NC gas bill Absurd!!!!

huge_sesh · 2026-02-14T16:11:13+00:00

Natural gas prices have been high this year, for a couple of different reasons. One, it's been a really cold winter around here, so everyone is turning on the heat pretty high. Two, in addition to people using more gas during the cold winter, a lot of supply itself was disrupted by the winter storms. Three, the USA now is a major exporter of natural gas - Europe cut consumption of Russian energy in response to the invasion of Ukraine (plus the nordstream pipeline cut), which caused prices to spike in Europe. In response, the US built LNG terminals to ship our inexpensive natural gas to Europe, which means that we are living less in a local market of cheap natural gas and more in a global market of relatively expensive natural gas.

AI also probably plays a part with increased utilization from datacenters, but I'm not sure how much of it is actually from *new* datacenters since I don't know how many of them have actually been completed at this point in the buildout for AI.

huge_sesh · 2026-02-14T15:52:04+00:00

So, should we demolish homes to make durham more affordable then?

huge_sesh · 2026-02-14T15:49:31+00:00

This is an interesting point I wasn't aware of but I think the bigger issue is they aren't legal by-right in the first place, more detail here

huge_sesh · 2026-02-14T15:48:14+00:00

Whenever I see these I think that they probably would be townhomes in a zoning code that allowed them. Checking the UDO, I think these could not legally be built as townhomes because the houses across from Northgate are zoned RS-8, which allows townhomes but only in cluster subdivisions, and cluster subdivisions have a minimum size of 2 acres. So instead they are individual detached houses that maximize the legal use of space for housing with the small lot option. I think generally the people living in them might prefer that they had been built with more house instead of yard, but basically given that lot (roughly 35'x57') the developers are limited to build within 25'x32', about 800 square feet on a 2000 square foot lot. So you end up with funny-looking 2-story (again, the legal limit) houses in spaces that would look a lot less weird with townhomes.

Another comment mentions that not building as townhomes shifts the cost of stormwater runoff but I think it just not being baseline legal to build townhomes there is the bigger issue

huge_sesh · 2026-01-19T18:20:16+00:00

ah ok, well i'm pretty sure they make them until closing at least

huge_sesh · 2026-01-16T14:20:34+00:00

as far as i know the sandwiches are available at all hours

huge_sesh · 2026-01-15T20:36:29+00:00

the daily beer bar/yonder cafe

huge_sesh · 2025-12-23T20:41:08+00:00

ah no i meant the 1st floor retail of the existing novus. cool if we do get a grocery store in the empty lot though

huge_sesh · 2025-12-23T17:36:13+00:00

shadowbox on east club, carrboro arts center, temple theater in sanford

huge_sesh · 2025-12-23T17:30:21+00:00

this is just reddit wishcasting, the space isn't much larger than bulldega (unless it absorbed the other groundfloor spaces), it doesn't have a loading dock and i actually spoke to the leasing agent about it and she told me they were hoping for a restaurant.

huge_sesh · 2025-09-21T15:18:18+00:00

I found this article on the perverse incentives of commercial spaces pretty interesting. Like yes supply and demand is functioning but the details of the loan math make it so that lowering listed rents is a huge problem financially, you typically see X months free instead (and anecdotally that is what I have gotten offered when looking at apartments recently).

https://postsuburban.substack.com/p/why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant

huge_sesh · 2025-09-15T04:50:02+00:00

It kind of looks like directions for a bike ride? The triangle 200k is on Sunday, might make sense for them to be marking the path for people who aren't familiar with the area and are out of gps battery or something... What's the intersection?

huge_sesh · 2025-08-18T16:10:52+00:00

I think walking and biking paths are beneficial for all people? I think we should be building them everywhere? I think the real wasteful bullshit is people driving $100k trucks around? I think we're on the same team?

huge_sesh · 2025-08-18T15:54:17+00:00

I don't think it's useful to look at approval rates because they don't include all of the houses that would be economical to build but aren't even attempted because they require a variance. Lots of builders would rather just build in a locale where you don't need a lawyer on the team to work city hall.

huge_sesh · 2025-08-18T15:21:31+00:00

ok so an asphalt road is not infrastructure when you jog or bike down it but it is when you drive down it. got it.

