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The Italian towns selling houses for €1

theguardian.com

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Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#121

Post by cloudbonsai »

ta12653421 wrote: post #120
cloudbonsai wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan, we have a special term for real estate that has become a financial burden on their owners: "負動産" (fudosan, negative real assets). It's such a huge social problem that people choose not to accept the inheritance if it involves old properties in rural areas.

May i ask, is there also a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?

> a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?

Some seems to use the term "富動産" to mean that, but I don't think it's catching on.

Side note: normal real assets are called "不動産" (which pronounces as "fudosan"; it originates from Immobilière in French) in Japan. It's all about puns.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#122

Post by devilbunny »

robocat wrote: post #112
illiac786 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the previous comment said “low power”?

The point is that if you are feeling actual thermal effects then you're probably in the danger zone of high power. They implied the effect was thermal "to make rooms feel much warmer", "like stepping into sunlight"; without clarification from them then my assumption is good that they were not talking about milliwatts.

It was not an article in an engineering journal, so no mention of power.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#123

Post by devilbunny »

magicalhippo wrote: post #108
devilbunny wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on. Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.

I read about how they tried this in the 60s. They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such. So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.

Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#124

Post by munificent »

khazhoux wrote: post #88
munificent wrote: post #48

There's a subtext here that I think is telling. A lot of people feel a deep-seated unsease in their life. We're a couple of generations in to advertising and consumerism taking over the world and when people are presented with a problem, they often can't imagine any way to solve it except to buy a thing . Modern society has trained people to limit their sense of agency down to only purchasing decisions. Then people a…

I think you started on right track but reached a very wrong conclusion. * Deep-seated unease: Yes * No way to solve it except "buy a thing": No Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy. No more Teams meetings. Instead you just pick up your daily loaf of bread from the baker down the twisty walkway. All your mundane troubles are gone.

> Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy.

Yes, exactly.

But note that the author presumes that the way to attain that fantasy is "buy a house". This is not an article about figuring out how to move to Italy, it's an article about buying a house in Italy.

There's almost no discussion of, saying moving logistics, visas, commutes, etc. It's not about the act of getting there. It tacitly assumes that the way you accomplish the goal is almost entirely by purchasing a thing.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#125

Post by magicalhippo »

devilbunny wrote: post #123
magicalhippo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read about how they tried this in the 60s. They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such. So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.

Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.

Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#126

Post by fxtentacle »

solardev wrote: post #110
thefz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?

Train a LOT of models?

Turns out Sam Altman accidentally bought a vacation home with broken heating in Alaska and his subsequent obsession with expensing the heating bill on the company CC is what brought us ChatGPT ;)

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#127

Post by cptskippy »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #96
cptskippy wrote: post #24

We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast about 10 years ago. To get anything done you need permits and in order to get permits you need to bribe everyone involved. The permits are time bound and expire so you have to be ready to go when approved but the small towns don't readily have access to construction materials so in order to get materials in the time bound window you end up having to bribe a whole…

> We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast You really thought it's possible to buy any real estate in a location where rich Germans and Scandinavians pay €1000 for one night in a hotel and moor their €10mln yachts?

I guess you're not too familiar with the region. There are numerous depressed towns with little or no access to transit or services that have many properties selling for very low prices.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#128

Post by AngryData »

guywithahat wrote: post #116
al_borland wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was once referred to as the Paris of America Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0] Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_West

I would argue unions in particular destroyed Detroit, it's arguably even less complicated than Baltimore. I think there was ~13 major auto factories in Detroit at one point, and what would happen is when the UAW would protest, they'd leave one factory and go to another, more important factory (often wherever they were producing engines) to apply pressure. The result is auto makers were forced to build new factories o…

They weren't "forced" to outsource their factory work, they chose to rather than increase wages or worker rights. And the only reason Detroit got so big to start with was because the auto manufacturers claimed they could pay people more than elsewhere and incentivized them to come move to Detroit for work, only to pull the rug on them later when profits didn't continuously rise as fast as they wanted and outsourced.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#129

Post by bestham »

devilbunny wrote: post #85
thefz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?

One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on. Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.

The “human heater” was literally a mock idea for a competition in the sitcom Silicon Valley. The jury canned it. https://youtu.be/Di3fPj0pUbQ

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#130

Post by devilbunny »

magicalhippo wrote: post #125
devilbunny wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.

Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.

This was probably 70s-80s. House heated to 10-15 C/50-60 F and microwave for comfort beyond that.
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