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)

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.

Yep because as everyone knows the biggest time consumer associated with raising children is the conception. After those few minutes, you never need time for the children ever again.

He wasn’t instructed to do so, it was a statement that while they wanted to work together and address his concerns if possible, ultimately if he only offers up a “dont do it at all”, they are within their rights unless he moves away from open source.

Our three weapons are…

We have one side’s unilateral description of how they perceive the existing state of things and their changes. Folks are very likely to poorly characterize things in a way that would sound crazy to disagree. However the truth is usually somewhere in between.

I have had very very vocal user that decry very deliberate design that the wider user base wanted as a “bug”. If someone read their rant without the wider context one would think my team was unreasonable and producing bad software. Even after fellow users took time to explain why they wanted his request rejected, he was quite adamant that everyone else was wrong.

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.

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.

First, this is not really science so much as it is science-themed philosophy or maybe “religion”. That being said, to make it work:

• We don’t have anyway of knowing the true scale and “resolution” of a hypothetical higher order universe. We think the universe is big, we think the speed of light is supremely fast, and we think the subatomic particles we measure are impossibly fine grained. However if we had a hypothetical simulation that is self-aware but not aware of our universe, they might conclude some slower limitation in the physics engine is supremely fast, that triangles are the fundamental atoms of the universe, and pixels of textures represent their equivalent of subatomic particles. They might try to imagine making a simulation engine out of in-simulation assets and conclude it’s obviously impossible, without ever being able to even conceive of volumetric reality with atoms and subatomic particles and computation devices way beyond anything that could be constructed out of in-engine assets. Think about people who make ‘computers’ out of in-game mechanics and how absurdly ‘large’ and underpowered they are compared to what we would be used to. Our universe could be “minecraft” level as far as a hypothetical simulator is concerned, we have no possible frame of reference to gauge some absolute complexity of our perceived reality.

• We don’t know how much we “think” is modeled is actually real. Imagine you are in the Half Life game as a miraculously self-aware NPC. You’d think about the terribly impossibly complex physics of the experiment gone wrong. Those of us outside of that know it’s just a superficial model consisting of props to serve the narrative, but every piece of gadget that the NPC would see “in-universe” is in service of saying “yes, this thing is a real deep phenomenon, not merely some superficial flashes”. For all you know, nothing is modeled behind you at anything but the most vague way, every microscope view just a texture, every piece of knowledge about the particle colliders is just “lore”. All those experiments showing impossibly complex phenomenon could just be props in service of a narrative, if the point of the simulation has nothing to do with “physics” but just needs some placeholder physics to be plausible. The simulation could be five seconds old with all your memories prior to that just baked “backstory”.

• We have no way of perceiving “true” time, it may take a day of “outside” time to execute a second of our time. We don’t even have “true” time within our observable universe, thanks to relativity being all weird.

• Speaking of weird, this theory has appeal because of all the “weird” stuff in physics. Relativitiy and quantum physics are so weird. When you get to subatomic resolution, things start kind of getting “glitchy”, we have this hard coded limit to relative velocity and time and length get messed up as you approach that limit. These sound like the sort of thing we’d end up if we tried simulating, so it is tempting to imagine a higher order universe with less “weirdness”.

The ioniq 5 N has that covered, evidently: https://youtu.be/DSIguemKIbQ?si=Do2diTJm8-_Hb9Ro

Or playing cards in the wheels

Well now the question is why they don’t put an extra AA battery in the glove box.

Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.