I've heard it's because most homeowners who got nice 3.5% interest rates during the pandemic are obviously loath to sell their houses to get a 6.5% or 7% interest rate.

I think it was during the pandemic that many people saw real science unfolding almost in real time. Until then most people only had the orderly, bite sized chunks in school. Which give the illusion that science is always an orderly process.

But real science is messy, with an educated best guess proven or disproven. Lather, rinse, repeat. It does amazing things but orderly, it is not.

And these many people got very upset and decided it's not a good thing because it's not crisp, black and white and unchanging.

Going out to get some hot Dunkin, since I prefer hot coffee unless it's above at least 65 degrees or so.

And that is before the "ban abortion in all Red States" started. I expect that life expectancy to go further downhill in the next few years. Particularly for women.

The vast majority of black holes have accretion discs, which have such high amounts of hard radiation, any probe would be fried long before it gets anywhere remotely near the black hole.

Besides hard radiation, the only other really cool things we'd want to investigate are either gravitational (we don't have super-tiny gravity sensors to my non-expert knowledge) or quantum in nature (and I don't think we have a particle accelerator we can fit into a space probe.

And, using current spaceflight tech, it would take thousands of years to get a probe anywhere near one. So it would be an expensive investment, which might give us useful data in thousands of years.

A related question:

What is a neutron bomb? I've heard the term and from what I recall, it was supposed to be a bomb that destroyed people but left buildings intact.