard to get along in today's society without one. But if you're going to do anything you're not supposed to, it is easy enough to just leave the phone at home that day.
We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel
No, but we DO know that no other FOSS project has been remotely as successful. How many devices use BSD kernels?
or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs
No, but we DO know that Apple has the highest market cap of all the tech companies (and all companies, IIRC), and is definitely the most profitable of all tech companies.
So obviously, these organizations' styles *are* successful for them. Maybe you don't like them, maybe other people don't like them, but the results do speak for themselves. It's not like all these turned-off workers are going somewhere else and those other places are doing better than Apple and the Linux kernel (for tech companies, and FOSS projects, respectively, which are two rather different types of organizations).
Basically you're trying to argue that these organizations should have different management styles, and that this would give them better workers and better results. However, you have ZERO evidence to prove this. You can't point to anything to back up your claim. These organizations are the most successful on the planet at what they do, despite your dislike of their management styles.
A couple other points: frequently (if not all the time), it's not the smartest workers who do the best job, in fact it seems that's almost never the case. It's like the tortoise and the hare story. Really smart people usually seem to not get along that well with others or be able to put up with organizational BS. How many MENSA members have made huge accomplishments in life and have their names in the record books for scientific or mathematical discoveries or anything significant really? A successful organization is able to take less-talented people and do great things with them.
Finally, just because you don't like Jobs's or Linus's style doesn't mean others really care that much. How much did the average Apple worker have to deal with Jobs? It's not like he was micromanaging every little thing (though he was known for being micromanaging); there simply isn't enough time for the CEO to run around and harass tens of thousands of employees. Same with Linus: he doesn't usually interact with most contributors, that's what he has his lieutenants for. These public exchanges with him are usually between him and one of his lieutenants or other frequent, high-level contributors. Your average person who works on a device driver or something and submits it is not going to hear from Linus. It's little different from any big company: what goes on in the corporate boardroom or between the executives or upper management isn't privy to your typical cubicle peon. With Linux, everyone sees it because it's all on a public mailing list. Did you really care if Steve Jobs yelled at one of his direct underlings in a private office and berated him? Of course not.
My experience wasn't too too horrible. One roommate played crap music ridiculously loud and apparently didn't like me much, so he moved out into his own room, so I got the room to myself for the rest of the semester, which was great. I had another roommate later and he sucked too, but luckily wasn't around that much. Another roommate was OK. The 4th semester I simply bought out my room and that was great. (After that was all off-campus living.)
When I had the dorm room to myself those 1.8 semesters, it was actually a lot of fun, and I liked that situation a lot. I had a room to myself, only had to share a bathroom with two other guys (in the neighboring suite), but I had several different friends in the hall to hang out with when I wanted to. That's why I like the idea of this "dorm" concept: you get your own 300sf living space so you can stay by yourself if you want, and then you get a big common area to hang out with your group-mates (or whatever they're called) when you want, so you can have some community without losing too much privacy. The big problem with college dorms is that you usually have to share a bedroom with someone, and that's a giant lack of privacy there.
I don't follow. Do you mean "*with* your 'fatal flaw'"? (rather than without)?
You seem to be saying that allowing the group to vote people out will result in groupthink. How is any other community which polices itself and allows members to toss out misfits any different, and how is this a problem? I don't know about you, but I for one don't want to be stuck for a year living with someone who's antagonistic towards me, steals my stuff, etc. Every group of people is going to turn nasty and dysfunctional if they have no mechanism to peacefully remove people they don't get along with. Furthermore, this is an issue of freedom of association: people should generally be free to associate with whomever they want, and not be forced to associate with people they don't. There are some reasonable exceptions for this here and there (like saying businesses open to the public can't refuse to sell to black people), but this is a residence situation, not a business where you walk in the door, grab something off the shelf, plunk down your cash and walk out all in a few minutes--living with someone is entirely different.
I understand that, but they don't usually have *that* much money.
