The article makes it sound like someone bought the place and jacked up the monthly maintenance fee by $5000 just because “fuck you.”
Well, given that they bought in under the lump-sum + maintenance model and have somehow been "upgraded" to the rental model, that's exactly what happened. It would be like buying a home and then the old owner coming back and saying, "you know what, I could get more money renting this place - you have to pay rent now." These people likely sold their house and used that money to buy into the community - essentially paying for the right to use the building until they die. It's common in CCRC facilities (continuing care retirement community). You essentially pay for the plant and then pay maintenance, and they guarantee that they will have a spot for you in their care facility as you need more assistance (Independent living -> Assisted Living -> Nursing and/or Memory Care - Hospice). It's much like a reverse mortgage in that you "buy" your "home" and get to live in it until you die, at which point the deed is turned over with your heirs getting nothing. Except that in this case you don't get a monthly payment; instead you pay a fee for the facility services which is free of a rent cost. As you move up in care, the fee gets larger to cover the additional services (additional meals, personal assistance, and ultimately nursing care), but it's just for utilities and services - your payment covers the physical buildings. As you move up, people behind you buy in and that money is used for (CEO bonuses) maintenance and updates to the buildings. Many of these are "non-profits" so the extra money technically isn't for profit, but there are lots of corporate mouths to feed in CCRCs and they find ways to distribute the money.
From the article it sound like there was no maintenance escalation clause limitation - they bought in for, say, $750,000 with a payment of $1000/month in fees, per their contract. Each year the contract maintenance increases (since costs increase) and it had gone up to ~$1300...then, all of a sudden, the owner decided that they weren't getting enough people with $750k to drop up front and added a $6.5k/month option with little or no buy in. When these residents rolled to their annual renewal, instead of the normal 3-6% increase, they were "upgraded" to the new rental-based prices - $6.5k.mo. Their contract is still valid, and they can still stay there, but based on the lawyers these people have gone to about the increase, it's all 100% legal because there is no limit in the contract on how much the fee can increase.
Okay - you lease a car that includes gasoline and all maintenance. The agreement is that you get to drive it until you die. You pay $80,000 up front for the car and $100/mo for the maintenance, which can increase per the lease. You go along for 4-5 years, and each year your maintenance increases, maybe to $130/mo today, because of the cost of gas and parts needed. You can leave at any time, but if you ever leave or die, you don't get to keep the car - it still technically belongs to the leaseholder. You forfeit the $80k.
Well, the company sold and the new owners can't find enough people with $80k lying around to buy in, so they decided they'll just change the model to include the cost o the car - and charge $650/mo for the service. You get a letter that at your next annual increase, the monthly fee is going to from $130 to $650 because they've changed what constitutes "maintenance" as part of their terms and conditions. You can either stay with the package and pay $650/mo or you can leave and have no money to go find a new car. Oh, and you have no job and are on a fixed income because you're 75 years old.
CCRC buy-ins/contracts are for life. I used to design the buildings for them, I still do design work on existing facilities. I've also gone over a contract with my own parents. You essentially pay full price for a residential "unit" and as you require more care you are moved, without additional cost, into a higher care location. The owners than re-"sell" your previous unit to the next resident. When you die, there is no equity that your heirs will receive - in that way it's like a lease. The contract is for life with an annual escalation for maintenance and service.
She's far too sane for Trump to even consider. The only way Trump doesn't get a sycophant that's dumber than 3 dollar bill is if the GOP makes him take someone from the party. And they can't even get him to show up to a debate so they're getting whoever the next My Pillow guy is as the VP nomination.
Funny effect, though - many cheap electronics (think coffee makers and microwave ovens) use the line frequency as a time base. Taking a 60Hz or 50Hz appliance and plugging it into the other causes the clock to be off.
That's probably just fluctuations in the line frequency and the method for keeping time varying between the two (one might use a crystal that drifts). Being on the "wrong" frequency will have it shift by hours every day. I had a (US/60Hz origin) microwave in my apartment in Bonaire (50Hz) last year that never seemed to have the right time, and when I did the math I realized it was the frequency - it was behind by ~4 extra hours every day (50/60 x 24 hours).
Yeah, that's just a shitty (or out of spec) time base. My Seiko watch gains 1-2 minutes a day, but it's completely mechanical so it depends on temperature and winding/mechanism tension for accuracy. There are electronic timing circuits which are resistance and capacity based, and as the resistance and capacitance of the system drift (time/age and temperature) they also drift. A crystal, made to vibrate at high frequency (piezoelectrically, iirc), will provide a much more stable time base and be accurate to seconds over many days' time.
