Bedroom: 0. Watching tv before bed throws off circadian rhythm.

Kitchen: 0. Kitchen is for cooking, not tv.

Living room: 0. Why would you want a distraction when you have guests over?

I agree with others that they should get at least 1.5x market value. There is an emotional damage to taking someones belongings that should be accounted for. And also, supposing they use the funds to buy a new home, they will need to get a mortgage still, which now have significantly higher interest rates, increasing their monthly payments.

They threatened eminent domain. This is like the cops offering you a deal instead of going to trial.

This is a gross oversimplification.

The mother (property owner) was given an offer she accepted. They didn’t even use eminent domain. Now marinate on that.

That’s like saying the schoolyard bully didn’t steal your lunch money - you just gave it up willingly after they threatened to beat you up. Jeez, they didn’t even beat you up! Where’s the crime?

The company essentially said “Here is our offer. Take it or we will use eminent domain to get your land anyway.” Fighting this in court would take years and cost tons of money, and would likely still result in losing their home.

Plus this is Georgia, who do these people vote for? Local elections matter.

Georgia is quite evenly split politically.

A good landlord is one who understand that his job is to provide housing and maintain the property, and not sit on his ass collecting passive income/hoarding wealth.

I will go ahead and plug Georgism here.

Anon has his ordering wrong

>start job
>hate job
>start new job
>leave old job

It’s the most basic principle in job hunting - the best time to get a new job is when you still have your old job.

you can’t even sleep in a parking lot in your car anymore without getting a knock on your window.

That is not at all true. I’ve slept in plenty of parking lots. Its the same as it ever was - don’t go where you aren’t wanted.

If you didn’t know, biting the bullet doesnt mean killing yourself. It comes from back in the day when soldiers would be given a bullet to bite down on while they got their leg amputated. Which is kind of even more gruesome

It was a pretty good children’s tv show aimed at young girls.

Some terminally online dudes, probably due to the over-the-top girlie nature of the show, start to watch it so they can make fun of it. Then some of the terminally online dudes realize that it is halfway decent - but more importantly, realize they can get a funnier reaction by trolling the haters with the show’s strong points. This attracts more dudes who arent necessarily trolls, so much as they have a deeply seated need to be contrarian - the fact that this show was very clearly not made for them drives them to want to watch it, and they find community with the other pathologically contrarian online dudes who also watch it for the same reason.

Hence, there are two parallel fandom/hatedoms. The primary - little girls and terminally online dudes hating on a tv show made for little girls. And then the bronies and brony-haters. The existance of brony-haters being completely unsurprising because that was the point of watching the show in the first place - after all, there are other tv shows. There are better tv shows. And there is always the option to simply watch a tv show you like and then not make fanfic art about it and not bring it up in conversation in your college dorm room. The underlying motivation of the brony was never to simply enjoy watching a tv show, but to watch a tv show that other people didn’t want them to enjoy, and therefore to piss people off by enjoying it. And so the existance of the brony haters isnt so much a bug of the brony community, nor a feature, but the whole point.

“Soft power” is basically your ability to get others to do what you want because there are benefits to your friendship and they don’t want to lose those benefits.

So the way to get soft power is to make sure there are benefits to your friendship others don’t want to lose, and then create a credible threat of losing them. Some obvious sources of personal soft power are being hot or rich, or throwing really good parties.

For example, suppose you want to get good at throwing parties. So you go out, meet some people, send out some invites, and people show up. Your place looks super cool, you put on some good music, and you spend the night making sure everyone feels welcome and introducing people and fostering conversations between them. Everyone leaves having a fantastic time. The next week, you meet some more people and invite them to your party again, and the people you invited last week invite some of their friends. Repeat for several weeks, and your parties have gone from a dozen people hanging out to 100 people packed into your house having a blast! And inevitably, someone will show up who will bring a bad vibe, and that person won’t be invited back. And eventually the party simply has too many people, so you have to choose who to invite and not invite back, while still allowing new people to show up. You now have soft power. Individuals will want you to like them because they want to get invited to your excellent, exclusive parties, and want to keep getting invited back.

I played Jurassic Park Danger! and it was so bad that now I want to kill myself

^ review you should leave on their website.