Real-estate developers, however do. They have lots of money, and can hire lawyers and lobbyists. However even their power is limited; I really wonder if they'd be able to get changes passed to local ordinances about tenant rights. In most places, it's absolute hell trying to get a bad renter evicted; things are way too much on the side of the tenant in that regard. Someone can stop paying rent, move in 30 people, tear the place apart and sell all the fixtures and copper pipe, and there's absolutely nothing the landlord can do about it for months.
This "dorm" concept sounds great in theory to me, but I can't imagine how it'd possibly work if the management has no way of very quickly getting rid of problem people, and also being able to shuffle people around in case there's personality conflicts. Colleges don't seem to have this problem as much, I imagine because they're probably not subject to normal landlord-tenant laws and as quasi-government entities have a lot of latitude in handling residence hall occupants (and also probably because dorm residents, IIRC, are not really considered to "reside" at that address as far as the government is concerned, they're considered to reside at their parents' home, and are even required to move out of the dorm between semesters.
Because of these issues, the developers will have to get local government to pass ordinances to address them.
I've been doing this for a month or so, and I don't find it to be "way too much work". Honestly, there aren't that many sites that really need all these scripts to work. Just about every site these days needs a locally-hosted script to work it seems, but that's taken care of with my point #1 (Options->General->Temporarily allow top-level sites by default->Base 2nd level Domains). Just set that one option and most sites work fine.
After that, you'll find some sites that need stuff from some CDN. Enable those as needed. You might as well just permanently enable the Amazon AWS one. Do this permanently for all the sites you regularly visit.
I don't know about you, but I don't visit *that* many different sites on a regular basis, so after a week or so of this, I haven't had to mess with it too much. Everything pretty much "just works". And as a bonus, my browser isn't so slow and I'm not running out of memory so quickly on this old machine that's limited to 4GB.
You'll have to enable disqus.com if you want to see comments on a lot of sites.
There are a few really shitty sites where even after enabling a few things it still won't work. I don't really feel like letting these sites run scripts from 20 different domains, so I just close the tab. I don't need to see their crap that badly. Even the porn sites aren't nearly that bad.... (usually those just need the own-domain and some CDN site enabled).
I think the "genius" bit may be unfounded, it's hard to say for sure. What he really meant there is that Linux has a proven track record of getting stuff done, which is honestly a lot more important than an IQ score. There's a crapload of people in MENSA who just sit around in MENSA meetings talking about how smart they are, while they've never actually done anything very productive in life at all. Just look at Marilyn vos Savant: what did she ever do besides write a newspaper column (wherein she got a fair number of things wrong)? There's no mathematical discoveries or anything like that named after her.
Anyway, the idea is sound: people do tend to allow more latitude to someone if they have a record of getting things done. Suppose you have two auto mechanics in your little town (and the next town is too far away to get your car fixed); one mechanic has a great personality and is always polite, but he's infamous for screwing up auto repairs, with several incidents of peoples' wheels falling off and them driving off cliffs, while the other mechanic is a gruff jerk, but has fair pricing and a stellar reputation for fixing cars well without ever doing unnecessary repairs. Which one are you going to take your car to?
If anything, I think any forgiveness in that area which may be offered by the public would have more to do with what a person is known for, and how much they have actually done than it would to do with the person's intelligence.
I agree entirely, and that's why I think the author misspoke. He's equating Linus's obvious accomplishments (Linux runs on billions of devices) with an IQ score, making the assumption that he must obviously be a genius to have accomplished this, which is faulty reasoning.
No, you don't need to do that. You can just outsource everything offshore, and let the middle class implode here. Later, when our economy resembles Somalia's, no one will care much about how productive workers in this country are.
Meetup.com is OK, but it really depends where you are I think. I used to live near NYC and the outdoors groups there had lots of 20- and 30-something singles, it was like a big singles mixer. Now I live near DC and this place seems to suck; the outdoors groups seem to only have older people. I'm not sure what the ~30-40 crowd is doing here, but it doesn't seem to be hiking. I wish I could move back to NYC and just live there, but unless you're into finance, there's no jobs there for programmers.
