Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?
Please explain your reasoning as well.
Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?
Please explain your reasoning as well.
New houses are fucking garbage, what are you talking about? You aren’t from the trades, clearly.
The only thing new houses have on old - speaking in generalizations - is a warranty - which is really what’s at issue here. And as it plays out, it’s super fucked up
The main number one metric for housing is livability. New houses are all glue and wood shavings. Literally what’s swept up after tree delamination for plywood. I’ve seen it. I’ve swept it up. I don’t even want to know the VOC release from OSB over time. If there’s ANY traceable amount (and of course there is) then the fact that I have to spend thousands putting in a RADON bypass cuz the ground wants to kill me for standing on it now yet swimming pools of profits from industry remain untouched and not held responsible. Yea…no. Old walls are best walls. Gypsum is nice but plaster isn’t out of reach. Old framing is best framing. Old wood floors can be found inches thick, no nailing. Carpet? Vinyl? Linoleum is only the best…NOFX song…arguably…Gen Z is suuuuper good. And Eat the Meek, New Boobs, Kill all the White Men, Creeping Out Sara, Idiots are Taking Over. Fuck. NOFX is just best, everything, really. Fat Mike seems like a cool ass dude to hang out with.
Um. Back on it…
PEX cannot be good for you, and even if not bad - yet - it’s not going to kill microbes like copper piping will - “upgrade” your pipes back to copper people, as a matter.of health). +1 old home
Hmm…Hardy board, that’s a modern win. Except it dulls your carbide immediately. That shits awesome for siding and water containment. +1 new homes
Modern windows are better. Without question.
Modern wiring wins over obvs.
Whatever. The WARRENTY. Don’t be the second owner of a new house. Do. Not. Do. It. Motherfucking chosen class gets zero percent interest rates and carried into new development, just to move 7 years later right before the “25yr” roof mysteriously needs to be replaced at 10years, just outside it’s warranty. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this. 1st owners have no costs going into house. 2nd owners, night shift, if you will, gets caught out, besides paying more for the house than the original owners did almost a decade ago, are going to have to absorb that extra 50k in repairs, essentially insuring 2nd owners NEVER rise above their position. Modern red-lining. Fuck bankers. Usury guarantees you’re going to hell. Fuck old money. Fuck everything -lord. Put feudalism back down, THAT SHIT IS BAD. The media only serves to persuade you of an opinion the owning class wants you to have without informing you of opposing opinions.
Did you know there are more houses in the UK and USA to the population than ever before? We’ve never had MORE housing…and yet…crisis…? That doesn’t make NeoLiberal sense…I was told…
Lies. You were told lies.
The amount of housing, that’s true. Thatcher and Reagen really changed the game tho. If you were born past 1980, your future was already sacrificed before the better part of you hit your parents sheets.
Before Thatcher less than 10% of housing in the UK was rented. It was considered one of the most successful postwar decisions, to promote security and autonomy in the citizenry…and now? The housing crisis is literally at the heart of every single crisis the western world is having, the entire world over. It’s vampiric. Cannabalizing the economy and lowering GDP for NO FUCKING REASON.
I am not against rentals - AFTER everyone has been housed. Let people have vacation homes, sure. Shit. My grandfather put 3 kids thru school, golfed thrice a week, stay at home wife, two car garage, bought his kids cars, my father raced motocross semi pro (thousands of trophies - that probably cost a house in itself) and was still able to buy a vacation home off his sole income (just so you don’t lose sight in how much economic freedom neoliberalism has stolen from the working class). I’m also not against private insurance - as Cadillac insurance. Capitalists have proven, beyond a rational doubt, that if they’re allowed monopoly to provide a neccesity (by that I mean, only private sector agents) than the rest of us are steadily more and more fucked. This is exemplified in the Simpsons. Homer went from bumbling idiot to upper middle class. Nothing about them changed, it’s just every year it gets harder. 2020 was the easiest year of the decade - bank on that - and that’s pretty fucking harrowing if you ask me.
Private farming…who has an issue against the farmer? No one. People have issues with being fleeced. See Netflix 10 years ago to the streaming shit cacophony today. Yar me matey, seems like some things are back in fashion. If farmers decide to fleece on a starving population, I won’t be sympathetic when the farmers are served up with their wheat. Treat people with respect. It’s fundamental to social cohesion. Exploitation is not.
My point, ultimately, is that people are people and people are entirely predictable. Our problems are manufactured by greedy people in power who’ve been using mass media to propagandized obedience while they return wealth to preplague levels of serfdom. And they e overplayed their hand, and they know it, everyone knows it - that’s why everyone’s just waiting for when the violence to start. Not if, when. People, again, are entirely predictable. Frankly, imo, we’ll be much better off when notions of social engineering and social darwinism go the same way route as phrenology.
