Passengers possessions - e.g. jewelry, watches. Technical equipment on the ship. Items from the on-ship shops. Interesting artefacts (ships bells are often a prized loot from wrecks).
> the latrines are always at least 30m from the sleeping quarters
Toilet facilities are lacking in many parts of the world, and "open defecation" – e.g. toileting in a field without the benefit of a dedicated hole / long-drop / pit – is still in use.
The study did show positive health outcomes with the new housing over a traditional mud + thatch dwelling.
Given that the new housing incorporated dedicated latrines, harvesting of clean water, and insect-exclusion techniques, it's unsurprising that the new housing outperformed traditional dwellings in health outcomes.
It didn't do a cost-benefit analysis comparing an equivalent investment in e.g. provision of latrines, insect-netting, clean water, or simply providing cash to the participants.
At least in rural Syria I noticed the opposite. Food/housing/daycare in the farm never enters GDP those things are 'free' that eat most a western persons paycheck. People will spend half of their entire income on entertainment in the form of cell phone, internet, and energy drinks, cigarettes, as their necessities basically dont pass through commerce.
Median income in Tanzania is ≈ $1,800pa, so this property is around 5 times the median annual salary.
That said, housing in first world countries is generally a significant multiple of annual median income. In the UK, banks typically lend at 3–4 × an individuals salary or 3 × a couple's combined salary, so a single median earner on around £40k could borrow £120k – £160k.
The article notes the pricing is out-of-reach for many people in Tanzania, but it's also not wildly disconnected from salary:housing ratios in high-income economies.
Also i doubt Tanzania has the code/zoning insanity of the US. You build your hut for cheap and quickly, then you put your concrete house next to it and build it over 10 years as you get money. Probably shared across a larger family. In places like US this impossible; you can only build 1 house on most plots and permits aren't amenable to slow progress so you need a loan and a gigantic pile of money all at once.
That and the whole refugee problem in Europe. If we could fix the problems driving refugees out, then great. If we are creating more future refugees (a pattern which could easily be weaponized by destabilizing countries and then propagandizing their plight, for example), then not sure that’s such a good idea.
Oh and also you don’t have to look forwards at projections, you can look backwards at the population growth, it’s not as if this sort of thing just started yesterday.
If the recipients could only afford a traditional mud + thatch home, the contractors building work was new additional demand, rather than competition against existing builders.
Even when first-world funding dries up, knowledge of the design, its features and benefits will remain. It's also cheaper than the alternative single-storey concrete home design, so perhaps generating new construction demand from people who couldn't quite afford the more expensive single-storey stone house but can afford this new design.
It's certainly an eye-opening unusual project, but I think it's a net gain for the region, even without a sustained/permanent first-world benefactor.
The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart.
The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.
There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.
Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.
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