I didn't have a bad time back in my college dorms... once I got my own dorm room and didn't have to deal with roommates.
That's exactly what happened to me: once I bought out my dorm room, it was probably the most fun living arrangement I had in my life. (Our dorms were organized by suites: two rooms sharing a bathroom.) I had friends in the neighboring rooms, but I had privacy too (except for the bathroom, but since I only shared it with two other guys it wasn't a big problem). This concept sounds a lot like that, only better since each room (IIRC) has its own bathroom and kitchenette.
And since the whole marriage-and-kids thing never worked out for me, I'm actually very interested in a place like this. Too bad Syracuse seems to completely lack any jobs in my industry.
No, the problem is that while they have been zoned out of existence, the laws haven't changed to match the "gig economy" we're living in.
I seriously doubt this concept will work at all unless they can somehow get the local government to change the zoning and tenant laws. If they're not able to easily evict people, this simply isn't going to work. Or if they're unable to discriminate against people with kids, that won't work either.
Someone will apply, get rejected, and sue, because they were turned down due to age, income level, number of children, political affiliation, type of job - or any of the other hundred reasons to sue for housing discrimination.
So how is it that over-55 housing communities are able to legally bar anyone under 55yo from buying a house there?
Nope, I actually enjoyed my dorm experience, at least some of it. When I had a roommate it sucked, but then I ended up buying out my whole room so I didn't have to share with anyone. It was great: I had a nice-sized room all to myself, but I could walk out my door and hang out with my friends across the hall or just down the hall if they were around. Or I could just stay in my room if I wanted privacy. If I wanted to eat, the dining spots were a short walk away.
It seems like this might work, but only if it's really easy for people to move to different apartment groups, or to get out of the lease altogether. If you're stuck with a yearlong lease and you still have to pay it even if your roommates kick you out, that's not going to work.
OK, I'm talking out my ass here as my only personal experience with roommates is not military, but in college where I'd only have one roommate at a time, and usually didn't get along all that well with them which led to me moving to my own apartment ASAP. And now that I'm older, I have one failed marriage under my belt so obviously I didn't do so well in living together there either. So the following is theoretical.
Suppose they built a bunch of large buildings like proposed in TFA, divided into groups of rooms like they're proposing. But they organize it so that people in each group (let's call it a "pod", as I went to a middle school that used that term) are able to vote out people they don't like, so you end up with self-organizing groups. Because there's a whole bunch of pods all owned by the building or complex management, if someone doesn't get along with the members of one pod, the management will simply help them pack their stuff and move to an open room in another pod, with no financial penalty (they'll build this into the rent).
See, the problem I've seen with both roommates and marriage is that you either don't get to pick who you live with, or you're not able to easily change your living arrangements. With roommates, you're either assigned people at random (as in college dorms), or you have very limited time and ability to check some stranger out before agreeing to be their roommate (as in off-campus apartments). Dorms do have a mechanism and policing (RAs) to deal with conflicts between roommates and move them around if things get too ugly, but apartments do not; once your lease is signed, you're stuck with that person unless you go through all the trouble of finding a new person to sublease at the same time one roommate finds a different place to sublease. And of course marriage is very difficult to get out of because of all the legal entanglements, requiring a lawyer for $$$, going to court, arguing over how to divide things, possibly getting slapped with alimony, etc. (and that's assuming there's no kids).
Now also consider that this living arrangement isn't exactly like your typical college roommate situation. According to TFA, each person's tiny apartment actually has its own kitchenette, bathroom, etc., they just share larger common spaces like a chef's kitchen, big living room, etc. So this seems like it'd avoid the problem of one asshole stealing everyone's food, among other things.
So, if this thing is run right, and it's relatively easy for people to self-organize into groups of people that get along well and to get rid of people who don't fit in or grate on peoples' nerves, it seems like it might be successful.
