Dude, wtf doi you live that there is only one ISP? I live in the rural south, 50 miles from the nearest city of any size and more than ten miles from town. I don't have cable, don't pay for a dish - the cellphones don't even work here. But I can choose from about a half dozen different ISPs.
Do you perhaps mean they have the only broadband access in your area? Cuz.. that's not a monopoly, you know.. that's competition. Nothing for the courts to do there... and be thankful you have even that choice.
People who are so stupid they can't get their minds around Free software deserve what they get. I don't even fix windows computers anymore; leave the sheep to the wolves and enjoy the show.
That "IP" is stuff like engineering reports and structural analysis you can take to your local building inspector to prove the structure is sound in concept and planning. This is not something anyone is likely to provide free of charge, because it is an engineer putting his firm's name on a report that could come back to haunt him. If you just want instructions on how to do it and are too cheap to pay the guy twenty fve bucks for a book you can find guides all over the internet and in your local library.
You are paying for acountability. If you cannot afford even this much accountability you're not likely to be able to afford a piece of land in the first place. Now, keep in mind I'm the guy who was flamed just the other day for complaining about building codes and called a "liberal" (I think that was meant to be an insult) for suggesting people should be able to build cob homes in town. But $2000? Do you know what plans for a stick home will cost you? $1800 is the price of a cheap old used car - it's hardly out of reach for anyone motivated enough to build a house, even if they're on a McDonald's salary.
but I still don't see what the complaining is all about. It's called BETA for a reason. If you don't like a feature, time to let them know.
it needs to be able to view the post back in context (ie thread view). other than that I don't see anything here that wasn't before. It's just different - not the same - but not really worse.
I think what folks are most threatened by is google appears to be going after a yahoo type look - ie to make it look more like a web forum and less like usenet.
part of the "Superadobe" construction is a proiper external shell. Plastering the house with a proper lime based mix will help make it reasonably waterproof. Replacing this as it's washed away is not something that can be neglected for decades on end, but it's not something that needs to be done every year either.
People often have the same notions about cob homes. If the walls are made from mud, then enough rain would cause them to weaken. In cob structures this is taken care of by proper foundation (ie a foot or so of rock along the ground before placing mud) a roof with good overhang, and proper plastering of outside walls. There are cob homes all over France and Germany and England that have stood hundreds of years.
With these structures the earth is contained in bags and interlocked with barb wire. You would want to make sure the house had a proper foundation for the walls, but the bags would help stabilize things much better than plain cob, which is already quite strong. I'm not sure if it's still online but I once read a report from a fellow who was demolishing one of these to make room for new construction, and it was pretty incredibly strong. He took a hose and shovel and had the entire dome standing on just three narrow "legs." It took quite a lot of deliberate undermining the foundation to cause the dome to finally collapse.
What I find really amazing is the concept of using solar energy to heat the soil to magma, then guiding its flow to form ceramic dwellings. I've read accounts of people filling these structures with wood and firing them in order to make ceramic domes, but the notion of directing magma flows is pretty... "ambitious."
People tend to post soon after their purchase with lots of glowing reviews. This makes it pretty much useless for new products.
Then, when the product proves to be a piece of junk, you'll find post after post from many of those same people complaining about their piece of junk. While this might be comforting in a group therapy kind of way, it is also pretty much useless as a "product review" unless you happen to be considering purchase of two year old merchandise.
Not everyone got Maude, either... especially the people who liked All in the Family because they related a little too closely to Archie bunker.
"Right on, Maude!"
And I don't get Family Guy (nor did I like Futurama).
I like Will and Grace. Unfortunately they put them against Survivor and, unlike most of my gay friends, I don't have a tivo. Thank heaven we still get reruns.
TV is no "dumber" now than it was twenty years ago. This is just a stupid knee jerk reaction to an industry it is now more fashionable than ever to hate.
Look at the top rated shows and you will find only a sliver of those "reality" shows everyone loves (when they're alone in front of the tv) to hate (the next day around the water cooler). What is there in spades, however, is the cookie cutter crime shows - allegedly "intelligent" content apparently all written by the same crack team of hackneyed high school chemistry dropouts.
