sloreti

Whenever someone cites the fact that there are millions of vacant homes across the US as evidence of either oversupply or an inequitable distribution, they're almost always misunderstanding that real estate has a "natural vacancy rate" of ~6%.

With real estate, there is inherently time in which it lays empty between tenants moving in and out or being sold. When a place like California has over a million of vacant homes, that still makes for a vacancy rate below the "natural vacancy rate"!

The other big category of vacant housing is in places that are depopulating due to lack of jobs. We could be giving decaying homes in the Rust Belt, but they'd be more of a liability to the new owner than anything else.

> Google offers quotes

Today it almost exclusively offers quotes from content marketing intended to sell you something. It's like trying to learn by reading the ads in a catalog.

The last sentence of the second paragraph literally reads, "The organization at the center of one of the industry’s most epic feuds and divorces is cloaked in secrecy ... which is, by design, the central value proposition of the entire family-office industry."

> Producing meat in the lab “will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food,” Pat Brown, founder of the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, told the Post last year.

Whether correct or not, this kind of reporting always seems silly to me. You're not interviewing an impartial expert on the subject, you're getting a quote from a direct competitor. Of course, they're going to say something along these lines. This important nuance will be lost on most readers.

Disappointing that an article like this wouldn’t mention one of the main reasons children are given less autonomy in the US: our built environment. The vast majority of our children grow up in neighborhoods in which one can’t easily be a pedestrian at any age. Low density communities, in which almost all trips have to be taken in cars, are of course not friendly to non-drivers.

Japan builds dense, mixed use neighborhoods. As a result, children are empowered to walk to the store or a friend’s house.

Except unsurprisingly it did take the status page a few minutes to catch up to Twitter and HN.