The problems I foresee are 1) if they don't have an easy way to get rid of people (this would doom it IMO), 2) how do you handle people bringing their boy/girlfriends over for the night/weekend/month/year, 3) are these pods going to be single-sex or mixed, 4) what if someone has a kid. I imagine a bunch of this stuff would need to be written into the lease as to how they'd handle it.
Wrong! I was born in the mid-70s. I lost interest in everything after 1995 because it was all crap, and I gained an interest in all the stuff from when I was a toddler (or not even born) because it was quality music.
I see the same thing with a lot of 20-somethings (and younger) these days: I see them going to classic rock concerts with their middle-aged parents. When I was a teenager, there was no way in hell any of us would go to a rock concert with our parents; our tastes were just too different. These days, we still have bands from the 70s and 80s touring. When I was a teenager, this just didn't happen; there were no 50s bands still playing to large crowds.
I used to use just uBlock Origin (and ABP before that). My browser was dirt slow. After I installed NoScript, things got a LOT faster. So just blocking ads didn't work for me; all those other tracking scripts were just using up too many resources.
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The problem with outdated, obsolete technology is maintenance. Nothing lasts forever, and a 25-year-old PC computer is going to fail at some point. Then you're not going to be able to find working replacement components, though you might be able to get by for a while by replacing capacitors or something. But at some point you're going to have a lot of trouble finding people willing and able to work on this stuff and keep it going. And yes, the prices end up going through the roof because you have to find specialists to do this stuff, and they charge a fortune. A highly skilled electronics tech could probably get an old PC like that working again, but his hourly cost isn't going to be cheap; you could buy an all-new server-grade PC for less that it'd cost to get him to diagnose and repair a component failure.
Win3.1's UI is clunky and horrible and very low-resolution.
But it's still orders of magnitude better than the atrocity that is Windows 10's Metro UI. Anything is better than that turd. I'd rather just go back to DOS than use that.
Kansas was pretty bad for the opposite reason - so many drivers driving at 10 or more MPH under the speed limit.
That's just like Virginia. Not only are the speed limits typically lower than other states, but the drivers just love to drive 10mph under the limit.
The cops in Virginia are Nazis too.
No, the kind of moron who's dumb enough to spend good money and waste time on Windows 10 and its shitty Metro interface.
Oh, and they are tracking your cell phones. Always.
And, yes, your xBox One and PS are spying on you, as well as Windows 10.
Well luckily I don't have an Xbox One, PS, or Windows 10. What kind of idiot would willingly use any of those?
The cellphone one isn't so easy to avoid however; it's pretty hard to get along in today's society without one. But if you're going to do anything you're not supposed to, it is easy enough to just leave the phone at home that day.
What's "American" and "un-American" has changed a lot over the years.
We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel
No, but we DO know that no other FOSS project has been remotely as successful. How many devices use BSD kernels?
or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs
No, but we DO know that Apple has the highest market cap of all the tech companies (and all companies, IIRC), and is definitely the most profitable of all tech companies.
So obviously, these organizations' styles *are* successful for them. Maybe you don't like them, maybe other people don't like them, but the results do speak for themselves. It's not like all these turned-off workers are going somewhere else and those other places are doing better than Apple and the Linux kernel (for tech companies, and FOSS projects, respectively, which are two rather different types of organizations).
Basically you're trying to argue that these organizations should have different management styles, and that this would give them better workers and better results. However, you have ZERO evidence to prove this. You can't point to anything to back up your claim. These organizations are the most successful on the planet at what they do, despite your dislike of their management styles.
A couple other points: frequently (if not all the time), it's not the smartest workers who do the best job, in fact it seems that's almost never the case. It's like the tortoise and the hare story. Really smart people usually seem to not get along that well with others or be able to put up with organizational BS. How many MENSA members have made huge accomplishments in life and have their names in the record books for scientific or mathematical discoveries or anything significant really? A successful organization is able to take less-talented people and do great things with them.