Now go back thirty years to 1974 and note the top rated shows. Sanford and Son might be classics now, but no matter how much I loved Redd Foxx I sure wouldn't call it "intelligent." Six Million Dollar man? Fun when I was 12, but in the end only slightly less demeaning in its scientific take than CSI-name-your-favorite-city. It's Charlie's Angels for the geriatric.
Then there was MASH and Bob Newhart and Maude; now there's West Wing and Will and Grace and Family Guy.
Now let's move into the eighties. I'm not even going to bother looking for a link - I can name them off the top of my head: intelligent fare like Three's Company and Dukes of fucking Hazzard and Wonder Woman intermingled with the monthly installments of Battle of the Network T's and A's.
Great shows like those produced by Rod Serling - the MASHs and the West Wings have always been rare on TV. By and large it has always sucked, all that's changing is your own awareness of just how badly. What you're forgetting is it's been that bad all along... you just had no other choice.
If it's the latter, it's really quite cheap and could be helpful to build cheap, sustainable housing. Hell, I'm an out-door buff and I'd love to buy one of these that can be reused when I go on long treks and climbs.
Sure as hell beats living in a tent for weeks on end.
Even $10,000 is a ridiculous price for the structure in that picture. You could build a whole village of yurts for the price of one tiny "cardboard house" from these people.
This is for legal reasons. How does anyone know your "guy" knows what he's doing? Plus while your ultimately liable for your home. If you have insurance? It's their pockets that hurt people are going to go after.
I certainly wasn't saying we should have no standards for licensing contractors. But that has little to do with my point, which is that individuals should have the freedom to be responsible for themselves without involving contractors. and they should have the freedom to decide if they even want to go with licensed contractors.
Want to hire a cheap unlicensed contractor to work on your home? Fine - good luck getting insurance. Want to do the work yourself? Do it and pay an inspector to certify it for you - then the insurance company can be ok. Don't want to do any of that? Then don't bitch when no one will insure you and your house burns down because you overloaded the electrical box.
Require inspections on all homes at time of transfer of ownership and publically posted reports; if it's about safety, then this alone would be more effective than those "codes." This keeps owners responsible for themselves and protects the market - WITHOUT granting "neighborhood associations" and local contractors what amounts to an old world Lordship over everyone's allegedly privately held estate.
Putting a sewage plant in a populated area would be one of those "public health" issues which we already covered while you (apparently) were not paying attention. Likewise would be that nuclear reactor you mentioned (we won't address the fact this is moot since there haven't been any new-clear reactors built in many, many years in the US). You didn't mention a hog farm either, but just to save you that trouble I'll point out we are again talking about an issue of public health here, which trumps "it's my land to do what I want." Public health always comes first. Likewise, if you want to live in an unheated cardboard box and freeze to death this winter, that's no one elses business until we have to haul away your rotting carcass (at which point we would, of course, bill your estate for the handling fees).
Anything else, if you got a problem with the way the neighbor keeps his place, buy him out. If the neighbors all agree with you then form an alliance, pool some resources, and pay him to get the hell out of there. Clean up the property, build a home however YOU want it to look and rent it out. Problem solved, and freedom and responsibility (what a novel fucking notion) is preserved for all parties involved. Buy out the whole block if you want, and lease it out only to those with the money to pay and the willingness to abide by the landowner's "community standards."
You want to preseve those artificially high property values on your block? Fine - then YOU bear the responsibility and the cost of doing so.
Your heart is in the right place, but this would end up being used for evil. If you don't have building codes, then slumlords will be able to get away with even more crap then they do now.
Nope. You are confusing commercial property (ie property I rent to you) with privately held property (ie it's my fucking house, so piss off). This situation is easily dealt with exclusive of those building codes - it has been for decades, as there are plenty of old apartment buildings where slumlords have been properly taken down to prove it.
That's not a building code issue, it's an occupancy issue. I never said get rid of basic laws regarding potentially PUBLIC matters like waste disposal and even water runoff.
Do you even know where to go in your state to find lists of contractors and the list of jobs they have handled? If you want to protect the people it seems to me pretty obvious the first place you would start is by making sure contractors can be held accountable by the public. But most places don't even put the registry of contractors (and people who claim to be but are not licensed) alongside the list of people who have filed complaints against them!
