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Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
I was able to get a really nice, conveniently located 3br/2ba condo for less than 70k about two years ago and the prices for units in this complex are still hovering around the 70-80k range, despite housing prices in most of the city absolutely skyrocketing (a similar condo in downtown, which is less than 15 minutes away by car, will set you back $250,000-300,000 easy).

There's not really any security and maintenance isn't that great and the neighbors like to leave trash everywhere, smash open the gates with their cars, and get hosed up on some sort of recreational drug and loudly, incoherently fight in the courtyard at 1 am on a weeknight, but I'm also spending less on mortgage and HOA fees combined than I was spending on rent for a smaller apartment, so all in all it's not bad.

Kind of hope the housing price explosion never makes it out here, high property values don't really benefit me. I don't see this as an investment, it's just a place I sleep that's cheaper than renting, and if the property values around here goes way up then I'll be in a pretty tight spot if I ever decide I want to move to a different one.

Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 07:17 on Apr 8, 2021

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Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
for comparison I spent my 20s working in construction and thought I was making good money while pulling like $45,000/yr, which required me to work 10-14 hours a day, 6 days a week, and which did permanent damage to my body that I'm still feeling in my 30s

even now I don't know what the gently caress I'd even do with six figures, I could live like a king on 75k. like, what do you spend that money on? what can you possibly spend it on?

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

actionjackson posted:

I'm not sure how a "soccer superstar" can live there when the income limit is twice the national average. You would think that kind of person would be way above that!

the overwhelming majority of the people who play soccer professionally or semi-professionally (which, worldwide, is a surprisingly large number of people) make basically normal-person money, and even the ones who make it big and start pulling in stupid huge gigantic piles of money usually only do so after slumming it for a few years. the average salary for a professional soccer player in Austria is like 43,000 euros per year, which is actually about 15,000 euros below the national average.

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
you could take identical pictures in any Sam's Club

or at least you could have, before the pandemic, when the shelves were reliably stocked

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
I look back nostalgically on the -3000 day

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

Regarde Aduck posted:

Why do you people keep saying this like its a binary outcome? Its too late to prevent a lot of bad poo poo happening. It isn’t too late to prevent it killing everything. Who the gently caress is telling you ‘it’s too late’? It sure as hell isn’t climate scientists.

Like if you cba to do anything fine, but don’t just lie about it being too late. Being locked in to 2.5 c isn’t an excuse to let it get to 5, then 10 then 20. Christ you people make me mad. We lost the ‘preventative’ phase. We’re now in the main phase of the war but everyones given up because you don’t know the difference between ‘climate change cannot be stopped’ and ‘global extinction of all life’. The fate of our species will be decided in the next 10-20 years. Most likely we’re hosed because the entirety of capital is against us. But there is still a fight to be had. It isn’t too late to prevent the end of everything. It will be soon.

I’m not hopeful, nations appear to be trying to get more planes and boats in the air and sea to make up for covid shortfalls, ideas of a ‘green recovery’ appear to have been memoryholed. This bodes ill. But people need to shut the gently caress up saying its too late everytime someone tries to make things better, even just a little. Just wait a decade.

it's because it is a convenient excuse for doing nothing that still allows you to feel like you're better than the people who are doing nothing because they just don't give a poo poo

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

Penisaurus Sex posted:

did the Brits ever figure out how the border with Ireland is going to be handled?

yeah after much deliberation they settled on 'let's just not address the problem at all and see what happens'

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

mod sassinator posted:

Don't they already record and track serial numbers of guns you purchase? If nothing else they for sure log and keep track of gun purchase background checks.

the first time I ever purchased a firearm I did so by handing a random guy a literal wad of cash with one hand while receiving the firearm with my other hand, with absolutely no paperwork of any kind involved at all, and it was completely legal

in fact I'm pretty sure there is technically no record at all anywhere of me actually owning most of the guns in my closet, and that is not at all abnormal in most of the US

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

I like how all of these are both extremely dangerous and also so physically demanding that they will inevitably make ruin of your body if you make a career of them even if nothing bad ever happens

not knocking blue-collar tradespeople, I am literally one of them, but there's a high price attached to that 'good living'

also I hope you like 12-14 hour days because you're gonna be working a lot of them!

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
yeah until I see a second source on that my immediate suspicion is that it's just somebody making poo poo up to pump Bitcoin before selling a bunch in a day or two

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
ARE YOU LOVIN’ IT MARINE

YES STAFF SERGEANT I’M LOVIN’ IT WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES WITH THAT OORAH

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

Paradoxish posted:

just going to buy this house that I'll still be paying off long after "retirement" and probably until I'm dead

this definitely isn't rent or anything no way

my mortgage is functionally the same as rent but it’s also less than half what I was paying for my last apartment even though this place is almost double the size so :shrug:

I got extremely lucky being able to do this at all, and it’s hosed up to think of a beloved relative’s death as ‘lucky’, but my share of the life insurance was just enough for down payment and closing costs, and paying rent directly to the bank instead of to a landlord is going to save me tens of thousands of dollars in the long run.

it’s still a predatory trap option with more downsides than upsides, but housing is so hosed up in the US that it manages to be the least bad option available. Unless you’re wealthy, of course - the rich can just buy houses outright and not have to deal with any of this poo poo, lucky them!

