Perfect is the enemy of good (enough).

I appreciate that’s literally the first site that comes up when you DDG “why are us houses made of wood” but it’s credibility is… lacking (and I’ll confess, I’m quite content having an answer that differs from the one given on an AI generated slop site.)

You really don’t take a disagreement well. Don’t worry, it won’t happen from me again because I block anybody so fragile they respond like you did. But first:

~1/7 the population

Is that not smaller than 6/7?

~1/5 the landmass

Is that not smaller than 4/5?

I disagree on the subjective meaning of a very small portion but I guess we’ll just have to disagree.

the big factor for most of the country is that stone houses fall down in earthquakes and are very sensitive to soil erosion, floods, etc.

I think you’re overstating it a bit. Those are considerations for a very small portion of the country, and in fact changes in building code to be less strict on materials made brick/stone no longer a requirement.

It’s primarily material availability. Milwaukee is a great example of the early availability of brick and its prevalence in construction until availability and cost, among other factors, drove the change to wood frame construction.

The east cost cities are good examples too. Boston, Philadelphia, New York all have a lot of brick due to the brickworks and availability but the farther west you go the less you see. This is, in a large part, because it’s expensive to transport brick/stone, especially when there’s an abundance of building material to harvest and use in the form of wood.

I would agree in modern times though it’s largely cost and climate that drive building material in the US and wood is not only suitable and cheaper, it’s also more flexible to build with.

Just build houses of stone

The US did build houses out of stone, where it made sense. Many places don’t have easy access to stone for building, however 1/3 of the country is forested. Wood is available, economical and suitable for building single family homes in much of the country.

Europe even has got some that are 1000 years old.

And the US has Fairbanks House which is older than the country itself.

That is basically a non-answer and doesn’t mean anything.

You struggling to understand a statement doesn’t make it a non-answer.

The reality is AI is classified a national security priority and therefore has the US govt to prevent it from running out of money.

Your conflating the current technology AI and AI companies.

but ultimately its the willingness of people/companies to use the AI that results in the win.

Ah, you’re one of those people.

There is no way it doesn’t get propped up by the government at this rate.

There absolutely is a way. It starts with people hold their governments and representatives accountable.

The AI companies can and absolutely should fail. AI itself isn’t going anywhere. That Genie is out of the box.

My thought is the AI market won’t crash because especially in data engineering and devops there is an inherent worth.

Did you see Anthropic’s IPO filing? The company is upside down and there’s so much commingling between 3 or 4 companies that when one goes the rest will topple like dominoes.

What won’t crash are the billionaires at the top. See, they’re going to cash out with piles of money and leave the index fund investors (e.g. the every day person) holding the bag.

Even with all of that, gas is still cheaper. I sat down and figured it out because we replaced our furnace last year.

The folks who benefit most from heat pumps are those that currently use propane or electric resistance heat. However, to qualify for those rebates you have to meet certain requirements on an audit which is often harder the older your home construction is.

If they want people to switch to electric heating in Minnesota then they need to make electric cheaper. Utility costs for most in Minnesota drop significantly compared to summer because it’s far cheaper to heat with natural gas than it is to cool with electric.

Fixing the public utilities commission would be good too.

I believe Motorola already manufactured ALPRs for one of the other companies and decided to get into the ALPR provider business too.