The reason trailer park lots are so expensive in the northeast is because most places OUTLAW placing a trailer home (no matter how high quality) on your own goddamn land. Doesn't matter how much it cost, doesn't matter how many union employees you're willing to pay to connect it to the sewer and water and electrical lines - in most communities north of mason-dixon it's just slap illegal to use your own land this way unless you are "zoned" as a trailer park. Ergo, trailer parks get what they want because there is so little competition. Go out west or down south, where people outside the most urban areas still have at least this leeway, and you'll find lot prices proportionately FAR more affordable.
This discussion has gone wildly beyond what I said. Feell free to take it wherever you like, but allow me to point out again I am not talking about contractors and hiring. If a person has the money to hire a bunch of contractors then they are not "poor" (Remember? This "cardboard house" was put forth as a means of making "affordable housing for the poor?")
If you are poor then your time is worth less than if you are wealthy. That ain't politically correct, but it's the truth - the more you are able to charge for your time, the less likely you are to be poor. Do the math.
Using found materials, self-manufactured or low cost materials (like cob, adobe, straw bales, etc) one can construct a home that is energy efficient and durable. Naysaying know-it-alls aside, there are thousands upon thousands of cob homes all over france, germany and england that have stood for hundreds of years (and thousands were made in germany post-WWII) - and what exactly is the difference between a "cheaply made" 400 year old mud house with (by necessity) two foot thick walls and an "expensive" 400 year old mud house with two foot thick walls? What about a mud house with two foot thick walls I construct with my friends and relatives? The cost is mud and labor, which cannot be dictated by those building codes. Ergo, such entrepreneurial approaches to home ownership are disallowed. Less competition means higher prices. And higher prices makes the neighbors (who already have their house) happy.
So, good luck getting permission to build a cob home in pretty much ANY area outside the most rural in the USA. And in many states (especially the trendy ones in the south and west), good luck getting permission to build a cob home - on your own land - even in the most rural location.
The objective is to get people into home ownership - call it "an investment in a committed relationship with a community" - without requiring the condescending approval of a bank or the yuppie neighbors. Contractors are not an avenue to doing this, because any licensed and even moderately successful contractor's time is going to be worth MORE than the time of the poor person who would be trying to hire them. Provide local workshops for training, and let the poor person DIY as much as he or she is able - even down to raw materials.
And I'm not just talking about mud - for example, this cardboard bit. You could likely pick up baled cardboard boxes for nothing from your local retailer (who just has to pay the recycler to haul them off) but can you secure "permission" to build a home from them? In most cases, no - it has to be cardboard that's been "blessed" by local government after being properly bribed by the corporate entity that "retouched" it. You can also construct bricks from recycled paper pulp and cement and sand - but will the local codes allow it? In most cases no, because your bricks would not have the required "blessing."
The whole point is that "DIY" bit. But, unlike computers, a home does not have to come from "raw materials" that can only be made using expensive and highly specialized equipment. I cannot take the mud and straw from my back yard and build a durable and energy efficient computer - but in most places, you can construct a home exactly this way. That is, you could if the codes would allow it.
The best you can come up with is to call me a "troll" - for putting forth the heretical notion that people (OHMYFUCKINGAWD!) be allowed to do with their own goddamn property as they please?
Do those codes outlaw the sale of mobile homes in Florida? No? Well then it's obviously not about safety and insurability, but simply about impeding people's freedom to utilize resources as they see fit - ie it's all about selling more manufactured shit to keep the local businesses fat and happy.
To use the first example (and yours) a cob home capable of standing on its own would, in all likelihood (and based on other examples you can easily locate in google) weather a hurricane mch better than the sticks of wood we all saw strewn about on tv. Even if it completely lost its roof you would still have walls unless perhaps it was taken away by a tidal swell - and a stick home wouldn't do any better.
And to address the latter: if one CHOOSES to build a sub-code home, then it's going to be up to you to rebuild it when it gets blown away. Not the insurance company, not the goddamn federal government (which it presently does even with your precious building codes and all that insurance).
It's called freedom. Not freedom as in "free beer" but freedom as in "it's my property, my responsibility, and my fucking choice."
