Yet new housing is built all the time. Why? Because it’s lucrative for those with gobs of money, holding all the housing.

It’s really not being built at the amounts needed (at least, not in the places that need it most) which is why there’s a housing crisis. Those who already own housing benefit more from preventing new housing from being built by anyone other than themselves. Ensuring scarcity of housing while demand is continuing to grow from the population rising and average household size shrinking makes the housing they hold skyrocket in value.

The drugs at play aren’t limited to androgens. For example in swimming many people have been busted for Methylhexaneamine, a performance enhancing stimulant.

Everyone is looking to shave off any time they can. Just taking drugs alone definitely isn’t enough to put you at the Olympic level. But if you have trained and trained relentlessly and have those sorts of passive genetic advantages you mentioned for your flavor of sport… that may not be enough to assure victory. You can expect your top opponents have similar advantages, since in a world of billions of people who are more mobile than they used to be you are likely not the only person with those particular in-born genetic advantages who trained a ton and has a good strategy… what can you do to get even the slightest edge?

I replied to the other fellow but in no way am I calling them lazy, actually many of the drugs they use allow them to train harder for longer and as an Olympians they take full advantage of that to push the boundaries of what is possible. Those agents aren’t an “I win” button but at the highest levels people will do literally anything to push themselves to be able to shave off even fractions of a second or gain whatever advantage they can, and being able to train more and bounce back quicker is tempting.

I explicitly said they are searching for EVERY edge they think they can get. That includes insane hard work and practice. The hard-training Olympian who is doped will easily crush someone who is doped but just sitting around eating bon bons. Actually many agents people dope with are used because they allow people to train harder for longer and recover more quickly which is invaluable as an athlete. Saying that many athletes are doping is saying many don’t have integrity, not that they don’t work hard - that couldn’t be further from the truth at the Olympic level.

Colombian food isn’t spicy. Spice is high in like Mexico and Central America but that’s not universal across Latin cuisines ex. I know an Ecuadorian who can’t even take a sprinkle of black pepper without having to fan their mouth. Will happily eat vigorously salted green grapes, green apples or green mangos without batting an eye though.

Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.

There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.

She’d probably love playing Candy Crush at Assad’s gamer pad in Moscow

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.

First game of real golf I ever played I got a hole-in-one… on the wrong hole. The course wrapped back around next to itself, so when I shot wildly off course it just so happened to land in one of the later holes which was actually immediately adjacent. Still felt nice since everything else I was doing was way over par.

Clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry, the latter can open up deep fissures in it that act as channels for unfiltered water to flow down deeper than you may expect, leaving aside tectonic activity or other reasons that could cause such penetrations in the ground. The native plants also have impressively deep root systems that can provide similar gaps, and you may never know if it was there or not if the clay got wet again and sealed up the voids along with any presents washed down and absorbed into the clay matrix. It puts a lot of faith in Bo Taylor to break his back digging way way deep beyond the reaches of this above plus the necessary amount for scrubbing whatever waste may have gotten down that far… I agree it’s not especialy likely as far as bacterial infection alone, I just protest at the absolutely no risk formulation. There’s a reason bags of this stuff are sold as ‘novelty items’ rather than going through FDA approval.

How would you know that no animal had ever crapped over the clay deposit and had rain drift in durable, long-lasting bacterial spores from the waste whiøe the rain was on its way through the clay to join the groundwater? That a burrowing critter didn’t die just upstream in the ground of where you’re digging? It’s not terribly likely that those would get you sick maybe but ‘absolutely no risk’ is a high bar to clear.

Also there can be other sorts of non-obvious contamination like if there are trace amounts of heavy metals. Kaopectate got sued by California because the clay contained in their popular anti-diarrhea pills had traces of lead, such that the adult version pills would have fifty micrograms of lead a pop or six to twelve micrograms for children. For reference California currently mandates a warning slapped on if a product exposes you to half a microgram of lead per day. It’s difficult to know the provenance and full risks of stuff dug from a hole for a regular person. Even trained people with a lot on the line sometimes screw up and get people hurt.

The west has maintained more of the larger, predators certainly. Not as much here in the east. Coyotes are invading and sort of acting in the now unoccupied larger land predator niche but given their small size they still don’t really take out deer in any serious quantity.

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over

Mozambique has you covered

12 inches isn’t that bad as far as subsidence issues can get. The ground below you is filled with very tiny holes and gaps that water seeps down into and fills and flows through, kind of like a sponge. While water fills those pores it’s difficult to squish down the soil.

If a heavy weight is on them like a building, though, that can put on enough pressure to push the water out of those pores and flow down out and around. A mix of soil and voids/air give much less resistance to weight than a mix of soil and water filling the gaps so then the voids get compacted down and the ground sinks. Different soils in different conditions may not evenly subside and that can give you a situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where one side was subsiding faster than the other side. In modern construction people try to get the water out and compact the ground ahead of time so that it acts more consistently and doesn’t make big changes when a heavy object is placed on it.

Here’s a picture from an agricultural area in California illustrating ~30 ft of subsidence that occurred in that area over a half century of pumping out the groundwater to water the crops.

(This also makes flooding worse… ground that used to be filled with holes that could channel the water down and away into large aquifers is now compacted such that those holes are gone. So instead water piles up on the surface in huge sheets that flow and wipe out whatever is between them and a lower elevation.)

After a spell of being a NEET I managed to wiggle my way into my old job despite being a fresh out of college grad … they were desperate to hire because they couldn’t hold onto people willing to be regularly on-call, occasionally flipping to nights and working twelves at random and extended times in the worst site of that industry in the worst state of the union, AND it was legally required so they had to have it. Each time they hired someone they had to not only spend usually two years training them while they were on intro engineer salary before they could become useful, but also spend a few tens of thousands of dollars on contractors to teach classes and the valuable time of qualified people as mentors. Then after the trainees got qualified it was like coin flip odds of them either staying for a couple years or instantly booking it and the whole investment wasted.

The bosses were constantly showering the qualified people remaining with promotions, raises and golden handcuffs and so on to placate people to please stay and not have them do more rounds of interviews, even when the people weren’t that good. Of course, that also meant it was a great way to develop the resume for an exit artificially early too.

Talked to a doctor there, there was a deal for foreign doctors to be stationed in undesired places like that in exchange for progress towards getting a green card. On finishing their time the department they joined could be on the verge of dissolving from the older people ditching so then BOOM program director by attrition rather early in their career. Which then looks great on their resume when sent to someone else so the cycle continues lol.

Dang that was one of the three I was first introduced to as a kid. Teacher recommended using AskJeeves, Dogpile, or what she called her “personal favorite”, Google.

Not sure how Dogpile still exists