• 1 Post
  • 547 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 12th, 2025

help-circle
  • It’s worse than us simply becoming poorer. It’s that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There’s just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We’ve only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:

    1. Letting older suburban infrastructure decay to well past its replacement state.

    2. Relying on growth to prop things up. (Build new neighborhoods and require developers to repave streets and replace/upgrade utility infrastructure in an area.)

    3. Relying on ever higher levels of debt.

    It isn’t financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.


  • The meme is just that it’s a book with a funny-sounding title. Like, “yup, it’s wood!”

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/identifying-wood

    If you want to take a look at the book itself, you can probably find it at a local library, or a digital copy can be found here:

    https://annas-archive.org/md5/cda044e9fa42876a51bb245e8b3ac251

    But it’s really what’s right on the tin. When just given a peace of lumber, it can often be very difficult to identify a specific species. You’re not going to pay for DNA testing for most scenarios where you need to identify lumber. So you have to learn in detail about wood anatomy, using features that can be identified with nothing more elaborate than a hand magnifier. And if you know enough about wood anatomy, you can determine the species with high degree of accuracy. That’s what this book is meant to help you do. Ideally you would be able to be handed a board, a light, and a magnifying lens, and be able to estimate the species. I actually had to do this on some assignments and exams.












  • Columbia has decided to adopt the Hitlerian definition of antisemitism, one that embraces despicable ancient tropes of Jews being forever foreigners in whatever land they occupy.

    Think about the actual philosophy behind this. The only way that criticism of Israel can be considered identical to antisemitism is if you believe that all Jews, regardless of nationality, beliefs, and personal character, have some innate tie to Israel. You can be a Jewish person, only a citizen of the US, with no interest whatsoever in the Israeli state, but it doesn’t matter. Simply due to your ethnicity and religion, you are forever tied to the state of Israel.

    Columbia has fully embraced the antisemitic belief of the perpetual foreigner.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner

    Columbia admins believe that no Jewish person can ever be a true full American. From birth, every Jewish person has innate ties to Israel. They cannot escape this tie. Thus any criticism of Israel is innately an antisemitic attack on Jewish Americans. To be a Jew is to be an Israeli, and to be an Israeli is to be a Jew. They are one and the same to the antisemites running Columbia University.

    Notably, this was the belief also shared by the Nazis during WW2. Jews were considered perpetual foreigners in Nazi Germany. It mattered not how they lived their lives. They could never truly be fully German. They could have lived in Germany down ten generation and personally served Germany in WW1. It didn’t matter. Jews were always foreigners, and thus it was justified treating them differently from other Germans.

    This was the logic of the American Japanese internment camps. Japanese were considered forever foreigners. They were interned regardless of their actual personal beliefs and loyalties. Their own character mattered for naught. If you were ethnically Japanese, you had innate loyalty to the Japanese emperor, and thus even Japanese American citizens were treated as suspect foreigners.

    There is a reason the white nationalists currently running the White House have embraced this definition of antisemitism. If it is normalized that being Jewish and being Israeli are truly interchangeable, then why can’t American Jews be forcibly deported to Israel? If all Jewish people are essentially Israeli from birth, then an antisemitic administration can justify deporting any and all Jewish citizens “back to their homeland.” After all, they can be treated as suspect foreigners with dubious loyalty to the US. And this is ultimately why the right wing is so fond of this Hitlerian definition of antisemitism. Currently it’s being used as a cudgel to attack Palestinian rights protesters, but it can just as easily be wielded against Jewish Americans to justify their involuntary deportation to the state of Israel.