Also now he’s convinced that God specifically saved him from a bullet and chose him…

While true, I was thinking more about how the person you replying to probably was reacting to the trend of people talking about saving and waiting until they had a reasonable downpayment before they would consider entering the market, and how the market keeps running away from their downpayment savings.

The ‘never make a downpayment regardless of context’ would be bad advice, but I just presume there is a context in mind about not even having the downpayment to start with and being stuck on the rental treadmill as a result.

Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.

This presumes you can elect to either just spend the 100k now, that you may not have.

If you declare you want 100k, but let’s say that would take you 10 years (and the goalposts wil move). That’s likely 120 months of rent you will have to pay, so while you’ll end up saving on interest, you’ll more than lose out on rent.

Paying down aggressively and going with as big a down payment as you can reasonably afford makes sense. However waiting to save up for that downpayment may cost more in rental expenses than you’d save.

WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.

This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.

Don’t know about them specifically, but it seems that more than anything real estate investors are just grabbing as many properties as they can find, whether they can get tenants or not. A house goes up for sale and it’s bought sight unseen by a company almost instantly.

So occasionally I look out of curiosity and the reason is pretty plain.

I look for houses for sale in a suburban area as public listings, and there’s like 1 within a few square miles of the area.

I switch over to renting, and there’s like 12 houses just like the one for sale available, all owned by companies. I also know a coule that aren’t listed that have no tenants, but are still owned by one of those companies. You can tell because those yards are now waist deep grasses (in an area where HOA throws a hissy fit if your yard looks just a smidge unkempt).

Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.

While true, I have been scratching my head wondering why this rash of ads is happening, why they are so intent on making sure everyone knows their election participation is available to all.

One possibility: if you sit it out, people will know and blame you if your candidate loses.

Another possibility: if you vote, and the “wrong” person wins, you’ll be suspected of voting for the “wrong” person.

I don’t know which they are going for, but it has tickled my “creepy” meter, and this was before I saw it associated specifically with Trump/Vance (the ads I’ve seen mention no candidate and just seems a vague go out and vote pitch)

I own one and like the car, but the branding is awkward. There was one car related service that had me select and let me specify that it was the mach e, but the places system just printed out “mustang” and they were a bit confused.

Problem is in practice, I suspect something is pretty wrong in most teams.

Some common examples come to my mind:

• Management hears “talk about what you’ve done and what you will do” so great time to sit in and take notes for performance review, and it becomes a “make sure management knows you spent all your time and did really impressive stuff” meeting. Also throws a kink in “things I need help with” as there’s always the risk that management decides you aren’t self sufficient enough if they hear you got stuck, so you also need to defend why you got stuck and how it isn’t your fault.
• The people who feel like everyone needs to know the minutia of their trials and tribulations including all the intermediate dead ends they went down on the way to their final result. Related to the above, but there are people who think to do this even without the need to impress management.
• The people who cannot stand to “take it offline” and will stop everything to fully work a problem while everyone is still ostensibly supposed to stay in the meeting despite having nothing to do with the two people talking (sometimes even just one, a guy starts talking to himself as he tries to do something live).
• Groups that are organized but have very little common ground. An “everything must be scrum” company sticks a guy who does stuff like shipping and receiving into a development team and there’s no ‘scrum-like’ interaction to be had and yet, there he is wasting his time and having to talk about stuff no one else on that meeting has a need to hear either.

Those would be parallel killers rather than serial killers.

Our three weapons are…

It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.

One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.

So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.

Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.

Might also depend on the timing. At least in the 90s, my area was as described, a hangout place where ambient hanging out was considered just fine because enough people bought stuff it was worth it and people behaved relatively well, or they had enough security to make that the case.

Now there’s all sorts of signs up about unaccompanied teenagers are not allowed.

I think not “most” but the ones that did spend spent plenty enough to make up for the rest. Maybe “most” do at least grab food at a restauraunt though.

I’ve seen both. Our area has had, for a few years, mixed use zoning as a requirement. So a bunch of projects that clearly only wanted to do housing are doing what you describe: Housing and a meets minimum commercial/office effort. Notably while trumpeting “walkable” which is really code for “we don’t waste land on unprofitable parking lots”. So you have somewhat dense living and retail where the retail has zero parking, so the only people a business could hope to get are the people in the units immediately close by, which are not a lot, since each project seems to go for low rise housing. So you get three stories of apartments which is more dense than suburbia, but not nearly dense enough to sustain a dedicated retail presence.

But there is this mall they’ve effectively renovated into a “downtown”, adding high rise apartments, and lots of them to the massive retail presence as well as big office buildings. Critically, also expanded to an insane degree the amount of available parking. It was a pretty failing mall (like most) and now it’s doing really well, both with high occupancy for their apartments and people going there for the rather nice retail. I think this was the first project and inspired the county to decide everything will be a success if it’s just mixed use, and they haven’t really come around to realize that they haven’t succeeded in forcing the developers to do viable mixed use by the current weak regulations.

There was a failing mall in the area and they renovated and added a bunch of housing and it’s doing amazingly well.

We laughed at the protagonist.

Sticking his hand into a fire thinking it was the way and having it burned off… ok, he was tricked by a greatly trusted person in his life.

Then later accepting that the problem was not that it burned off his hand, but he should have put his entire body in…

Our conclusion was that the ending where you jump in are his friends making a cover story of how stupid he was to just jump in the fire and claiming he in fact did become some invisible divine being, and that’s why you can’t see him, not because he was a gullible idiot.

I think the point is that while this photograph kind of works (from above, at a distance), generally from ground level it doesn’t. So if it only works from above, then is it really useful as a camouflage?

In fact, a 2016 study concludes that the camouflage hypothesis doesn’t seem to carry weight: https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/zebra-stripes-not-camouflage-new-study-finds

Such a purpose would inform the constraints. If we are just “the sims” on steroids, then all the deep physics are absolutely utterly faked and we are just “shown” convincing fakery. If it’s anthropological, then similar story that the physics are just skin deep. If it’s actually modeling some physics thing, then maybe we are “observing” real stuff.

But again, this is all just for fun. It’s not vaguely testable and thus not scientific despite the sciencey theme of it, just something to ponder.