Anyway… suicide is almost always comorbid with feelings of social ostracism (or simply outright insanity). People don’t typically kill themselves because they are miserable - a person with two broken legs will spend days crawling across a barren landscape to find food, water, and medical attention with the hope of continuing to live. But have that person lose their 10 million dollar company after an accusation of child molestation that causes all their friends and family to shun them, and you have a different story.

I have two theories.

First, humans naturally want to help other humans in need. If you were walking through the forest looking for harvestable tubers, and you came upon a healthy adult, you might be wary and suspicious. But if they are clearly limping along on a broken foot and falling over from hunger, your fight or flight response reduces and you feel pangs of sympathy and a desire to help. Hence, when someone is socially ostricized, the thing that will gain them sympathy is acting hurt. And what better way to act hurt than to actually be hurt?

Second, humans are social animals and feel an intrinsic sense of fairness and justice in our social groups. So if a group ostricizes a memeber, self harm may be a natural way to show penance for their transgressions. A way of admitting “I know I did the wrong thing, I am so sorry that I am willing to harm myself.”

In either case, the brain develops patterns of thought leading to self harm and suicide attempts. Importantly, suicide attempts should be dramatic and obvious, but should fail. A successful suicide would be biologically disadvantageous.

This feels absurdly paternalistic

30 something guy here.

I oscillate. Usually somewhere between once every 2 days and 3x/day.

However, I’ve noticed that I feel almost no urge to masturbate when I spend a lot of time in nature - eg, on long backpacking trips. My theory is that - while there is nothing really wrong with masturbation - what is actually happening is that I am masturbating to counteract the stress of modern life. If I feel tired or lonely or anxious or sad, my brain knows it can feel happy chemicals just by beatin’ the ol’ bishop.

In this way, it feels similar to hunger. Sometimes I eat because I need food. But the vast majority of the time, I eat because I feel a compulsion to make myself feel good by eating.

So it might be worth considering if your desire of masturbate is coming from actual horniness, or a desire for some form of enjoyable escape from the moment you are in.

I don’t disagree. But people also don’t move all the time despite the weather. Sure, retired New Yorkers move to Florida (or, I will point out, Arizona) - but they continue living in New York for their working careers because that’s where the jobs are. No one particularly loves Houston weather, and yet it is one of the largest cities in the country.

Why not find a hobby that keeps you intellectually and socially active? And physically, for that matter.

Wtf are you talking about?

Looking at the thread you linked, it seems like this is some pretty in the weeds drama. And it is driven by a single dev. So I’m confused by how you think this is some society-wide trend.

Isn’t that the same as saying that one values a pen more than the author who uses it to write something down?

I feel like your analogy is flawed. As a consumer, I don’t care about the pen or the author, really. I care about the book.

Growing old alone must suck.

My goal: don’t do that

I agree with you here. I just think that it isnt a given that people will choose to leave the desert southwest - or anywhere else for that matter - simply because of heat.

Interesting video, but I disagree with its conclusion that the downtown’s decline is due to NAFTA, nor that its revitalization is “impossible”.

NAFTA did a lot of things, and few people understand it, so it often makes a convenient punching bag. However, even in the context of the video the criticism makes little sense to me - NAFTA liberalized trade between the US and Mexico so that factories moved from hiring undocumented migrants in the US to hiring Mexicans in Mexico… that seems like a totally reasonable change to make.

Instead, downtowns tend to be in decline because of specific government policies and local conditions. In particular, government subsidies for single family homes, auto infrastructure, and corporate big box stores, which draw people out of city centers with lower prices and greater convenience. El Paso, in particular, has probably seen its downtown remain in decline (compared to cities like Dallas and Austin) due to crime driven by US drug policy.

However, in an efficient market, downtown areas like El Paso should never be hallowed out unless the area as a whole is bleeding population. The natural progression of a city in decline is to see its population abandon outlying areas, continually re-occupying depopulated land close to the city center. Beyond auto-oriented government subsidies, this hallowing-out of city centers is driven by speculative land holding. The owners of those big, old, beautiful buildings have little incentive to perform upkeep, rent out apartments, or fill their ground-floor retail spaces because the expense of simply owning the building and land and waiting for the value to go up is less than the expense of investing in and running the building to serve the community. The solution to this problem is a Georgist land value tax, which incentivizes land owners to shit or get off the pot - either fill your retail space with shops and your apartments with tenants, or sell the land and building to someone who will.

