alt Hacker NewsI opened it, it told me it was impossible to build a house in california for less than 350K, i closed it
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Perhaps the test was that if you finish the test you haven't passed it.
Worse: the author probably assumes it's $350k per year since they are comparing to a yearly expense.
Intellectual captcha™
Seriously. And not even to build a house, but to make a single person not homeless. Give me a break.
Same. And I'm not even focused on whether this is a reasonable number or not. The quoted tweet also says "But our politicians would rather spend that on genocide." And I'm asked to evaluate whether this is "accurate" with a thumbs up or thumbs down. (According to Mentwire, it is not accurate). So I'm evaluating both the cost of housing the homeless, but also whether politicians would rather fund genocide. So, this seems like it is not really an intellectual CAPTCHA, but rather an ideological CAPTCHA.
And just to disclose my biases, I would tend to believe that $350k is an absurdly high figure and that politicians are obviously not holding a vote where they are forced to choose between ending homelessness and funding genocide. But I believe that people who disagree with me can be considered intelligent and not "too dumb to pass an intellectual CAPTCHA".
Let's assume that the tweet is proposing to spend $10 billion per year to end homelessness in the entire US, since it contrasts it with genocide which is clearly a national objective not a local one.
A quick Google gives on the order of 1 million homeless people in the US. That's $10k per person per year which is the correct order of magnitude for the price of housing someone.
I believe OP missed the "per year" in the tweet that's why they are comparing to house prices rather than the yearly cost of housing, which is obviously much smaller because houses last longer than 1 year.