The Official Treehouse Articles Thread
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- #1,177
Cool buffalo story
wildideabuffalo.com
One of the First Buffalo...
One of the first buffalo that came to this ranch was a scrawny orphan with a crooked horn. He couldn’t have weighed over forty pounds and no one was betting that he would even survive, let alone thrive.
wildideabuffalo.com
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- #1,178
The Many Ways Scientists Are Turning Birds Into Feathered Field Assistants
From frigatebirds and gulls to curlews and cormorants, researchers are tapping the ”Internet of Animals” to map, understand, and protect our changing world.
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- #1,179
rather rad article, probably 8-10 minute read, worth it imo, lmk. Definitely some lols in it.
The Hadza are totally, well, wild.
www.michaelfinkel.com
The Hadza are totally, well, wild.
The Hadza – Michael Finkel
“I’m hungry,” says Onwas, squatting by his fire, blinking placidly through the smoke. The men beside him murmur in assent. It’s late at night, deep in the East
www.michaelfinkel.com
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Nutball
TreeHouser
The Growth of Web Page Size - KeyCDN Support
Web page size is an important factor to measure as the bigger a page is, the longer it takes to download the required resources to display it.
www.keycdn.com
Are people retarded? I feel like at some point we are going backward. Just the ads and even built in popups get obnoxious.
Imagine cutting a tree for a customer, then stopping just after you got started to offer the customer some recommendations to grind extra stumps they don't even have, and to apply fertilizer around the trees you are cutting down, followed by some paid sponsors to hand the customer some roofing and window replacement pamphlets with the sales pitch whether they want it or not.
I'd like to see the owners of Lowes, Home Depot, ect try to use their websites on a regular basis, or the food packagers try to open the "easy open" packages they still haven't figured out how to get right after decades.
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- #1,181
Animal's wounds heal much faster than humans, fyi 
Nutball
TreeHouser
I shot a groundhog the other day, It instantly flipped on its back and laid there. I put the rifle up, came back, and it was gone. Just a penny size drop of blood where it had been laying. Animals are tough.
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- #1,183
Interesting housing article. Before you read, make a guess as to how many houses currently exist in the US.
Nutball
TreeHouser
I didn't find the answer in the article, I must be a bad reader.
Nutball
TreeHouser
My first guess was 100mil, then 50mil, then 10mil. I wonder if they subtract the ones destroyed by natural disaster?
Nutball
TreeHouser
At this point I think rentals, especially big business owned, should be severely limited in number, and maybe the rate should be limited too. Big biz over paying for regular houses just to turn them into overpriced rentals does not help affordability.
Apparently in Australia the government wants house prices to keep rising, and they seem to have similar problems to the US regarding many things like immigration, the covid laws, and such, as if this is some global plan.
Apparently in Australia the government wants house prices to keep rising, and they seem to have similar problems to the US regarding many things like immigration, the covid laws, and such, as if this is some global plan.
Kaveman
Treehouser
Psst, it's called globalism...
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- #1,191
Desalinization for drinking water info:
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- #1,192
Any of you financial gurus capiche this stuff? It's from a book- In her new book, Bad Company, journalist Megan Greenwell shows how the secretive industry has insinuated itself into average Americans’ lives.
An excerpt:
Leveraged buyouts are a huge percentage of what private equity does. The basic way leveraged buyouts work is that the private-equity firm bundles together money from their outside investors—university endowments, pension funds, ultrawealthy individuals. But that only ends up making up a small minority of the total money they use to acquire a company. The rest of the money is bank loans, and those bank loans are assigned not to the private-equity firm that made the decision to borrow that money, but to the company that they are acquiring.
So if I make an offer for your company, and I’m borrowing money to buy it, I’m not responsible for paying that money back; only you are. You end up with this complete divorce of incentives, where what is good for the private-equity firm is not necessarily what’s good for the portfolio company.
In industries that are real estate heavy—hospitals, retail, newspapers—private-equity firms will sell off the real estate assets of those companies to pocket the proceeds themselves. Then the portfolio company has to pay rent on the same land that they may have owned for years or decades. Now you have a situation where the private-equity firm is doing great because they’re collecting their management fees, plus they got this tidy little profit from the real estate sale, but their portfolio company is buried under debt from the acquisition and also rent payments where they previously owned their land outright.
You see the two paths start to diverge. The private-equity company is winning, and the portfolio company is getting weaker and weaker and weaker
An excerpt:
Leveraged buyouts are a huge percentage of what private equity does. The basic way leveraged buyouts work is that the private-equity firm bundles together money from their outside investors—university endowments, pension funds, ultrawealthy individuals. But that only ends up making up a small minority of the total money they use to acquire a company. The rest of the money is bank loans, and those bank loans are assigned not to the private-equity firm that made the decision to borrow that money, but to the company that they are acquiring.
So if I make an offer for your company, and I’m borrowing money to buy it, I’m not responsible for paying that money back; only you are. You end up with this complete divorce of incentives, where what is good for the private-equity firm is not necessarily what’s good for the portfolio company.
