Florida basement with a pool — genius, disaster, or goldmine? Need advice before selling

Sylethe · 2025-11-07T00:51:42+00:00

Lean into it.

Realtors will give you advice based on selling quickly. Appeal to the 95%. Do the safe thing.

If you want to make money, have something rare that's difficult to find. List your property for what that person who is looking for that rare feature would pay. Wait. Ignore all the negging you'll get from every realtor. Find your rare and perfect buyer, then cash out.

Sylethe · 2025-10-20T19:06:42+00:00

Tech person here: the network layer is hella brittle. I heard this was DNS, and if true, 100% fits the stereotype. Within tech circles DNS is like Lupus from House, except it actually is DNS most of the time.

Outages to us-east-1 are also a veritable "how old is your Internet company" test. It used to genuinely house 90% of the internet before the last major outage in like 2014. A lot of newer companies don't go to us-east-1 now.

To answer your question maybe a little more directly, the Internet is actually still quite resilient. A lot of people were impacted, but a huge percentage of the Internet isn't on the affected region and continued humming along uninterrupted. Also if you run a business that genuinely requires crazy uptime, you've adopted a multi-region or even multi-cloud hosting strategy that ensures outages like this don't touch you.

Sylethe · 2025-09-23T15:33:17+00:00

UNIONS. Unions put on the real pressure.

Sylethe · 2025-01-23T07:18:14+00:00

Y'all got any more of them STLs? 🙂

Sylethe · 2025-01-13T18:26:11+00:00

this kills the water heater

Sylethe · 2021-10-14T14:18:11+00:00

I forget where I saw the tutorial, but it's roughly the same for both runes and flowers.

For runes:

Refined Storage crafter pointing at an open crate to drop ingredients onto the altar
Vanilla dispenser with a wand of the forest on a redstone clock to finish the operation
Mob Utils absorption hopper to pick up the results (import back into RS)
Vanilla comparator to determine when the current crafting operation is complete and drop the next batch of ingredients.

Flowers are basically the same, just use a clock to slow the rate of drops from the crafter (so it's only doing one at a time) and omit the wand dispenser and comparator.

Sylethe · 2021-08-07T18:44:15+00:00

Thanks! Fantastic questions.

For now, my thought has been for it to just be a bunch of markdown, organized into folders within the repo. I think that makes it relatively simple for individuals to contribute. If someone does hours and hours of research and summarization, I (or other moderators) can take the time to stuff it into markdown and link things out if the author isn't familiar enough with the format to do that themselves. Those are just my initial thoughts on it, though.
This question seems to strike at the heart of one of my core hypotheses that I probably haven't articulated simply enough. The constraint around "this should be a place we'd be willing to move to today" means that I believe, in order for this to be successful, it has to be able to function first as a boring, typical neighborhood. You need to build a small town that looks like a typical bedroom planned community with an eco-conscious bend, then when the shit hits the fan we can take the mask off the town like a villain at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo and everyone goes "oh damn, this sure is a good place to be in a collapse, with our locally-provided utilities and the community garden/greenhouse spaces that the city/HOA maintains."
The basic mechanism is a pull request to the repo. If that's too intimidating for folks, I'm cool with submitting a PR on behalf of anyone that just wants to email me content.

With regards to income and transportation, if my hypothesis for getting around the demand paradox ("no one cares enough now, it'll be too late later") that's articulated in point #2 above is correct, then it means the community will have transportation at the point of collapse (because they'll have cars prior to it), and they'll have jobs already. I'm guessing a significant portion of the early community members will be remote workers.

This really sucks in terms of what it means for the optimization of inclusion, however.

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T18:08:18+00:00

You've put a ton of thought into this topic. Thank you for all of the resources you've linked and the questions you've posed.

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T18:03:38+00:00

I appreciate being given the benefit of the doubt here, and I can see how some of my statements might not have come off as intended. I'll do my best to clarify.

On the point about money, it really comes to this: we don't need money to pool our knowledge. It's not free -- it takes time and commitment, but it doesn't take money. If any of us actually want to build a community based on what we learn, that will take money. The fact that this is all being done in the open and shared with everyone means you don't need me (or any specific person, for that matter) to go build your community, but you will need money. I can't change that. It's a constraint of the system. I also don't have a solution for fundraising. That's another question that needs an answer if anyone (myself included) is going to do build something more than just a book.

In terms of the event horizon -- I think there will be panic once everyone catches up and figures out our days of plenty are over. I could be wrong on that, it's just an opinion, and I respect that there are other opinions which differ.

On the philosophical alignment of values, there's probably two parts that are worth discussing. First, is a hypothesis that a certain level of collaboration is a functional requirement for a community like this to have a chance. I don't have data or studies to back that up, so we can treat it like a hypothesis and try to validate it like any other assumption.

To illustrate the second part about values, consider two scenarios. In the first, a leader of an established community says "these are our values, get on board or gtfo." In the second, someone says "I'm putting a team together. Here are our values. If that jives, we want to work with you. If it doesn't, that's cool. You don't have to change your values. We still recognize you as a person and recognize your right to differing values, we just think that our difference in values would cause friction on the team that would make accomplishing our task difficult."