Interesting aside - time keeping is how ships at sea used to determine where they were in the ocean. Latitude can be found from the stars, but longitude can't so it needs a time reference standard. The book, Longitude tells the story of the search and the competing methods for determining location prior to the invention of crystal/electronic time bases and modern GPS. I won't say that the storytelling is particularly gripping, but the actual path to discovery is fascinating.
I presume "decline" is used in the percentage sense and not the absolute sense. If the total power amount of carbon-based fuel generation plants is increasing, and the fuel is coal (C), then the carbon emissions must go up in an absolute sense. But the rapid deployment of non-carbon fuel power sources are increasing faster than the the carbon based, so percentage will go down. Am I reading this wrong?
Also, in a linked article: "And, as Myllyvirta highlights, numbers in the communique stating that coal consumption rose 4.3% in 2022 and total energy use rising 2.9% “appear to contradict weak or falling industrial output”
So consumption of coal - the most carbon-producing fuel - rose in 2022, and according to this article their energy consumption jumped again after Covid restrictions were lifted this year. Renewable installation is rising faster than carbon installation (280GW installed this year vs 136GW of coal "under construction"). The data given in these articles seems intentionally inconsistent, from annual installation (only given for renewable) to total capacity (only given for future Coal). One has to wonder if The Guardian is running their articles through some kind of Donald Trump AI filter to ensure that no verifiable content gets printed.
That says nothing about reducing total energy output, though. They're only talking about paying back installation costs for additional capacity. Adding 50% more capacity and then running everything at 80%, for example, still means burning more coal and making more power. And, often, running a plant at below optimal will decrease it's efficiency, leading to a higher CO2 load for every kWh. It's an incentive for growth and surplus capacity, not an incentive to lower carbon emissions.
China has increased their coal generation in terms of absolute GW, and increase the coal usage per GW this year. I'm not sure where your data is from. Here's mine:
"China’s CO2 emissions have seen explosive growth over recent decades, pausing only for brief periods due to cyclical shocks." and "...CO2 is rebounding in 2023 from zero-Covid lows (see: Why emissions grew in Q3 of 2023)..."
"Domestic coal output tonnage has continued to grow in 2023, following the steep increase in 2022 resulting from government efforts to boost output. However, coal quality has declined, resulting in a much smaller increase in energy supply from domestic coal. Poor quality of coal supplied has also pushed users to shift to imported coal for blending, the result being a record surge in imports."
The analysis points to a reduction in 2024, but that is speculation. What is clear is that 2023 is higher. And if the Chinese economy should pick back up and steel and concrete production come back up to recent historic levels, the CO2 is definitely going go continue to go up for a while. They're bringing renewables online, yes, but if we look at what is actually happening the CO2 is currently increasing. Both of us would be speculating beyond that.
his past year, China couldn’t run their hydro at peak capacity because of a drought.
Well, yes. The simple facts we have are that fossil fuel use is up. What happens next year will be speculation, but what we know is that they are using more coal this year, and they are hedging their future bets by building out their coal generation capacity. So if climate change means a further drop in hydro output, or more cloud cover where they install solar, or they need to make more power than they're installing because the world wants more steel (I'm in the building industry and steel supply is still a bit tight) - they can start belching out a massive amount of CO2.
Only time will tell - and I hope you turn out to be the one who is right :-)
My only reason to believe that is not what is happening is that China, and the Chinese, are too smart to using coal as a peaking or emergency source of power. The only thing worse than coal for peaking is nuclear. Oil, Gas, and hydro are all much better for short-to-mid term peaking and batteries - something they're very good at and have vast resources for - are perfect for short term emergency/failover loads. I believe (without documentation) that they are building extra capacity for the possibility of another expansion - the incubation of so many "third world" economies and partnerships across Asia and Africa to spur demand for their domestic production. If they don't use it, it was a jobs program; if they find they need it, they will accept short term cash and economic power for a worsening of the world environment. In a way, the largest communist country on earth is also the largest capitalist power. Ironic.
The way I read it was a ceasefire in return for some of the hostages. Nobody floats their final offer with the first contact.
