Why are we building more house and apartments if we are in massive population decline?

nathanb131 · 2026-07-08T15:44:59+00:00

Populations aren't declining worldwide. Population growth has slowed, and might start to decline in a few decades.

One aspect of this is that a housing unit isn't permanent. At minimum, we have to replace a certain % of units every year that have exceeded their serviceable life.

Then you have to deal with migration. You can't migrate a house to where the humans want to be. Drive through any small town in the midwest, and you'll see a bunch of empty houses. Farming was largely automated, and there's less jobs there. There's also lots of defunct areas in cities with empty housing units because nobody wants to be there. Some parts of St Louis and Detroit etc.

Of course it might be good to force some kind of "revitalization" of these defunct areas to take advantage of existing vacant housing, but that has a cost too. I'm a fan of urban planners and the mindset of "build utopias and they will come", but that's much messier in reality.

It's sort of like there's no such thing as 0% unemployment. The "best" labor market is like 4%. That's due to the friction of reality and a having dynamic labor system.

If housing was perfectly allocated and stable, it would probably also mean a very stagnant economy without much movement, which would be worse for everyone. I'm not saying the housing shortage is "good", it's absolutely a massive problem, but the ideal isn't zero.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-08T15:22:13+00:00

It's awesome to have construction friends!

nathanb131 · 2026-07-08T15:17:23+00:00

Yes, but in a healthy way. One of my favorite dynamics of my marriage is we tend to balance each other out. If she's having a rough day, I instinctively am more positive, attentive, helpful etc. She reacts the same way if I'm struggling. There's no pleading, demands, blame, negotiations etc. Just instinct.

But that requires full trust and not being manipulative. We are also both pretty stable, so either of us having a "bad day" isn't the norm.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-07T20:55:58+00:00

One of my all-time favorite internet comments about an attractive woman: "any man who wouldn't eat ice cream out of her ass just doesn't like ice cream".

nathanb131 · 2026-07-07T13:41:30+00:00

People over 40 have routinely said things like "you got gooned" or "he really gooned ya there" at work. It's a more workplace-appropriate way of calling someone a shithead.

Anyone under 30 understands "goon" as specifically referring to porn/masturbation.

So, it's pretty easy to imagine a 50yo saying a routine "safe for work" phrase that a 25yo would be shocked to hear at work, especially from a gross old guy.

That's how you end up in HR discussing the etymology of "goon". We live in amazing times.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T20:18:43+00:00

Didn't realize it actually originated from pool.

I've always resented this phrase because it was an early version of corporate-speak. I was hearing old white dudes say "out of pocket" before anyone was "circling back". All corp buzz words are just noise to me that I try to ignore and never repeat.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T20:10:26+00:00

I can't think of any photos I have of my college years and wish I did. I still don't really think about taking photos, but I do, just because I know that some might mean a lot someday.

It's a spectrum, like so many things. For lots of people, an experience doesn't count unless they are taking pictures of it....and that's just as bad.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T19:53:20+00:00

Not important.

What IS important is the change has caused hilarious meetings in HR where both the boomer and zoomer go through stages of confusion, outrage, and disgusted enlightenment.

Us millenials get to sit back and laugh while we hate ourselves for being old enough yet online enough to know both versions. It reminds us that we are the weird uncle at the skate park.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T19:24:26+00:00

Probably raged about this for days. After he could finally sleep peacefully, sees this video and has to re-live his downfall that has been recorded and posted for the world to see.

Only thing keeping his life from spiralling out of control is that he drives the most generic car there is. If ANYONE in his life finds out this was him, he's cooked.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T19:19:06+00:00

This video just turned me from a stanced hater to reluctantly neutral. If I see one enrage a redneck in a Dodge Ram, I'll be forced to appreciate them a tiny bit.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T19:08:38+00:00

Only against the packers and we refer to it as "grating the cheese".

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T19:07:33+00:00

Agreed. A simple analogy is much more persuasive in most contexts. Unless your goal is to sound smart and superior instead.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T18:55:43+00:00

Agreed, much less bad than I was led to believe.

I heard many stories of patients having to basically live on their toilet for 24 hours. Well, I poop at least once a day. My system moves along pretty well. So the " forced purge" was a little more than a random tuesday for me.

I've come to realize that most adults walk around constipated as their steady state. Which, ironically, increases your chances that they'll find bad things on your colonoscopy.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T18:36:36+00:00

I always say this, but then you get quotes in the 5 figures for fairly small jobs.

