Let me be the asshole and say... is it such a bad way to go?

Rather than be one of those kids blown up in the sky in WW2, or someone slaughtered by advancing fanatics of whatever nationality, this guy got to go out with a laugh from adoring fans. Or slowly dying of some disease in your tweens, like meningitis before 1941.

Too soon? Yes. For sure. Most people like the idea of dying at 88 years of age or so. But a bad way to go? Please, let us agree to disagree.

This is wild: i cannot imagine ANY home in the Vancouver BC mainland area. They were horribly expensive decades ago and this went crazy. You are right though: there are houses that are considered 'heritage' and they are very much cottage sized.

Nifty take on childcare-inflation. That also goes along with eduction inflation - everyone is expected to have at least one degree to be a 'professional'. I wonder how else the workforce changed besides the elimination of most farmers and weird shifts in trades.

One of the things they mentioned in problems with pre-fab houses, they noticed that having a 'Big Room' was hard to build and ship in factories. So what they did was combination building: they would have all the small rooms pre-fab built and the large room would be built on-site by the trades.

I wonder if this is why pre-fab homes are less popular. It is just harder to build these mega homes ('made up entirely of large rooms') with pre-fab, so collectively people gave up on them.

Must get to bed... but lots of stuff to mull on. Thank you.

This is a really nifty point. The houses went to a solid middle class standard but the wages went nowhere in four decades, effectively pricing people out of their own homes.

Well put, but i am surprised that i haven't seen this before.

I know, right?

Big things, unlike 'toy' batteries. Few elements. Just... melt them down and reuse the parts, yes? An engineer friend of mine suggests it is not so simple.

I do like the idea of using them as house-batteries. If we can find the space?

It is both weird and ironic that Canada (2nd largest country in the world, tops for softwood production) seems to suffer from a space and materials shortage.

You are right though: this struggle is political-economic. There are no laws restricting the number of televisions nor where-how we can build them ('some of it might be toxic, maybe?'). Construction has been regulated since medieval times (well... not in Canada so much, but you see what i am agreeing with here).

Still, it saddens me to see technology bonk its head against human stubbornness. We have had amazingly cheap straw housing for decades. Now we can obviously print them. Heck, Sears made pre-fab homes back in the 1970s (just looked into it - apparently a pre-fab saves on 'time' but not much 'money' - they still exist now). Land is also a problem because most countries have weird 'dead zones'. The Canadian shield, for example, can't sustain much life (it is a large smooth rock with a few tragic weeds growing on it). Amazing place to build a house, tragically no one could live there.

It is a weird battle. It appears we are solving every aspect of living (heating, food, lighting, insulation, circulation of air and fluids, etc) and yet we still can't find a space to live. That's just upsetting.

I was taught that each amazing break through is often in one dimension of the battery problem-set: expands-when-charged, holds-charge, charge-time, heats-when-(dis)charged, explosive/leaky, max-charge, etc, etc.

When each new technology is added into the meta-loop, it often adds 1% more overall efficiency. This is huge if you can do this ten times in ten years.

Engineering is a tough job, but it certainly sounds like a job that makes a huge difference to society.

Edit: here is an article from Ars Technics from 2021 - batteries have improved over a decade.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/

I bet that this continues to happen every year, the tortoise trying to win the tech-race.

We went out and got a 65" t.v. - the thing looks like a movie theatre in our living room. Compare that to the little black & white bubble boxes i had as a kid.

If they could do something similar to the cost of housing, i would relax much easier.

Not only does the durability of the Toyota-Honda group blow my mind, that pales in comparison to an electric car!

Except the battery of course. So many articles suggest that the bulk of an electric car is the battery that dies in less than ten years - and we are looking forward to a tsunami of car-sized bricks to recycle.

I honestly don't know what to believe at this time. It is nice that my 2003 Matrix still works though.