“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

-George Bernard Shaw

  • 85 Posts
  • 737 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • I recall reading the Sagan’s Demon Haunted World and the section dedicated to this “phenomenon”. The self convincing and conviction to these events was pretty amazing to read about from a curiosity prospective. The letters he would receive were pretty far out there.

    My matter of fact father swears late one night while grading logging roads in a remote area in the 70s, he saw a big bright light in the sky that he couldn’t explain and it moved in ways he didn’t expect.

    Being out in the wilderness I’m sure it wasn’t a comfortable situation for him. I still wonder what he saw but thankfully there was no accompanying abduction story to go with it in his case. These types of stories and shows did get his a attention forever after as a result.


  • It’s been said the pain of the bamboozle is too much for most to acknowledge so they continue to double down on it. The great grifters and conmen know this and use it to their advantage.

    Many think it’s only the stupid and uneducated that are taken in by these scams. At times it’s the tribal nature that we can get caught up in.

    Often the educated are worse off as they know better and the grave injury to their egos won’t allow them to announce to others they have fallen victim as it’s pretty embarrassing. They take their lumps and move on with their lives if they do recognize they have fallen into these traps.

    It’s going to be many years before we get to the other side and then I wonder if it will be like what the Spanish referred to as the Miracle that occurred when Franco died.

    After decades in power, the citizens that fought for Franco and supported him ceased to exist. When asked everyone fought against Franco in the civil war and they secretly fought against him at every level of society, government, and the military. It was miracle how he came to power and won a war with no support from anyone at any level within Spain.

    If we ever get past the identity association of team Orange it will be interesting who is found to still be supporting this current day madness especially among the religious groups that support a man that displays so many of the things many of the regular members would be chastised for…


  • We are seeing this in full effect from the opposition party in Canada. They don’t have a platform or anything except they aren’t Justin Trudeau. That’s all they have but it’s working as in Canada we vote out governments of power, and not into power.

    The current government has been in office for 8 years now and much like Biden is at fault for so many things in the world, our guy is too. At times I lose the thread on which one is a fault though… But yes I’m assured he’s to blame for everything wrong in their lives…


  • I’ve been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it’s now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.

    Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it’s the only option.

    WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!







  • This is the rub in some ways, but in others who risks their credit/capital and who also has the foresight to navigate the modern home building issues of financing a new home build for 2 years in many places without a shovel even hitting earth as permits and red tape are cleared? *It costs almost $100,000 just to get a permit in my North American city which the city keeps.

    I chose to rent as I want to live where I want and don’t want to deal with the issues of home ownership once the home is built or the taxes, however just the journey to building a home is no walk in the park and has changed a great deal since our great grandparents could just build any old house/shack they wanted on land they paid very little for as no one was living in the areas beyond the natives that once called these areas home.

    I’m not even sure the cabin my grandfather built in the 70s on recreational property in a remote area that he ended up retiring to could even be built today.

    In the cities where real estate pricing is through the roof due to demand, and occupancy is at record lows, those that can take the financial hit from delays and the costs to build a home are at present the only ones seeing homes being built in these conditions so the market in terrible ways have created a situation right or wrong of rewarding that initial capital investment as who else in their right mind would go through that just to have less than nothing in the end to hand it over to a tenant without a full refund of all of those costs in the first month by the tenant?

    Without these builders I wonder how many renters would be able to fund paying for the land for 2 years, then the materials for building the home, and the labor, then navigate the city, and manage the builders and trades, while working at their job full time (not related to home building in many cases) while living somewhere else during this process along waiting for a close with city approval to occupy once completed which might push this to 3 years?

    Paying both the bank and then your rent to live somewhere during this process isn’t cheap either.

    If the market relied on monthly renters for home building I suspect MANY more of us would be living in tents or campers… Which is also happening in the current system too but perhaps not at the same degree?

    How do we as a society trigger the removal of red tape, nimbys, and fund the building costs of higher density housing might be a better question to ask as these challenges need to be tackled to see more homes built. Getting around the reward paying for the large upfront costs of building homes needs to be navigated too.

    Unfortunately moving further west is no longer an option due to the west having run out for many of us.