Left to my own devices, I am a messy person. My wife is very tidy. A clean sanctuary is respite for her.
I don’t know how we ended up staying together after those first few dates, but I do know our twice a month housekeeper is acting as our marriage counselor.
Utilitarian - Row houses and small single family starter homes.
Detached single family housing is suffocating this country and the environment. I’d rather leave the woods to nature and nature walks, not streets and houses.
In addition to that, utopian architecture, like arcologies.
Most billionaires nowadays are not the type that have the bulk of their wealth in assets. The lot of them got wealthy because the company they founded or initially employed with became very successful and the stock they accumulated became more valuable over time.
In a way, it’s wealth up there in the ether. It’s the investors who give it value. Somebody says “hey $100 for a share of company x sounds like a good deal” founder has 10M shares of company x, and voila, they’re a billionaire.
In a way, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
A strange thing is happening nowadays with the market though. Markets are supposed to go down from time to time, but due to low barriers to entry so many people are in the market now, investing in ETFs, setting up automated monthly purchases, DRIPs, etc, that markets consistently go up. Even after a major economic shock like the tariffs, the market continues to go up.
And so those billionaires keep getting wealthier.
At some point this carousel will end. Healthy markets do have to go down, it’s one of the mechanisms of how capital gets redistributed from the slovenly to the savvy. There has to be some kind of adjustment or we end up where we are, a new Gilded Age.
China is on the edge of one such adjustment in real estate, but the state is pulling out all of the stops right now to prevent its collapse. What happens there likely is to be a harbinger of what’s to come.
In the US, I’m not so sure. If we keep letting our average population age slip towards middle age and beyond, then we’ll likely see the correction when we have no one left to keep the economic engine running. If we don’t mitigate that we probably have 15 to 20 years left. Unchecked political unrest may be the catalyst for its arrival sooner.
Back to billionaires. The best way to put this back in check in my mind is to tax unrealized gains. Think of it like real estate tax. Every year, you pay a nominal bit of your home’s value to fund the fire department, city planners, etc. if you don’t pay, then they can put a lien on your house. Same should apply with stock. The noninvesting public helped build the infrastructure that made the company thrive, thus, the public should be entitled to a bit of its success. The tax has the nifty little gimmick of distributing a bit of the power too - precisely why the billionaire class hates it.
There’s three ways to get rid of cancer:
Eating granola and berries or sitting there with hopes and praying for change is option 3. I’m on team option 1. Time to get active.
Well yea, when you train the entire 2nd generation of coders on a book that is “For dummies” what did you expect?
Being a US citizen permanently living in a foreign country, paying taxes to that country and not paying US taxes.
I’ve been interviewing folks for an internship position lately. These have been remote interviews. Six things that have made candidates stand out to me.
Some don’ts
Get on my bike and see how far it could take me. And when I was done with that I would go build bike trails for my community.
This guy, I bet he even reclines in his airplane seat.
Mr Burns got shot.
You see a baby on the second floor in a burning building. It’s crying. Its screams trigger your fight or flight response. Though you know going into that burning building will harm you, your will to act compels you to go save that baby and end its suffering.
You go in, the flames all around you, but you can barely feel them because you are so concentrated on reaching that baby.
You get to the baby. Your flight response now kicks in. You jump out the window. You break your ankle, but you can’t feel it, because your sense of duty and accomplishment of saving that child and the cheers from the community overwhelm your own internal nervous system.
That’s empathy. When your feelings for others override your feelings for yourself. When the extrinsic reward from the community can override your intrinsic experience.
Granted, an extreme example.
Gregorian chant can be very relaxing in the right moment.
Blathering Blatherskites!
Great Scott!
Great Googly Moogly
Narf!
Blech
Hot Dog!
Hot diggity!
Salad!
Biscuits!
Corn Nuggets!
Nerfherder
Awoooguhhhh!
Ballyhoo
Farfegnugen
To the mattresses!
What in tarnation?
Shoo whee
Pork BBQ and Collards. Finish it down with some Cheerwine.