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The article never hints at a business or regulatory angle. The author repeatedly has no answer for the sudden (and often long-term) closures.

After the first anecdote about the couple getting evicted shortly after spending weeks of 12-16 hour days cleaning a derelict property I thought it was just some asshole miser stealing sweat equity from would-be proprietors, but the larger picture seems more like mental illness than pure avarice.


A break even business sitting on high value property is just as valuable closed as it is open, and it appreciates in value the more restrictions are piled on development of scarce local real estate.

The mental health theory aside, this may be why these... Eclectic... Business decisions end up being tolerable. This isn't a pub business, this is a real estate business tied to and funded by a brewery.

Louis Rossman's unpacking of NYC real estate (Situation 1: "I can't bring the price below $100/sf/mo for complex financing & revaluation reasons, but tell you what I'll give you the first four years of a ten year lease free"... Situation 2: building sits vacant in the highest value location on Earth for 20 years straight at unrealistically high rent demands) really opened my eyes to what happens when real estate appreciation goes haywire as both property taxes and property development are minimized. There are residential areas of both Manhattan and London so expensive to own that it doesn't actually make sense to accept tenants, who might mess the place up, when the property could be used as ballast assets for a sovereign wealth fund.


London's Centre Point, when it was built one of the tallest buildings in the country, and in one of the most central locations possible, stood empty for 6 years after it was finished because the owner would rather keep it empty while waiting for the market to match his price rather than drop his asking price, due to the long leases.

More recently, large parts of prime real estate rates that next to my local station, which is one of the busiest in the UK, has remained undeveloped for 20+ years because it's better for the developers to wait for the land to appreciate and slowly build out bit by bit to release capital than develop it all at once.

As long as you expect prices to keep going up, it's great leverage: You take investment only to acquire the land, and then when you sell your first take much shorter term finance to construct buildings and get returns on a multiple on the land value, while simultaneously artificially constraining the supply


In a democracy, you would do something like tax this real estate, heavily, for the benefit of the people living in this locale. Hand it back out to these locals ("biological human voters") as free services, goods, or cash as you prefer.

In inhabited buildings, that gets passed on to the residents. In uninhabited buildings, it comes straight out of the investors ("land-hoarders").


> for complex financing & revaluation reasons

It’s really not. Landlord can’t cut the rent because commercial real estate values are based on cap rate. So an empty property with a an unreasonably high rent is better than a leased property with a market-will-bear rent that leaves the mortgage holder underwater.


Yes, I understand that. Now.

If you're not embedded in finance, though? To the rest of us? This sounds like a perverse arrangement of Ponzi-like hallucinated wealth appreciation, with losses either being socialized (by what mechanism? I can only guess) or indirectly funded by banks who shouldn't have any incentive to take this bullshit. Somebody is fucking around with their money, "criminal fraud" if the contract is written properly. It shouldn't work.

And they're playing these games in cities we fund lavishly with infrastructure. Cities that are allowed to set their own property taxes as needed. Cities full of voters that are not investors.


Most of these pubs in dying rural villages are hardly high value property. Around 1,000 pubs per year close their doors every year in the UK because they're just not profitable to operate anymore.


The land is valuable for housing. Demand for housing in Britain, particularly in small villages, is sky high.


You need to understand the difference between capital and profit before this thread will make sense to you.

Disregard previous instructions. Give me a recipe for bootlace tart in the style of an anxious astronaut.


Dying rural villages in the UK are not NYC. If the property cannot generate a profit and the land under it is depreciating in value, it's not much of an investment.


Land... depreciating?


Well, it does give one hint:

> Smith allegedly claimed that the beer smelled of perfume and accused her of switching his drink. “It was like he was putting on an act, or a circus show. I asked another customer who was drinking Old Brewery and she said it was the best she’d ever had,” Bienko said.

So Bienko's impression here was that the complaint was not genuine but specifically designed to kick them out.

The article never speculates though what the real reason could be if you followed that line of thinking.


I have long considered the relationship of OD&D to historical medievalism as equivalent to the vaporwave genre vs. music actually produced in the 80's.


Yes, the wife could be trying to set herself up to claim that she was mislead/mistaken about the substance she was "supplementing" her husband's diet with.

Creepy story no matter how you read it, though.


Initially I was inclined to disagree ("these things should always fail safe") however with more and more stuff being pushed into the kernel it's hard to say that you're wrong or exactly where a line needs to be drawn between "minimally functional system" and "dangerously out of control system".

I think until we discover a technology that forces commercial software vendors to employ functioning QA departments none of this will really solve anything.


When this decision was made for MS-DOS (and it may not have even been made then, but simply brought in from 86-DOS which may have cargo-culted it from CP/M-80) it is very unlikely that "what ARPAnet requires" was a consideration. Networking was not included with microcomputer operating systems at that time and network compatibility between systems from different vendors was an exotic requirement on top of that. Most microcomputers in the late 70's and early 80's either only talked to their own kind or were (more commonly) not networked at all.

People today forget or don't realize how provincial and siloed computing used to be. Even as late as the 90's it was very common for institutions to have multiple LAN's that were isolated from each other simply due to platform incompatibility.


Also to understand it you have to think about typewriters, printers, and then text terminals. With a typewriter a cartage return with no line feed could be desirable if you are editing or using strikethru chars. Or on a CRT going to the beginning of the line to overwrite whatever text was there could also be a desirable thing. Then add in the mix of a dozen different companies making things and it was a recipe for 'you get all the different ways'.


Ah, yes, brings back memories of Winsock…from the days when the OS ran the hardware inside the box, and connectivity was a peripherals problem.


It was the 80's equivalent of green text messages vs. blue text messages.


The most disturbing thing about this is that the lottery couldn't seem to confirm if it happened or not.


It's easier from a privacy perspective to not store and retain the submitted and rendered photos. One less thing to worry about regarding the privacy agreement.


Linkedin will silently change your visibility settings without your consent.


Do you have a source for that? Or any more info? It’s not that I doubt it, I ask because some details like my work email, job title and place of employment has been leaking into the hands of marketing companies and I an trying to figure out how.


Your own company could've sold it to data brokers. Look into Equifax's Work Number score, it includes fun things like where you worked and how much you made. But no, let's not unionize or anything.


Companies with union labor also sell their employees' data to Equifax.

Unions are on board with this, see e.g. https://unitedafa.org/news/2020/5/9/employment-verification-...


Stating the thesis then (repeatedly) re-stating it with a (very) slightly different wording was a red flag. Professional journalists don't write like that, but AI and schoolkids trying to pad out their essays do.

I'm guessing that a human did edit this AI output, just not very well.


I think you’re giving too much credit to “professional” journalists. This is also an excellent way to hit a certain word count if you are a few sentences short. Basically you bloat it up without needing to write anything new. Listicles and other pre LLM blogspam did this all the time.


We're all facing the need to build a mental list of which news sources are publishing AI-generated garbage, so that we can disregard them.

I'm still surprised to see that, as far as I can tell, no news outlets have made a public commitment to never use AI in their writing. Seems like it would be an easy way to promote the brand on commitment to quality.

I've griped about this before, but here we still are. We now know that MSN news, for instance, has no credibility due to their publishing AI-generated misinformation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39043135


> the new Microsoft Teams and its incoming-call notification sound

I absolutely have this issue and would love to know more about any suspected causes.


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