Some of the hostages for humanitarian lanes
Most of the hostages for a 7 day ceasefire with monitored evacuations
All of the hostages for a 14 day ceasefire
All of the hostages and known leaders of HAMAS for an indefinite ceasefire, contingent on zero future incursions or military operations (you have to offer at least one impossible option past what you want)
I'm not rich enough to hate Google. I have a couple of domains and several people who use them for email. I have calendars with people across device ecosystems. I don't have the hours and hours to keep up with fighting spammers or an infinite budget to hire someone else who will guarantee my privacy to do it. What are my options? Is Microsoft or Yahoo any better?
I've been with Google since they were a Do No Evil company. Now that they Do Evil, they already have terabytes of my old data in storage to mine. Adding a few more GB isn't going to make a hill of beans difference.
Also, I recognize nuance - Google, well Alphabet, isn't one company. It's a huge conglomerate of, sometimes competing, interests. That's a distinction that often gets lost in online discussions. Whether I hate Youtube's profit arc or not doesn't really affect my impression of the Gsuite services I rely on.
You sully the good name of Internet Pirates, sir or madam. I'll have you know that online pirates have a code of conduct and there is no value in promulgating an anti-ai or anti-anti-ai stance within the community which merely wishes information to be free (as in beer) and readily accessible in all forms and all places.
You are correct that the pirates will always win, but they(we) have no beef with ai as a content generation source. ;-)
Developing countries owe Chinese lenders at least $1.1 trillion, according to a new data analysis published Monday, which says more than half of the thousands of loans China has doled out over two decades are due as many borrowers struggle financially....
Wait until I tell you that the US is indebted to Japan for that same amount ($1.1T) and to China for nearly that amount ($0.9T). Sure it's a bigger portion of the available funds in the developing world, but on the scale of superpowers, it's not so much.
Though, realistically, an empathy test would probably filter out a large portion of the haters. It's harder to hate when you internalize the condition of others.
Both Chrome (with uBlock, even after turning on 3rd party cookies) and Firefox (vanilla, but always set to private browsing) are just in infinite loop of captchas on archive.ph for me - most don't even result in a photo-square, but even those that do just loop back to the blocked page.
It appears that it's a DNS issue, since I use either cloudflare or google as my DNS
From reddit:
archive.today (and its aliases: .is .fo .il .md .ph .vn) actively sabotages DNS queries coming from Cloudflare (1.1.1.1, etc.), Quad9 (9.9.9.9, etc.), and possibly others (I didn't check but there were reports that Google's 8.8.8.8 is affected as well). The inconsistent results can be due to DNS cashing.
Obviously, switching to your ISPs DNS server or to a third party one that isn't affected will fix the issue, but people have legitimate reasons for using those DNS servers and since archive.today is the only site that refuses to play the most plausible explanation is asshattery, and a better approach would be give them the finger and advocate the use of archive.org instead.
The odd bit is that flags anyone going through those DNS lookups by implying that it's your computer or your corporate network which is infected with malware.
Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA?
Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.
What can I do to prevent this in the future?
If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.
If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.
It does look like the DNS is the issue, as I just threw on the VPN - which doesn't use the local DNS configuration - and it loaded up (after the capcha).
Chicago area residents flee from senior community after 300% increase in costs (www.cbsnews.com)
I've got a bad feeling about this (startrek.website)
Nikki Haley to launch $10m ad campaign in bid to overtake Ron DeSantis in GOP fight (www.theguardian.com)
How are 144hz screen possible?
Had this reflection that 144hz screens where the only type of screen I knew, that was not a multiple of 60. 60 Hz - 120hz - 240hz - 360hz...
China’s carbon emissions set for structural decline from next year | Energy industry | The Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
Netanyahu rejected ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Gaza, sources say (www.theguardian.com)
Israeli PM said to have turned down proposal in early talks and continues to take tough line
Mmmm bread. (lemmy.ml)
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‘ChatGPT detector’ catches AI-generated papers with unprecedented accuracy (www.nature.com)
trading card. (lemmy.world)
Developing countries owe China at least $1.1 trillion – and the debts are due (edition.cnn.com)
Developing countries owe Chinese lenders at least $1.1 trillion, according to a new data analysis published Monday, which says more than half of the thousands of loans China has doled out over two decades are due as many borrowers struggle financially....
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Fifteen-minute cities are about convenience, not conspiracy (www.ft.com)
Despite the wild accusations, this is about providing parks and grocery stores within walking distance of people’s homes