I dunno about that. I bought a house well within what I could afford. The bank actually thought we made a mistake and reminded us they would approve a loan double the size of what we asked.
All it takes is two or three really expensive things needing work at the same time to blow your budget out of the water. And often there’s no clear answer on what’s truly urgent.
Water is entropy manifest to constantly remind you that anything you do is temporary and laughably futile on geologic timescales.
Gotta love having an old house. It’s simultaneously reassuring and deeply stressful when a professional looks at something that seems really bad and just says, “Well, I can tell from the layers of paint that’s been there a long time. So if it hasn’t become a problem in all that time, it’s probably fine. But give me a call if your house starts falling apart.”
What is interesting is how non-vocal many of these “concerned citizens” are when the criminal justice system does the same thing to normal people. It is why I have a difficult time believing the concern is really about justice and due process in many cases.
Zoning sounds great until you want to start a small business on your property, and you have to spend years convincing several councils and review boards that a photography business is not going to destroy the neighborhood character… and then you need to pay for a traffic study to prove it won’t negatively impact parking or meaningfully increase car travel on the street. And if it manages to get approved, then some retired busybody with no life will complain at every town council meeting that it’s attracting a bad crowd, and there’s too many people around now.
There is definitely a place for reasonable limits, but almost nowhere in the United States has that. People need to accept that neighborhoods change, and expecting them to be frozen in time is literally insane and fiscally irresponsible.
There are certainly stories of overzealous enforcement, but the context of Loi 101 and its amendments is worth considering.
Québecois is really interesting. It has a lot of old, outdated French in it due to the colonial connection with France being severed hundreds of years ago, where it evolved distinctly and the locals made different decisions on what to change and how to adapt to new concepts.
One could argue the French government has been obsessive about policing language much longer with the académie française.
He is from the Cincinnati area, which borders Kentucky, and he spent some of his youth in Kentucky. Not a proper southerner, but from the gradient where North becomes South.
Indeed. Or working for prison slave wages.
Yeah, the cheap standard powder detergent would probably be less expensive. The volume you’d need to make to beat it is huge. Like, maybe five years’ worth.
I am also laughing at making washing powder in the oven to save money. The amount you’d spend on electricity would put you in the red, unless you live in a petrostate with free electricity or something.
Vatican City: could participate but does not.
It’d be interesting for one of these games to have realistic planning and permitting mechanics.
“Your permit is delayed a week because the only person at City Hall who reviews them is on vacation.”
“To add a 6 ft fence, you need to go before the local planning board and convince them it’s necessary. You can reduce the height to 4 ft to avoid this.”
“The power company installed the meter on the wrong side of the house. They will relocate it for $10,000, and the earliest appointment is in three weeks. If they don’t, you have to relocate the HVAC unit and reroute the ductwork to account for that. Further, the electrician will charge $9,000 to adjust the wiring for the different meter location.”
English used to have this! Yea/nay for positive, and yes/no for negative I believe. The former fell out of common use.
So this is what Cardi B was talking about.
Thank you for reminding me these existed. Unlocked some memories that have been sitting there for decades unremembered.
I basically do the same. The tiny local bookstore I like has a big table in the middle with titles picked by the owner. Something in there will be interesting. I can always just ask the owner if I’m stumped. It’s a bit easier because I’m not a single-genre reader, so I’m spoiled for choice.
Quite a lot. The US did the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan too. Who cares about who the enemy is or how many people die if they military industrial complex is making bank?
A country doesn’t need to be a superpower to project some power, but very few rise to the level of global hegemony. I think China is probably in the superpower tier today. The belt and road initiative is classic economic hegemony shit.
China’s GDP was lower than Canada’s. Economic strength is not the only factor of a superpower, but it’s significant. It’s hard to project power effectively without sufficient wealth to fund those efforts.
Paradoxically, if you look right above that and click on whether they approve or disapprove of him, it’s 49 approve/44 disapprove right now. I’m not hugely surprised, as I’ve met several people who say they don’t like him as a person but they like XYZ thing he’s said or wants to do.
Rarely. I don’t think I ever have two years in a row.
Usually only if I’m very sure it’s a game I will get a lot of playtime out of due to past titles. For instance, I did pre-order Civ 7 because prior Civs have been the best hours-enjoyed-per-dollar investments I’ve ever made. No exaggeration, even accounting for DLCs I bought at full price.
It starts when the popcorn begins to cool enough that both it’s safe to ram mouthfuls and it’s a race against the clock to finish before it becomes cold.