In industries that are real estate heavy—hospitals, retail, newspapers—private-equity firms will sell off the real estate assets of those companies to pocket the proceeds themselves. Then the portfolio company has to pay rent on the same land that they may have owned for years or decades. Now you have a situation where the private-equity firm is doing great because they’re collecting their management fees, plus they got this tidy little profit from the real estate sale, but their portfolio company is buried under debt from the acquisition and also rent payments where they previously owned their land outright.
You see the two paths start to diverge. The private-equity company is winning, and the portfolio company is getting weaker and weaker and weaker
Nutball
TreeHouser
Some comments from a YT video I recently didn't watch, might be fitting to your post.
"It seems like they are willing to destroy far more value than they end up capturing."Exactly. It's like meth addicts breaking into a house and pulling out the copper plumbing and wiring. They'll get $40 worth of copper scrap, but it costs the homeowner $5,000. We have literal drug addicts metaphorically stripping the copper out of the walls of this nation."
"They'll burn down all the forests to make off with five or six more trees."
"The “hit” of acquiring more, more, more is literally the experience of addiction. Addicts get put in rehab, not in power."
"People are "very rich already," in most cases, because they have always been and remain obsessed with amassing more."
"obsessed with wealth accumulation and, let's say, "morally flexible" enough to do the kinds of things to others that that kind of massive wealth accumulation demands."
"I once heard a tale of a a bank robbery getaway driver that had the money in the car before his accomplice got in. Cops shot the accomplice, getaway driver hightailed it out of there. Two million dollars. In 1968. And he doesn't have to share it with anybody. He told this tale after he got out of prison. He didn't get caught in a high-speed chase, no: he got caught robbing another bank. When asked why he would risk getting caught when he already had two million dollars, he said " I looked at the bags and I thought - 'It isn't enough.' "Becoming wealthy means choosing to make money *for the sake of making money*. For the wealthy, like the bank robber, it isn't enough. It's Never Enough."
"It seems like they are willing to destroy far more value than they end up capturing."Exactly. It's like meth addicts breaking into a house and pulling out the copper plumbing and wiring. They'll get $40 worth of copper scrap, but it costs the homeowner $5,000. We have literal drug addicts metaphorically stripping the copper out of the walls of this nation."
"They'll burn down all the forests to make off with five or six more trees."
"The “hit” of acquiring more, more, more is literally the experience of addiction. Addicts get put in rehab, not in power."
"People are "very rich already," in most cases, because they have always been and remain obsessed with amassing more."
"obsessed with wealth accumulation and, let's say, "morally flexible" enough to do the kinds of things to others that that kind of massive wealth accumulation demands."
"I once heard a tale of a a bank robbery getaway driver that had the money in the car before his accomplice got in. Cops shot the accomplice, getaway driver hightailed it out of there. Two million dollars. In 1968. And he doesn't have to share it with anybody. He told this tale after he got out of prison. He didn't get caught in a high-speed chase, no: he got caught robbing another bank. When asked why he would risk getting caught when he already had two million dollars, he said " I looked at the bags and I thought - 'It isn't enough.' "Becoming wealthy means choosing to make money *for the sake of making money*. For the wealthy, like the bank robber, it isn't enough. It's Never Enough."
Nutball
TreeHouser
I found this interesting after having noticed some annoying fog forming even on a new windshield and in odd patterns and random places.
community.windowcleaner.com
Who knew glass would do that? Seems like the mfg's should have figured out a solution by now.
Sticker Film On Glass
Ive used the same method I’ve used for HW stain, foam cutting pad with a polisher and A1, followed by a coating of Invisible Shield, the ghost square has not come back in 1-1/4 year…I think it’s gone for good myself. After A1 and before sealing, while washing with GG4, no square was evident...
community.windowcleaner.com
Who knew glass would do that? Seems like the mfg's should have figured out a solution by now.
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- #1,195
Original affluent society - Wikipedia
pigwot
RuMi's, Juni's, Lowen’s, and Inge’s Gpa! (#5 soon)
Nutball
TreeHouser
People would need to be prepared to be self sufficient before trying that or there won't be enough to go around even with generosity. Gardening sounds easy, but it can be quite difficult, especially without proper local co-op planning, let alone storing enough food for winter AND spring/early summer. Too many people have been demoralized (through TV and the destruction of religion, among other ways) that such a collapse would get quite violent with all the theft. The gov probably has plenty of resources to supply the police and military to keep them on their side, so it doesn't look good from that angle, though you'd think they'd wake up to the problem at hand and stop serving the gov. Then, there's also the problem of coordinating this effort. It's not likely everyone would just start implementing that plan all at once, but if nobody does, then nobody will be encouraged to join in, so some significant few will have to set the example, and they may suffer the worst, since they will be suffering the longest. A better way that a hard quitting of jobs would be to shift to a lifestyle of great self sufficiency and minimal interaction with the economy, and minimal reliance upon government run resources (city water, power, and sewage). You'd think the utilities could keep running though, dollars don't convert into electrons and clean water, so if everyone is in on it, much of the cost goes away as the utilities workers keep running things in exchange for food/necessities, and the service other's to to rebuild a better version of society.
