buying a home. Hasn't made sense since the 1970s. The social contract is broken, you no longer can rely on job security or a decent pension. Yet the banks still expect you to pay them on time. A home is a *liability*, not an investment.
No, rent is a liability with no possible return on what you put in. Renting is for suckers and I wish that I had bought over a decade ago instead of renting all that time. I finally got into the property market and the assessed value of my condo has increased in just 6 months.
If someone paid as much rent in 20 years as they did owning a house than you would have a strong argument, that is never the case thou.
People will typically buy much more house than they were renting. Empty bedrooms, guestrooms, extra garage used for storage, rarely used home office, these are all common for owned homes but rarely have I seen renters with unneeded space.
People rarely calculate the price of yearly insurance, maintenance and repair needed for a house, things that are included in rent but not in a mortgage.
People almost never calculate the price of long term maintenance. Roofs, piping, septic-system at least one of those among others, is likely to need major maintenance/replacement every 15-20 years.
Finally, a lot of people spend a lot of money on improvements that do not add value. Things like swiming-pools, wall-to-wall carpeting, kitchen and bathrooms remodeling.
All the extra money going into the home could have been used to invest on things with much higher returns. About the only way a home as a investment makes sense is as a forced investment, in-case you simply cannot make yourself put aside a portion of your income.
Finding things that kill bacteria is easy. Finding things that kill bacteria and do not significantly harm the host, now that is the hard part.
That's exactly what they claim to have found (at least so far in tests on mice). They also assert that they think it would be extremely difficult for MRSA to adapt to this drug, as it would require a fundamental change in the structure of it as being a gram positive bacteria.
I should have specified a human host. Biotech is littered with drugs that seems to work great on test animals but have serious side effects on humans.
TFA bascially makes the point that you now have to pay for a lot of things individually on airlines that you used to get for "free", and that not everybody enjoys paying for these things. True enough, but the article brushes off the very real benefits of paying less when you get (and need) less. For example:
As fliers have learned all too well in the last decade, air flight has become unbundled. Want a bit of leg room? That will be a $50 upgrade for a seat in your airline’s “premium economy” cabin. Sandwiches are on sale for $9, a glass of wine for $7. Checking that bag costs $25, and there is a $200 change fee for your ticket, or buy a much more expensive one upfront.
However, what's wrong with bringing fewer bags, if you want to, or else paying the going price for the bags you really need?
In the cable world, I certainly can imagine someone whining about "Why do I now have to pay X for channel Y - that's a ripoff!", but I don't see how it can be a bad thing to pay less for only what you really want. It really boils down to economics: if it now is efficient to allow people to select and pay for cable channels individually, that's bound to happen. It's only a matter of time.
Unfortunately the airlines have been pushing their fees by deliberately making basic service as unbearable as possible. The seats are getting smaller while the waistlines are getting larger. A so called upgrade to a seat they can fit in is not a value added service, it is a necessity.
And exercise is the rest.
The human body is so efficiently optimized to run on as few calories as possible that exercise simply is not effective as a counter to overeating. The calories in a piece of cheesecake would take hours of moderate exercise to burn off. Of course exercise has many benefits, especially in keeping the cardiovascular system in shape which mitigates some of the risks of obesity even if not loosing weight.
"Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan Perlis
