Preventing this in single family neighborhoods (which increased to stop Airbnb) is causing some retirees to become homeless. That extra income was helping them keep up with higher taxes and increasing costs of living. Of course, banks and corporate real estate investors profit from turnover. The state (and taxpayers) ultimately bear the costs for those unable to age in place.
The changes to zoning laws in cities to outlaw SRO’s was due to pressure by real estate speculators. Back in the day.
Glad that we don’t have to worry about real estate speculators fucking things up any more.
I remember the days of gas stations having a differential between self- and full-serve service. But I didn’t know we had the Swedes to thank for moving us to self service.
I do wonder if regularly using the self-service option affects people’s health. The fumes are terrible, and extremely difficult to avoid.
Reading this made me wonder if they’re still using these suits:
I think the problem is made worse by cultural and economic factors. For some groups, leaving those in the third and fourth stages to fend for themselves is unacceptable. Families have been ostracized or shamed for it. In other groups, not only are the elderly devalued, but also the caregivers who would watch over them. The marketing of denial - in which 40, 50, and 60 are the new 30, 40, and 50 (or even lower decades 
) adds pressure and expense to people who might be members of the “sandwich generation.” Aging in place is a luxury not every family can afford, and spending too much on pretense prior to that stage means having less available for more care when it is needed.
Care for those in the final stage requires investment. Unfortunately, the US for-profit healthcare model means eldercare services are expensive and difficult to secure - just like preschool or after school childcare. Maybe we need a system of adult daycare as accessible as public schools, or a combined solution:
Is there a field or industry on Earth in which the contributions of women haven’t been dismissed, discredited, diminished, distorted, or deleted* from historical records? 
Asking for a lot of friends who get pissed off because this is still so pervasive. It’s deliberate, and it affects perception of capability, which in turn impacts opportunities and compensation.
*After they’ve been duplicated and attributed to men, of course. 
None that leap to mind, and I’m in one of the industries that was bootstrapped into being by intelligent, capable and driven women primarily, but there is very little today which reflects that fact either in the current workforce or in the parthenon of “heroes”.
Beautiful, sensuous, heartfelt writing, such a great weaving together of so many perfectly apt details and facts.
How does Rebecca Solnit keep getting better and better?
Huh, i just read this, about other Houton beings:
Excellent think piece about a term that’s bothered me before, “whataboutism.” The author, Viet Thanh Nguyen (whose novel The Sympathizer is also excellent), helps me sort through the issue of when it’s NOT wrong to ask, “But what about…?”
I was skeptical, then, when Pentagon press secretary John Kirby became emotional talking about war atrocities and Vladimir Putin. “It’s difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature leader would do that,” Kirby said. “I can’t talk to his psychology, but I think we can all speak to his depravity.” I am trying to remember the last time an American military or wartime official became emotional discussing civilian deaths that occurred because of American weaponry or American policy, such as embargoes and sanctions. What makes Putin depraved, versus an American president who orders carpet-bombing or drone strikes that inevitably result in civilian deaths?
The answer is apparently that the monstrous Putin intends to slaughter, but well-meaning Americans have good intentions, lawyers, and… innocence. Graham Greene depicted the consequences of this mix of innocence, naivete, and high explosives in his 1955 novel The Quiet American, in which the idealistic CIA agent Alden Pyle ends up killing dozens of Vietnamese civilians. “It was a pity,” Pyle says, “but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway, they died in the right cause…. You could say they died for democracy.”
Quiet Americans are still with us. After American drone strikes killed hundreds of civilians in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, for example, the Pentagon excused itself from culpability by noting that its troops followed the rules of engagement and the laws of war. This appeal to legality avoids the obvious point: Those who make the laws rarely see themselves as criminals. It is almost impossible to imagine an American president or general being prosecuted at The Hague for war crimes, because the cliché is correct: Might makes right.