This is no different than the skillion other "homes for poor people" sales pitches. So what? We already have habitat for humanity and they're in just about every community in the US. Fact is this is all about nothing but selling shit and putting more people in debt, because people in debt are going to be "more responsible" and feed the machine.
You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business. There are homes all over Euroupe, Asia, and the Mideast that have stood for hundreds of years and are made of nothing more than mud. Cob homes, in some parts of the world, are now becoming "fashionable" again and sought by well-to-do who want something with quality and character - attributes long lost to modern construction. But because building a cob home doesn't financially benefit anyone but the nearest dirt farm and an army of unskilled laborers, it's disallowed in just about any non-rural area in the US.
At the other end of the affordable/quality spectrum, you can buy a used trailer home in ths country for just a couple thousand dollars - but most local ordinances won't allow people to put these low cost homes on their own fucking property.
You want to afford poor people the opportunity to own their own homes, give them the freedom to do with their own property as they see fit. Set appropriate national MIMIMUM standards for sanitation and structural integrity and set barriers to local communities mandating higher, purely politically motivated, standards.
I'm actually surrounded by carcasses of T600 laptops. My daily driver is a 600x/500PIII but I have other models from a 233 with a 12" screen (the first one - a gift that got me hooked on'em) to a couple of 400PII/600e's including one out on loan (until she pays me for it).
Haven't noticed any problem. If it doesn't wake up from sleep it's usually because the battery completely died while it was asleep. I plug it in, turn it on, and it works. This is with either mandrake or ubuntu, but I have noticed X works much, much better with ubuntu.
Yes, these have coin cells. And are you sure your problem isn't just a dying main battery? When they get aged they start acting odd. I resolved this issue by using the unit plugged into the wall.
of why we need to further evolve the internet. Back when it was limited to academics and fringe kooks the server/client model was valid, but as its becoming a broadcast medium it needs to evolve past antiquated notions.
Universal broadband - even constrained geographically (ie we are all broadband peers in our neighborhood/block/town whatever) will make both ddos attacks and hacking individual machines ineffective. Imagine how popular radio would have been all those decades ago if more listeners caused the radio station to be knocked offline.
Trade sanctions will never work against China, and they know it. For starters, the party members experience a different level of comfort than non-party members, and government officials are even further detached.
Methinks you are unfamiliar with the history of this nation. Why don't you do some googling and see for yourself just how willing the people of that nation are to organize against the state if they feel the need.
Takes a lot of tanks to run over a Billion people.
Right, so we should just let them get on with torturing and persecuting people, because it is happening in another country?
Yep.
So long as they are not exporting goods produced by slave labor or some such... yes. The government of any nation is up to the people of that nation. You cannot impose "freedom" (as we have tried to do in iraq) nor can you be so arrogant as to assume every culture should emulate your own because yours is the only right way.
Frankly I see a lot of gaping holes in the western system - the way capitalism seems to be spiraling into feudalism because of the backdoors our liberties create for governmental corruption, for example - and if the chinese can come up with a plan that works for a nation of a Billion or more, maybe it's not we who need to be teaching that class.
If the people of china want change, let them direct it themselves. We wouldn't tolerate anything less for our own nation.
No, but it pretty much was 40 years ago when, little more than a decade past their last civil war, Nixon began opening up relations with them.
and as opposed to USA they don't have a proven track record of aggression and meddling in other countries' affairs.
Wow, Yoko, do you still have that "Chairman Mao" tee-shirt?
It's hard to focus on intereference in other nations when your own nation is mired in one civil war after another. Meanwhile, their human rights record with their own people isn't exactly a shining beacon of grace.
The FSU was huge compared to the US but it never exceeded us. Canada has a tiny population and has a comparatively high standard of living.
If China is to become the next world leader it won't be because of Communism. But if it retains some of those ideals and is able to overtake the western version of capitalism in the process, than I would say that means they had a better idea and we would do well to take from the best of theirs, just as they did of ours.
Yes... I do think the people of the US are getting upset over nothing. The only thing threatened is their pride; to me, arrogance is nothing worth preserving.
