They even ambush me every time I go to the grocery store. And they’ve doubled my bill since I signed up. Why bother marketing when you can raise rates whenever you want? They could save so much money by not mailing every day and hiring people to hunt me
You clearly haven’t heard of private equity
I think businesses get bills from the fire department, but not individuals.
I just got a 2018 Honda Odyssey and it’s great. It has the touch screen, but also has physical buttons for almost all of the climate and radio stuff. That’s how it should be IMO. Just give us both!
I have engineer in my title, I work in software, and there kind of is a PE available for software but it’s actually just an EE license with maybe half a dozen software questions tacked on. I’ve never heard of anyone in software actually getting it. It’s slightly more common in EE and ME, and I think a lot more common in civil and structural engineering.
I don’t know how aggressively state engineering boards actually enforce their hold on the word “engineer”, but I still try to be careful. The last thing I want is to get sued for misrepresenting qualifications.
Surprisingly relevant lol
I don’t think chickens raised for meat live anywhere near 2 years. Yeah, a quick google shows around a 2 month harvest time for chickens raised for meat. That’s a big part of why chickens are such amazing creatures and make such an affordable protein source, they can be sustainably* harvested year round. (Sustainably as in without decreasing the size of your flock.)
Laying hens are productive for two to three years. They rarely make it into the human food supply though, after that long the texture and flavor of the meat changes and American consumers don’t prefer it. You can probably get them through a local butcher shop, though they might have to order it for you.
In a small and well managed flock, chickens can live 6 to 8 years. In the wild, I don’t think modern chickens would exist at all. Ask anyone who’s kept chickens, keeping the hawks and foxes and raccoons etc. out of them is a constant and eternal struggle.
The article is pretty short so it’s hard to tell, but I know in other cases there can be a significant difference between whether or not you say you’re an engineer when you make these claims.
The term engineer is effectively a trademark controlled by a state licensing board. They want to protect the word engineer so it’s clear to the public when someone is speaking as a professional licensed engineer vs not. Overall, this is a good thing and a direct response to specific and numerous very bad things that have happened in the past.
However, this has also resulted in some very awkward situations because the word engineer has almost become a genericized trademark in that there are many people who have the word engineer in their job title but do not have or need a professional engineer’s license.
Based on the fact the guy won the case, I’m going to assume he wasn’t substantially misrepresenting his qualifications. The headline is very sensationalized though and the article is lacking any detail, so I don’t know how relevant this little anecdote is but I find it interesting.
I think a big component of the problem is location. I may have a different perspective living in a low cost of living city. Just a few years ago I lived in a two bedroom apartment that was $650/mo. It was old and not very nice, but totally functional and reasonably safe. It was a bigger complex so the landlord was a management company. They weren’t amazing or anything, but they held up their end of the lease. I understand the situation somewhere like NYC or California is going to be radically different.
I think that’s where a really interesting question comes in though, do people have a right to housing? Or a right to housing in the place they’re currently living? It’s a big difference. Forcibly relocating people is… Problematic at best. But there are places like LA where it’s almost physically (geologically) impossible to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live there.
If you haven’t already I’d recommend listening to the podcast mini series “according to need” by 99 percent invisible. I really appreciated the perspective it offers into some of the practical challenges of trying to get homeless people housed.
Ultimately I don’t know that I’d call housing a “right”, purely for semantic reasons, but I do think the very existence of homelessness and housing insecurity is a devastating critique of our social and economic systems. I didn’t think we’ll ever have a system that completely eliminates renting/short term housing, but we do clearly need to change a lot of things about how housing works now.
What do you mean no choice? There’s always a choice.
Realistically many people don’t have a choice to buy, because they don’t have the credit score, reliable income, or down payment, but I don’t see why that blame falls on landlords and not on the banks or the government?
I’d be willing to bet you bought at least a few years ago, and probably couldn’t afford the house you’re in now if you had to buy it today. I’m in a similar spot. It definitely feels wrong. The rapid increase in prices in the housing market in the past few years is ridiculous. I think it’s a lot more complicated than “landlords” though. I think a lot of the issue stems from restrictive zoning that prevents the construction of small homes in dense neighborhoods. A lack of respect for trade jobs also contributes, with massive shortages of skilled construction workers driving prices up.
Granted, I live in a relatively affordable smaller city. If I were in a city with a lot of real estate speculation like LA or Toronto I might feel differently. But speculators aren’t landlords. I have a much bigger beef with a speculator who let’s a house sit empty than a landlord renting out apartments.
Landlords take on risk. For example, when I rented an apartment, I came home one day to a plumbing disaster. I called emergency maintenance and left. The landlord fixed it and paid for my hotel in the meantime. As a home owner now, that would be entirely on me to figure out. I’m pretty handy, but I have no disrespect for someone who doesn’t want to be responsible for that.
More importantly, selling a house costs about 10% of the value of the house, and the first few years of a mortgage you’re mostly paying interest. If you move every 3 years, it’s actually cheaper to rent than to buy. It’s just that your money is going to a landlord instead of to banks and realtors.
So while I see your argument that landlords don’t “deserve” the money they make, practically they’re an important part of the housing market, and I respect people who make an informed decision to rent.
They are not the same, but it is still disappointing to see lots of lazy, reactionary arguments, circle jerking, etc even if you agree with what someone is ultimately supporting.
People aren’t comparing it to alternatives, they’re comparing it to Google 5-10 years ago.
Google used to be astoundingly good at figuring out what it was you wanted, and finding out for you. Now there’s a lot more SEO garbage and meaningless fluff clogging every results page, and if your search could even remotely be related to buying something, it’s only products and ads.
It’s a “potato bar” not just a potatoes to presumably that price is intended to include all the bacon, cheese, etc.
Really though it’s probably just whatever the hotel cafeteria charges for potato because that’s a lot easier than coming up with a new price and then justifying it in case of an audit.
In my city you can’t diy electric without a license if you intend to sell soon. It’s a reasonable precaution to prevent shoddy flips. I assume plumbing works the same way. Just installing a toilet might be fine though, it’s pretty straightforward.
As a potential purchaser, the greatest concern is if it’s already been more than 10 years. In my mind this is exactly the kind of situation adverse possession is for.
Even if adverse possession doesn’t apply, trying to actually evict those home owners from the land is going to be a nightmare. The validity of the lot itself may even come into question. Generally I would expect the laws governing the creation of lots to try to prevent useless lots like this.
Honestly I don’t understand how lots like this even get listed. I looked at one in my city that was a little piece of a corner between two homes. It’s far too small to build on and you probably couldn’t even fence it off legally. Literally the only thing you could do with it is try to coerce the adjacent homeowner who’s been using it to buy it from you, but that’s just evil, and who wants to be evil?
The reality is they’re almost certainly already using that land and buying it would give you nothing because they could claim it under adverse possession. Actually taking possession of that strip would be nearly impossible.
That’s the worst part. The fact they keep doing it means it probably works. I just don’t understand how.