Finally, just because you don't like Jobs's or Linus's style doesn't mean others really care that much. How much did the average Apple worker have to deal with Jobs? It's not like he was micromanaging every little thing (though he was known for being micromanaging); there simply isn't enough time for the CEO to run around and harass tens of thousands of employees. Same with Linus: he doesn't usually interact with most contributors, that's what he has his lieutenants for. These public exchanges with him are usually between him and one of his lieutenants or other frequent, high-level contributors. Your average person who works on a device driver or something and submits it is not going to hear from Linus. It's little different from any big company: what goes on in the corporate boardroom or between the executives or upper management isn't privy to your typical cubicle peon. With Linux, everyone sees it because it's all on a public mailing list. Did you really care if Steve Jobs yelled at one of his direct underlings in a private office and berated him? Of course not.
Ever heard of a lease? Are you seriously suggesting people who don't like some jerk should pay rent for the rest of the lease term?
Fuck you.
The Chinese middle class is quickly rising.
My experience wasn't too too horrible. One roommate played crap music ridiculously loud and apparently didn't like me much, so he moved out into his own room, so I got the room to myself for the rest of the semester, which was great. I had another roommate later and he sucked too, but luckily wasn't around that much. Another roommate was OK. The 4th semester I simply bought out my room and that was great. (After that was all off-campus living.)
When I had the dorm room to myself those 1.8 semesters, it was actually a lot of fun, and I liked that situation a lot. I had a room to myself, only had to share a bathroom with two other guys (in the neighboring suite), but I had several different friends in the hall to hang out with when I wanted to. That's why I like the idea of this "dorm" concept: you get your own 300sf living space so you can stay by yourself if you want, and then you get a big common area to hang out with your group-mates (or whatever they're called) when you want, so you can have some community without losing too much privacy. The big problem with college dorms is that you usually have to share a bedroom with someone, and that's a giant lack of privacy there.
I don't follow. Do you mean "*with* your 'fatal flaw'"? (rather than without)?
You seem to be saying that allowing the group to vote people out will result in groupthink. How is any other community which polices itself and allows members to toss out misfits any different, and how is this a problem? I don't know about you, but I for one don't want to be stuck for a year living with someone who's antagonistic towards me, steals my stuff, etc. Every group of people is going to turn nasty and dysfunctional if they have no mechanism to peacefully remove people they don't get along with. Furthermore, this is an issue of freedom of association: people should generally be free to associate with whomever they want, and not be forced to associate with people they don't. There are some reasonable exceptions for this here and there (like saying businesses open to the public can't refuse to sell to black people), but this is a residence situation, not a business where you walk in the door, grab something off the shelf, plunk down your cash and walk out all in a few minutes--living with someone is entirely different.
I understand that, but they don't usually have *that* much money.
Real-estate developers, however do. They have lots of money, and can hire lawyers and lobbyists. However even their power is limited; I really wonder if they'd be able to get changes passed to local ordinances about tenant rights. In most places, it's absolute hell trying to get a bad renter evicted; things are way too much on the side of the tenant in that regard. Someone can stop paying rent, move in 30 people, tear the place apart and sell all the fixtures and copper pipe, and there's absolutely nothing the landlord can do about it for months.
This "dorm" concept sounds great in theory to me, but I can't imagine how it'd possibly work if the management has no way of very quickly getting rid of problem people, and also being able to shuffle people around in case there's personality conflicts. Colleges don't seem to have this problem as much, I imagine because they're probably not subject to normal landlord-tenant laws and as quasi-government entities have a lot of latitude in handling residence hall occupants (and also probably because dorm residents, IIRC, are not really considered to "reside" at that address as far as the government is concerned, they're considered to reside at their parents' home, and are even required to move out of the dorm between semesters.
Because of these issues, the developers will have to get local government to pass ordinances to address them.
I've been doing this for a month or so, and I don't find it to be "way too much work". Honestly, there aren't that many sites that really need all these scripts to work. Just about every site these days needs a locally-hosted script to work it seems, but that's taken care of with my point #1 (Options->General->Temporarily allow top-level sites by default->Base 2nd level Domains). Just set that one option and most sites work fine.