You need to spend some time with more than one of those links, chief. Here's one for ya. Like I (and you) said: we essentially owned the place. We could have kept it as a state, but we didn't. Ironically, it likely would have been much better off if we had rather than let it become a haven to mob bosses and internal corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, wtf doi you live that there is only one ISP? I live in the rural south, 50 miles from the nearest city of any size and more than ten miles from town. I don't have cable, don't pay for a dish - the cellphones don't even work here. But I can choose from about a half dozen different ISPs.
Do you perhaps mean they have the only broadband access in your area? Cuz.. that's not a monopoly, you know.. that's competition. Nothing for the courts to do there... and be thankful you have even that choice.
People who are so stupid they can't get their minds around Free software deserve what they get. I don't even fix windows computers anymore; leave the sheep to the wolves and enjoy the show.
That "IP" is stuff like engineering reports and structural analysis you can take to your local building inspector to prove the structure is sound in concept and planning. This is not something anyone is likely to provide free of charge, because it is an engineer putting his firm's name on a report that could come back to haunt him. If you just want instructions on how to do it and are too cheap to pay the guy twenty fve bucks for a book you can find guides all over the internet and in your local library.
You are paying for acountability. If you cannot afford even this much accountability you're not likely to be able to afford a piece of land in the first place. Now, keep in mind I'm the guy who was flamed just the other day for complaining about building codes and called a "liberal" (I think that was meant to be an insult) for suggesting people should be able to build cob homes in town. But $2000? Do you know what plans for a stick home will cost you? $1800 is the price of a cheap old used car - it's hardly out of reach for anyone motivated enough to build a house, even if they're on a McDonald's salary.
but I still don't see what the complaining is all about. It's called BETA for a reason. If you don't like a feature, time to let them know.
it needs to be able to view the post back in context (ie thread view). other than that I don't see anything here that wasn't before. It's just different - not the same - but not really worse.
I think what folks are most threatened by is google appears to be going after a yahoo type look - ie to make it look more like a web forum and less like usenet.
Can't have all those webteevee-ers hanging about!
part of the "Superadobe" construction is a proiper external shell. Plastering the house with a proper lime based mix will help make it reasonably waterproof. Replacing this as it's washed away is not something that can be neglected for decades on end, but it's not something that needs to be done every year either.
People often have the same notions about cob homes. If the walls are made from mud, then enough rain would cause them to weaken. In cob structures this is taken care of by proper foundation (ie a foot or so of rock along the ground before placing mud) a roof with good overhang, and proper plastering of outside walls. There are cob homes all over France and Germany and England that have stood hundreds of years.
With these structures the earth is contained in bags and interlocked with barb wire. You would want to make sure the house had a proper foundation for the walls, but the bags would help stabilize things much better than plain cob, which is already quite strong. I'm not sure if it's still online but I once read a report from a fellow who was demolishing one of these to make room for new construction, and it was pretty incredibly strong. He took a hose and shovel and had the entire dome standing on just three narrow "legs." It took quite a lot of deliberate undermining the foundation to cause the dome to finally collapse.
What I find really amazing is the concept of using solar energy to heat the soil to magma, then guiding its flow to form ceramic dwellings. I've read accounts of people filling these structures with wood and firing them in order to make ceramic domes, but the notion of directing magma flows is pretty... "ambitious."
People tend to post soon after their purchase with lots of glowing reviews. This makes it pretty much useless for new products.
Then, when the product proves to be a piece of junk, you'll find post after post from many of those same people complaining about their piece of junk. While this might be comforting in a group therapy kind of way, it is also pretty much useless as a "product review" unless you happen to be considering purchase of two year old merchandise.
Not everyone got Maude, either... especially the people who liked All in the Family because they related a little too closely to Archie bunker.
"Right on, Maude!"
And I don't get Family Guy (nor did I like Futurama).
I like Will and Grace. Unfortunately they put them against Survivor and, unlike most of my gay friends, I don't have a tivo. Thank heaven we still get reruns.
TV is no "dumber" now than it was twenty years ago. This is just a stupid knee jerk reaction to an industry it is now more fashionable than ever to hate.
Look at the top rated shows and you will find only a sliver of those "reality" shows everyone loves (when they're alone in front of the tv) to hate (the next day around the water cooler). What is there in spades, however, is the cookie cutter crime shows - allegedly "intelligent" content apparently all written by the same crack team of hackneyed high school chemistry dropouts.
