Spock played a key role in their extinction.

It’s a not wisdom of individual builders. They obviously will go for the cheaper option. It’s more a wisdom of the crowds/market. A lot of folks outside the US have a cultural aversion to the American style of home construction. There’s a lot of areas of the world where even if a builder could affordably construct American-style stick-framed houses, that they simply wouldn’t sell. Look how some folks lament the “cardboard, sticks, and glue” that make up American homes, as if an inch-thick OSB panel is in any way comparable to the cardboard boxes used to package food. Even things like “tape,” as though the purpose-built and engineered weather-sealing “tapes” are in any way comparable to common masking or Scotch tape. It’s like denigrating a well-engineered concrete house as “just a pile of rocks.”

Americans have more of a cultural attitude of impermanence. It wouldn’t say it’s anything like the Japanese, but it’s still there. There’s an old saying, “in Europe, a hundred miles is a long distance. In America, a hundred years is a long time.”

It’s a real hard problem for localities to get right. On the one hand, you want to preserve old buildings. On the other hand, buildings are expensive as hell. And when those ancient buildings were constructed, they were built by modest people. They were never meant to be super expensive to maintain. But over the ages, techniques that were commonly known then became rare specialties now. Every Medieval peasant could thatch their own roof. Now you’ll pay a fortune to bring in an expert in historical construction techniques to do it.

Yes, it would be ideal to require everything be maintained to historical standards and methods, but at some point, people just stop trying. People only have so much time, money, and resources. If you make it too difficult to renovate properties, they can’t be updated for regular use. And if they can’t be used, then who will put in the money to maintain them? The properties just end up being abandoned and slowly succumbing to the elements.

Some historical artifacts are easy to preserve. Give me a 300 year old violin and ask me to take care of it, and I can do so for almost no cost to me. Just keep it somewhere safe and dry, and it will be preserved just fine. But buildings require constant maintenance, and they are built assuming the easy availability of certain maintenance techniques. Requiring excessive adherence to historical standards does not result in more preserved homes; it just results in old homes being left to rot.

Meanwhile in Europe, in some places you can literally get a castle for free!*

*Just as long as you can pay the titanic maintenance bill to maintain it to historical standards.

In an era of rapidly evolving technology, there ultimately isn’t much point to construct buildings, especially individual homes, that will last for centuries. Yes, the house may still be there two hundred years from now, but will anyone actually want to live in it? Or will it require so much updating that you would be better off just building something new?

If we hit a wall on rapid technological progress, then things will be different. If you can be reasonably certain that human beings will be living much as we do now in 500 years, than building a house to last that long will make sense to me. Until then, why waste the resources?

I definitely want to see houses be made of materials that can be recycled. But raw durability is not itself a virtue. Remember the ultimate truth here. Buildings serve people. That’s why they exist. And most people in 2026 do not want to live in a home built for the lifestyle of a 16th century peasant. How many people today know how to tend and cook on an open hearth wood burning stove? Yes, some homes that age do survive. But if anyone is still living in them, they have been heavily renovated and modified, many times over the generations. Old buildings like that are very much Ships of Theseus.

The wisdom of the American style of home construction is precisely in its impermanence. It’s an admission that we don’t have all the answers for all time, and that many of our choices today will seem foolish to our grandchildren. Yes, American homes can be quickly built and quickly torn down. But that is the entire point.

I am Ozymandius, King of Kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

With drug addiction, it is often very much literally not your choice.

At some point your lack of tracking itself becomes a data point. When someone shows up to a website who is a complete data ghost, the site has to figure out how to react to that. I could see companies saying, “well, if someone has no record, there’s two possibilities. Either one, they’re chronically homeless and are living completely off the grid. Or two, they’re somehow who goes to great lengths to hide their tracks. In the former case, we can ignore them when setting our prices, as they can’t afford our product anyway. In the latter case, we can charge them the maximum, as wealthy people can more afford to care about their privacy, and the person avoiding the tracking will probably assume we’re actually giving them the better deal.”

I imagine most such systems would be set up so that by default the maximum price is charged, and it’s only lowered if tracking data is available to suggest a lower price is more likely to create a more profitable sale.

Some professions that were traditionally male dominated and were also called “____ man” can be made gender neutral by replacing “man” with “person.”

This does not work for “garbage man.”