echodot

joined 2 years ago
[–] echodot@feddit.uk 4 points 2 hours ago

How much RAM does a time machine require because that seems to be the basic advice here.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 4 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

A hobby farm isn't sprawl.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

The West was making real inroads with Russia before Putin came along.

It's the same with every dictator there has ever been, they have to manufacture a war in order to justify their iron fist.

Capitalism isn't the best by any stretch but one of the things it's good at is making people realise that they will be much better off financially cooperating than having a pointless little war. War generates profits for the military industrial complex, but for everyone else they cost money.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk -1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Are you literally never seen it spelt like that.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 17 hours ago

I've seen this warning on a t-shirt. Not on the label of the t-shirt, the actual design of the t-shirt. Which presumably also constitutes a warning, I bet the lawyers love that one.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 17 hours ago

According to a friend who's a lawyer she once had to explain to someone that she can't sue her landlord because she slipped on a wet floor, since it was her house and therefore her wet floor. The landlord merely owns the house, but didn't make the floor wet.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It reminds me of the time at work that we got a piece of industrial equipment. The manual clearly had been translated from Chinese into English via a Tibetan monk who would never heard either language.

It said things like "ensure when on that the fingers are not found" and "if loud kick immediately and call for help from empowering". The best bit was the warning at the top that said "DO NOT DANGEROUS", which was very helpful.

For some reason it also had a biohazard label on the box. It was a laser engraver. Where's the biohazard?

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It makes it sound like some cursed item. Get the SCP on this.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 12 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm sorry about the stress but to be fair one of the reasons that house prices got so insane was people like you who were buying to rent. That puts pressure on the housing market because if you buy to rent you can own multiple properties, so more and more housing stock gets taken out of rotation so it gets to the point where even if people could theoretically afford to buy a house, there are none available.

Renting brakes the supply and demand system. If there were more houses than there was demand, the value would go down and would open up home ownership for more people, this would increase demand and stabilise the market. If there was insufficient supply, housing prices would go up which would incentivise companies to construct more properties, thus increasing availability and stabilising the market. But the want to be landlords come in and buy up all the available homes and now there is high demand but low supply, so construction companies build houses and sell directly to landlords (because landlords have no chain), demand has increased but supply has remained the same, despite construction having happened. Repeat that for 50 years and you get our current housing market.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 15 points 18 hours ago

I can't find it now because I'm on phone and not a computer and I can't really search for it l, but I'm sure that there was a post a while back where someone worked out that if minimum wage had actually kept up with inflation it would be around $80 USD an hour now. Which seems ludicrously high for minimum wage job, but apparently the math works out.

Obviously American employment protection laws are probably the worst in the western world, so probably not a great baseline, but it still demonstrates how badly off people are in general, compared to their parents and grandparents.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 12 points 18 hours ago (8 children)

Well it's telling that all of the rich investment banker types always eventually quit and start a hobby farm in the country.

The general feeling seems to be that agriculture was a good idea, but we took things too far with this whole civilisation thing.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 13 points 18 hours ago

The house I own now has sold six times between 2000 and now. Mostly because it's been in a possession of elderly people who've lived in the house for 2 or 3 years after downsizing from their original house and then either dying or have to enter care.

As a result the house has basically had no work done on it for 20 odd years and it shows, the person I bought the house off of was one of the first non-elderly people to live in the property and she did do quite a number of important maintenance, but not a lot because she only lived in the house a year and then got married and moved in with her husband, so between me and her we've probably added untold value to the property. However had we done none of that and just held on to the house as an investment, we did probably been able to triple our investment in about 5 years.

Not that it'll do me any good when I finally sell it.

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