Now go back thirty years to 1974 and note the top rated shows. Sanford and Son might be classics now, but no matter how much I loved Redd Foxx I sure wouldn't call it "intelligent." Six Million Dollar man? Fun when I was 12, but in the end only slightly less demeaning in its scientific take than CSI-name-your-favorite-city. It's Charlie's Angels for the geriatric.
Then there was MASH and Bob Newhart and Maude; now there's West Wing and Will and Grace and Family Guy.
Now let's move into the eighties. I'm not even going to bother looking for a link - I can name them off the top of my head: intelligent fare like Three's Company and Dukes of fucking Hazzard and Wonder Woman intermingled with the monthly installments of Battle of the Network T's and A's.
Great shows like those produced by Rod Serling - the MASHs and the West Wings have always been rare on TV. By and large it has always sucked, all that's changing is your own awareness of just how badly. What you're forgetting is it's been that bad all along... you just had no other choice.
If it's the latter, it's really quite cheap and could be helpful to build cheap, sustainable housing. Hell, I'm an out-door buff and I'd love to buy one of these that can be reused when I go on long treks and climbs.
Sure as hell beats living in a tent for weeks on end.
Really?
Even $10,000 is a ridiculous price for the structure in that picture. You could build a whole village of yurts for the price of one tiny "cardboard house" from these people.
This is for legal reasons. How does anyone know your "guy" knows what he's doing? Plus while your ultimately liable for your home. If you have insurance? It's their pockets that hurt people are going to go after.
I certainly wasn't saying we should have no standards for licensing contractors. But that has little to do with my point, which is that individuals should have the freedom to be responsible for themselves without involving contractors. and they should have the freedom to decide if they even want to go with licensed contractors.
Want to hire a cheap unlicensed contractor to work on your home? Fine - good luck getting insurance. Want to do the work yourself? Do it and pay an inspector to certify it for you - then the insurance company can be ok. Don't want to do any of that? Then don't bitch when no one will insure you and your house burns down because you overloaded the electrical box.
Require inspections on all homes at time of transfer of ownership and publically posted reports; if it's about safety, then this alone would be more effective than those "codes." This keeps owners responsible for themselves and protects the market - WITHOUT granting "neighborhood associations" and local contractors what amounts to an old world Lordship over everyone's allegedly privately held estate.
Putting a sewage plant in a populated area would be one of those "public health" issues which we already covered while you (apparently) were not paying attention. Likewise would be that nuclear reactor you mentioned (we won't address the fact this is moot since there haven't been any new-clear reactors built in many, many years in the US). You didn't mention a hog farm either, but just to save you that trouble I'll point out we are again talking about an issue of public health here, which trumps "it's my land to do what I want." Public health always comes first. Likewise, if you want to live in an unheated cardboard box and freeze to death this winter, that's no one elses business until we have to haul away your rotting carcass (at which point we would, of course, bill your estate for the handling fees).
Anything else, if you got a problem with the way the neighbor keeps his place, buy him out. If the neighbors all agree with you then form an alliance, pool some resources, and pay him to get the hell out of there. Clean up the property, build a home however YOU want it to look and rent it out. Problem solved, and freedom and responsibility (what a novel fucking notion) is preserved for all parties involved. Buy out the whole block if you want, and lease it out only to those with the money to pay and the willingness to abide by the landowner's "community standards."
You want to preseve those artificially high property values on your block? Fine - then YOU bear the responsibility and the cost of doing so.
Your heart is in the right place, but this would end up being used for evil. If you don't have building codes, then slumlords will be able to get away with even more crap then they do now.
Nope. You are confusing commercial property (ie property I rent to you) with privately held property (ie it's my fucking house, so piss off). This situation is easily dealt with exclusive of those building codes - it has been for decades, as there are plenty of old apartment buildings where slumlords have been properly taken down to prove it.
That's not a building code issue, it's an occupancy issue. I never said get rid of basic laws regarding potentially PUBLIC matters like waste disposal and even water runoff.
Do you even know where to go in your state to find lists of contractors and the list of jobs they have handled? If you want to protect the people it seems to me pretty obvious the first place you would start is by making sure contractors can be held accountable by the public. But most places don't even put the registry of contractors (and people who claim to be but are not licensed) alongside the list of people who have filed complaints against them!