After that, you'll find some sites that need stuff from some CDN. Enable those as needed. You might as well just permanently enable the Amazon AWS one. Do this permanently for all the sites you regularly visit.
I don't know about you, but I don't visit *that* many different sites on a regular basis, so after a week or so of this, I haven't had to mess with it too much. Everything pretty much "just works". And as a bonus, my browser isn't so slow and I'm not running out of memory so quickly on this old machine that's limited to 4GB.
You'll have to enable disqus.com if you want to see comments on a lot of sites.
There are a few really shitty sites where even after enabling a few things it still won't work. I don't really feel like letting these sites run scripts from 20 different domains, so I just close the tab. I don't need to see their crap that badly. Even the porn sites aren't nearly that bad.... (usually those just need the own-domain and some CDN site enabled).
I think the "genius" bit may be unfounded, it's hard to say for sure. What he really meant there is that Linux has a proven track record of getting stuff done, which is honestly a lot more important than an IQ score. There's a crapload of people in MENSA who just sit around in MENSA meetings talking about how smart they are, while they've never actually done anything very productive in life at all. Just look at Marilyn vos Savant: what did she ever do besides write a newspaper column (wherein she got a fair number of things wrong)? There's no mathematical discoveries or anything like that named after her.
Anyway, the idea is sound: people do tend to allow more latitude to someone if they have a record of getting things done. Suppose you have two auto mechanics in your little town (and the next town is too far away to get your car fixed); one mechanic has a great personality and is always polite, but he's infamous for screwing up auto repairs, with several incidents of peoples' wheels falling off and them driving off cliffs, while the other mechanic is a gruff jerk, but has fair pricing and a stellar reputation for fixing cars well without ever doing unnecessary repairs. Which one are you going to take your car to?
If anything, I think any forgiveness in that area which may be offered by the public would have more to do with what a person is known for, and how much they have actually done than it would to do with the person's intelligence.
I agree entirely, and that's why I think the author misspoke. He's equating Linus's obvious accomplishments (Linux runs on billions of devices) with an IQ score, making the assumption that he must obviously be a genius to have accomplished this, which is faulty reasoning.
Exactly. Most people feel this way too, which is why Jobs never got anyone to work for him very long and his company went under. Oh wait...
No, you don't need to do that. You can just outsource everything offshore, and let the middle class implode here. Later, when our economy resembles Somalia's, no one will care much about how productive workers in this country are.
Meetup.com is OK, but it really depends where you are I think. I used to live near NYC and the outdoors groups there had lots of 20- and 30-something singles, it was like a big singles mixer. Now I live near DC and this place seems to suck; the outdoors groups seem to only have older people. I'm not sure what the ~30-40 crowd is doing here, but it doesn't seem to be hiking. I wish I could move back to NYC and just live there, but unless you're into finance, there's no jobs there for programmers.
I didn't have a bad time back in my college dorms... once I got my own dorm room and didn't have to deal with roommates.
That's exactly what happened to me: once I bought out my dorm room, it was probably the most fun living arrangement I had in my life. (Our dorms were organized by suites: two rooms sharing a bathroom.) I had friends in the neighboring rooms, but I had privacy too (except for the bathroom, but since I only shared it with two other guys it wasn't a big problem). This concept sounds a lot like that, only better since each room (IIRC) has its own bathroom and kitchenette.
And since the whole marriage-and-kids thing never worked out for me, I'm actually very interested in a place like this. Too bad Syracuse seems to completely lack any jobs in my industry.
No, the problem is that while they have been zoned out of existence, the laws haven't changed to match the "gig economy" we're living in.
I seriously doubt this concept will work at all unless they can somehow get the local government to change the zoning and tenant laws. If they're not able to easily evict people, this simply isn't going to work. Or if they're unable to discriminate against people with kids, that won't work either.