We seem to be on the same page and I get where your coming from on new constructions. But I don’t fully agree with you on modern housing. Even like 60 years ago they barely knew what a joist hanger was. It was all still dimensional lumber and thus not straight. The late 1800s to early 1900s housing stock is croooooooked as shit. Sure the lumber was thick, it still bent because it wasn’t supported properly. There was plenty of plywood which I’m sure is just as bad on VOCs (btw you can get no VOC OSB), but also they had lead paint, asbestos tile, asbestos joint compound, asbestos tile glue, asbestos ceiling insulation (I live near the mines, you should see the tailings piles); insulation if you had any was basically 4" of fiberglas, housewrap if there was any was tar paper (I’m sure also great on VOCs), radon was just as much of an issue but wasn’t mitigated at all. So yeah… Is there a lot of shoddy jobs in the new construction business? Hella. But are modern homes by definition worse than they were? I don’t think that is true at all. Modern building science is inarguably better.
PEX is sketch though ;)
Anyway, you’re alright, you don’t live near me do you? I need a GC ;P
Timber framing, and all Amish framing, is actually done with green wood. Attention is paid to grain of the beams and they are put up so as the wood dries and ages it’ll twist into itself making a more cohesive unit.
Sure it makes remodeling a bitch, but plum straight and true were never part of a remodelers lexicon to begin with.
Oh man, the quest for plum straight and true. Rick was well within his right to wipe Morty’s brain of it. It was probably the single greatest act of compassion we’ve seen him do. I wish he’d wipe mine.
Meh I disagree, it’s not just remodeling, it’s also fixing shit. And stuff like large format tiles which frankly I think are super in terms of maintenance (less grout, less failure points, less maintenance, etc). I dunno if you’ve ever lived in an Edwardian apartment building, they are very common in Montreal. A 2" drop over 2’ is not uncommon. It sucks. The floors creek like all hell. They are drafty af. Fire ratings between two town houses? Ain’t never heard of it! Sure some stuff was built better back in the days, but it’s foolish to think we can’t build stuff properly now a days. I’d take a properly engineered, built with care by a good GC, house any day over anything built in the past short of a stone castle. Traditionalism is dumb. Capitalism pushes the lowest bidder to become the standard, but it doesn’t mean that the craft hasn’t evolved for the better.
Oh I’m with you, believe me. Theres some great building tech now, things like aircrete and the hundred variations and uses of lime. And if course just caluz it’s old doesn’t mean better, there was definitely a gradient to build quality back then, same as today.
We can look at churches in Uppsala that were built with pine and have stood for 1000 years…in Sweden…and it’s clear we’re missing something in our knowledge today that they had (it was their harvesting practices, btw, fucking germ theory levels of brilliance). Or how the Japanese have relied on coppacing for lumber for 500 years and that’s why Japan still HAS trees and didn’t go all Rapanui/Easter Island. The Amish and green wood timber framing is another example - practices that take the future into account. It’s the planting of trees who’s shade you’ll never sit in.
It’s easy, and incorrect, to point at history and say it was ALL better then, because only the cream of the crip has survived. Survivorship bias, clear as day. Of course we can build with the same mindset today - we just DON’T.
For a substantial group of people building their own home, to their own standards, towards sustainability or fingerprint reduction is their main driving goal. Earthships are an attempt. Buckminster Fuller made his entire career building off such ideas. Fuck I want to live in a geodesic dome SOOO BAD. Only have to deal with rain when I have to brave society. (I figure where the segments meet I can channel the rain to irrigation channels for the foliage and trees in the inner biodome…and then I’m raising free range sugar gliders.)
I’m in the middle of building my redoubt now. Everything by hand, it’s tedious, requires a ton of knowledge and physically taxing, but it also screams of character, uniqueness and craftiness. I take a lot of fun making things intuitively crafty if you know, but invisable if you dont know. Microprocessors can be a part of that (Im a huge electromagnetism fanboy, I’ve spun up my own generators from magnet wire for custom windmills, and I’m debating doing it again for some microhydro but currently leaning stepper moters), hidden magnetic locks are fun. shit my firearm safe is a Rube-Goldman-machines worth of steps to open, and that’s if you even noticed it was there.
I love the new tech. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe it’s that I’m a xennial, and that I had an analog youth, idk. I own all the power tools - I also own the hand tool analog version and know how to use them. I’ve always maintained the position that I had to level up into power tools. Electric planers save a SHITTON of time but if I can’t plane by hand…then it’s just a crutch. I don’t even want to get into metal working by hand, I’ve done it, i prefer metal to wood so that entire attitude applied to metal before wood.
Anyway. I think we have more in common here than not, lol.
Xennial here too ;)
I’m right there with you, for the most part.
But like you said what survives of the past is the cream of the crop, and not sustainable to build at the incredible scale we need to get out of this crisis we find ourselves in.
I lived all my life in century old buildings, most of them sucked one way or another. I live in a half century old building now, it’s better, but clearly nowhere near modern standards. And even if I tried to bring it to modern standards, it will never be quite as good as what could be achieved starting from scratch.