The reason trailer park lots are so expensive in the northeast is because most places OUTLAW placing a trailer home (no matter how high quality) on your own goddamn land. Doesn't matter how much it cost, doesn't matter how many union employees you're willing to pay to connect it to the sewer and water and electrical lines - in most communities north of mason-dixon it's just slap illegal to use your own land this way unless you are "zoned" as a trailer park. Ergo, trailer parks get what they want because there is so little competition. Go out west or down south, where people outside the most urban areas still have at least this leeway, and you'll find lot prices proportionately FAR more affordable.
This discussion has gone wildly beyond what I said. Feell free to take it wherever you like, but allow me to point out again I am not talking about contractors and hiring. If a person has the money to hire a bunch of contractors then they are not "poor" (Remember? This "cardboard house" was put forth as a means of making "affordable housing for the poor?")
If you are poor then your time is worth less than if you are wealthy. That ain't politically correct, but it's the truth - the more you are able to charge for your time, the less likely you are to be poor. Do the math.
Using found materials, self-manufactured or low cost materials (like cob, adobe, straw bales, etc) one can construct a home that is energy efficient and durable. Naysaying know-it-alls aside, there are thousands upon thousands of cob homes all over france, germany and england that have stood for hundreds of years (and thousands were made in germany post-WWII) - and what exactly is the difference between a "cheaply made" 400 year old mud house with (by necessity) two foot thick walls and an "expensive" 400 year old mud house with two foot thick walls? What about a mud house with two foot thick walls I construct with my friends and relatives? The cost is mud and labor, which cannot be dictated by those building codes. Ergo, such entrepreneurial approaches to home ownership are disallowed. Less competition means higher prices. And higher prices makes the neighbors (who already have their house) happy.
So, good luck getting permission to build a cob home in pretty much ANY area outside the most rural in the USA. And in many states (especially the trendy ones in the south and west), good luck getting permission to build a cob home - on your own land - even in the most rural location.
The objective is to get people into home ownership - call it "an investment in a committed relationship with a community" - without requiring the condescending approval of a bank or the yuppie neighbors. Contractors are not an avenue to doing this, because any licensed and even moderately successful contractor's time is going to be worth MORE than the time of the poor person who would be trying to hire them. Provide local workshops for training, and let the poor person DIY as much as he or she is able - even down to raw materials.
And I'm not just talking about mud - for example, this cardboard bit. You could likely pick up baled cardboard boxes for nothing from your local retailer (who just has to pay the recycler to haul them off) but can you secure "permission" to build a home from them? In most cases, no - it has to be cardboard that's been "blessed" by local government after being properly bribed by the corporate entity that "retouched" it. You can also construct bricks from recycled paper pulp and cement and sand - but will the local codes allow it? In most cases no, because your bricks would not have the required "blessing."
The whole point is that "DIY" bit. But, unlike computers, a home does not have to come from "raw materials" that can only be made using expensive and highly specialized equipment. I cannot take the mud and straw from my back yard and build a durable and energy efficient computer - but in most places, you can construct a home exactly this way. That is, you could if the codes would allow it.
The best you can come up with is to call me a "troll" - for putting forth the heretical notion that people (OHMYFUCKINGAWD!) be allowed to do with their own goddamn property as they please?
Do those codes outlaw the sale of mobile homes in Florida? No? Well then it's obviously not about safety and insurability, but simply about impeding people's freedom to utilize resources as they see fit - ie it's all about selling more manufactured shit to keep the local businesses fat and happy.
To use the first example (and yours) a cob home capable of standing on its own would, in all likelihood (and based on other examples you can easily locate in google) weather a hurricane mch better than the sticks of wood we all saw strewn about on tv. Even if it completely lost its roof you would still have walls unless perhaps it was taken away by a tidal swell - and a stick home wouldn't do any better.
And to address the latter: if one CHOOSES to build a sub-code home, then it's going to be up to you to rebuild it when it gets blown away. Not the insurance company, not the goddamn federal government (which it presently does even with your precious building codes and all that insurance).
It's called freedom. Not freedom as in "free beer" but freedom as in "it's my property, my responsibility, and my fucking choice."
