The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993) • Hacker News Board

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#321

Post by somenameforme » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #316

somenameforme wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other religions, are growing to rapidly growing - in spite of the perception many in the West would have about the global increase of secularism. In fact we're likely to become a far more religious species in the future thanks to secular individ…

The US (and even the UK) are a lot better at integrating immigrants than most of Europe. > Migration was even one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire! You might like https://acoup.blog/ for a few more nuanced takes. > The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other relig…

What you're arguing here is largely ahistorical. Immigration to the US was relatively small scale and almost entirely from highly compatible cultures. There's a decent write up here [1]. Some datums: Immigrants today (including illegal) are about 14.3% of the population - that's about the same level as it was following the great migration of the late 19th century shortly before it started to become an issue leading to immigration being clamped down on hard, reaching a low of 4.7% in 1970. [1]

Fertility, when shared amongst a population, has an easy to model effect on population. It's a population scalar of fertility_rate/2 per ~20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 would mean your population is dropping by 50% every 20 years. That is compounding/exponential and never ends until you go extinct or start having more babies. Compensating for this by immigration is basically impossible, and at that scale you will quickly become the country of origin of immigrants in any case. Of course we're not even especially close to a fertility rate of 1 yet, but that is the trendline and really the same argument even applies to rather higher levels of fertility.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/key-findi...

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

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Post by AndrewOMartin » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #247

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best examples of a food industry (grains) being able to influence eating habits to their benefit. Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it three times a day and little el…

At the same time, there is also a faction that appears to argue against overly studying or obsessing about nutrition science, saying that if you really just prioritize variety, moderation, and made-at-home, then you're already 90% of the way there.

Ben Goldacre used to have a regular column against misleading health fads, amongst other things, called Bad Science.

He was a practicing GP and whenever asked to give some advice himself he said that people and lifestyles were too varied to give any advice more specific than "Eat mostly fresh fruit and vegetables, cut down on cigarettes and alcohol, and do some exercise".

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#323

Post by happyopossum » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

urbandw311er wrote: post #81

happyopossum wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had a long term lease on a cabana - that wasn’t cheap. Also ate lunch and bought drinks there. Not saying this was out of reach for anyone, but the cabana alone probably would have been for the vast majority of people.

If you read the piece he was gifted the cabana

Only for 10 years

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#324

Post by xp84 » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 6:06 AM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #298

xp84 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what area is this? That sounds strange to me. Some people in your boat would choose to buy an investment property in one place and rent in another in order to still get exposure to the real estate appreciation that is so common, while not having to buy a condo in a difficult area like yours. But it would probably be so much easier to just to invest in a few good residential property REITs. Probably lower…

Richardson specifically, but honestly most of DFW. Pretty much any apartment complex built in this area in the past 20 years is corporate owned. These days even a lot of the townhouses around are corporate owned rental units. In fact, this area (and other places in Texas) has given rise to a new kind of apartment architecture called the "Texas Doughnut", which is a 5-over-1 apartment complex wrapping a central parkin…

Thanks! That's an interesting trend. I wonder if that is mainly due to high rates, making condo purchase less attractive to non-wealthy people than it was 5 years ago.