Sidebar: while economic analysis of international trade agreements is always fraught, the general consensus is that NAFTA was good for the average person in both the US and Mexico. Gains for the average person were not as large as were projected, but did exist and were significant. The largest gains for the average person came not in the form of wage growth, but instead in the lower cost of consumer goods, including necessities such as food, transportation, and clothing. While a significant minority of the poor and middle class in both the US and Mexico did experience losses due to the agreement, on the whole, the agreement did not create a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, but rather created a regressive gain across the economic spectrum - ie, the rich benefitted more, but the poor still benefitted. One particularly interesting point to consider is that Mexico’s rate of extreme poverty has decreased significantly since NAFTA - this can be directly attributed to progressive policy implementations in the Mexican government. But the funding for these progressive policies benefitted greatly from the expansion of the Mexican economy which was enabled via NAFTA. Modern economists, who have developed a more nuanced view of international trade policy since NAFTA was ratified (in part, driven by the observed effects of NAFTA), certainly have their critiques - but these critiques should be viewed as lessons learned to be applied to future trade deals. Contemporary critiques of the deal, however, were significant, and failures to modify the deal to address them contributed to the regressive nature of the economic gains. In particular, strong protections for labor rights and the environment would have shunted more of the economic gains to workers and communities rather than to corporate profits. And agreeing to the creation of funds to ease the transition for vulnerable individuals and communities (like El Paso) would have helped preserve many of the most impacted local economies better - though domestic policy likely played a bigger role here, and the critique should lay not just on the implementation of the trade deal but also in the US government’s response to its impacts and general social support of its citizens. On the whole, NAFTA was a net positive, and trade liberalization was likely necessary not just for national economic gains, but to avoid economic contraction in an increasingly globalized economy. The exact implementation deserves critique, but this critique should not be taken as a condemnation of international trade or as evidence in favor of protectionist policies. Instead, the critiques should be taken as areas for improvement to create more equitable distributions of the wealth generated by liberalized trade, and as areas for the attention of domestic welfare policy when international agreements fall short. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Very doomer take. People already live in Phoenix and a Las Vegas. People have lived in the Sahara and Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years. We could equally imagine El Paso land exploding in value as Mexicans flee across the border north from increasing heat waves.

The main issues of a hotter climate for a place like El Paso will be hotter days and lack of water.

Hotter days are solved easily by resting mid day, while waking up earlier and sleeping later. Or else by air conditioning. Ideally, air conditioning in the form of air conditioned blocks of public space and apartment buildings, as the surface area to volume ratio of these would be much more favorable compared to individual houses and cars - but Phoenix and Vegas prove it can work fine with cars as well. Also, an emphasis on improving shade and airflow in outdoor areas - a 120° day becomes a much more pleasant 90° day if the park you are in has lots of shade trees and a nice breeze, or if the restaurant you are eating outside of has awnings and fans.

Water is more difficult. Except wait, no, it isn’t. We already have the technology for transporting large amounts of liquids long distances - they’re called pipelines, and the fossil fuel industry uses them liberally (when allowed to). Even if all water sources around El Paso dried up, sufficient public pressure could be applied to build a pipeline there to provide for the city’s water needs. And a city’s water needs are almost never that much. Low flow toilets and showerheads are very nice and all, and would certainly come more into vogue in this case - but the big water users in any area are always agriculture, followed by lawns. Eliminate those two, and there is plenty of water for people to drink, bathe in, and flush their poop. Simply applying appropriate water pricing structures could ensure this - every home gets sufficient water for their daily needs for free, then beyond that, water use is charged at increasing rates for increasing use. And if everyone stops doing dumb shit like growing alfalfa in the desert and trying to make their front yard look like scotland, then the city will still easily have enough water left over to provide abundant leafy street trees and public parks with grassy fields for relaxation and recreation. On the front of food, since most agriculture in the area will now be unprofitable… it doesnt matter. Most cities already import most of the food they consume from distant areas. Rice and beans are cheap and easy to import on a train car.

The real question is - will anyone want to live in El Paso? And that has a lot more to do with things like crime in the area, available jobs, affordability, and how enjoyable it is to live there.