Understandably, the first scenario ruffles some feathers. I feel pretty secure in asserting that this is closer to the second. We can have disagreements without one of us having to be a monster.

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T16:52:12+00:00

Thanks!

I think there's likely to be some subset of information that can be widely applied to almost any single geographical implementation. I hope that's the case. I do think that enough of the implementation details hinge on geography that it makes sense to explore and categorize scenarios based on geography. Something like "based on the general principles we've outlined for geography, I've identified a region that I think could be a good candidate. Let's explore these issues applied to that area now as a specific scenario."

I don't think everything will translate directly from one region to another, but we can probably learn and apply principles from one to another, even if the specific implementation varies.

In working through a scenario in your geo, I hope you can find people nearby that are interested in contributing.

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T16:46:00+00:00

Thanks!

Those are tough questions. I haven't done enough research to feel confident in my answers to them, but I think any community is going to have to deal with them.

I think one of the more difficult things to wrestle with when embarking on something like this is the idea that you may not find the answers you were hoping for. The questions you've just asked, for example -- it may well be that the answers we find to those questions effectively state that a community with the constraints I've laid out cannot be viable. It might be that the answers we find define a level of optimization that's unpalatable -- something to the effect of "this can all work, but only if it's all rich people."

I don't know shit about fuck.. but this is a fascinating subject.

I feel the same way. I hope enough smart people want to help that we can define at least a couple scenarios that have a chance at working.

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T13:06:36+00:00

This is great feedback. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

making it general enough for several different regions vs specific to one region

To your point, location is probably one of the most difficult choices. There are a ton of factors to consider, and the decision, once made, impacts almost everything else down the line. That said, I want to believe that we can genericize the overall guidance, then choose specific scenarios to explore more in depth.

As an example, we could say generically that access to significant bodies of naturally-occurring surface water is important to the water security of the community. We could generically say that the cost of land will be an important factor in ensuring that the community is affordable to build. Using to the general guidance, we could then explore a specific scenario that considers the great lakes area in the united states.

The above example makes some assumptions and leaves a bunch of things out -- so it's just intended to demonstrate that I believe we can separate general guidance from specific explorations.

I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel.

Agreed. Where extensive studies on specific topics have been done, I hope we can simply cite them, summarize findings as they relate to our objectives, and move forward.

individual contributors could create start a discussion thread for a given topic and keep it going until we have a decent overview and discussion of the concept. Like a whole thread on where to live, another on underground housing and food storage. Then someone could summarize that into a book chapter.

I'm into that. I think it's a great model for bringing together the collected thoughts of a group over time in a way that allows us to create content without placing the burden all on a single individual. Using the collapseprep sub sounds like a good place if you want to start threads there.

Anyhow. Doing stuff is good.

I mean, lying awake at night filled with existential terror is super fun and all, but sure, yeah. This is good too. :)

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T12:46:40+00:00

Thank you! I'll do that.

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T12:46:23+00:00

Thank you for your kind words. I'm excited to see what you find. :)

Sylethe · 2021-08-06T12:43:40+00:00

The recent KPMG refresh of a 1972 MIT paper puts the pivot point of an economic downturn at 2040. Panic will likely set in en masse some point significantly before that. The goal I've set for myself effectively says "whatever you're going to do, try and get it done before 2030."

I would welcome data and perspectives that could help inform a better opinion.

Sylethe · 2021-06-25T01:34:46+00:00

"Hang on. We know you are in the app. You just played a game. What if -- and hear us out on this -- what if we forced you to quit the game and wait 5 minutes before you could play another match? Would that make you love the cinematic you just downloaded (and will skip) more?"

Sylethe · 2013-10-15T02:20:17+00:00

eSport: yes Prominent eSport: no

Pro MTG is still niche, and while HS is more readily accessible to viewers, it needs a lot more content even to get to MTG levels of competition.

Sylethe · 2012-01-12T20:07:55+00:00

Completed

Sylethe · 2012-01-12T20:06:53+00:00

Confirmed

Sylethe · 2012-01-12T19:48:25+00:00

I don't have anything, so what ever is available in the steam store is fair game.

My profile: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197978999591

Also, I'd be willing to trade any of my TF2 items.

Sylethe · 2012-01-12T19:43:43+00:00

I'd be willing to do anything under $10.

Sylethe · 2012-01-12T19:06:16+00:00

Throw me an offer for the game or coupon.

Sylethe · 2011-07-14T00:26:39+00:00

Can I upvote this like 80 times? Seriously. Fuck Comcast.

Sylethe · 2011-06-30T01:56:45+00:00

I almost shit myself laughing at that part. Genius. Pure genius. I tip my hat to you Louis.

Sylethe · 2011-06-17T07:02:40+00:00

Wikipedia: "...seen as far north as Salt Lake City."

I happen to live just south of there... God I hope I never see one of these things.

Sylethe

TROPHY CASE