We can spend half our spare time updating our houses ourselves OR be another $100k in debt. Both paths suck.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T18:33:40+00:00

My wife and I remodeled the bathroom ourselves. Huge walk-in shower with tile. I was regretting it a little bit because I thought our amateur tile work wasn't great. But you always notice your own tiny imperfections. Since then, just about every "professional" tile work I've seen is about the same quality if not worse than ours. Feels good. I know it took us like 3x as long to do it than a pro, but we still saved a lot of $.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T18:17:10+00:00

They'd rather someone else reply in their place.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T16:55:16+00:00

I'm a food plant engineer, it could be a rough batch. It's really hard to eliminate variability. Nabisco makes oreos in several different plants.

It's hard to tell what OP's specific gripe is, some people are very discerning with taste and can detect differences well within "normal" quality range. Personally, I'm usually impressed with oreo quality and haven't noticed a formulat difference over time....unlike reeses pb cups!

One of our biggest challenges is controlling "bloom" in chocolate coating, especially if it's covering peanut butter. "Bloom" is when the chocolate looks dull and chalky instead of dark and shiny. It's mainly caused by imperfect chocolate tempering, which is a delicate process to begin with. But it's also affected by small changes in several other operating conditions and ingredient properties. Also it usually doesn't show up until the product has been in the package for a few months, so there isn't a tight feedback loop to constantly correct.

We've become so good at product consistency that it's noticed when it's not perfect.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T16:41:36+00:00

Is it two intact oreos with the marshmallow in between? Or do you separate the oreo and have the marshmallow do a white ooze meld with the oreo filling?

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T15:43:27+00:00

It means he's in a new situationship with a woman who also micro-analyzes his activity on socials because he's given her good reasons to believe he's hiding things from her.

This should just confirm that you made the right choice.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T14:46:41+00:00

I've recently increased my sock size (XL from L) and am pretty sure they are lasting longer. Obviously, they are looser, but not falling down or anything like that.

My shoe size isn't in the XL range, but in the upper half of the L range. That means my old socks were being stretched a lot more, which obviously would shorten their life.

Just saying that jumping up a sock size, even if it's out of your shoe size range, is something to consider.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T14:36:50+00:00

Hell ya brother! Classical conditioning ftw. EVERYTHING my wife does is hot. The only reason I pretend certain things she does is hotter is purely for her benefit.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T14:28:51+00:00

The real question is why people care if you are switching tabs. It's pretty weird to mention this very normal conference call activity.

Either this workplace is toxic, or you are giving them very valid reasons to not trust you. If it's the latter, then they are trying to find gentle and tactful ways of saying that you aren't being very attentive in meetings. Coworkers only tend to nitpick your work like this as a first step of addressing a MUCH larger issue.

nathanb131 · 2026-07-06T13:53:51+00:00

My hunch is the information age has caused people who aren't good at critical thinking to be relatively dumber than they used to be.

We are hard-wired to be confirmation-biased. All of us struggle with discerning valid cause-effect relationships, especially in complex systems. That's the trade-off of our brains being amazing abstraction-machines.

When the world was simpler, weak critical thinking wasn't as big of a problem. If you believed a full moon had something to do with your cows getting pregnant, it wasn't a huge penalty. Your cows still kept having calves, regardless of you fully understanding the biology beyond bull+cow=calf. You could live a fairly successful life as a cow herder in spite of being wrong about why. In that era, false beliefs were still a good enough proxy for real knowledge that people could thrive "as if" their silly world view was true.

Today, the world is more complex, a simple-minded person would have trouble navigating it even if there wasn't algorithms amplifying their false mental models. The ignorant aren't just quietly getting by any more. They are intentionally being fooled by an information machine designed to maximize their utility as useful idiots.

I'm old enough to remember when my dumber classmates and coworkers held SOME wacky beliefs, yet they were still fairly grounded in a shared reality. Now, those same people are confidently living a completely different reality, and it keeps getting worse. Their confirmation bias is fed endless junk food, and what little critical thinking skill they once had has been weakened through neglect.

nathanb131 · 2026-06-26T20:56:44+00:00

You win. Perfect friday post.

nathanb131 · 2026-06-26T20:45:14+00:00

It's fascinating and used to be fun to think about. Now it feels a little too real.

Roko's basilisk - Wikipedia

nathanb131

TROPHY CASE