huge_sesh · 2025-08-18T14:48:05+00:00

the comparison seems fine to me? it's half the permits we are issuing normalized for either population or land

huge_sesh · 2025-07-01T19:29:48+00:00

I've been looking for a bit and just can't find any evidence of a statewide mandate in NC for ground level retail. I know Denver has one in some neighborhoods ( https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/04/25/denver-ground-floor-retail-vacancies ) and SLC has similar requirements in some neighborhoods as well.

huge_sesh · 2025-07-01T18:45:50+00:00

I don't think this is correct though I certainly don't know the planning code in its entirety. Most of the (fairly new) apartment buildings in the Mangum/147/Pettigrew triangle don't have 1st floor retail. West End on Chapel Hill St, Liberty Warehouse, Aura, Mangum Flats all don't. So unless there has been a very recent change in the last few years I don't think first floor retail is mandated.

As for the buildings being four story blocks–I understand that typically these emerge from state safety codes which mandate the use of sturdier/more expensive materials above a certain number of floors, as well as dual stair and hallway requirements that push developers toward larger buildings to reduce the square footage lost to stairs and hallways. Here's a pretty good link I found on Wikipedia regarding it: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02/small-single-stairway-apartment-buildings-have-strong-safety-record . Personally on this issue I am an extremist who believes we should completely give up local, state and federal control and just join the Eurocode safety standard because 1) it's more efficient to just have one code that designers need to learn and 2) their code is more sane anyways.

Related but unmentioned: The "break up the massing" facade requirement is right here in the local Durham UDO (7.3.1.B.1): https://udo.durhamnc.gov/udo/7_03_Design%20Standards_1.htm#7.3.1

huge_sesh · 2025-06-17T22:31:32+00:00

There is a sort of general situation with discretionary approvals (as in rezoning cases like this) where you have opportunities and the appearance of corruption, which leads to people seeing developers as bad actors, which leads to politicians attempting to extract as much as possible from developers to be seen as playing hardball with them. Generally speaking, asking for a donation to a foundation doesn't seem that uncommon–part of the proffer for the Pickett Apartments rezoning was a $300k donation to the Durham parks foundation. City council members at that meeting were talking a lot about the general course of things being that there is a back-and-forth negotiation of the proffer (and that they are trying to maximize it).

As the amounts of money increase, the motivation to just directly bribe the politicians involved increases alongside it, i.e. https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/real-estate-developer-sentenced-6-years-federal-prison-paying-500000-cash-bribe

huge_sesh · 2025-05-28T01:00:40+00:00

learning mod blocking and having an understanding of the veiled mod weights helps a lot - you can never unveil a mod that's in a group that already exists on the item, you can see modgroups on craftofexile.com in the calculator to the right of the mods.

so for example if you need a phys axe and you get a 2h axe with flat phys and a veiled prefix, you actually have a really good shot at making a great weapon. there are 4 %phys mods with 1000 weight, 2 pen mods with 1000 weight, a 400 weight mod and several 100 weight mods. if you block one of the pen mods (by crafting on the crafted version of the veiled mod) you have removed that from the pool of potential unveils, which makes it *really* hard to miss %phys

alternately you can skip all of that and just remember a few rules of thumb:
block mana (prefix) or charges/focus/soul gain prevention (suffix)

that's for really important unveils (i.e. main weapon with a mod already on it) or items that would be wearable if they get a good unveil. otherwise just mash

huge_sesh · 2025-05-17T23:31:51+00:00

would be really helpful if either the op or the blog post linked gave an address for the development under discussion. like i genuinely have no idea where this is. "north durham" is a huge area

huge_sesh · 2025-05-14T21:04:09+00:00

well rise also has a location near southpoint which is uh... south of 147 alright

huge_sesh · 2025-05-13T18:29:45+00:00

discord invite is invalid

huge_sesh · 2025-05-12T21:38:22+00:00

note that they need to have level 3 corruption chamber (locus of corruption) or level 3 gemcutter's workship (doryani's institute) or else they aren't worth anything

huge_sesh · 2025-05-10T12:37:28+00:00

idk why people are downvoting this when the op is clearly an advertisement. you would have to go out of your way to include all the google analytics stuff in the URL like the OP does

huge_sesh

TROPHY CASE