hraegsvelmir

joined 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

He could also just be in an area that was decently outside a major metro area when he bought his house, and urban sprawl and real estate speculation has massively raised the value of his property.

When my parents bought my childhood home in the 80s, the road ended about a mile down from the house and they had to park at the lake and carry things up. There's a hunting preserve just on the other side of the train tracks to the north, and when I was growing up, farms with cows, horses, and a shitload of corn.

These days, I don't know anyone I grew up with who can afford to live there any more, as it's become yet another commuter town in the country for the higher paid employees in the nearest major city. When they sold the house, I'm pretty sure it had to be knocked down completely (we had squirrels in the walls, and the previous owner had done a hack job on the electrical wiring to convert it from a summer cottage to a full-time residence) yet a half acre of land and a house you couldn't legally sell for occupation was still close to $500,000.

I can actually rent a two bedroom apartment in NYC for less than it would cost me to rent a studio in my home town, which has no public transport, and it was a two mile walk to the nearest gas station, one way.

It's kind of messed up that entire communities can be destroyed, through nothing they actually did and developments they had no way of predicting 40 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

No, it just doesn't make sense to me to do so. I mostly play single player games, so special skins to show you preordered are pretty pointless, and the most you tend to get is a discount on some DLC that I can just buy later, once I know I've enjoyed the game enough to warrant it, or items to give you a stat boost.

It's not like preordering a physical game, where at least I get an art book or something in exchange for handing my money over.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

religion dictates that the pope is always right whether they like it or not because god

While Catholics do have a lot of wacky beliefs, papal infallibility is somewhat more limited than this. It only applies when the pope makes an ex cathedra statement, so he would have to state this in a much more specific and formal manner to be considered undisputable doctrine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Genies are probably just super bored stuck in their magic lamps, have to get their entertainment when and where they can.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

There are countries that do, but you'll still need to demonstrate that you have the financial means to support yourself without working or needing recourse to public services for the duration of your study, so there's still a fairly significant financial barrier to entry for most individuals. If you have the money to put down for 3 years of rent, food, utilities, etc, while you complete a degree in Europe, I imagine you're generally doing pretty okay for yourself in the US.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Respect is a two-way street, though. People don't deserve to be disrespected or dehumanized just because they've fallen on hard times, it could happen to any of us, after all. My respect for crackheads is about as limited for my respect for the guys jerking off to lone women on the subway, though. If the system has chewed you up so thoroughly that you need to smoke crack to get through the day, you have my sympathy Go do you, hope things get better for you. On the other hand, I've got effectively no sympathy for the crackheads where I used to live that would get high as hell, then shit in the staircases, get into fights with the only elevator in the building until it broke, or just sat outside all night, screaming and blasting music.

I'm a reasonably healthy younger person, so having the elevator out of commision for months at a time because of their antics was a nuisance, especially when it came time to haul groceries up to my apartment on the seventh floor, or bring my laundry down to the basement to wash it. It was outright dangerous for more elderly residents on the upper floors, who essentially became housebound, though. My mother-in-law couldn't deal with all those steps, and there were elderly people on higher floors put at risk because paramedics couldn't reach them nearly as quickly if they had an emergency, not to mention the challenge of bringing someone down a bunch of narrow stairs on a stretcher.

Just because they're suffering at a given moment doesn't give them the right to degrade everyone else's quality of life, if not outright endanger their lives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Hey, now, that's unfair to third world countries. Some of them actually have functioning public health systems.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm not sure that's really the sort of architectural change that was intended. It's not fundamentally altering the chips in a way that makes them more powerful, just packing more in the system to raise its overall capabilities. It's like claiming you had found a new way to make a bulletproof vest twice as effective, by doubling the thickness of the material, when I think the original comment is talking about something more akin to something like finding a new base material or altering the weave/physical construction to make it weigh less, while providing the same stopping power, which is quite a different challenge.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Snigger is just a variant form more common in the UK, where snicker is the preferred one in the US. Though I wouldn't put it past a 4chan user, it's also a perfectly normal word they may have learned being taught and exposed to UK variants of English.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

It's hardly the sole cause of Japan's problem, nor unique amongst developed nations. However, given the near total aversion Japan seems to have towards the notion of enabling immigration as a means to permanent residency for immigrants, it takes on a much greater dimension for the problem than it might in other nations that are more open to immigration. Barring a sudden and total reversal politically and socially on the question of immigration, Japan will have to do far more domestically to improve quality of life and work-life balance if they want to avoid a total demographic collapse.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago

That, and the author is a regular writer for the opinion section there, with consistently terrible takes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

No trackball for me, but I use a vertical mouse and have my Glove80 mapped to a Colemak layout, so it probably balances out.

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