With the Kagi Summarizer, you can...continue not clicking the link to read the article.

Rich Bay Area towns are mulling a "disturbing" plan to avoid building low-income housing by creating segregated developments specifically for developmentally disabled adults. This plan has been proposed in affluent towns such as Hillsborough and Woodside, where residents have expressed skittishness about absorbing residents with lower incomes. In Portola Valley, a development called Willow Commons is underway, which promises to bring 13 housing units for developmentally disabled adults. Disability rights advocates have expressed concern that this type of segregated housing violates federal and state housing laws, and is infantilizing and offensive. Despite this, some communities are still in favor of the development, as they find it more palatable than a below-market-rate housing project. This highlights the NIMBY attitudes that are pervasive throughout the state.

A couple of notable points: "low-income" here means $87,000/yr for a family of four. A schoolteacher, basically. A crack-smoking, whoring, loud-music-playing schoolteacher, probably. Also, the developer who actually wrote that the developmentally disabled would provide "a source of loyal, entry-level employees." Sit with that "loyal" for a bit.

Don't eat the rich, they're toxic.

PS If any of you know what's up with the "builder's remedy" machinations in California zoning, and whether they might actually make a difference, I'd love to hear about it.

Are you for or against legalized gambling? I think I'm mostly against it on the grounds that when a certain type of person is in the addictive thrall, holy shit they can self-destruct quickly.

Is that worth the leisurely good time for the masses? Maybe, maybe not. Are there other safeguards that can be implemented? Like some sort of Narcan-for-gambling? I have no idea.

I can imagine a argument which goes "look, in the world of online gambling, everyone already has access to as much gambling as they want. Might as well open the floodgates." But the counterargument to that is, "Little nudges in opportunities help curb impulsive behavior. Putting a railing on a bridge discourages suicide attempts, even if people are perfectly capable of climbing over the railing."

We've found ourselves in a world where everyone seems convinced of the value of small nudges towards shaping behavior. I mean things like "Get rid of trays in cafeterias so that people won't pile the food on their plates as high!" and "put the candy by the check out register" and railings on bridges. (Surely some of these are total bullshit and others have merit.)

I don't know how I feel about the value of governmental nudges when it comes to moralistic behavior like drinking and gambling. I know I don't like it in the realm of gender and sexuality. (The dance team at the high school signs a behavior form because they are jewels who are held to a higher standard. It involves social media codes of conduct, as well as no PDA. That includes holding hands! "A quick hug before you go to class is fine," we were told.)

I don't have a useful heuristic for evaluating moralistic nudges, beyond checking whether or not I agree with the underlying moral. I suppose that's where I'm stuck on gambling: I don't have a strong opinion on the underlying moral. Everything in moderation?

(Also I personally find gambling unbelievably boring and mildly stressful, plus the odds are against you. I can't think of a less appealing vice.)

I can't actually make that post title work, sorry.

We've been watching this reality show, where the teams are formed with one engineer and one baker, and they have to "bakineer" various contraptions like a cake-boat with a functional rudder, or a cake-robot that can navigate an obstacle course. (We've only watched two episodes.)

I think the dynamic in these teams is really interesting, and that these are actually highly compatible professions. They're both used to paying very high attention to details, they're both highly focused on actually producing something, and they both are used to working with what's available or acquiring specific items to serve a purpose.

In the two episodes we watched, the challenges were insanely hard (in my opinion) and so the teams are stressed, but they mostly function with their partners in highly effective, low drama ways. (It's a good show to watch with kids, but I probably wouldn't watch it otherwise.)

On happiness, or unhappiness:

On average, happiness declines as we approach middle age, bottoming out in our 40s but then picking back up as we head into retirement, according to a number of studies. This so-called U-shaped curve of happiness is reassuring but, unfortunately, probably not true.

and

My study corrects a misinterpretation of research methods in previous studies. The U-shaped idea comes from statistical analyses that adjust data to compare people of similar wealth and health in middle and old age. That adjustment is intended to isolate the effect of age from other factors that influence happiness.

But given that people often become poorer and less healthy during old age, the adjustment can be misleading. When we omit the adjustment, an age-related decline in happiness becomes evident in many countries.

I did not wade into the actual paper (and found the use of first person a little weird, but whatever.)

But basically, this strikes me as plausible: to make the U-shaped curve, researchers account for health and wealth, because those correlate with age. But they do not account for things like aging parents and raising kids, which also correlate with age. So if you choose to include and exclude various events from your analysis, you get results that reflect the events you kept. Isolate those saddening-events which tend to happen in middle age, and you get a curve that bottoms out around those events.

And also, there's a huge variation between countries. The take-away: everything is context-specific.

A second take-away: Probably better to focus on ameliorating contexts that make us sad, rather than extrapolating about some grand biological instrinsic arc of happiness.

I have not seen this movie and I am fairly sure I never will. However, I'm struck by how polarizing it seems to be. Online taste-makers that I don't know are all panning it. In person people who I like (but whose taste I don't totally trust) seem to love it.

Or we could talk about Chinese balloons over Montana. Whatever suits you.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe fifty two