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
VR has a couple of niche uses it's great for - in particular, it's almost as good for flight simulators as TrackIR while requiring less annoying fiddly hardware than TracklR does (VR requires one headset, versus a good TrackIR setup needing a sensor on your head, sensors on your desk, and a couple of extra monitors to provide peripheral vision). Once you've simmed using one of those two technologies it's almost impossible to go back.

I've also got a friend who is disabled and near-permanently bedridden and enjoys using VR to simulate leisure activities she can no longer do, like watch a movie in a theater.

That said, it's really telling that this technology has been around in a usable format for over thirty years now, and basically all of its actual usage is as either a game peripheral or a gimmick. I am hard-pressed to think of a single thing you can do in VR that you can't do on a regular desktop computer with a monitor, usually better, and without having to devote 100% of your attention to the screen like VR demands.

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

I know they never will because they don't actually want to, but the Dems have absolutely zero excuses remaining to not go hard left.

they can do nothing, literally nothing at all, and still get Very Serious People calling them communists who are bankrupting the country with 'insane spending'

like, you're clearly not going to alienate anyone by actually improving the welfare state or increasing government spending on desperately needed social programs, economic aid to the poor, or maintaining the country's crumbling infrastructure. all the people who will be angered by that already believe you're doing it anyway, and will talk and behave as though you are doing it whether you do it or not, so what loving excuse do you have not to?

Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 08:33 on Dec 17, 2021

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
Tom Clancy is absolutely cheating but he was still writing weird racist caricatures of the Irish well into the 1980s.

along with basically every other ethnicity - it's actually kind of fascinating, the guy was deeply terrified of everyone who wasn't white, and his definition of 'white' was extremely narrow, excluding a bunch of people who would almost universally be considered white even when he was writing.

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

Casey Finnigan posted:

caves of qud would be significantly more fun if it didn't use hit points but instead used the dwarf fortress method of simulating body parts and bleeding out and all that. Shoot off enemies' hands and legs and stuff

anyway hope the stock indices continue to fall this week

the dwarf fortress adventure mode wrestling system except you’re a teenage mutant ninja turtle with eight arms sounds pretty badass

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

SKULL.GIF posted:

I am seriously in awe that ARKK rose 11% from the bottom in only like 90 minutes.

the plunge protection team is back baby

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

I still produce plenty of urea myself

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
there are whole-rear end towns in the rural midwestern US that only still exist because there are a few hundred desperately poor people who can't even afford to move elsewhere within the US, so they're just trapped in this decaying ruin of a community, living off meager welfare payments, petty crime, and whatever little odd jobs they're able to scrounge up - or, if they're extremely lucky, commuting 2+ hours to work in a distant city they can't afford to actually live in

a few years ago there was a big corruption scandal in a small town I drive through pretty regularly, because there was still a K-12 school system for that town, which still had an entire administrative apparatus and full staff, including a superintendent, assistant super, principal, vice principal, a manager for the janitorial and maintenance staff, multiple janitors, a bus mechanic, assorted secretarial personnel, etc., even though there were only like 15 children left in the entire town who were all crammed into I think two classes taught by two teachers. A huge deal was made out of how this was stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state education budget to funnel it into the pockets of a bunch of people who were mostly doing literally nothing, and they all got fired and the school was forcibly closed down by the state, but, like...those were pretty much the only jobs left in that town. There's a municipal government with like two full-time employees, a police department with one full-time employee, and a gas station with maybe 3-5 part-time employees, and then there was the school, and that's it. eliminating those fake jobs also eliminated basically all of the remaining money circulating through the community. still a couple hundred people living there, though. where else are they gonna go?

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Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010

all of the decrepit skilled tradesmen will spend half the day complaining about how there are no young people getting started in the trade to take over for them and pay their pensions, and then the other half of the day ruthlessly hazing and harassing any new person who tries to get started in the industry until they get fed up and quit, especially if they are a woman or visibly not white. they want new blood but they also like their little club being small and exclusive, it makes them feel special and gives them a sense of control. whether it's training or the job site itself they go out of their way to weed people out who don't 'deserve' to be there, and that worked out for them when those jobs were highly sought after and there was always a surplus of new workers, but not so much these days

I'm not in construction anymore but the guys who caught the worst poo poo were always the ones who started in the trade as nonunion workers and then organized into the union later. people would openly tell them that they were unwelcome here and nobody wanted them around and they should tear up their cards and gently caress off back to their nonunion shops - between complaints about how no one is joining the union anymore and most of the few people getting started in the trades around here are going nonunion now and they just do not understand why, it must be because these lazy loving kids hate honest work

Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 17:35 on Jan 6, 2023

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