karmelapple

Hosting someone involves some money for the food and drinks to be consumed, sure.

But hosting also requires the hosts to feel up to the task of hosting by feeling that their home is adequate for hosting.

Having a home that's adequate for hosting involves money. And these days, lots of it.

In 2025 in the USA, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old. [0]

The average 27 year old who might have bought a home in the 1970s [1] and hosted people there is now probably renting until they're 40 years old.

Not that you can't host when you're renting, but there's more potential issues that aren't there when you own a place, including:

* a higher chance of having roommates, which increases the logistics of planning, and also potentially intruding on someone else's hope to have a quiet night in * probably less space to host

So I think it seems reasonable to include the housing affordability crisis as a contributor to this, too.

I saw a very notable scientist talk about topics like this and how they wrestle with them. Things like a "gene drive" [0] are being experimented with in the world [1], and biologists think very hard before doing certain things with the powers they wield. And I have not heard a life scientist laugh off ethical or spreading concerns when a thoughtful question was asked... but maybe the interview you're thinking of was a more lighthearted one?

Do you want to help scientists, doctors, and historians discover breakthroughs? Join our small, fully-distributed software development team to help connect scholars of all disciplines with peer-reviewed journal articles.

Our company has been remote-first since we began in 2011. You’ll join a team with plenty of experience putting into practice what works well remotely, and avoiding what doesn’t.

We've never taken VC money, and we’ve never had layoffs.

Third Iron software is used by researchers at over 2,000 organizations, including universities, hospitals, corporations, and government agencies, located in over 35 countries.

In a refreshing change from advertising-dependent tech companies and those who sell user data, we instead have a straightforward business-to-business model. We sell our subscription-based services to libraries, and anyone affiliated with one of these libraries can use our software. We do not sell user data. Our focus is on building the best software to enable research that changes the world.

### Senior Quality Engineer ###

We’re looking for a Senior Quality Engineer who wants to help us define and continually refine the quality aspects of our software lifecycle, create automated tests, and monitor our quality metrics to ensure we're providing researchers and librarians with a great experience.

Ideally you have many years of quality experience in an agile environment, either as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), Release Engineer, or Quality Assurance (QA) role involving web technologies. We care more about the quality of your work than the numbers of years

Playwright and/or Cypress experience is a big positive. We primarily create web apps, and we also have a popular browser extension, along with all the backend APIs and systems that support our many customer use cases.

Interest in working with our top-notch customer support team, release management, accessibility testing, or load testing are all nice extras, too.