Someone will apply, get rejected, and sue, because they were turned down due to age, income level, number of children, political affiliation, type of job - or any of the other hundred reasons to sue for housing discrimination.
So how is it that over-55 housing communities are able to legally bar anyone under 55yo from buying a house there?
Nope, I actually enjoyed my dorm experience, at least some of it. When I had a roommate it sucked, but then I ended up buying out my whole room so I didn't have to share with anyone. It was great: I had a nice-sized room all to myself, but I could walk out my door and hang out with my friends across the hall or just down the hall if they were around. Or I could just stay in my room if I wanted privacy. If I wanted to eat, the dining spots were a short walk away.
This seems like it wouldn't be too different.
It seems like this might work, but only if it's really easy for people to move to different apartment groups, or to get out of the lease altogether. If you're stuck with a yearlong lease and you still have to pay it even if your roommates kick you out, that's not going to work.
OK, I'm talking out my ass here as my only personal experience with roommates is not military, but in college where I'd only have one roommate at a time, and usually didn't get along all that well with them which led to me moving to my own apartment ASAP. And now that I'm older, I have one failed marriage under my belt so obviously I didn't do so well in living together there either. So the following is theoretical.
Suppose they built a bunch of large buildings like proposed in TFA, divided into groups of rooms like they're proposing. But they organize it so that people in each group (let's call it a "pod", as I went to a middle school that used that term) are able to vote out people they don't like, so you end up with self-organizing groups. Because there's a whole bunch of pods all owned by the building or complex management, if someone doesn't get along with the members of one pod, the management will simply help them pack their stuff and move to an open room in another pod, with no financial penalty (they'll build this into the rent).
See, the problem I've seen with both roommates and marriage is that you either don't get to pick who you live with, or you're not able to easily change your living arrangements. With roommates, you're either assigned people at random (as in college dorms), or you have very limited time and ability to check some stranger out before agreeing to be their roommate (as in off-campus apartments). Dorms do have a mechanism and policing (RAs) to deal with conflicts between roommates and move them around if things get too ugly, but apartments do not; once your lease is signed, you're stuck with that person unless you go through all the trouble of finding a new person to sublease at the same time one roommate finds a different place to sublease. And of course marriage is very difficult to get out of because of all the legal entanglements, requiring a lawyer for $$$, going to court, arguing over how to divide things, possibly getting slapped with alimony, etc. (and that's assuming there's no kids).
Now also consider that this living arrangement isn't exactly like your typical college roommate situation. According to TFA, each person's tiny apartment actually has its own kitchenette, bathroom, etc., they just share larger common spaces like a chef's kitchen, big living room, etc. So this seems like it'd avoid the problem of one asshole stealing everyone's food, among other things.
So, if this thing is run right, and it's relatively easy for people to self-organize into groups of people that get along well and to get rid of people who don't fit in or grate on peoples' nerves, it seems like it might be successful.
The problems I foresee are 1) if they don't have an easy way to get rid of people (this would doom it IMO), 2) how do you handle people bringing their boy/girlfriends over for the night/weekend/month/year, 3) are these pods going to be single-sex or mixed, 4) what if someone has a kid. I imagine a bunch of this stuff would need to be written into the lease as to how they'd handle it.
Wrong! I was born in the mid-70s. I lost interest in everything after 1995 because it was all crap, and I gained an interest in all the stuff from when I was a toddler (or not even born) because it was quality music.
I see the same thing with a lot of 20-somethings (and younger) these days: I see them going to classic rock concerts with their middle-aged parents. When I was a teenager, there was no way in hell any of us would go to a rock concert with our parents; our tastes were just too different. These days, we still have bands from the 70s and 80s touring. When I was a teenager, this just didn't happen; there were no 50s bands still playing to large crowds.
I used to use just uBlock Origin (and ABP before that). My browser was dirt slow. After I installed NoScript, things got a LOT faster. So just blocking ads didn't work for me; all those other tracking scripts were just using up too many resources.