Guy I worked with retired from the Navy as a captain and got whatever very generous pay came with that. Then used his veterans preference to get a job in my agency, did that for 20+ years, retired as a gs 14 so he gets that annuity plus his TSP savings plus social security in a few years. He’s still barely 60, so he is working as a consultant. I’m guessing he’s pulling down $200k with all the various incomes and maybe working 20 hours a week, and he’s got the Healthcare and other benefits for life. People trash talk the military and government but if you work the system right it can be worthwhile. Hell, I wish I’d joined just so I could get USAA.

That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don’t see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don’t think we Dan just wave our hands and say “corporate buyers” and explain away our housing market problems.

We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we’ve pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that’s nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that’s bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.

I’d love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say “disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock” and solve the problem, but it’s nowhere near that simple.

Serious answer, as someone who’s been through years of therapy.

Pretty much everyone rich and powerful experienced intense trauma early in life. And one of the horrible ways our early childhood trauma plays itself out is by causi us to recreate it on younger generations. You don’t just wake up one day as a child molester. That shit was visited upon you in some fashion when you were a child.

Our entire culture is based on generational trauma (strongly suggest you read the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate).

People who seek power and fame are almost all incredibly damaged from a very young age. Not necessarily an excuse, but if you want to stop the cycle you have to be able to step back far enough to see it.

Chase sapphire reserve. $595 annual fee seems crazy at first but if you use the perks it pays for itself multiple times over.

Pizza in Boston delivered by door dash is routinely right about $30 before tip. My credit card offers free door dash premium whatever it’s called and I usually choose places offering a promo and tend to order early when there are also promos. That brings things down to the $20s. But it’s generally about $30 with tip even doing all that. If I’m not paying attention it’s easy to order a $45 pizza.

To be fair I don’t eat from pizza Hut or Dominos or other chains. Those might be a few percent cheaper.

Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Or as I originally heard it, “going to bed is going to work.”

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn’t had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don’t think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.

Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I’m trapped and can never sell.

They literally stole the doors and windows

Don’t invest in Detroit real estate

I’m not an expert but my general understanding is that its unlikely you’d have both parents be narcissists. A true narcissist is too self absorbed to stay in a relationship with someone else who’s also that self absorbed. Narcissists tend to be in relationships with people who have opposite traits, highly empathetic and easily manipulated. Not saying it can’t happen but youtube isn’t necessarily the best diagnostic tool.

If at all possible, I recommend you see if there are any counseling resources available to you at school or through your local government. Also recommend you read some actual books on the subject, not just get info from YouTube and the internet. Hopefully you live in a place with a public library. Many libraries have a way to check out ebooks and read them on a phone app, which may easier and more discreet.

And I’d urge you to remember two things.

First, it gets better. It can be hard to believe, and it can feel like forever, but it gets better.

Second, narcissism is just another reaction to a traumatic childhood. No one is born a monster. They’re worthy of compassion, even if you can’t have a functional relationship with them.

Late 40s, from the US. My mom drove a manual so I learned on her car. Then my first car was an old VW Bug, and my next couple of cars were also manual.

Now that I live in a city with soul crushing traffic and a completely broken public transit system, I drive an automatic. Driving a manual in stop and go traffic is just not fun. Plus, it’s gotten hard to even find a manual transmission anymore. But when we went on vacation to Costa Rica a few years ago they gave us a car with a stick shift and I had a blast bombing that thing around.

I have heard conflicting versions. Some people are saying it seems that the locked-down subs are the ones where the new comments aren’t sticking. Which makes sense, but who knows what the truth is. None of us can trust anything Reddit or /u/spez says ever again, so it could be malicious or it could be technical.

I have 11 years of prolific commenting to edit. But I might use powerdeletesuite to change all my comments to have that phrase in them.

I am trying out the Kagi search tool for that very reason, and their Orion browser. Have not yet signed up to pay them $5/month but am leaning towards it.

But when I mentioned it here I had someone immediately saying they couldn’t see spending $60/year on something they are used to getting for “free.”

Now there’s a thought. How would I go about doing that? I have 11 years of prolific commenting on reddit that I am getting ready to nuke.

Well, you posted and have a username so you must have done something right. Welcome!

Well, you posted and have a username so you must have done something right. Welcome!