This is no different than the skillion other "homes for poor people" sales pitches. So what? We already have habitat for humanity and they're in just about every community in the US. Fact is this is all about nothing but selling shit and putting more people in debt, because people in debt are going to be "more responsible" and feed the machine.
You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business. There are homes all over Euroupe, Asia, and the Mideast that have stood for hundreds of years and are made of nothing more than mud. Cob homes, in some parts of the world, are now becoming "fashionable" again and sought by well-to-do who want something with quality and character - attributes long lost to modern construction. But because building a cob home doesn't financially benefit anyone but the nearest dirt farm and an army of unskilled laborers, it's disallowed in just about any non-rural area in the US.
At the other end of the affordable/quality spectrum, you can buy a used trailer home in ths country for just a couple thousand dollars - but most local ordinances won't allow people to put these low cost homes on their own fucking property.
You want to afford poor people the opportunity to own their own homes, give them the freedom to do with their own property as they see fit. Set appropriate national MIMIMUM standards for sanitation and structural integrity and set barriers to local communities mandating higher, purely politically motivated, standards.
I'm actually surrounded by carcasses of T600 laptops. My daily driver is a 600x/500PIII but I have other models from a 233 with a 12" screen (the first one - a gift that got me hooked on'em) to a couple of 400PII/600e's including one out on loan (until she pays me for it).
Haven't noticed any problem. If it doesn't wake up from sleep it's usually because the battery completely died while it was asleep. I plug it in, turn it on, and it works. This is with either mandrake or ubuntu, but I have noticed X works much, much better with ubuntu.
Yes, these have coin cells. And are you sure your problem isn't just a dying main battery? When they get aged they start acting odd. I resolved this issue by using the unit plugged into the wall.
Universal broadband - even constrained geographically (ie we are all broadband peers in our neighborhood/block/town whatever) will make both ddos attacks and hacking individual machines ineffective. Imagine how popular radio would have been all those decades ago if more listeners caused the radio station to be knocked offline.
Methinks you are unfamiliar with the history of this nation. Why don't you do some googling and see for yourself just how willing the people of that nation are to organize against the state if they feel the need.
Takes a lot of tanks to run over a Billion people.
Two great replies in the last few minutes here.
Really, I do. Smooch.
Yep.
So long as they are not exporting goods produced by slave labor or some such... yes. The government of any nation is up to the people of that nation. You cannot impose "freedom" (as we have tried to do in iraq) nor can you be so arrogant as to assume every culture should emulate your own because yours is the only right way.
Frankly I see a lot of gaping holes in the western system - the way capitalism seems to be spiraling into feudalism because of the backdoors our liberties create for governmental corruption, for example - and if the chinese can come up with a plan that works for a nation of a Billion or more, maybe it's not we who need to be teaching that class.
If the people of china want change, let them direct it themselves. We wouldn't tolerate anything less for our own nation.
No, but it pretty much was 40 years ago when, little more than a decade past their last civil war, Nixon began opening up relations with them.
and as opposed to USA they don't have a proven track record of aggression and meddling in other countries' affairs.
Wow, Yoko, do you still have that "Chairman Mao" tee-shirt?
It's hard to focus on intereference in other nations when your own nation is mired in one civil war after another. Meanwhile, their human rights record with their own people isn't exactly a shining beacon of grace.
nature HAs made a "CRT." Those octopi can project all sorts of shapes of color across their bodies. It allows them to hide in the wide open...
So this is how we'll destroy ourselves - not with fire or machines, but by clogging the world with self-replicating spider silk!
The FSU was huge compared to the US but it never exceeded us. Canada has a tiny population and has a comparatively high standard of living.
If China is to become the next world leader it won't be because of Communism. But if it retains some of those ideals and is able to overtake the western version of capitalism in the process, than I would say that means they had a better idea and we would do well to take from the best of theirs, just as they did of ours.
Yes... I do think the people of the US are getting upset over nothing. The only thing threatened is their pride; to me, arrogance is nothing worth preserving.
You need to spend some time with more than one of those links, chief. Here's one for ya. Like I (and you) said: we essentially owned the place. We could have kept it as a state, but we didn't. Ironically, it likely would have been much better off if we had rather than let it become a haven to mob bosses and internal corruption.